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April 6, 2005
Introducing Mohammed
My host brother is quite a character and deserves a post all to himself.
Usually he just likes to follow me around a bit and watch the English language programs with me. Sometimes he tries to convince me that he knows Kung Fu and swings around a kitchen knife, but his favorite game is asking me what celebrities I know. "Do you know Madonna? Do you know know Bugs Bunny? Do you know Julia Roberts? Do you know Pokemon? Do you know Spiderman?" and on and on and on. I have decided that these questions come from an idea that all Americans know celebrities and that all we do is watch tv. (and mostly bad tv based on the characters that he usually mentions)
Last night we were watching a Disney channel movie called "Luck of the Irish". It is a pretty silly movie where the main characters are leperchauns living as normal people. Anyways, my host brother kept calling the leperchauns genies instead so I decided that I was going to make fun of him. I spent the next half-hour trying to convince him that all Arab families must have a genie because that's what I saw on TV. I challenged him to find one English movie about the Arab world that doesn't have a genie in it but he couldn't come up with one! The only example he could think of what "24" which is a not a movie or is it set in the Arab world. Instead, it is a show where Arabs put a bomb in LA. . . yeah, that's a great sterotype. . .all Arabs are terrorists. My come back was that the bomb hasn't gone off yet so maybe there is still a genie inside. :)
At this point he left the room and came back 10 minutes later singing. Well, rapping is more like it but it was in this really high-pitched voice and in horrible English.
"My name is Mohammed and I live in Amman,
I didn't go to school today,
today is a holiday,
so I stayed at home with my Uncle,
he was sleep till 1,
I take a shower,
then watch tv. . .
I decided that maybe if I correct his grammer he will stop so I start telling him what he is doing wrong. "It's my Uncle woke up at 1pm and I went to take a shower." Well, this prompted him to tell me that he was going to join Star Academy and become a rock star. I of course told him that that wouldn't happen unless he stopped rapping in that high, squeaky voice and improved his grammer. What he didn't originally tell me was that he was going to rap in Arabic so that meant that he now needed to demonstrate his Arabic rapping abilities.
"Ismee Mohammed,
ana escoon fee amman. . . "
Well, at least this time it wasn't in a squeeky voice.
Posted by rcollins at April 6, 2005 7:42 AM
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Comments
I get that whole do-you-know-any-celebrities thing here, too. I try to explain to people that I live in a really, really tiny state that they haven't heard about and that the United States is really, really big, but I don't think it makes much difference.
Posted by: Rebecca at April 6, 2005 11:47 AM
So I think that Mohammed is a replacement for your own brother Sean. They sound very much alike, ask silly questions, impress people with their knowledge and all the little brother things. Are all little brothers the same or what?
Posted by: Barbara at April 7, 2005 8:27 AM
Rebecca, I respect some of your opinions (even if they tend to be too PC and naive); but if you really have such a problem with America and Jews, I don't understand why you don't just emmigrate to Saudi Arabia or some other repressive country. I have been to Jordan, and for all it's progress, it's very naive and near-sighted how you put the US down time and again. You come to Jordan as a guest, a student who doesn't have to earn a living in that country, pay utilities, and worry about the basics. If you really paid it much thought, there is a damn good reason those Jordanians were willing to wait for up to a day in "fortress America". People emmigrate from Jordan to the US, not the other way around. A Jordanian, I can guarentee you, has more religious freedom in the US than you have in Jordan. If America sucks so much, then I implore you to renounce your citizenship (for which so many others around the world are willing to risk everything for) and move to an absolute monarchy, such as jordan.
Posted by: Josh at April 8, 2005 11:38 PM