Claire CP #1

March 9^th, 12:00-1:00pm

Location: Starbucks/Landis Green

I met with Norah as a conversation partner for the first time today. Norah is from Saudi Arabia and I have known her since she started studying at CIES about a year and a half ago. Today was just the second time that I saw her face, though, and the first time I had a prolonged personal conversation with her—it was really a treat! I had brought copies of the first intercultural activity with me, but we didn’t end up getting to them. As a gesture of the hospitality that is so engrained in the Middle Eastern culture, she insisted on buying me something to drink at Starbucks when I had just planned to drink water from my water bottle and had neglected to bring my wallet (like a true American). I really appreciated that, and will try to return the hospitality next time we meet! Norah and I talked a lot about our families, which are wildly different (I grew up as the only child of a single mom and Norah is the second of six children), and the different expectations Saudi and American families have for their children. She finds it odd that American children are often expected to move out of their parents’ house at 18 when in Saudi Arabia the children are encouraged to stay with their parents until they marry (or longer in some cases). We also got into a lot of financial topics like how American students pay for college (help from parents, loans, scholarships, and part-time jobs), the home buying process, and wage disparity between men and women in the US. She explained that a lot of these things are regulated and/or funded by the government in her country; it was interesting to note together the different kinds of problems and unfair situations that can arise in a capitalist system. Norah has been in the Advanced level at CIES for a while now, but she mentioned that she has difficulty communicating with Americans outside of CIES. I explained to her that this is a common experience and that many speaking or writing proficiency rubrics even evaluate in terms of whether the person could be easily understood by an ESL professional vs. a native speaker with no experience with second language learners. She asked me to speak with her like I would with another American, not shying away from using difficult expressions or slang, in order to benefit her English. I am going to try hard to do that and to correct her errors as well. I am looking forward to getting to know Norah better through this experience!