“I’m trying to function in three languages right now, so you’ll forgive me,” College senior Julia Johnson said between bouts of Persian, Arabic and English.
She and the other residents of the new Middle Eastern Studies and Asian Studies theme hall (MESAS Hall, for short) were busy entertaining their multilingual MESAS faculty guests, who visited on Sunday for the hall’s first big event.
MESAS Hall, which houses 17 students on the 14th floor of Clairmont Tower, is one of Residence Life and Housing’s Living-Learning Communities, where students can incorporate Arabic, Hindi, Persian and Hebrew into everyday life.
“It’s great practice, but four days of language classes just isn’t enough,” Johnson said, explaining the push behind the theme hall.
Johnson serves as the hall’s resident adviser, and she also worked to get the hall started when she first heard of Living-Learning Communities last year.
Currently, each apartment more-or-less focuses on one of the four languages. One of them, for example, houses three Arabic speakers and a Hindi speaker. In the future, Johnson hopes each apartment will focus on a single language.
At the MESAS dinner with faculty on Sunday, residents pitched in by cooking or accommodating guests in their apartments.
Johnson herself prepared a Persian dish named fesenjun, a kind of paste made from pomegranates, walnuts, onions and cinnamon.
Farther down the hall, College sophomore Emily Pollokoff — who speaks both Hindi and Arabic — had hummus in the refrigerator, Moroccan stew on the stove and falafel in the oven.
Johnson said describing the food at the dinner was akin to describing Middle Eastern and Asian culture.
Hummus, she said, is hard to pin down to one place on the map, since “just about every place in the Middle East will say hummus started there.”
The residents also served paneer (cheese in sauce) and nan (flat bread) from India, zaatal (an Arabic, pesto-like thyme sauce meant to be eaten with nan) and even Mexican wedding cookies and frushi (fruit sushi) for good measure.
“We have four languages and innumerable cultures represented here,” Johnson said, speaking about the food as much as about the general cultural interaction. “It’s an advantage to us, but sometimes it can be hard to find a focus.”
Hindi professor Rakesh Ranjan, who attended dressed in a black kurta, said the hall’s multicultural focus is especially practical for students learning a couple of different languages.
“There’s a chance for enormous growth here,” Ranjan said. “The interaction helps culturally and linguistically.”
Arabic professor Robert Greeley said he loved the theme hall’s focus on using a foreign language in everyday life.
“I studied Arabic years and years ago and there was not an opportunity like this,” he said. “In the end, a teacher can only teach so much.”
College junior Bentley Brown could be the poster boy for the theme hall: He speaks four languages — Arabic, French and English fluently — and he’s working on his Hindi.
“I enjoy them,” he said. “They’re fun.”
Brown hails from Dallas, but his family moved to an Arab community in Chad when he was 11 years old. As a result, he blends several different cultures into his identity.
For example, he’s a soccer fan, and he roots for both FC Dallas and France’s Marseille soccer team, which he said recruits a lot of African and Arab immigrants.
He’s also the co-president of the Arab Cultural Association this year, and served as the president last year. He and his roommate, Imad Abusam, can speak the same regional variation of Arabic, since Abusam emigrated to the United States from Sudan.
“It’s really cool, especially if we need to say something in secret,” Brown said.
College sophomore Hassan Cheema speaks Arabic and Urdu (a close linguistic relative of Hindi), which allows him to communicate with Hindi speakers.
Cheema plans to enroll in the Goziueta Business School, but he chose to live in the MESAS Hall because he needed a kitchen of his own to observe Islam’s halal dietary practices.
“And, to a lesser extent, my friends also live here,” he added.
Johnson said ResLife sponsors the hall’s programming. Johnson said future events — which are open to all students, not just MESAS majors or residents — may include guest lectures or calligraphy lessons from faculty, study breaks and movie screenings.
“What can I say, language classes are addictive,” she said.
