I'm still in Kuwait

(written Sept 26, 2008)

I just checked my refrigerator to see if my wallet was in there. Can you relate to that? When I have too much to do, things find their way to the most unlikely places. Well, it wasn’t in the refrigerator. My latest taxi driver Mohammed-Iqbal (who says his name like “mama-dickball”) called me to see if I found it, and just as he called, I found it in one of the side pockets of the same backpack-briefcase that I’d already checked about six times. Mohammed-Iqbal was happy to hear this. I owe him money for this morning. He said I could pay next time. He is a Muslim from Chennai, India, and seemingly in the process of converting to Christianity. The first time he took me to the cathedral, he asked me for a picture of Jesus. I didn’t have one, so I went to the little bookstore on the cathedral property. I figured maybe they would have a holy card or something. They didn’t have any, but the guy working there had a memorial card from somebody’s funeral or something that showed the Jesus of Divine Mercy. That’s an image that depicts Christ holding up his right hand, while his left hand points to his heart from which a spectrum of rainbow light shines downward. The first time I saw that image was on a sticker in a gift shop at the Basilica Shrine in Washington DC. I bought it because it struck me as a symbol of Christ having some loving connection to gay people, who often use the rainbow as their symbol. It’s still stuck to the cover of one of my old journals, now packed away in a box in my sister’s garage. Mohamed-Iqbal kissed the plasti-coated memorial card I got from the cathedral bookstore and thanked me for it. I didn’t remind him that as a Muslim he should consider all graven images as unlawful. I figure that’s between him and Allah. It will be interesting to see what happens. He said he would like to come to mass with me some time. They have a mass in Tamil, his language, a couple times a month. Maybe I’ll try to take him to one.

Oct. 13, 2008

It’s 2-something in the morning. I was awakened by the sound of a dog barking. One doesn’t hear dogs barking in Kuwait. Dogs, in general, are feared and reviled in the Islamic world. I remember Mir Ali, the guy from Hyderabad I befriended when I was in high school, nervously backing away from our little white cockapoo, Bridgette, as if she were a 500 pound gorilla. A couple who joined the staff this year had their dogs flown in from the states. They walk them in the morning. One of them was the service dog who lived with their disabled son for many years before he (the son) died, and the other has been that dog’s companion since the death. The husband works with me in the middle school. He recently has a look of horror on his face – the realization that he is committed to living in an unpleasant place for a long period of time. It’s existential shock. I recognize it. I hope the barking dog wasn’t one of theirs. Anyhow, it’s stopped, thank God. As I lay there wondering whether I was going to fall back to sleep or get up, I mused about the terrible futility and honesty of the poor dog. The domesticated dog is not really prepared to live in a natural environment anymore, and see where his fate takes him—to pace in small apartments in cities wherever his master chooses to go. I interpret his barking: free me, pay attention to me, let me be who I am meant to be, or kill me. Is this not a prayer as eloquent as any we can compose?

Mohammed Iqbal stopped taking my calls last Wednesday, a couple days before he was scheduled to receive his monthly salary and pay me back the money I loaned him. (I know, it's a bit confusing--I said I owed him money. I paid him back, and later he borrowed a sum from me... a substantially larger sum.) I thought about never telling anyone about my bleeding heart gullibility, but why pretend? I tend to trust people, I have made the same mistake before, and I will again. I know plenty of people who are defensive and suspicious. I don’t admire them. Some of us gamble at the slot machines and some of us gamble with destitute taxi drivers. You win some, you lose some.

About two weeks ago, during Eid, I was invited to go with a Kuwaiti friend on his father’s yacht. It was something like 50 feet, with two huge motors. We traveled for about one hour out into the Persian Gulf, to a tiny patch of rock and sand called Kuber Island. We didn’t actually go on the island, but we anchored there, did a little fishing, ate a lunch of Kuwaiti “machbous diyai” chicken and rice, and swam around the yacht. Another guest, an Italian national who works at the Italian embassy, and I were both stung by jellyfish. An old retired doctor, a friend of the owner who was also along for the ride, informed us that the best remedy for a jellyfish sting was urine, and he said that in the old days if you got a jellyfish sting you would get your buddy to pee on you. I just suppressed a smile and sipped on my pepsi. Unfortunately, the shoulder that was stung is still hurting, almost two weeks later. I think that I probably coincidentally pulled a muscle in the same spot where I was stung, but I can’t help wondering if I should have taken the good doctor’s advice more seriously.

