A Chat with Hissa V2

Today I met with Hissa for our second meeting, after a few weeks of schedule changes and conflict issues. Overall, I thought it was another successful conversation session, for both her advancement of English and my understanding of Middle Eastern culture.

Just like last week, we started off by discussing how the studies have been going. She’s been busy with all of her English classes, which have all been going pretty well. Life in Texas has been pretty good for her also. The past few weekends she got to go to Dallas and Houston, and had wonderful experiences in both cities. She said she likes the big hustling downtown areas of those cities as opposed to the quiet Fort Worth downtown.  She compared it to going to Abu Dhabi and Bahrain on the weekends when she lived in Saudi Arabia, which I thought was pretty cool.

I then asked her if she’s been doing anything around campus. When she said no, I asked her if she knew about the baseball games that have been going on. It turned into fifteen minutes of me trying to explain what baseball and football actually were. After a while, I realized those sports aren’t very popular outside of the United States. She said the sports she knew the most about were cricket and soccer, which makes sense considering those sports are really popular in Europe and Asia. I find that stuff very interesting, considering how much I follow soccer in Europe. Not really beneficial to the overall conversation, but still cool.

Lastly, she then lamented her frustrations about her studies, which startled me. She said she wants to continue to develop her English, and the classes are helping her do that. But outside of classes, where most of her friends are from Saudi Arabia as well, she still finds herself speaking Arabic on a regular basis. She said she doesn’t feel like she’s making any progress in the advancement of her English. I realized how important these conversation partners truly are. Even though she is studying the language, she doesn’t get much time to practice it outside of the classroom setting. I know I never practiced Spanish outside of the classroom, and it shows in my very elementary fluency of the language. I think with practice Hissa will continue to develop her English.

Overall, I think we had another successful conversation session. I look forward to our next meeting next week.