As I may have mentioned a few zillion times in my past few posts, the students have returned to San Juan Capistrano … wait, I’m getting mixed up. Anyway, there’s a lot more people floating around campus today than there were last week, and the general consensus among the staff is that things are so flipping hectic that we don’t have time to reach a consensus on anything.

Because one of the three or four hats I wear around here is Official Photographer, I gathered up my camera, cable release, tripod, and three folders of release forms and trudged over to two student gatherings: one for the general program, and one for the Arabic program. It has been the desire of the students to have online profiles so that everyone can see what everyone else is researching, and I get to take the head shots that accompany them. Yippee!

I recruited one of our hourly employees as a PA (photographers’ assistant), and we distributed forms and snapped some photos of students at the happy-go-lucky gathering for the general program. Then we went upstairs to the Arabic gathering, and wandered in on the faculty delivering khutbas to the students in longer and more eloquent language with each passing turn (khutba = sermon). I stood there catching only about 70% of what was going on — my poor PA speaks no Arabic at all.

At the end of all of this, the director of the Arabic program turned to me and asked me to introduce myself and tell the students what I do. In Arabic. As in, he asked me to do this while speaking Arabic to me, and he asked me to deliver my remarks in the Arabic language. And so I did, stumbling over my words because I have gotten extremely lazy about speaking formal Arabic, having gotten used to speaking in the Egyptian dialect which is much less gramatically rigid (and also uses different words for a lot of things).

One of the things that I told the students by way of introducing myself was that I was a graduate of the program, having graduated, as I put it, منذ سنوات كثيرة — many years hence. (When it was one or two I specified the number. Now that it’s been 7 it sounds like I’m trying to relive my grad school days).

What should have dawned on me was that it was so many years hence that only one of the faculty in the room was teaching when I was a student (and he played along, saying that he was too old to remember how long ago it was), and that several of them had never heard me speak Arabic before. When the meeting broke, suddenly they rushed me, expressing amazement and complimenting me … in Arabic. These are people I occasionally have to conduct work business with … and now they’re all refusing to speak English with me.

I’m not your student! Stop pop-quizzing me in the hallway!

I guess the fall semester has truly started…

Tags: Arabic - عربي, faculty, photography, work