I went to mass tonight at the cathedral. Sunday is not church day here in Kuwait, but it was packed just the same. There are 140,000 Catholics in Kuwait, and only three legally permitted churches. The people were reciting a pre-mass rosary when the electricity went out. The bishop came to say mass by candlelight. Given no sound system, the Bishop’s unfortunate weak voice and Italian accent, and the fact that the congregation consists almost entirely of people who are not native speakers of English anyway, I’m quite sure that nobody understood his homily. But the mass itself could be followed easily enough, and it was very beautiful to experience reverence and calm among the few thousand people jammed into one building with no light but a few candles.

Meanwhile the world teeters on the edge of economic armageddon. I am guilty of harboring a tiny impulse of glee at signs of rain on the greed parade that has defined American culture and society for much of my life. Forgive me, but I want to see people plant potatoes in their back yards. If the meager efforts we’ve made to concern ourselves with the environment, global warming, social justice etc. have only been extravagant fancies to entertain after everything else is crossed off the shopping list, then those things are probably going to be serious casualties, and somebody will come back to say, “We’re all poor and miserable and the earth is ruined. Are you happy now?” We like to say that change is good. Here comes the test.

OK, I’m going back to bed.

Ramadan-o-rama

Outside I can hear the honking of horns, and the street below is a parking lot. All the schools and businesses quit early during Ramadan, and everybody heads home at the same time. My school beats the traffic by letting us go a half hour earlier than everyone else. We have a new driver. He's an old Syrian guy with a leathery face and bristly beard. He looks like a National Geographic picture, a little scary. The first day he was silent. I imagined him reciting the surras in his head and trying not to make eye contact with us infidels. But he was just shy. Since then he's softened up, and he's so gentle and respectful, it makes me ashamed of my first impressions. This morning he showed me a picture of an American teacher he met when he was working in Cairo. He carries the guy's picture around in his wallet.

Ramadan is different this year. I guess I've changed. Some Arabic staff got word that I was upset about the mosque noise. They all started asking me if the mosque noise was disturbing my rest too much. By the time they got around to asking, I had already softened on the issue and I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but I admitted that sometimes it woke me up and I couldn't get back to sleep. One of the teachers said that he was going to call the Ministry of Religion and tell them about it. Well, apparently it worked. For the past week, the call to prayer hardly wakes me up. Not only is the volume turned down, but the vocalization is softer. Sometimes it even gives me the idea to pray. Imagine that. All my Muslim friends are fasting right now, and sometimes I can see the exhaustion in their faces. Islam requires a dry fast -- no water. It must be so hard to go without water all day when it's hot. I made up my mind that I would do something in solidarity with my Muslim friends, so I committed to a vegetarian diet for the month. I also threw away the half pack of cheap Egyptian cigarettes that I bought. It would be good to quit meat and tobacco permanently, but we'll see how the month goes.

I heard last night that Kuwait is experiencing the highest humidity that they've had in ten years. Last week it felt like a steam bath outside. As soon as I stepped out the door my eyeglasses would fog up immediately. It was strange. It's starting to subside a little. The combined heat and humidity does tend to keep people indoors. Usually I will walk a couple blocks to a small basement grocery store to pick up an item or two, milk or whatever. I'm using up everything I have to avoid going anywhere. Strange dinners of macaroni with cashew nuts and ketchup. The school provides a shopping a bus once a week, and tomorrow is shopping day again. I mustn't make the mistake I made last time -- the heat put me in a frame of mind to buy liquids. I bought NA beer, fruit juice, water, milk, etc... hardly any solid food. Of course five liters of the fruit juice were for a special project. By the way, we've learned that you have to use real fruit juice. I already knew that myself, but a good friend confirmed that artificially flavored sweetened drinks will not ferment. He was basically trying to make wine out of Kool-Aid.

When I got back to Kuwait, I sent an email to the Vicariate of Kuwait Catholic church to ask about volunteering. I got an answer back from the bishop, who invited me to come and meet him. I met him. He's an Italian. He talks just like Marlon Brando in the Godfather. We talked about the fact that westerners don't come to mass much in Kuwait. Apparently, those who go at all go to a small mass said by the military chaplain at the American Embassy. He seemed very tired. He's been serving in Arab countries for about 40 years. He invited me to attend a three-day "Unity Congress" about unifying the Church in Kuwait. It was this past weekend, and I went all three days. I got to see another side of the Indian and Filipino Catholics whom I described before as having sad and angry faces. At times they can be very focused on reverence and solemnity, but I also saw them clapping, flapping angel wings, and singing their hearts out when they were prompted to do so. It was funny, cute, and humbling.

