Legal Notices

Yesterday morning I came home from a meeting to find 2 pieces of paper glued to my front gate. One was from a lawyer, one from the judicial system and both were in Arabic. I didn't really know what they said but, seeing as how I've had my share of local judiciary system experiences, there was a chance that the letters might be for me. I figured that if they were for me or my neighbors next door we would rather not have everyone else in the neighborhood know what they said when we didn't, so I took them down. Tricky thing though, when you stick glue paper to metal in 100's degree heat it doesn't exactly peel off neatly (for future reference). Being the innovative person that I am, I ran upstairs and got my camera, took a few pictures of the letters and then took them down. Good thing I took the pictures b/c there were holes in the middle of the paper, words missing...it was pretty unreadable.

I took the letters upstairs and later in the afternoon I got together with my foreign neighbors next door and we set out to decipher what the letters said. If you haven't ever attempted to learn Arabic I'll let you in on a little secret. Written Arabic is totally different than spoken Arabic, at least in this country it's like two different languages. So while my neighbors and I can speak just fine, we had absolutely no idea what the papers said and had to break out the dictionaries.

After spending about 15 minutes on one line we realized that we were decoding our address...felt pretty stupid about that. We also figured out that there was a defendant and a plaintiff, only to later realize that the 1 word for defendant is also used to describe the plaintiff if it is followed by a second word. We spent about an hour going through this thing and didn't even get halfway finished. Then we realized that the people upstairs were the defendents and not the plaintiffs and it had nothing to do with us. Good thing too, because I just don't know that I'm up for spending another entire day at the police station.