Every day I walk by seemingly endless children no matter where I go, and they all want your attention. “Sura sura!” is the most common thing they yell. That’s pretty easy to get away from since I don’t usually carry a camera with me. Some ask for money, but that’s usually only the slightly older ones. In my experience, it is the 10-15 year olds, always boys, that ask. A lot of kids use the only English phrases they know, “Hello! What’s your name? Where are you from?” The What’s your name question is particularly tiresome. Why do you want to know my name?
A more humorous one is “I love you!” A couple of boys that were 10-12 years old were shouting that to me the other day. It was a bit disconcerting. I think the reason for that is the verb in Arabic “hab” is used interchangeably for like and love. There is a more complicated way of saying I like something (I had a whole blog post on it a while back), but most people won’t use that in spoken Arabic. Anyway… Every day I pass by all these kids and I can only talk to a handful of them. They love the attention, but I would spend my entire day there if I stopped for each one. Luckily, our conversation topics dry up pretty quickly, there’s not much I can talk about with a 12 year in Arabic. If you go to the villages, be prepared to assume the role of the pied piper. Kids of all ages will follow you around, yammering away. One of my most vivid memories about traveling through some villages that cannot be accessed by cars is what seemed to be 50 or 60 kids all waving and saying “Bye-bye” as we left the village. It was quite a racket, but sweet. Honestly, I was happy to escape, but their farewell made it clear that they enjoyed having us there.