Farooq Salam
Freshman Composition
Professor Lobell
10/3/2023
Cover Letter for ELLN
I’ll admit when I first learned of this assignment I wasn’t exactly thrilled because I just saw it as another assignment being tossed onto my workload that I was barely learning to balance as a brand new college freshman. But while I was working on it, recalling specific moments and experiences that I had on that trip with my siblings and my dad, and going through the photos of the trip that captured memories that will forever hold a beautiful meaning, I started to see it less of an assignment and more of a reminisce.
At first thought, my audience for the narrative would be my peers as well as my professor but while I was writing the first draft of my narrative I was thinking to myself that I would never get to actually show the taxi driver the impact that he had on me from such a small deed. In a deeper and more meaningful insight, my true audience was the taxi driver. Even though I know he can’t read my narrative even if he did know it existed, I hope that my writing in some way materializes his act of kindness.
One insight that I feel like I have gained in this phase is that I feel more comfortable while writing because I don’t have that burden of restriction to a singular tone or a specific way of writing. I can write whatever and however I feel and that might not make my writing as good as Shakespeare but it gives it more “life” and meaning. Through writing this assignment I feel like another insight I have developed is not overlooking moments in my life and to sometimes try finding the meaning in things however small or mundane they seem because those moments can have life-changing lessons or eye-opening experiences.
I think two concepts have most impacted my learning and my writing practices and they are rhetorical situations and purpose. I think actually understanding rhetorical situations and seeing how their different aspects work together is not only crucial to be able to understand a reading but also to make an effective writing piece. For example, you need to be able to understand what and how you want the audience to react in order to formulate how you want to present your piece to your audience. That leads me to, purpose. Purpose is what gives any writing “life” because it organizes your thoughts and lets you write with passion, and everything is done better with passion than without it.
I think this phase’s assignment has brought me closer to some of the course objectives. Obviously not at the mastery level but I do feel like I developed the skills in the objectives more. One course objective I think I developed is number 2 which is “ Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations”. I think from reading texts such as Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” and listening to my peer’s spoken narratives I think I did learn more about how narratives can be different genres and each one has a different rhetorical situation. For example, one peer’s narrative might focus on overcoming a past obstacle while another’s narrative might focus on a specific moment in their life.
English Written Narrative Final Draft
I let out a groan as I sat next to my older brother and my two older sisters on a bench at the airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was freshman year of high school and we were performing a pilgrimage to Mecca, called Umrah in Islam. It was around midnight and I was beyond exhausted from the two flights it took to have arrived there and I had not slept a minute in almost forty eight hours. In an effort to fight my sleepiness while waiting, I began to look around the airport. My gaze scanned across several different groups of people laughing and speaking in languages I couldn’t understand, then I saw signs that were written in Arabic and had small English translations instead of the other way around. I felt uneasy and not secure being in this foreign place even if it was with my family. It’s a difficult feeling to explain but it’s when you appreciate a place but it just doesn’t feel right not because there’s something wrong with it, but that it’s just not “home”. That’s when it truly sunk in; I was a foreigner for the first time in my life as it was my first time outside of North America. After years of seeing immigrants coming to New York City, I could finally get somewhat of an understanding of how it felt. My thoughts were interrupted when my dad came to us and told us that he had found a taxi driver to take us to Mecca.
Walking out of the airport with the luggage I shivered as the cold night air of Saudi Arabia hit me for the first time. Much of Saudi Arabia is desert and though it is extremely hot during the day, after the sun sets, the temperatures drop drastically. Surprisingly, the first thing that I noticed were the trees, they were tall palm trees with thick trunks and spaced out leaves that for some reason I couldn’t believe were real. It wasn’t until my siblings and I loaded our luggage into the taxi that we realized the driver only spoke Arabic and nothing else. Already dealing with the mixed feelings of being somewhere new and having no time to adjust, I was beginning to get frustrated. I was already tired and immediately thought to myself this is going to be a disaster and it was going to be a very long time before I could finally sleep. How was I meant to enjoy a trip if I was going to be sleepy for half the time I was there?
