second post

Walking in the door my group did not know what to expect, we did not know if these people spoke any English and if they did how good their English was.  We walked in and were greeted with much enthusiasm, it seemed they liked us and to our surprise the father spoke English very well. It being our first meeting we spent the whole time just talking and getting to know each other. The environment was great and we all just seemed to connect them wanting to learn about us and our culture and us wanting to teach them our culture while learn parts of theirs. The family being very welcoming had a lot of food normal American food put out on the coffee table for us to eat and that was another thing that kind of threw me off with it all being food I was use to eating.

            Our first visit was two hours, me being a person who thinks greatly about first impressions knew that I had to make sure these people liked my group and I. So I went in thinking I am going to have a lot of questions to ask to just keep conversation so I kept that in the back of my mind. Again to my surprise I did not need to use all my questions the conversations we were having were very long and interesting. I learned about what Wahab (the father) did for a living, he was a civil engineer in Iraq and I was really interested in this for two reasons. One I know to be an engineer you have to be smart so I knew he would catch on and learn very quickly. Secondly because I am interested in things like that because of all the time and knowledge it takes to be an engineer. We talked about this for almost the whole time learning what he did over in Iraq and how much he enjoyed doing it. The mother Rasha did not talk much Wahab did most of the talking and their son Yassen was very shy. I had a feeling it was going to take Yassen some time to get use to us.

            I learned a lot about how things were different in other parts of the world the struggles that they were going through and how happy they were to be here in America. Wahab told me many times it was the best decision he had made for his family to move here. I liked how they greeted us and how welcoming and understanding they were to us when we did not understand at times what they were saying because of their accent. When we were leaving I could only think about how much I already liked this family and was thinking of ways for next time to even get closer with them.