The official emphasis was on bringing together the different ethnic communities and Rites which tend to stick to themselves too much. In small groups, I tried to extend the definition of Church. The Indians and Filipinos in my discussion group were hard pressed to think of non-Catholic Christians as their brothers and sisters, because they've experienced too much painful division and separation. Unfortunately, the local evangelical Bible church see the Catholics as prime targets for their missions. Families are split up over this. It has been going on for generations, I know. My grandmother had two brothers who became "Assembly of God" fundamentalists, and the rift in the family was never healed. Attacks on Catholic tradition can sometimes get a little sharp. The traditional Catholics that come here from India and the Philippines have a strong devotion to the Virgin Mary, and this is often made a point of attack for the non-Catholics, who call it idolatry and say that Mary was just an "eggshell." (It almost sounds funny -- eggshell! Do they think that Jesus of Nazareth hatched from an egg?!)

People's cell phones kept going off all weekend in the middle of everything. Lectures, panel discussions, prayers, the consecration of the Eucharist -- doesn't matter -- you would hear somebody's cell phone go off with some crazy variety of ringtone; once it was Bobby McFerrin's famous whistling bit from "Don't Worry Be Happy." In hindsight, that was kind of prophetic. I was getting annoyed, though, and thought, "Can't these people get a CLUE and turn off their cell phones?!" Then on the last morning, a cell phone rang in the middle of the Bishop's address. I saw him look down and I thought he was going to really scold us. But he fumbled in the pocket of his cassock and said, "Oh, I fogetta to turna offa my mobile."

After such a busy weekend, I'm glad to have some stay-home time tonight. I might go down and give some food and water to the cats that live outside the lobby door. There used to be just one, an orange tabby. A brown and gray one has figured out that somebody is putting food out, and now he's taken up residence there as well. They're both starved to skin and bones, and they cry at everyone who uses that side door. Poor little critters. Other than feeding them, I'm just going to play some music, do some feng-shui (that's a fancy word for tidying up) around the apartment, and take a glance at my lesson plans. Maybe I'll play my Arabic Groove CD.

Maasalama

back to Araby

I must have reached a new plateau of middle-aged dorkiness. What would my friends think if they knew I was tuning to Easy Listening on internet radio? I’m finding I’d much rather hear Patty Page singing “On the Street Where You Live” than David Bowie’s angsty “Ziggy Stardust.” For crying out loud!

Come to think of it, what’s probably more surprising is that I’m not listening to the “Arabic Groove” CD that I bought. I thought I ought to be giving myself the appropriate soundtrack for myself while I’m here. When I was an exchange student in Japan many years ago, I had a kind of rating system for myself as a person living abroad. I felt that it was my responsibility to prefer everything Japanese. Whenever I went to the department store snack bar for a corndog or listened to my Supertramp album, it was a kind of guilty pleasure. I knew that I supposed to be immersing myself in things Japanese. People go to great lengths to “do as the Romans do.” There’s something in Japan called “natto,” which is fermented soybeans which have a gooey slime on them and make long saliva-like strings when you pick them up with chopsticks. They smell and taste disgusting. To love natto is to prove your status as a true japanophile. I knew a guy who made the mistake of boasting that he LOVED natto. His fame spread quickly, and everywhere he went people gave him bowls and bowls of natto. He secretly told me that he regretted ever saying he liked natto, but by then it was too late to back down. What you have to do is explore with an open mind, but be honest about what works for you. I like wearing a dishdasha around when I can get away with it, because nothing else makes sense given the heat here. Jeans are just miserably hot, and I don’t see how anyone could wear them regularly without developing fungus in the crotch. But after swimming this morning I didn’t feel too bad about eating at McDonald’s for breakfast (not very exotic, but I just wasn't in the mood for bean gruel and pita bread). I was with Mahmoud and his brother Mustafa. Mahmoud had called me at five in the morning to see if I wanted to go swimming in the Persian Gulf. It’s something you only do in the early morning before the brutal sun gets going.

The sun was just rising as we got to the beach. It was huge and gorgeous. We discussed what would be a good description for our morning sun. Mustafa said it was like an orange. I told him he should be ashamed of himself for such an unpoetic description. So he said, “How about a golden plate?” That was an improvement. We settled on “golden peach” for our metaphor. And that is was, a golden peach of a sun, marking the morning with a kind of celestial blessing. The water of the gulf was soft gray-blue color, and close to body temperature (but refreshing nonetheless because the air was warmer than body temp). Here they call it the Arabian Sea, and according to our staff handbook, teachers can receive a warning letter at my school if they refer to it as the Persian Gulf. Persian or Arabian, it was wonderful, and we swam far out and back. Then we went and ate our McDonald's Value Meals. I found out that Mustafa likes fishing and communist ideology. I’ve pretty much come to see communism as a discredited pipe dream, but I shook his hand anyway. I love youthful idealism. Where would we be without it?

