september twelfth

Ramadan starts tomorrow. It’s a one-month period of Islamic observance during which people fast during daylight hours. Kuwaitis take it quite seriously. You can be arrested for eating in public. It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim or not; they expect you to respect the tradition. The expats go along with this in good humor, keeping their sandwiches and Cokes behind closed doors. But it does require an adjustment, because all restaurants, whether they are fast food or sit-down dining, must be closed until sundown. To complicate things for me, my refrigerator stopped working about a week ago. First I noticed that the stuff in the freezer wasn’t frozen. Then the refrigerator section itself started acting “a bit dodgey” as my Brit friend here would say. I spoke to our harris. Have you heard of this word, “harris”? I never did before coming here. It’s something like a building manager. Our harris is from Sri Lanka. He lives with his wife and children in a tiny cramped unit that is about one third the size of our apartments. He is paid a tiny sum to take care of all building responsibilities and must be available at all times. He’s probably about 30 years old, but is missing teeth, looks gaunt and tired, and regards us all with a manner of humble servitude that makes me feel almost ashamed of myself for my privilege. But he is rather notorious among teachers here for saying one thing and doing another. Some have told me that I can’t really count on him to do anything unless I bribe him. So now I’ve been without a refrigerator for about a week, and I’m wondering if I need to give him a few KD to get things going. I came right out and asked him, “If I give you some money, will you get me a good refrigerator?” I saw the look on his face for a split second as he calculated what to answer. “No, no, Sir,” he insisted. “Company weel pay.” Meanwhile I’m hearing stories about residents here who have gone through four, five, six refrigerators - yes. Nobody’s really sure why they break down so much. One theory is that the dust coming through the air conditioning muddles them up. Another theory is that there are really only about a half dozen refrigerators that keep getting hastily repaired and rotated.

There are some good things about Ramadan. Because the children also fast, and it is a total fast during daylight hours--they can’t even drink water!--they are not expected to have the energy to do very much. So school days are shortened. Teachers are asked not to assign much homework, and things lighten up for everyone. Also, the evenings are festive, because once the sun goes down it’s a kind of reverse mardi-gras effect, everyone catching up for lost gluttony. Of course there are no drunken people wearing feathers, unfortunately, but I’m told the streets will be jammed with traffic from everyone going to family banquets and restaurants.

This is probably a good time for expats like me to try to lose a pound or two. It’s very inconvenient to eat during the day because you have to hide, and inconvenient during the evenings because you have to deal with the crowds. I had an appointment with a personal trainer, a buff Filipino guy (don’t see many of those, do you?) at the fancy gym where I paid too much for my membership. Filling out the card he said, “Of course number one thing, losing weight.” Of course. I have another appointment with him tonight. He’s a bit of a slave driver. I think he enjoys being in the position of commanding his rich customers to work harder, do more, move, move, that’s only 30 kilos, you can do that. Like I said, I paid too much. It was a year’s membership and cost the equivalent of more than a thousand dollars - it kind of makes me cringe now. It’s fancy and shiny and clean because it’s connected to a nice modern hotel, but the facilities are really pretty average. Not very spacious, few classes, and the pool was a big disappointment. Hot water. It would be a good public bath if it were in Japan, but it’s pretty lousy for swimming laps. Last night, however, it wasn’t too bad… cooled down to a few degrees above body temperature, a bearable luke warm. I swam about 8 or 10 laps… pretty pathetic really, but we’ll blame it on the temperature. Water temperature is a perplexing matter here in Kuwait. The taps are all marked with red or blue. Do you think hot water comes out of the red tap? Wrong. Hot comes out of the blue, cool from the red. I laughed about this and assumed that it was another of the goofy mix-ups that are common here. It was explained to me later. The red tap comes from the hot water heater tank, and the blue tap comes directly from the plumbing pipes that are run in the ground. During the summer, the ground is so hot that the water being piped in comes out hot enough for a shower, and the hot water heater is turned off so that it can serve as a holding tank and allow water to cool while it rests in the tank inside the air conditioned building. Strange, huh? In the winter, the ground will cool down, and the hot water heater will be turned on.

Yesterday was September 11th. I asked my students if they knew why it was a famous day in America. One of them knew about the Twin Towers. Some students asked me who did it? I know they were testing me. I wouldn’t be surprised if their parents tell them that the Jews did it and blamed it on the Muslims, or some such nonsense. I told them that terrorists did it. They wanted to know more, but I changed the subject. There is a list of subjects and topics ranging from BLT sandwiches to the Holocaust that we are forbidden from discussing in class, and while I’m sure I could probably manage to have the discussion without breaking the rules, I just didn’t feel like bothering with anything political. I am a natural wave-maker, and if I am as careful and prudent as I can possibly manage, I will probably do just the right amount of stirring to stay out of trouble.