When I was working in camps for displaced people near Juba in southern Sudan, we
hired a young woman named Lily to help cook at the mission.  Since all cooking
is done from scratch over an open fire, dinner preparations often take several
hours.  However, I have always enjoyed cooking, and I looked forward to helping
Lily once I returned home in the evening.  I was struggling to learn the local
Arabic and Lily wanted to learn English so while we cooked we traded vocabulary
words.  One day I opened a package of spaghetti I had bought on my last trip to
the city. "What do you call this in English?" Lily asked.  "Pasta," I said. 
"What?" she asked perplexed.  So I bent down and spelled it out in the dirt.
"Ah," she said, bending and doing the same, "in Arabic we call it
M-A-C-A-R-O-N-I.