Days Two and Three of DSAC-Iraq Training Over
Days two and three of DSAC-Iraq proceeded much like the first. Day two covered Arab and Muslim culture, which I found fascinating. Some noteworthy aspects:
- Arabs place high value on generosity, hospitatlity, etiquette, and personal relationships
- Offering and accepting food and drink is an integral part of meetings; to refuse it an egregious insult
- Extensive ’small talk’ about one’s family is an expected part of any meeting; as with the food and drink, skipping it is at your peril
- Arabs generally are extremely generous and gracious to their friends, and expect the same in return
FSI distributed copies of an excellent book, Understanding Arabs, which went into much greater detail on the subject.
Overall, Arab culture sounds like a combination of elements I wish Western culture emphasized more often (generosity, hospitality, honor, relationships) and some social elements I could do without (Arabs are very social; being alone is highly undesirable to most Arabs). That said, I cannot wait until I arrive in Baghdad and experience it for myself. I only hope my exposure to a small Iraqi team will give me a taste of Arab society.
Day Three covered a very basic introduction to Arabic, both spoken and written. I don’t have any Arabic fonts, so I can’t type any of the words I ‘learned’ (that is, had read to me once), but it was a fascinating lesson. I found the right-to-left order of Arabic writing to be fairly easy to pick up, but the alphabet is much more difficult.
Arabic letters have as many as four forms: the letter alone, at the start of a word, in the middle of a word, and at the end of a word. Each of these are subtly different, and the letters in a word are all connected (like cursive English) with a few exceptions, so it’s very hard for me to pick out individual letters.
The translitteration to the Latin alphabet is also somewhat tricky; ‘DH’ sounds kind of like a ‘V’, for example. This makes pronunciation guided by a Latin translitteration rather error-prone as well.
Finally, there are two letters, ‘9ayn’ (sounds like German ‘ein’) and ‘qaff’ which my Western mouth is not able to reproduce. The instructor, a native Arabic speaker from the Kurdish region of Iraq, assured me that a Western pronunciation as ‘a’ and ‘k’, respectively, would be sufficient for my needs.
Next week is five days of security training from Diplomatic Security. This will likely be somewhat less interesting, as anyone who’s had any dealings with an official security aparatus might expect. We’ll see. At least it’s closer to my house, so I won’t have to get up quite as early.
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