First Few Days, First Impressions

Hard to believe I've only been here about 48 hours.... Beirut is bustling with life in the neighborhood around The Near East School of Theology (NEST), about one block into the city from the American University of Beirut (AUB) that stands by the seaside. Streets around NEST are narrow and full of pedestrians, cars, scooters, smells of open air cooking by vendors, & sounds of new construction work. This sector of Beirut is home to many students who come from all over the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and N. America. 


The weather is hot and humid this week, like Chicago in August. The Mediterranean sunlight strikes objects with a clarity that showed up in the very first pictures I took of the AUB campus. Five times a day I can hear from my room or out on the streets the call to prayer from various mosques in the area. On the street and on the NEST campus I hear Arabic (in several versions), French, German, Danish, and English in many different accents. 


I am just getting to meet most of my colleagues in the faculty, administration, & student body for the first time. We have our first faculty meeting on Friday. Over meals of Lebanese cuisine at NEST, I have already met two students in my courses who are from Lebanon and the West Bank. I have also met students from Armenia, Denmark, & Scotland. Classes begin on Tuesday.


On Tuesday, I begin my study of conversational Arabic with a tutor at the Berlitz Language Center just 5 mins. down the street. Our plan is to meet three times per week for 90 mins. of instruction at each session. This plan gets me through the basic course by the end of November. We'll see if I can keep up with the pace and add some Arabic words or phrases to later posts.


I had lunch with an Anglican M.Div. candidate today who took two semesters of Hebrew from Terra Winston, a recent graduate of McCormick (May '08) who lived here at NEST after completing her M.Div. It was wonderful to hear about Terra's teaching abilities becoming appreciated in a very different cultural setting from Chicago. She has just begun in the doctoral program in Hebrew Bible at Princeton Seminary this fall.


The first picture I have posted is the entrance to the NEST campus where an ecumenical community of Christians live, eat, study, worship, and play volleyball. We have students from several local campuses who live here also, and some faculty and administration have apartments in the building. There are offices for churches and other organizations in our 'vertical campus' that stretches both above and below the first floor. At least one local Presbyterian congregation also worships in the beautiful chapel here on Sundays. 


I am looking forward to meeting more of the faculty on Friday and discovering where I will worship on Sunday. Time to crack open my first Arabic textbooks....