Wow, now my easy listening internet radio station is playing Ryu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki,” the only Japanese language pop song that ever made the hit parade in America. The irony never ends. And here we go with Rosemary Clooney and “You Took Advantage of Me.” I’m so hot and bothered that I can’t tell my elbow from my ear. [dance break]

Let me see, now what can I tell you about my first week back in Kuwait? The first day I tagged along with my friends from the old clique (the British 5th grade teacher and his art teacher wife) to get their computer set up for wireless internet and have lunch at the mall. The art teacher wife is pregnant. She can’t really take the sun at mid-day, and when we had to hike from the parking spot to the computer place, hubby had to forge ahead and let us follow him by going in little runs from one air-conditioned shop to the next. The heat is not as big a topic of conversation since this is our second year here, but neither is it ignorable. Yesterday afternoon I came home and saw that Yahoo Weather was showing Kuwait temperature as 120 degrees. So it seemed kind of crazy when the same couple called me on Sunday and asked me if I wanted to go for a ride with them in the desert to visit Mutla Ridge. 5GT insisted he was going to attempt to hike the ridge a bit despite the heat, and let the Mrs. run the air conditioning and wait in the car. It sounded insane to me, but I figured it would be something to write about, and I could wear my new Indiana Jones hat out there without feeling too ridiculous. It was a long ride. When we got to the ridge, it was completely inaccessible because of fencing. I read later that it is in a military zone. We did stop at a little general store that had the quality of a space station on the moon, out in the middle of nowhere-and-nothing, just barely air conditioned to tolerability and stocked with everything imaginable. We went to Ahmadi, known as the roughest district in Kuwait, said to be populated by stone-throwing Beduoins. We went all over the place asking for directions to the historical Red Fort. Nobody threw any stones at us. One guy said, “Isn’t that in New Delhi?” (Indeed there is also a Red Fort in New Delhi. We chuckled over the silly idea that someone would go to the wrong country in search of the Red Fort.) We finally found it. Unfortunately the Red Fort is closed on Sundays. They took a picture of the gate, and then we went to Marina Mall to eat at the food court. So much for our educational Kuwait field trip. Still, it was a fun day.

What else transpired this week? Waleed and Ahmed joined me in the school’s pool on Tuesday. Waleed’s swimming is looking great. Ahmed still can’t stand to put his face in the water. We’re both coaching him. He invited us to his sister’s apartment for dinner the next night. He bought grilled chicken, bread and hummus. We spread newspapers on the floor and tore into the food with our fingers like wild barbarians. A bone flew out of my mouth and landed in the hummus. Waleed said, “Don’t worry no problem.” I love those guys.

We have been having great inter-religious dialogue.. and here, I’m not really kidding anymore. Since Taize, I guess some people would say I’ve sort of “got religion,” and prayer has claimed a new priority in my life, for better or worse. It now makes a lot more sense to me why these guys drop everything to pray. I’ve decided that when I’m with one of my Muslim friends, now, instead of sitting there picking at my fingernails while he prays, I’m going to pray beside him wherever possible. I’ve done it a few times already. Catholic prayers, like the “Our Father” and the “Glory Be” lend themselves quite well to this. It seemed especially relevant and meaningful that night at Ahmed’s apartment, because Waleed got a sudden call from his uncle. His uncle said that something had happened to his mother, she was in the hospital, and it was very serious. The uncle was on his way to the airport to fly back to Egypt, and he told Waleed that he needed to make travel arrangements immediately. Waleed came unglued. Ahmed and I prayed with him for a while, and then he went home to figure out what to do. After he left, Ahmed and I stayed up and talked until after midnight. It’s amazing how much you can communicate with extremely limited language ability.

