in lieu of progress reports

I seem to have reached the point of routine. I must have adjusted to my normal state of being a teacher because I am terribly bored with school work and procrastinating like there’s no tomorrow. (Wait a minute… if procrastinate means “put it off till tomorrow” then how can you put something off till tomorrow like there’s no tomorrow? Oh well.) My progress reports were supposed to be done by the end of the day, but I just packed all my paperwork in my briefcase and brought it home and left it on the couch. It is still there, untouched. I have spent the evening with my banjo trying to figure out songs which are probably unsuitable for the banjo. Can anyone really play “It Ain’t Me Babe” on the banjo? I don’t think so. I sure can’t.

My favorite shuttle driver has been transferred to a different route. He was an Indian from Madras. His buddy, another guy from Madras, still drives us to the grocery store. Today I talked to this #2 Madras guy about his family. Communication is very dicey with these Indians. They mix English up with their native language because that’s what is commonly done in India, and they don’t slow down because they don’t know that it’s not normal English. I think he told me that he wanted to bring his wife and child to Kuwait with him, and his wife drank poison because she didn‘t want to come. She went to the hospital, and now she’s okay, but she didn’t come. So I guess her tactic worked. He told me that he is Hindu, and said that the other Madras guy is Hindu, too. I found this interesting because the other guy had told me that he was Christian. I wonder if Hindu religion is somewhat malleable. Maybe you can be a Christian for a while if you feel like it, the gods don’t mind. The grocery store was a madhouse. The funny thing about Ramadan is that everybody is fasting, but you have never seen so much food in your life. It’s because they have huge feasts at the end of each day of fasting, which amounts to every night for a whole month. They gain weight. Speaking of which, I haven’t been to the gym for about a week. I hate paying for a taxi to go to the gym. It seems like I should get paid instead of having to pay. I do carry my heavy briefcase around. But I should go to the gym, because the swimming pool is probably cool enough to swim in now. It still gets into the low 100’s everyday, but that feels like nothing to us.

The paperwork is a drag, but I like my job. The kids are cool. There’s one boy, a little tyke with black-rimmed glasses who loves to say his English words so he just says them over and over. “Good morr-neenk! Good morr-neenk! Good morr-neenk! How arrre you! How arrre you! How arrre you!” The staff likes to say that they are spoiled rotten brats because they’re all from such rich families, but the truth is they are really very eager to please their teachers. You can say to them, “Will you be good boys and girls today?” and most of them will smile and nod eagerly practically jumping up and down to let you know how much they want to please you. If you said that to American kids I think they would laugh at you and shoot spitballs at you. Not that we don’t have behavior problems. But even their behavior problems are kind of funny. Two boys will be fighting. “Sir, he hit my shoulder.” “Well, sir, he put dirt on my paper.” “But sir, he said that my mother was hairy all over.”

I’m sitting here looking at my messy apartment. I have to clean it up. Tomorrow the maid comes. It’s funny that I feel like I need to clean up before the maid comes. She’s Indian too. I know it’s time for her to come when I see the little cottony bits of dust here and there on the floor. There is a lot of dust in the air here, and it gets in through the air conditioners. The maid told me her theory that something was wrong with my bed and cotton was spilling out of it and ending up on the floor. I just nodded and didn’t say anything about the AC. I enjoy hearing her ideas. She is not shy about telling me what I need to do. I need to get a new iron, she says, my iron no good. Also she tells me that my apartment not nice other school’s teacher have much more nice apartment my apartment not nice like other school teachers. She’s very proud of her English because she never went to school herself, and it is pretty good English when you consider that. She likes to be paid at the end of the month in one lump sum, otherwise her husband will spend the money.

Last week she showed up really early and I was getting ready for school. There was a small basket of candy in front of my door. Today is Sweets Day, she explained. Somebody give you sweets. There is a day in the middle of Ramadan called “Girghiahn” when the Kuwaitis dress in their traditional colorful clothes and do something like trick-or-treating. All the kids wore their outfits to school. It was pretty cute. It was funny to see the boys dressed up like little sheiks walking around. A lot of them handed out very fancy gift packs of candy. Mostly the fanciness was in the packaging, and inside was actually very cheap junk candy and peanuts in the shell. One day I didn’t have any lunch with me and I ate that junk candy all day. But I don’t think that’s why I got my case of 27-hour hiccups. The hiccup marathon was a mystery. I have no idea where that came from. I had the hiccups from around noon on Tuesday till Wednesday evening. I was giving an IEP test to a sixth grade kid when the hiccups hit me. Actually it was the same kid with the black rim glasses. I asked him how you say hiccups in Arabic, and he said “Mafaaghe.” He didn’t complete the test, and I had to continue testing him the next day and I still had mafaaghe. He didn’t seem that surprised though. He just looked at me funny. He probably thought foreigners get mafaaghe for a long time. At least the hiccups stopped for about an hour when I had to be interviewed at the Ministry of Education office on Tuesday night. I thought it was just going to be a formality, showing my certification and getting some papers stamped or something, so I didn’t dress up - I was wearing jeans and an Alaska t-shirt. When I got there, all the other teachers were wearing suits and ties. And there I was, jeans, t-shirt, and hiccups. One of the custodians there took me into a small kitchen and gave me a glass of cold water, and I held my breath and took tiny swallows ten at a time. It worked long enough for me to get through the interview. As soon as I got home they started up again. The next day I went through all kinds of superstitious ideas and philosophical analysis about what it meant to have the hiccups for so long. They finally stopped in the evening. I don’t know if it was the foamy non-alcoholic beer I drank or the intercessory prayers for a cure that my brother offered up on my behalf after reading of my ordeal in a family email.

I still don’t know who gave me the little basket of candy. Unlike the peanuts and sour chewies that were in all the kids’ Girghian bags, this had really good milk chocolates in it. I think it might have come from the neighbor across the hall. She’s a science teacher, and she makes big bucks moonlighting as a tutor for physics and chemistry students. She was the one who talked to me about her career the day that I broke the window when I was locked in. I hope she isn’t trying to flirt with me. But the chocolate is very good. I wonder if she hears me playing with the banjo sometimes. I have to say “playing with the banjo” because you see, I’m not actually playing the banjo. That would require some kind of knowledge of how to play a banjo.

Tomorrow I am going to have to go to my coordinator and tell him that I had technical difficulties and couldn’t complete my progress reports.