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Lessons in Friendship
Susan Adelman, MD
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When I opened my office more than 25 years ago, I never
expected to find mothers and children in my waiting room with scarves on
their heads and wearing traditional Arab dress. Still, there they were,
accompanied by older children or neighbors serving as translators, and
sometimes a husband or a grandfather with a checked kaffiyeh on his head.
I soon discovered that Dearborn, Michigan, has the largest Arab American
community in the United States. Since I am Jewish, I wondered what that
would mean for my practice.
At first, one pediatrician referred most of these patients. I decided to
meet him. After talking with me at several pediatric dinner meetings, he
revealed that he is Palestinian. I held my tongue. It was not yet the time
to discuss politics or to ask why he was referring his patients to me.
Soon I recognized a problem in my practice: I would speak with an Arab
mother for 5 minutes, and her neighbor would translate for 1 minute. Then
I would talk for 1 minute, and the translator would go on for 10 minutes.
Clearly, something was getting lost. Often, the father, proud of his
ability to speak English, would volunteer the child's history, instead of
the mother. The mother would sit by meekly, no doubt suspecting the father
was embellishing and acting like he knew more about the child than he did.
As a woman, I would see that look in her eye, and I empathized.
After several years, the same pediatrician referred a young mother who
spoke some English. Slim and energetic, she chatted happily during her
baby's postoperative visit. When she told me she taught Arabic to young
children after school, I asked if she would teach me. Her husband
answered: "Fatme will be happy to teach you, but you cannot pay us,
because you are taking care of our people."
I began going to Fatme's house each week for my lessons. We began with the
Arabic alphabet. She was not trained as a teacher, but since I had studied
other languages, I could guide the lesson. Fortunately, Arabic grammar is
very close to Hebrew grammar, and many words are similar or the same, yom
for day, dam for blood, for example. When it comes to pronunciation,
however, Arabic may be the most difficult language in the world. It took a
year before I could successfully roll the consonant combination in one
word, burghul.
Fatme told me she is a Shiite Muslim from a village in southern Lebanon. I
began to wonder how safe I was, a Jewish woman, in her house. The shakiest
moment was the night when, while peeling fruit, she waved the knife at me
to emphasize a grammatical mistake I had just made. I jittered, "Fatme!
Please put down the knife. It makes me nervous."
I began to hint to her that I am Jewish. Fatme reassured me that her home
village had both Shiite Muslims and Christians, with Jewish neighbors. "My
parents taught us that we should respect everyone, honey," she said.
Coming from a country in civil war, she also said quite emphatically that
her father had taught her in Lebanon, "If you talk about seasy [politics],
you die."
Soon, traditional norms of Arab hospitality took over. Fatme started to
insist on serving me dinner whenever I arrived for a lesson, meaning that
I was to eat heaps of food, completely. One evening her brother-in-law
laughed, "I thought this was an Arabic lesson, but it is an eating
lesson."
From the time I operated on her oldest girl, Samar, Fatme has referred to
Samar as my child. After Samar, Fatme had five more babies. We sat
together many evenings while she was pregnant, and she talks now of how I
held her hand in the delivery room, that I touched her twins before she
did. I was with her each week while she breastfed her babies, and later I
held them on my lap.
By this time I felt guilty that I did not speak Hebrew well, so I joined
an adult Bat Mitzvah class. As I learned each blessing, Fatme asked me to
chant it. She listened, eyes closed, swaying slowly as the tune brought
back memories. The melodies were like a dream from her early childhood.
She then told me that when she was a little girl in Lebanon, a childless
Jewish woman wanted to adopt her. Her parents refused, of course, but on
many weekends the woman obtained permission to take Fatme into her home in
a Jewish neighborhood. There, Fatme would have heard these tunes, chanted
during Saturday worship.
Eventually Fatme came to work in my office, helping my secretary,
translating explanations that were beyond my uncertain Arabic, and
assisting with dialects from diverse countries. On her first day, a mother
asked her (in Arabic) whether the doctor is Jewish. Fatme picked up the
underlying hostility, became angry and defensive, and threw the woman out
of the office. Later I gently explained that in my practice, I hear only
what I choose to. "You do not need to understand everything. Be a little
dumb," I told her.