Taize is not easy to replicate, but it is a kind of incubator for a little spiritual flame that can be brought home or wherever life takes you. I’ve decided to start attending mass at the Vicariate parish here in Kuwait. I’ve written before about the “third world” quality one finds there. Last week the mass was said by an old priest from India who sort of barked out the liturgy with forceful, mechanical tones. The faces of the congregants, nearly all either Filipino or Indian, looked angry and sad at the same time. They always seem beat up by life here in Kuwait, and I’ve seen enough to understand how they struggle and how they are treated. Faith keeps them going, and their devotion is palpable. I know Mustafa the Communist would probably quote Marx’s famous line, “Religion is the opiate of the people,” and look no further. Maybe I’m too hypnotized myself; I just think it’s more complicated than that. Today I’m going to try to save a few dinars by catching the bus to church. I talked to one Filipino guy before mass last week… maybe I’ll see him again. It would be nice to make a friend or two there. But even if I don’t connect with anyone, it’s okay. I want to say a couple Glory Be‘s, because I found out just a little bit ago that Waleed’s mother is okay. And my own mother and father are okay. It was great to spend time with them this past summer, and I miss seeing them, but I know they’re okay.

Now I’ve written a blog entry, so I can cross one thing off my to-do list. Tonight maybe I’ll write my new students’ names in my attendance book (school attendance is done on the network, but administration wants us all to keep handwritten records). Maybe I'll dust off the banjo and see if I remember the three chords I mastered last year. Till next time, Maasalama.

Europe, Canada, and home

(Gananoque, Ontario, July 15)

I am sitting in a white and purple cabin with fake deer lawn ornaments and petunia beds out front overlooking the highway. We are in the Thousand Islands district of Ontario. My brother and his wife picked me up at Toronto airport a week ago. We had a wonderful five days at their friends' cottage near Algonquin Provincial Park. Northern Ontario reminds me of Alaska. The landscape is just gorgeous. We saw a black bear and two moose, along with loons, turtles, hummingbirds, etc. Canada - wow!

I have been away from Kuwait for a month. I’m having a cup of black coffee and some cold, leftover steak and mushroom pie that I ordered at a restaurant last night. I just got back from a walk in a cemetery that borders these rental cottages. I woke up too early and felt restless. The walk seemed to help. I put out a general invitation to all the ghosts to let them know that I would be glad to have a friend who has seen the bigger picture and might be willing to help me figure shit out. I didn’t get any responses, just a few mosquito bites. I recalled the memory of Brahmin big brother TS telling me that I should regard all trouble and confusion like inevitable grass and weeds growing up everywhere until my happy ending arrives.

I was in Europe for three weeks, but I didn’t do much sightseeing. I flew into Basel, Switzerland, and stayed in a hostel for one night, then took a train to Lure, France where I was met by a forty-something guy from London with a bright smile and a Mohawk haircut. This was Lovestar, the guy I’d connected with through email. I was now in the company of “Faeries,” a little-known subculture of gay hippies with whom I have often felt very at home. My own Faerie nickname, “Cannoli,” would be put to use once again, through I have often told myself that Cannoli is no more. Lovestar helped me load my bags in the trunk of his car, where his partner, Spider, sat having a cigarette. Spider has beautiful soft eyes and blond hair, but most people only see his multiple piercings and face tattoos. With time I learned a little about his turbulent life as the child of two junkies who abandoned him to a system full of bad influence and regular abuse. These two Londoners would be my main companions for much of my time in France. Both were hard-core London punk-queers, and some of the details of their world left me speechless, but they were authentic, gentle, and kind, as Faeries are prone to be. Spider was a great cook and a hard worker, chopping wood and tending the vegetable garden every day. Lovestar preferred sunbathing to labor, but he was the brains of the operation, planning for the solstice gathering, coordinating shopping trips and train station pick-ups, etc. People trickled in over the next few days. A wild-haired and witty inter-faith minister, tall and lean despite his 50+ years, now studying Jungian psychology in Zurich; a delicate and soft-spoken Frodo/Harry-Potter look-alike with chronic fatigue disorder and an extensive knowledge of Native American medicine ritual; a golden-hearted sissy who sang Tina Turner songs and hid the stretch marks that told of his growing up obese; a fair-skinned and quiet Dutch truck driver who looks good in a white silk slip and didn’t try to keep up with the English and egos of the gathering; his sage-eyed partner, confident in his knowledge of plants and skilled at using divining rods to find water and energy meridians on land as well as chakras in the body. You get the picture. Not your average bunch of KOA campers.

