ho-hum Eid

If you are busy, come back and read this another time, or skip it completely, because there isn’t anything interesting to report, and I’m just dredging up some crumbs to keep the blog updated. It’s Eid vacation, and there has been no school this week. Those of us waiting for our residence cards knew that we would be stuck in Kuwait with little to do. I haven’t minded much. I went the gym a few times, practiced the banjo, did a little shopping. Ramadan is over, and mosque noise is back to its regular level, which is enough to bother me but not as maddening as it was during Ramadan.

I had an Arabic lesson with my tutor last night. He is a member of the Arabic staff at my school, and consequently makes only a fraction of what we foreign hires make. It’s a supply and demand issue, I suppose. Would I give up 25% of my income to see the salaries equalized? Well the reality is, I probably would not have come to Kuwait if the salary were that much lower, so I guess the answer is no. Unfortunately it does result in a huge inequity. From his point of view, I make a fortune, and get free housing, free benefits, transportation to and from work, everything handed to me. He gets the meager salary and no benefits at all. Of course there is also the fact that he and his wife produced five children who have to be fed and cared for. Anyhow, the fallout of all of this is that I think the money I’m paying for my Arabic instruction is an important chunk of income for him. Got the picture? Now here’s the problem…. he’s not a very good instructor. Since I taught foreign language for many years, I have an idea of how a language should be introduced to a non-speaker. My Syrian friend teaches Arabic to Arabic speakers, so he is more comparable to an English teacher who teaches Mark Twain to American kids…. but put that teacher in a room with Chinese people, and he/she may not know where to start. My teacher makes the mistake of thinking that because he has an impeccable knowledge and expertise in Arabic, there is nothing that I would ever need that he doesn’t know. The truth is, I need a good teaching technique, and that, I don’t think he has. I tried to steer the lesson in a different direction last night, but he quickly directed us back to his grammar lesson. Maybe I’ll look for another teacher to get some conversational practice on the side. Right now, I’m not learning very much.

Since the instant message conversation with the guy in UAE in which he told me that part of the tirade from the mosques had to do with outrage toward Israel, I have been reading up and paying more attention to that conflict. It really is a very interesting saga. There were once local Jews living in Kuwait, but according to the internet, the last of them left some decades ago. Oddly enough, there are practically no Palestinians in Kuwait either. Because Arafat cooperated with Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, Kuwaitis expelled 400,000 Palestinians--a full 30% of the population at the time! Anyhow, I have never felt more than a general sense of disgust about the perpetual ugliness between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East--sort of a “Go ahead, blow each other up, be my guest!” attitude. I still feel a lot of that, but living here where the conflict is a bit closer does heighten the sense of drama. I think I would really enjoy visiting Israel, but we were told early that one loses entry rights to Kuwait if his/her passport has an Israel stamp in it.

I have to think of something good to make for dinner and have my teacher friends over. This is something we’ve gotten into the habit of doing. It’s kind of fun having these little dinner parties. We don’t sit at the table--that would be too formal. We sit in the living room and put our plates on the coffee table or hold them in our laps. I want to make something very American, since I am the only American in our clique. I’m thinking of meatloaf and scalloped potatoes. Seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it? But it’s something to do. I have a cookbook that I brought from home, so I can probably get the recipes from there. Prices are really very high here. I guess it makes sense, given that everything must be imported. I was at the grocery store yesterday, and I just felt like I wanted to get some fresh vegetables. Everything was so expensive. I figured cabbage was a sure bet. Cabbage is always one of the cheapest vegetables per pound, don’t you think? I paid 485 fils for a small head of cabbage. That’s $1.74. Isn’t that a lot for a small cabbage? But maybe it’s what one should expect given that it has to be transported from far away. Other things are cheap. You could build a house out of flat bread. There’s a tiny little shop across the street where men bake some kind of fresh flat bread in a fiery oven right there every night. You can get a pizza-size flatbread, hot and delicious, for about a dime. It’s best eaten hot though. It gets kind of hard and rubbery after it cools.

Tonight, we’re all going on the bus to Fahaheel, a district in Kuwait that has a very elegant shopping center with fountains and nice restaurants. I was finally able to withdraw some money from the bank now that Ramadan is over. I was pretty strapped for cash for a while because the banks were only open from 11:00 to 1:00 during Ramadan, and I was in school at those hours every day. In a few days we’ll be back in school for full schedule days again. I have a lot of planning to do. I’ll probably try to put a dent in it today before we head off to Fahaheel.