222. A Letter Home

And now, dear and respected reader, for your delectation and edification, you are going to be exposed to some printed “spoken American” language of the late twentieth century. Here following, almost unedited, is another facet of your writer, a transcribed audiotape that I mailed to my parents from Tripoli, Lebanon in the winter of AD 1973.

I borrowed this little tape recorder from a friend of mine who teaches English here in Tripoli. He has helped me quite a lot. He and a friend of his got me a little class of students to teach English.

Three boys. All of them want to go to America and they’re kind of interesting for me to talk to. They speak English pretty well. Well, anyway that’s how I got this tape recorder and it is not a topnotch tape recorder but it seems to be doing OK. I just checked the playback and its working so here goes:

Let me tell you about this mosque first because this place is probably the strangest place I’ve ever lived in my life. It’s in the old section of Tripoli. I guess its about eight blocks from a crusader’s castle that was built here when the crusaders came through. It’s a huge castle and this building where I live is about six or seven hundred years old so that makes it the oldest place I’ve ever stayed. I’ve been in this mosque about two weeks and before that I was living in various places in Tripoli.

I met a Moslem teacher and he invited me to stay for the winter and he’s introduced me to his circle of friends and it’s really quite interesting. They’re trying to teach me all they can and I’m learning. I knew a little bit about the religion before I got here just from reading though I had never met any Moslems before. But what I am learning mostly is their way of life just by observing. They’re really quite gracious livers.

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