The place is called “Folleterre” which means “Land of Fools,” and it so happens that folle in French is coincidentally a common pejorative term for homosexual--the equivalent of “fag.” Anyhow, a group of European Faeries bought the place about five or six years ago. It has an old farmhouse with an attached barn, lots of wooded acreage, some apple trees, and a couple water springs. The house has neither electricity nor modern plumbing. So far, it is only occupied during the summer months. The first time I traveled up the mountainside and along its long driveway, I felt like I might have been in Tennessee or Pennsylvania instead of France. Over the course of the week we hiked in the hills, bathed with big pots of hot water heated on a wood stove, cooked and ate delicious stews, stir-fries and pasta dinners along with lots of bread and cheese bought in the village. We had “heart circles” during which we talked about our life journeys and the various challenges and dilemmas we faced. My pressing question was whether to leave for a week for a stay at Taize, an ecumenical monastery and pilgrimage destination in Burgundy, just a train ride away in physical distance but certainly a world away in other respects. Some of the faeries were baffled why I would want to go to a Christian pilgrimage destination, but there was one who had been there three times before, and his comment was, “If anybody gets Christian spirituality right, they do at Taize.”

On the eve of Solstice we hiked up to a beautiful outcrop of rock which is considered a kind of sacred spot on the land, and we paid homage to the setting sun. Then we gathered blankets and supplies and moved to a small prairie where we built a nice fire and had storytelling, drumming, and wine through the night. A few tents had been put up for anyone who didn’t want to sleep under the stars, and I eventually got sleepy and parted company with the revelers. Before the sun came up, Spider came and told me to come and play my recorder to signal wake-up call. We had agreed to hike to Blueberry ridge, the highest point on the land, to welcome the Solstice sun. The march up the moonlit path was marked by mixed giggling from those who’d been up all night and the groans from those who’d gone to sleep and weren’t really ready to be awake again. The sunrise was not particularly spectacular, but it was nice to have a quiet hour with the bracken ferns as we waited for the sun to peek through the pines.

I decided to go to Taize. It was not easy getting there. I caught a ride for part of the way with the Dutch guys and ended up in an off-track location. It was a Sunday, and there were no internet cafes open, so I had difficulty getting directions. There are two towns called Taize in France, and I almost went to the wrong one. What should have been a three or four hour trip took all day, and I arrived late at night. When I first got there I felt completely out of place. For one thing, the primary focus there is on an invitation to young people, and the older generation is sparsely represented. While the young people did not seem particularly religious, the people my own age were mostly ministers and serious committed Christians, primarily non-Catholic. I made the adjustment by paying attention to the less-pious members of the pilgrim population. There were teenagers there who seemed to be having a rock concert experience (I smelled funny smoke near the tent camping area at least once). On the first or second day I sat by some teenage boys who sang along with the Taize chants in mocking falsetto voices. A nearby mother grew impatient with her fussy baby, and when she yanked the kid up to carry him out, the little tyke farted--which caused those teenage guys to bust into convulsions of stifled laughter. I got a kick of those bad boys. I also got a kick out of the one middle-aged monk who, in contrast to others, sat with his arms folded and his legs crossed and looked about with a totally bored expression during the services, as if to suggest that he couldn't wait to get out of there and go back to fix himself a big bowl of Cheerios. I think I was fascinated by out-of-place folks who, in their innocence, somehow evaded the gravity of the place and its strong spirituality. Maybe those boys eventually succumbed to the pervasive atmosphere of holiness like I did. I have the genes for religiosity, and I am easily swept up. I told my discussion group from the onset that I wasn’t really comfortable calling myself a “Christian,” but gradually the layers of the resentment, shame, and frustration of my knotted-up life and uneasy dance with Christianity just sort of fell away. By the third day I let go of resistance. It had a lot to do with the openness and vulnerability of people I met there. I suppose there is safety in a place where everyone comes together from a different corner of the earth, and people find it easier to be genuine. I felt mutual trust and acceptance with people I never imagined would understand me. Most notable was a Methodist minister from Louisiana. He was just as polite and southern as you'd ever find, and at first seemed almost like a stereotype to me, but we became friends, and what a heart of compassion he had. The actual services in the church certainly didn’t feel like any church I had ever been in before. There was absolutely no feeling of religious authority, only a focus on prayer and openness. By the time I left, I felt transformed. Was it brainwashing, crowd psychology, or God? I don’t know, and it doesn‘t really matter. I left Taize so full of love and peace, I spontaneously kept tearing with joy and thanksgiving up as I bumbled through my inevitable missed trains and communication break-downs on the way back to Folleterre. In fact, a missed connection caused me to be two hours late getting back to the station at Lure, and Lovestar and Spider had had such an ordeal trying to be there to pick me up (running out of gas, dealing with their own quarrels, losing patience as train after train arrived with no Cannoli) that they finally gave up and went home with the idea that I’d get a taxi and find my way back. Instead I slept on a park bench in the company of two poplar trees that seemed to hover over me protectively as Taize chants continued to echo in my head.

