Those of you who follow the bulletins from the first “episode” might remember the two students whose dance of seduction fascinated me last year. I wrote about them again recently touched by the beauty of their subtle seduction that silently lasted month after month.
These two students came to university today with a big smile and a shiny ring. They came to our offices with a box of chocolate to announce their engagement!

A few weeks ago I started taking Kurdish classes again. The attempt I made to learn the language at the beginning of last year dramatically failed and in the meantime I only managed to pick a few words here and there.

Frustration for not being able to understand the culture of this place fully, added to the difficulties of daily communications.

I thus decided to start asking around and eventually managed to find a teacher. He is a student of Linguistics, comes from a very conservative family and has never shaken my hand since we first met. We have had five classes until now and we are having a really good time.

One thing that we have in common is a deep passion for grammar. I therefore feel entitled to ask million of questions on how language, syntax and structure of the words work. My favourite Kurdish word has become “bo?” – which means “why?”

I feel like a mixture of a three year old girl who is discovering the world and a six year old who is learning to describe it by “carving” words, letter after letter, on a notebook – this is me when we do dictation!

My inhibitions, beginner mistakes and perfectionism make me think that it will be a while before I will actually manage to utter my first full sentence in public. The other day, B. asked me to translate a sentence from a book – I looked at the words, I knew them all, and thus with great pride I slowly started saying: “… his… brother… is… a… girl!” B. looked at me in disbelief and burst out laughing. I was too proud of having been able to recognise all the words to realise what I was saying. When I actually did realise, I got really embarrassed (that was not the most appropriate thing to say to a member of the Muslim Brotherhood…) and started laughing; it took a fair bit for us to stop laughing and get back to work. For your information, the correct translation was: “he is the girl’s brother”!

One of the most fascinating discoveries so far is that, through the language, I am learning a lot about Kurdish culture and mentality. Last week we were studying phrasal verbs and B. was explaining me how to construct the different tenses. It was a real moment of enlightenment – present and future are constructed in the same way, there is no difference. The explanation is very simple (yet dramatically profound): for Kurdish people present IS the future.