Marhaba! Soo dhawoow. Assalaamu alaykum from RefuLingua.
In April, we held our first RefuLingua Arabic Language Café, a space for tutors, students, and anyone curious about the project to mix, mingle, and practise their language skills in a relaxed ‘café’ atmosphere. This was a proud moment for RefuLingua. While our online classes offer a higher degree of flexibility, language learning happens best in social, conversational spaces where teachers and students can fully connect. We’ve spent the last six months increasing our number of face to face classes to reflect this, and are now running half our classes online and half in person.
In other news, 10 volunteers from Care4Calais have joined our cohort this term to learn Syrian Arabic and Dari, a new language for 2023. They are an engaged and committed group, and we are delighted to be able to support their work through the languages we offer.
We’ve also welcomed Nazia, Ibrahim and Ahmad to the teaching team, bringing our current total of tutors to 9. This means we have more flexibility with times, languages, and venues. We have held group classes at BASE Easton, Easton Community Centre, and St Paul’s Learning Centre, and our 1:1 lessons have taken place in parks, cafés and even ice cream shops! It is wonderful to feel the support for RefuLingua from our local community spaces, and to be able to invest in their work in return.
Our regular group classes will take a break over the summer, but there are still plenty of opportunities to learn. We’re holding our first Summer Arabic Intensive in July. This a two-week evening course of Sudanese Arabic for beginners in St Paul’s. Our second Arabic Language Café will be on Friday 23rd June to coincide with Bristol Refugee Festival, and our tutors are available for 1:1 lessons throughout the summer.