Lisa Wolring shares some of her experiences from when she was studying abroad, during her time as an International Studies student. During her bachelor's, she studied in Jerusalem for one semester. Jerusalem was the only place considered safe in the Middle East at that time (2014) and she went to the Hebrew University to take part in the Arabic Immersion Program, an intensive language program.

Preparation and traveling
Before I went to Jerusalem, I got in contact with Sarah. Sarah is an American Palestinian; she was doing research in Jerusalem. She had put an advertisement online for two rooms in the Arab part of the Old City of Jerusalem, just behind the Damascus gate. The house was owned by a Palestinian family. They rented the top-floor mainly to foreign students. The family lived on the ground floor.

When I arrived in Jerusalem I was warmly welcomed by the whole family. After hours of traveling, I first had to sit with the family to drink tea and eat. The eldest daughter and her father spoke some English and slowly they started asking a lot of questions. “Do you have brothers or sisters?”, “What are their names?”, “Do you like this food?” etc. They were very curious and everything was immediately translated for the mother of the family. I made it one of my aims to be able to speak to the family without translation being necessary.  

Before I started studying, I went to Jordan and travelled around Israel. In Jordan, like most of the tourists, I visited Petra, where I met a Bedouin family. They invited me for dinner on a big rock (see photo below). At the time it was just an unexpected but interesting interaction. However, their stories got me interested in the position of the Bedouin population in the Jordanian society, on which I later wrote my Bachelor thesis. During my time in Jordan I found it was easy to get in contact with all kinds of people, everyone was very welcoming and friendly.

Living and studying in Jerusalem
During the first two years in the in International Studies program, I learned the basics of speaking modern standard Arabic. When I tried to speak the Arabic I learned, for example on the market, the sellers would start laughing and usually shout to the other sellers: “she speaks Arabic (better than I do)!”. Slowly I started to understand that the Arabic I spoke was very very formal. “Dear sir, I would love to have a kilo of your apples.”- it didn’t take me long to learn such sentences in the local dialect.

Back in Jerusalem, on my first day in the Hebrew University we got information about the safety regulations. A map of Jerusalem was shown in red and green. Red areas were the forbidden zones and the green ones were considered safe. I looked at my friend Theresa, who lived on the same floor; we lived in the middle of the dark red area.

In the Arabic Immersion program, some days we had 8 hours of Arabic classes in a row. In the morning we started with 4 hours of Modern Standard Arabic. In the afternoon we had 4 hours of Palestinian dialect. The dialect classes were focussed on speaking. Something that was very useful about studying Arabic in Jerusalem was that our teacher used to invite Palestinian students from the Hebrew University to join us for the conversation classes. In this way we really learned how to speak the dialect.

I have been reflecting a lot on the choice of living in the Old City with a Palestinian family. On the one hand, I was immersed in the Palestinian day-to-day life: I got to practice speaking the local dialect, learned how to cook some Palestinian dishes (maqluba, literally upside-down, a dish with rice, meat, and vegetables which is cooked in one pot and turned upside-down when served), and had a wonderful view from my window (see photo below). On the other hand, I was constantly confronted with the difficulties this family was experiencing. The house was not in a very good condition and it was not always safe. There was a lot of unrest in the city, mainly in the areas Isawiya and Silwan, but also in the Old City. There were Israeli soldiers on almost every corner where I lived. Those soldiers would “get into cat and mouse games with boys in the street”, as the father of the family would call it. Sometimes it got out of hand - their oldest son, Nabil, was 13 and had been imprisoned twice.

Foremost, Jerusalem is a beautiful city, most people are helpful and friendly and there are some really good falafel places. However, the situation is rather tense and there are ‘incidents’ every day. You have to be very alert all the time. I usually checked Twitter to see if I could go outside when I heard protesting or fireworks. After living in the Old City for 5 months, I was very relieved I could go home.

What I learned in the period abroad is first of all to speak Arabic, especially the Palestinian dialect. I not only learned a lot about the Palestinian culture, but also about the culture of the Israeli Jews and the American Jews I was studying with. I learned to be more patient, because everything would happen tomorrow (bukra, bukra); sometimes you had to wait for hours and hours, for example to pay the electricity bill in the post office. I learned that speaking about “the conflict” was very difficult. Some of the American Jewish students I studied with had very strong opinions about Palestinians for example. Sometimes we got into very emotional discussions together. I, not being Jewish, not being Palestinian, did not have a say, I was not part of it. It even got me to question who I am, because people around me, the Palestinian family, the Jewish Americans had such a strong sense of identity.

Lisa’s advice on studying abroad
When you are going to study abroad, try to speak with the people. You will learn a lot about different perspectives. Also try to speak the local language, especially in the beginning this might be embarrassing, but you will improve a lot in a short period of time. If it is possible I would advise not to live on a campus, because even though it is easy to live on a campus, I think it is way more interesting to live in a “normal” part of the city.