Snails in Beirut…

When I moved to Beirut, I was surprised to find my house surrounded by snails. But it wasn’t until yesterday that I bothered to learn the Arabic word for my slimy little neighbors. When a young boy and I in the playroom at St. Jude’s were playing a computer game featuring blinking, flourscent fish–and, surprise–a slow-moving snail, I didn’t know how to refer to the strange creature slinking across the bottom of the screen–since he and his mother didn’t speak English.

“How do you say that in Arabic?” I asked, pointing to the snail.

حلزون, his mother said, giggling as I repeated it. Halazoon.

“Snail” wasn’t exactly a word she was used to saying–or hearing out of the mouth of a foreigner. As I repeated my new vocabularly word over and over again to commit it to memory, she kept her hand over her mouth–since she couldn’t stop giggling. Halazoon, halazoon, halazoon. Snail, snail, snail. For a brief and absurd moment, neither one of us was thinking about cancer–just about snails in Beirut…