Ayman Ismail

And she said all these really nice things.

All in Arabic, right?

She doesn't speak English at all.

And my kids were just like staring out the window like they have no idea what's going on.

And at that moment, I'm like, oh, no, it's not just like about religion.

It's not even about like language.

It's about their tether to their heritage.

Are they ever going to truly feel connected to their huge family in Egypt at all if they can't talk to them?

And at that point, it started to feel more like an emergency than anything else.

Yeah, it was something we were weighing.

You know, my wife and I were both Egyptian.

And so a part of us when we first became parents felt like maybe it was possible that we could teach these kids just enough Arabic to get by.

We're both Americans.

We both were born and raised here.

We both had parents who were Egyptian who taught us the basics.

And we both went to, she went to Sunday school.

I went to a full-time Islamic school.

And so we both had these like structures in our life that taught us Arabic and

And so we felt like, you know, maybe we could just like get them Arabic baby books.

We can like teach them the Arabic letters, get them a puzzle.