I met with Ibrahim on Thursday night and at first we both asked each other directing questions to gage a little bit about who we were as individuals. His wife, Amirah, and him are both here to acquire English at CIES. We quickly realized that she is also my conversation partner, which is a lucky coincidence. For him, learning English is a necessary effort to practice law and advance in his work as a lawyer in Saudi Arabia, as more professional opportunities arise with this skill. He said he found it interesting how kind the women here were and though I'm not unaware of the gap between genders where he is from, I was surprised by the word he used. He said it was a nice change and that his country has made some serious mistakes, but that his loyalty is there as well as his religion. This is when I introduced the word faith to him, an unfamiliar word but I knew it would be a familiar concept to him and an important term to be able to utilize. Ibrahim has trouble with writing and especially with i, e, a sounds. I understand this difficulty and tried my best to approach some common words that he would just have to memorize to grasp, along with the sounds that are produced by those letters. He seemed to really enjoy discussing the differences between his culture and my culture as well as the bridges that we were able to find, so I asked him to write as much as much as he could about his understanding of the two seemingly separate worlds and bring it to our next session so that I may be able to help with spelling, structure, and grammar while still continuing an interesting discourse.
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