(continued, July 28, 2008, Ephrata, Pennsylvania)

The return to Folleterre after Taize was very strange. I didn’t feel free to talk about my experience because I understood that Christianity is viewed as oppressive and antagonistic by those guys. Meanwhile, what was normal thinking and behavior for them struck me as unhealthy and confused. There was nothing they were doing that I hadn’t myself done before (except maybe Acid), but it just felt dark and twisted to me after coming from that bath of prayer and contemplation. Did I feel out of place? Well, yes I did. But I’m glad I went back and had that last week at Folleterre. It was a great exercise in acceptance and perspective. It was like seeing an aspect of myself from a remarkable point of view that I never held before. At the same time, I felt love and respect for those guys. We all walk our own tightropes, and they are on paths of their own which I have to believe fit into the big picture just as the chapters of my life fit into mine. Anyhow, they were extremely respectful and kind to me during that last week. We took dinner to a neighbor, a handsome young German skinhead who had cut his thumb very badly while using a sickle. He had a bang-up electric guitar which he plugged in for me so I could impress him with my rudimentary 12-bar blues, something that seemed very cool and American to him. We hiked over the hills and trespassed on some land to have a swim in the beautiful clear pond. Spider was thrilled when little fishes nibbled at his toes. Later, while washing dishes, Lovestar asked me to sing him a Taize chant, and I sang, "Nada te turbe, nada tespante, quien a Dios tiene, nada le falta, Nada te turbe, nada tespante, solo Dios, basta!" (Nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten, those who seek God shall never go wanting, Nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten, God alone fills us.)

When Lovestar dropped me off at the station, he said "God bless you" and I said "God bless you" back to him. It felt a little funny because I knew he was sort of regarding me as somebody “religious,” and maybe I myself was trying to play a role there, but it was a loving and respectful goodbye for both of us. If we were put together with different timing and context, the roles would probably be reversed. Life doesn't make sense on any comprehensible level. The challenge must be to let go of control and really trust in the flow of time with its so-called accidents and surprises. Time itself really is God’s great symphony. T-shirts and bumper stickers are not required.

I have been home for two weeks. I’ve had a lot of time for just sitting around thinking about life, and that is exactly what I needed. It is a beautiful summer morning in Ephrata, the air feels perfect and the sunshine is friendly and gentle on the greenery. Poor Kuwait--once I left it, every place I went seemed so wonderful. But I have no dread of going back to Kuwait. When people ask me how I feel about going back for my second year, I answer that I am very comfortable about returning. The fact that my situation there buys me time to make important decisions about my future feels like a perfect arrangement. Many of my students will be the same ones I worked with last year, and I’m looking forward to seeing them again. When I look at photos I realize just how much I love those little turds. For now, I’ve settled in with the company of family and familiar territory for welcome summer vacation. I am slowly coming down from the high of adventure and spiritual focus. I’ve smoked a pack and a half of small cigars and downed a few beers and bloody marys, bitched about stupid things that bug me, and stolen peeks at internet sites that are banned in Kuwait. In other words, I’m still the same little mess I always was… but I am allowed to hope that the good things that have been planted in me will grow. I have about a month to just hang out and enjoy the greenness of Pennsylvania and the ease of being at home. My mother is keeping the kitchen stocked with home-made cookies and cherry pies to make sure I don’t die of starvation. I opened packages I ordered from Amazon.com in advance from Kuwait. Mostly books to help in learning Arabic. When I looked at the stack of them I realized how much I really have invested in Kuwait. I don’t have any intention of staying there any further than the one additional year to which I’m obligated by my contract. But, at this halfway point I do feel that I can give myself a pat on the back for making the most of my time there on many levels. When I left Ephrata last August, my dad said, “For crying out loud, give it your best shot!” We had been kidding about some of those old expressions like “for crying out loud…” and he was joking and being serious at the same time. And, for crying out loud, I think I have been giving it my best shot, and insha’allah I’m going to keep doing that. But right now it’s the middle of the night in Kuwait, and the temperature is 108 degrees, and I don’t miss anything about it.

Happy summer!
==

departing notes

(June 8)

I went to the dentist yesterday to have a cavity filled. She put some kind of a jaw-opener inside my mouth so that she could work easily. My face was numbed with anesthetic, but I could feel my jaw muscles cramp from the force of the device pushing my mouth open. I made her take it out. Today I have an earache. I wanted to swim this afternoon, but I don’t think I’ll be able to.

