Han al-waqt!

I just finished my Modern Standard Arabic test with the people at BEX. What a disaster. I knew my nerves were getting the better of me when in my regular early morning lesson with the folks in Cairo, I could feel my consciousness start to sort of float away. I don’t know whether other people experience this or not: that part of an oral exam where you drift off and spend more time thinking about how you sound saying something than you do about what you’re actually saying? I’ve stress-tested this technique across a wide range of environments, and I can confirm that it’s a guaranteed way to sabotage yourself.

I called about five minutes early, only to have someone pick-up the phone and hang it back up immediately. It’s nice to see that government employees are the same in DC as we are here in the courthouse. We’ll stay late if we have to, but by God we will not start earlier than scheduled. If I’m in before 9:00, it’s because I want to read the newspaper for ten minutes, not to get a head start on serving the public.

I called back a few minutes later. This time, they answered and took down my information before passing me along to the testing team. Now, I won’t go into too much detail about the test’s subject matter - nobody mentioned anything about an NDA during my test, but the notoriously conservative folks on the A-100 Yahoo message board have me so completely terrified that I’m breaking some sort of Foreign Service code just by admitting the existence of the test (or the Yahoo message board, for that matter), that I’m going to hold back a little.

We began with a pretty simple dialogue. There was surprisingly little opportunity to go off-topic on this “interview” portion of the test. Basic questions about the weather would get cut off before I had an opportunity to expand on, say, exactly why I hate winter so much in New York, or whether or not I think the summer here is even worse than winter. I felt like I was cruising along until I hit a question that I just didn’t understand at all. The tester rephrased it three times until I finally sort of understood and I apologized and stammered out an answer. When I asked for that second repetition, I could hear the two or three testers whispering with each other and writing stuff down. It was like a scene in a courtroom drama where the prosecutor has just revealed evidence that’s going to get a man hanged.

Having failed that section, we moved on to open discussion. This is where you’re given a topic and you talk, for at least a couple of minutes, on whatever topic you’ve been given. I think “open” is intended in the same sense that the ocean or a desert are “open.” The subject they give you is your means of survival, and you have no idea what it is or how useful it will be until they toss it to you. If they asked me about, say, my job, than I’ve been given a life-raft. This is because I can happily talk at some length about what I do every day and what I think of it - I can survive the open water with this subject. Now, I wouldn’t say that the topic they gave me was an anchor, exactly, but it sure didn’t float. If this were a desert scene, it would have been a bag of salt.

My answer included an unflattering discussion of the Republican Party. I referred to them as “Hizb Republican” (wherein I say "Republican" in English, but with some bizarre accent that’s meant to convey a certain foreignness). At one point, the tester said, in English “what is 'Republican?'”

I said, in Arabic, “well, there are two principle parties in the United States, the Democrats are liberals, and the Republicans are the opposite.”

She said again in English, “no, that is an English word, what do you mean by ‘Republican?’”

I answered, again in Arabic, “It is a proper name, like my name, Chadha, it is the same in all languages, like Hezbollah.”

She didn’t agree, and really, I was just stalling because I have no idea what they call the Republicans in Arabic countries - they probably consider them left-wing radicals or something. I compromised by turning the Arabic word for “Republic” into an adjective, but I think it was too late by then, as the damage was already done. The test ended directly after this and I’m to call tomorrow to get my results. There’s probably some rule that if the tester has to switch into English, than you automatically fail. One year of studying for twelve minutes of semi-coherent dialogue, trouble with a technicality, and probable failure as a consequence of both. Next time I’ll limit my discussion to the wicked “Hizbashay.”

My greatest hope (and my worse fear) rest on the fact that scoring a two really shouldn’t be so hard. Low bars are the worst though - they don’t let you feel that great if you pass, and you feel that much worse when you fail. The way I feel right now, I’d be very surprised to hear any good news. So I probably would feel pretty fantastic about making it through. And really, let's be honest, they have yet to make a bar so low that I’m not delighted to jump over it. I get a little thrill just crossing the lines sometimes.

When I get the inevitable bad news tomorrow, I don't think I'll feel too badly about facing another six months of hard-out study. The temptation to slack on my studies and lose all of this progress would be too great if I didn’t have a terrifying test to motivate me every waking minute of my life.