Strategies in Fluency

Great news!  I've had three meetings in the last three days with various Bedouin women's organizations in Be'er Sheva.  Each meeting consisted of two representatives from the organization, my supervisor Amny, and myself.  Each meeting with the three women and I lasted about an hour.
Here is a brief summary of what I gathered from each conversation:
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The first meeting was in Hebrew and the next two were in Arabic.  Thanks to the miracle known as a "cognate" I'm pretty sure a telephone was being discussed during one of the conversations.  Other than that, I really just sat there clueless but attentive. (ladies, insert your gender-based jokes here) I'm sure this is some form of karma from my days as a math teacher when I droned on and on about things like quadratic formulas and the square roots of irrational numbers.

Believe it or not, some people promote this exact type of situation for learning new languages.  It is commonly referred to as "immersion". Here is my description of learning not one but two, count them two, languages through immersion:

Imagine you are thirsty.  Really thirsty. The less you know of a language the thirstier you are.  In other words, you're dying of thirst.

Imagine a rainstorm.  Not a scary, lightning and thunder filled rainstorm.  One of those fantastic rainstorms with gigantic raindrops that cools a hot summer day.  Hallelujah!  So much water for so much thirst.

Now imagine one of those little red straws that people put in coffee.  Imagine that the only way you are allowed to get water into your mouth (remember, you're dying of thirst) is to put that straw in your mouth and point it upwards hoping for a direct hit from a raindrop.  You will be fluent when, and only when, your thirst is quenched.

That, my friends, is immersion.

Thankfully, Amny is infinitely patient.  She recaps all conversations and she is confident I will be of use to these organizations.  And I continue to be ecstatic about learning.