4 weeks stay in Hebron

My name is Sophia, I am a medicine student from Switzerland and I have been learning Arabic for three years now. This year I decided to travel with my sister to an Arabic country to improve our Arabic skills especially the spoken language, therefore we both applied for the intensive Arabic program at the EC in Hebron. The first day we arrived at the center I didn’t understand anything since I had been studying standard Arabic and it was a little shock to realise how much the dialect differs from the standard language. Honestly, the first two days were hard because I felt like a child repeating every sentence I heard and I had the impression all the standard Arabic I had learned was totally useless. But after a few days I got used to the differences that turned out to be less than I had thought in the beginning. Our wonderful host family helped us a lot to become more fluent in the Khalili dialect. From the first second we felt at home in our family. We were welcomed as a real family member, spent time with our host mother, sister, brothers and their families drinking tea, cooking delicious Palestinian dishes, chatting, joking and thereby improving our Arabic more than I had thought would be possible within four weeks! We even had the opportunity to attend a Palestinian wedding. At the weekends we had time to visit other cities such as Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nablus, Ramallah or to join trips organized by the EC. Travelling was no problem since public transport exist between all the cities in Palestine and as long as one sticks to some basic safety rules, it is no problem to travel. In fact during my whole stay I have never been scared or felt unsafe. In all the places I have been to, I have met friendly and caring people who were very welcoming and willing to help when we didn’t find a place or had a problem. There was no way to get bored since we had lessons every day and apart from the lessons, the EC organized visits to local factories such as the famous Hebron glass factory or Kuffya factory and also guided tours to the old city of Hebron and the tomb of Abraham. The lessons at the center were really intense but that’s why we improved our language so fast. My Arabic teacher is a wonderful person and I enjoyed so much spending time with her talking about any subject that came to my mind. The lessons were never boring: we talked a lot about topics that I am interested in, we went out to have coffee in a coffee shop near the center, we listened to Arabic songs, read poems and short texts and so on. All the teachers at the center are really flexible and willing to adapt the style of their teaching to the individual wishes of their students.
If I think back of my stay now, the first thing that comes to my mind is the picture of me and my sister sitting on the stairs between the apartments of our families, where all our family members had gathered in the evening to prepare Mahshi (stuffed vegetables). We were sitting there, the air fresh and cool after a hot day, the guys smoking shisha, the kids playing and joking and the girls preparing zucchini, pumpkin and eggplant to be filled. It was such a lovely and warm atmosphere and it pictures so well how we got involved into the daily life of our family! I could tell a hundred stories, impressions, feelings and thoughts of my stay in Palestine but I would never be able to transmit the real feeling of being here. So the only advice I can give you: Visit Palestine!