my exciting life in an exotic faraway land

I’ve been walking to school for about a month now. The temperature cooled enough for walking, and in the past week it is actually chilly on some mornings. On the way, I walk on litter-strewn sidewalk, through litter-strewn sandy areas, and often right out on the litter-strewn streets. Cars park on the sidewalks and the people scurry in the streets trying not to get hit. I go past about a half dozen garbage bins where I get to see the mangy cats hanging around. There is garbage everywhere, so the cats have plenty of places to search for food scraps. While I walk, I pass concrete buildings, a shisha (smoke) bar, a lot of barber shops, tailors, and dry-cleaners. A sandy soccer field. At night it will be full of guys playing. Little “bakala” convenience stores. Some actual trees - mostly stocky palm trees with a lot of dead fronds hanging down, and many dead tree trunks with no green on them at all. Car mechanic shops that take over the sidewalk and half the street, so you have really have to walk to the middle of the street to get past them. All the taxi drivers beep their horns at you to see if you want a ride. By the time I get to school my shoes get white with dust. The building is designed like an open-air complex that you might find in Florida. I climb stairs to the third floor but here they call it the second floor because the ground floor does not count. The first thing I do is open the windows or turn on the air conditioning depending on the temperature outside. There are eight periods in our school day. I have a lot of planning periods, but for some reason it’s hard for me to get everything done in those in-between times. I’m not very efficient with my time, which makes teaching a very hard job.

Thursday we took a field trip to the Kuwait National Museum. We had about 24 kids and five staff packed into a mini-bus. The first section was set up like a wax museum where visitors could look at scenes from Kuwait before the discovery of oil. It wasn’t bad. The kids, of course, ignored the guide’s explanations, just raced through it, and complained how bored they were. Then we went to a planetarium. I enjoyed the planetarium the most. I love looking at stars. The third section was an archeological display of artifacts collected from Falaika Island, now largely uninhabited, but in ancient times a population center. I didn’t really get to look around there very much because another teacher and I had to deal with a kid who was picking fights and misbehaving. After the museum visit, we went to McDonalds for lunch. There’s a massive McDonald’s on the Gulf Road, right on the beach. This was the best part of the field trip for the kids. Next to McDonalds’s, some entepreneur has set up an inflatable mountain park where kids can pay some money and go bounce around. They loved that.

I had an interesting conversation with one of the teaching assistants. She put me on the spot by asking me about how I like Kuwait. I stuttered something about every day being different. I asked her about her hijab. That’s the name of the head cover that women wear. It’s not the same as the black veil that conservative Muslim women wear - that’s called abaya or burga. With the hijab, you can see the woman’s face, you just can’t see her hair. Once a woman puts on a hijab, she can never appear in public again without it. They’re big on permanent decisions in Islam… another example is that if you become a Muslim and then change your mind, you will be executed. Fun religion, huh? Anyhow, I asked her about how long she’d had her hijab. She said she put it on after she had her first baby. She’s from a very liberal family and she’s the only one wearing a hijab. She said it was a very personal decision, and she had been wanting to do it for a long time. I commented that it must be convenient not having to worry about what your hair looks like. She said that actually it is more of a challenge to look nice because your face or your figure show up more. I guess it makes sense.

McDonalds is immensely popular here. They import workers from the Philipines to work behind the counter. I tried to tip one of them but she refused. It must be against the rules. I thought I was past my stomach bug, and I was hungry. I ordered a “Big and Tasty” meal. That was a mistake. But McDonald’s was the highlight of the field trip for all the kids.

I’ve gotten a couple emails from people back home telling me to be careful what I say. I went into an international teacher’s bulletin board to see if there was in “inside scoop” about the teacher who is in jail for letting her kids call a teddy bear “Mohammed.” Apparently she is a wonderful teacher, very dedicated. Somebody is claiming that a school secretary got mad at her for some petty thing and pressed charges which led to this whole thing. That makes perfect sense. The Islamic world is a mine field. I’m not the most prudent person in the world, and I just hope and pray that I don’t step on anybody’s toes while I’m here. One thing is for sure, there is no appeal to common sense. You just have to play by the rules. My friend teases me that when the guy gets going during Friday sermon and is screaming and yelling at everyone, he’s really speaking directly to ME, and he‘s saying, “You chose to come to this country, so shut up and deal with it!”

Well I do have two trips planned - one to the Sinai for Christmas, and the other to the Malabar Coast of India for National Independence Day vacation in February (they take off a whole week!). Both trips will be solo.

Meanwhile, if I don’t get around to posting very many entries on my blog here, it may be that I have the stuck-in-Kuwait blues, but I will respond to any personal emails.

Maasalama!