The "I can'ts"

I spent my final college semester in a service-learning program in Palestine. As part of this program, I enrolled in a beginning Arabic class. During our very first lesson, our teacher - Samia 'Atta - taught us perhaps the most basic of linguistic capabilities: affirmation and negation, the words "yes" and "no".

In Arabic, the word for "no" is la'. But, she cautioned us immediately after we had rolled it around on our tongues, one never answers a question in Arabic with a simple la'. It is astonishingly impolite to simply negate. In order to make a negative answer more acceptable, one should always add the complement: instead of just la', you say la' lissa.

No... not yet!

I used this phrase probably thousands of times during my semester in Palestine. For one thing, my vocabulary was severely limited. For another thing, I was 21 years old and there were very many things I had yet to experience, had yet to learn. And so there was much occasion to say "no... not yet."

Had I been to Gaza? La' lissa.
Biked around the Sea of Galilee? La' lissa.
Had I learned how to write Arabic script? La' lissa.
And a thousand other questions to which I gave the stock response.

I have made good on some of those promises. I had the opportunity to guide one of my small blind students through the Gaza checkpoint, shepherd her through the cadre of armed guards in no-man's-land (yes, armed guards in no-man's-land), myself armed only with my magic blue passport and my utter naivete. We made it safely to the waiting arms of Iman's mother.

My college, bless its heart, provided some "relief assistance" to us in the form of a very much needed weeklong vacation in the Galilee, where we could for the first time decompress and begin to process the tensions of living in Jerusalem.

And I took an Arabic class in seminary, and learned to decipher the graceful squiggles.

And so la' lissa became an integral part of my interpersonal communication that semester. But it isn't the phrase that has stuck in my head so much as the worldview. I think about the Palestinians, surrounded by barriers that have now become gut-wrenchingly concrete, never saying "No, I can't", but always... not yet.

It kind of makes you think that everything's possible. Ensh'allah.