At 5 years of age, Samar announced she was going to be a doctor. Later she
too came to the office, fetching supplies for minor procedures and helping
to hold wriggling babies. The oldest of six, Samar was an expert. I told
the other mothers she planned to become a doctor; they beamed at her and
at me, for encouraging her.
Fatme taught me much more than her language. She gave me a course in Arab
psychology. I once asked her how to say, "Lie still so I can examine you."
She proposed, "If you lie still, I will give you chocolate."
I asked how to distinguish between saying that a mother should, could,
ought to, or might do something. For each, Fatme insisted on, "You must."
When I objected, she chided, "You always have to say 'must.' Otherwise
they will not follow you."
At the hospital very early one morning, a mother from Yemen refused
scheduled surgery on her baby. After arguing fruitlessly with her in my
best Arabic, I called Fatme. Talking at great length to the mother on the
telephone, Fatme explained that I had operated on her own baby and that
this was the woman's opportunity to have the sweetest, best doctor take
care of her baby, the Doctora. How could she refuse? By the time Fatme
finished, the mother had tears falling down her cheeks. She put down the
telephone softly, saying, "Allah, Allah."
I immediately called Fatme back. "Fatme," I teased her, "can I assume by
'Allah' she means yes?" Fatme replied, "She means yes. Now grab the baby
and run to the operating room, before she changes her mind."
My husband and I began to have dinner with the Palestinian pediatrician
and his wife from time to time, each curious about the other's point of
view and intrigued to argue politics with "the other side." We also found
him so concerned about his patients, his wife so efficient, motherly, and
impish in her stories about the office, that we soon became friends. We
even traveled around Israel and the West Bank with them for a week in
1987, during their family reunion outside Ramallah.
The Palestinian pediatrician and his wife asked Fatme to work in their
office on days that I did not have office hours. Thus she also became
their friend. Since these Palestinians are Christian, we all see this as a
special trilateral friendship, which we believe needs to be replicated in
more places than just Dearborn.
During the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War, television reporters came
frequently to Dearborn to obtain footage of an Arab American community.
They were interested in "local color," comments from US Arab leaders, and
reflections and opinions of "Arabs-on-the street." After watching these
stories on television, my mother begged me to stop going to Fatme's house.
I suggested that Fatme write my mother to say she would not take me
hostage. Fatme said, "Of course, honey, if you write my mother a letter
and tell her that you guys will not take me hostage."
I called Fatme one night: "Fatme, turn on the TV. Pieces of Scud missiles
are hitting your brother-in-law's neighborhood in Riyadh." She effused,
"Oh, thank you, honey. You know how I feel about politics. I hate war. You
know I would never look at this unless you asked me to."
During the war my husband and I continued visiting with the Palestinian
couple too, discussing issues frankly, but still able to tease each other
when we disagreed. Always when we bid each other good night, we agreed,
"If only it were just up to the four of us, we could solve these
problems."
Other Arab families in Dearborn have welcomed my husband and me into their
lives to dinners, weddings, even a funeral. Fatme's sisters send their
love to "the Doctora" in tapes sent all the way from Lebanon. This year I
had the pleasure of seeing Samar graduate from high school with honors;
she chose to attend college at the same university where I had attended
medical school.
After I finished my Bat Mitzvah class, Fatme started praying several times
a day. She did not wear a headscarf, the hejab, when I met her. Now she
does. After September 11, a few isolated incidents of anti-Arab graffiti
occurred in Dearborn, and women became nervous about wearing the hejab in
public. Now it is my turn to be defensive on Fatme's behalf, telling her
not to be afraid. After all, I tell her, this is America.
The practice of medicine in this large Arab American community has brought
us together. It is comfortable here now that many of us have learned to
speak the same language. For me in particular, Fatme's family has become
my family. When I look to the Middle East, somehow this seems important.
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