Thankfully, the taxi driver was able to understand where we needed to go. Throughout the car ride the taxi rider continued to talk even though we could not understand what he was saying. Despite the voice of the driver and my siblings talking, my eyelids began to grow increasingly heavy and it was becoming extremely hard to stay awake let alone be aware of my surroundings. I must have dozed off a little because when I was finally able to fight off my fatigue we were taking an exit off the highway that took us to a rest stop. Confused and starting to get anxious, I turned to my brother and asked him what was happening, and neither he nor my dad knew what was going on. I think the driver must have sensed our confusion but couldn’t find a way of explaining what he was doing. He did eventually point at a coffee shop at the rest stop and only then did we realize what he was doing.
My dad tried to explain to him that we were kind of in a hurry because of how tired we all were and that he could get his coffee after he had dropped us off. In response, the driver said a short phrase in Arabic with a smile and nod and drove to the drive through anyway. Even though we couldn’t understand what he was saying, his order sounded a lot more lengthy than something just one person would order. It wasn’t until we got to the pickup window that we realized he hadn’t ordered anything for himself but 5 cappuccinos for each of us, from his own pocket. I didn’t realize it because of my tiredness and distracted thoughts but I couldn’t remember the last time I drank something. We accepted the coffee gratefully and for the rest of the ride we discussed amongst each other what and why the driver just did, while the driver continued to speak with a cheery smile and laughter.
His act of kindness was nothing short of bewildering; even now my family still thinks back to that day. A taxi driver who couldn’t understand anything we were saying went out of his way to spend his money in the middle of the night on a family of random tourists that he would probably never see again. What made this small deed so bizarre was that you would probably take the taxi hundreds of times in New York City as a tourist and never come across someone who was willing to buy you and your family coffee even if you spoke the same language. For the rest of our stay in Saudi Arabia we took the taxi multiple times and each driver could speak a language we could understand and none of them showed the same amount of kindness as our first driver did which is ironic in a sense.
We all have the ability to understand how others feel and think if we just try and put ourselves in other people’s shoes. Some people tend to see immigrants, foreigners or even people who simply speak differently than them as less intelligent or below them when it could very well be that they are the same or even have a higher intelligence. Speaking different languages, or dialects of the same language or even just speaking in a different way shouldn’t be looked down upon or be discouraged so that there is a better “understanding” amongst people, rather, it should be cherished because if everyone spoke the same way, there wouldn’t be uniqueness. We would never learn to accept others’ differences and see past them; the world is dull without uniqueness.
Our taxi driver saw that we were all extremely tired and were probably going to have to stay awake for even longer and decided to help us. This experience showed me that language and culture are only imaginative barriers that we create inside of our mind that can prevent us from understanding other people and that sometimes we even use it as an excuse to see others as below us especially in terms of intelligence so that we may feel higher about ourselves. The driver is an excellent example that all human beings are capable of showing kindness to others and that differences in language, culture and race aren’t an excuse for us to discriminate or treat people like they are below us.
The taxi driver gave me two important life lessons from just one simple basic act of kindness. Looking beyond just the language aspect of this specific moment, I learned that the most mundane parts of anything whether it is taking the subway to school or in my case taking a taxi on a 10 day vacation trip in a different country can be some of the highlights of your trip or your life. Such as the first moment that I saw the palm trees outside the airport. It seems like an insignificant detail that you most likely wouldn’t even mention to anyone if they asked you about your trip, but in your head you still remember it as a vivid part of your memory. We often overlook these small moments and mostly want to skip past them so we can get to do the things we “actually” have to do and in doing so we miss out on entire parts of our lives. Then later when we look back into the past we regret not being grateful for those moments. Like when I was initially getting frustrated and angry that we weren’t at our hotel yet so I could get up the next day and properly start my vacation when in reality it had already started.
The two images below are from two different taxi trips while I was on vacation:
