Joha and his sheep

I thought I would share with you some of the stories I have been reading in language class the last few weeks. I think you could classify them as Arabic fables—but I could be wrong. Unlike the ones you and I grew up with, these don’t really have a moral to the story, except to connive and trick people-which makes the stories even more interesting. I was sharing the stories last night with a friend and that is when I realized that they would encourage kids to lie and cheat. They definitely illustrate how this is a shame culture and you never do something wrong unless you get caught doing something wrong.

In class, my teacher reads the short story and then I butcher the story trying to read it as fast I as I can just to get through it. And then we go through and translate sentence by sentence. A lot of times I know the words, but the sentences don’t make any sense until we translate them. It is a good sign for the teacher then that on the third time around, I understand and laugh in all the appropriate places! I am not blonde, I am just an Arabic student! Lol. And then after reading the story, I have to answer questions about the story do excercises using putting new vocabulary words in correct forms in sentences. And conjugate the new verbs in past, present, and command forms for I, we, you (masc.), you (fem.), you (plural), he, she, they.

Here are the stories in my rough English translation. I think they are funnier (and of course less time consuming) if I don’t clean up the stories and translate literally.

Story #1: Joha and his sheep.

Joha cared for a sheep very pretty that he loved. His friends wanted to mock him because they wanted Joha to kill his donkey for them (“him to slaughter for them”=all one word (6 letters) in Arabic---let’s just say verbs are complicated in Arabic) to eat the meat from the sheep. So one of them told Joha: “what are you going to do with your sheep?” Joha answered: “I am going to hide it for my winter supply.” (meaning: care for my sheep and save him to eat in winter). His friend said: “What? Are you crazy? Do you not know that judgment day is coming tomorrow or the day after tomorrow? Bring your sheep here that we may eat of him.”

Joha didn’t care about what his friend said, but his friends came one after another and gave the same speech, until Joha was bored. So Joha promised them he would slaughter the sheep the next day and would invite them with a special invitation to the countryside to slaughter and eat the sheep. So Joha started a fire and began roasting the lamb on the fire. But his friends left him alone with their clothes while they went skinny-dipping in the river while Joha worked on the fire. Joha became angry that they left him and did not help him, so he gathered all their clothes and threw them in the fire, until they burned. And when they returned to him, they looked for their clothes, and saw that they had burned. They wanted to attack Joha, but Joha told them: “What benefit do you have from your clothes if you are sure judgment day is coming today or tomorrow?”


Joha always wins! Here the “phrase tomorrow or the next day” is very common. Nothing is ever for sure, but I have learned that if a repairman says tomorrow or the next day that maybe he will come the next week. The phrase is used to get out of a lot of things. Originally when we read this story his friends went on a stroll leaving their clothes with Joha, and this didn’t make sense to me, so my teacher and I both agreed that skinny dipping made more sense so we changed it!

Okay, this is a long post and it’s dinner time, so I gotta run, but I will post more stories of Joha soon!