Living with a host family

Today is the 11th of December. We have been experiencing very difficult nights. The drones are above us all day and during the nights we hear explosions, airstrikes and bombardments so it’s difficult to sleep.

I want to explain what it means to be hosted by a family and how this affects your life. There’s a big difference between Arabic culture and Western Culture. Over here, being hosted doesn’t mean that you feel like you’re at home. Being hosted means that the family ‘serves’ you what you need and as guests you remain in a couple of particular places within the house. This is to show that you’re being polite - you’re not just wondering around their house all the time. 

So we remain in our two rooms (the room I share with my father during the day and I share the other room with our in laws during the night). If I need something I go to the kitchen and then go back to my room. Because we are confined to these spaces in the house, we don’t share a lot in the host family’s daily life. This is especially the case because we have been here for a long time now and they need to have some privacy. We need to ensure that they don’t feel like we are a burden on them. Sometimes they get to watch TV or they receive visitors, but we don’t join in these activities - we stay in our rooms. 

Also as we are hosted we are not allowed to share in the house chores. This is very difficult because it means one has very few things to do during the day and I have to come up with things to do in order to make our day busy. We are not responsible for getting the food from the market (unless it’s a food we want to buy for ourselves), we are not responsible for the house chores. They only ask my brother sometimes to help with fetching the water from the mosque or from the hospital.

We have to act in a courteous manner, so sometimes when we buy things we get extra to give to the children in the house - like hairpins for the girls or for example some sort of food that the host family thinks is missing in the market and we come across it so we bring it for them. This is always a nice and good surprise for them. 

In order for them not to feel that we are an additional responsibility for them we don’t go to the kitchen and make coffee and tea, we also don’t get to ask for food at the time we want to eat, because it’s completely up to them. We do buy coffee and tea for our own use but we give it to them to look after. In the hosting culture they should be the ones in charge of it and bring it to us. They never use our supplies for themselves even though they have so many children and youth - there’s a lot of movement in and out of this house - but they don’t use it, they only use it for us. We know because the amount always lasts for a long time. 

Doing this is a way of letting them know they are in charge, i.e. “do whatever you want and we are here as visitors and we’re not going to be any extra responsibility or burden at all”. So even though it’s good because we have a safe place and we have the food we need, we are not for example in a school, but still it’s not easy to cope sometimes. I miss a lot of my own habits - I have special winter habits like for example I love drinking different kinds of herbal teas that I only drink during the winter, like za'atar (thyme), ginger, parsley, chamomile and cinnamon. I cannot have that luxury here because I don’t want the host family to regret their decision to have us here. 

During the winter time I’m especially fond of alternative medicine. I sometimes make combinations of different herbs for different winter illnesses and they work really well. For example if I have a cold I like to mix chamomile with cinnamon and it has a wonderful taste, unlike what you might expect. I used fresh herbs coming from the markets, not tea bags - I love this mixture. But wait, we do not have options in the market nowadays due to the war.

Most people I know who are living with host families have changed their habits a lot because of the lack of food and change of diet. It took me a lot of effort to improve my dietary habits which are now destroyed. For example I wasn’t having bread for more than six months prior to this war, but now I’ve had to get back to it because of the lack of good and healthy food. Because of this reason I’ve started to fast as it makes me eat less trashy food. Even though I’m fasting from dawn to sunset  I don’t want to eat at times which are different from the host family’s timings so I just keep my dish and whenever the time to eat comes I do eat. 

I consider other people living with host families luckier because many of them aren't hosted within the family’s house itself but within the same premises so they use their own kitchen utensils which they’ve bought, they use the coal that they buy in the baking pans that I showed earlier, they are using that in order to make their own food. They go to the market, they have more responsibilities, they have to cope with a different situation. They have to get new things for their own use and also they have to cook in a different way, change their own habits in their own way so it’s different - being hosted is different. For many people it’s considered a luxury but for someone like me I like to do things with my own hands so I would have preferred to be alone with my father and then do our house chores by myself instead of depending on others.

This situation adds to the pressure, not only for us but also for the host family who are hosting many families in the building.

We hope that we are visitors and that we’ll be going back home soon.

NB: I haven't mentioned all the details about living with a host family here out of respect to them as well as our own privacy.