On the way to the dentist, Arshad, a Kashmiri Muslim taxi driver told me a story. His English was very choppy. It took very careful listening to follow the story. This is basically it:

Moses was going up the mountain to pray. A lady on the side of the road said to him, “I’m getting old, and I don’t have a baby because my luck is bad. I want to have a baby. When you’re talking to God, please ask him if I’ll have a baby.” Moses said, “Okay, I’ll ask.” He asked God, and God said, “No. She can’t have a baby.” Moses went back down and told the lady, “Sorry, God said no.” A short time later, there was a holy man who had fasted for an entire year. When he was ready to break his fast he asked, “Who will bring me food and open my fast?” The lady cooked him some food and gave it to him. He said, “Since you gave me food, I’ll pray for whatever you want.” She said, “I want to have a baby.” One year later, Moses was on his way to the mountain, and he saw the lady with a baby boy. She told him what happened. Moses went up the mountain and asked God, “Why did you let that lady have a baby? You told me she couldn’t have one.” Then God gave Moses a knife and plate. “I want a sacrifice of human flesh. Bring me back a plate full of human meat, and then I’ll tell you.” So Moses went traveling around to find somebody. He traveled all over the land asking if anyone would be willing to cut flesh from his own body and give it to God. Wherever he went people laughed at him. Finally he came to the holy man. The holy man took the knife and cut meat from his own arms and legs and put it on the plate. Moses took it up the mountain to God. “Here’s the human flesh,” said Moses. “Now can you tell me why that lady had a baby after you said she couldn’t?” God said, “Moses, you went all over the places asking people to cut flesh from their bodies—why didn’t you take the knife and cut your own body? That holy man who cut flesh from his own body for me asked me to give that lady a baby, so I did.”

There is so much discussion that could come out of this story. I have a lot of questions for Arshad. May one infer from this story that God travels with us through time and may freely change his mind at any given moment? If so, how do the various world religions accommodate the possibility of a fluid and fluctuating God? Why would we ever want to see God as a being who would ask for self-mutilation, even if it’s just metaphorical? Why doesn’t the story present God as telling Moses to do some act of kindness and charity instead of going after a sacrifice of human flesh? Is it because God really is that way, or is it because applying our own economy of give and take is the best we can do? Of course I didn’t get to ask any of these questions, because the language barrier was too great, and there wasn’t time. Anyhow, Arshad was so happy to impart this wisdom, debate would have spoiled it for him. I told him he could take me to the airport on Friday morning, even though I know I could get a cheaper fare from another driver.

We had a field trip on Thursday to a big fancy bowling alley with a full-service McDonald’s inside. It was my mom’s birthday, and since she likes bowling, I especially enjoyed it. I kept saying, “This one’s for you, Mom,” before throwing the ball, thinking that it would be cool to get a strike for Mom. (Didn’t work.) The kids spent the day going back and forth between bowling and eating pancakes and french fries at the McDonald’s. I bowled a game with the boy who wrote about the Monster Dog who fell into the radioactive well. Remember him? He and the other kids stopped bowling right in the middle of the second game because they were bored and they just wanted to go sit at the table at McDonalds and eat and talk. I recruited some of the other teachers to jump in and finish the game. The guard rails were up because many of our students had not bowled much in their lives and were just throwing straight gutter balls. Whether it’s because they are “special needs” or not is hard to say. Anyhow, even with guard rails up, I still didn’t break 100. By the way, I recently learned an interesting lesson about “wasta” from the Monster-Dog boy. (“Wasta,” for those who forget, is the power of influence, pressure, and connections that rules all dealings in the Arab world.) I was going to fail him because he doesn’t do any work, and my coordinator wrote me an email and suggested that I find a way to give him at least a B so that he could make the honor roll. Okay, this is a kid with hugely rich and powerful parents, and my coordinator knows them personally, etc. I started to get uptight for about 30 seconds, and then I thought… why not. He’s got a serious case of ADD or whatever it is, and he’s in a special needs school. I can be tough and try to “teach him a lesson” or I can let him do some make-up work, tweak his grade here and there, and give him the B. If I ask myself the question of whether it’s going to matter ten years from now, the immediate answer is that I don’t have to wait that long—within a week it won’t matter to anybody. Still, I had to get my little dig in, so in the computer server document for his report card I wrote in the comment section, “Student received this grade only because of WASTA.” I am on friendly enough terms with the coordinator to goof around like that. I changed it to something more professional and tactful the next day after I was sure he saw it. But it did get me thinking about what “wasta” really is, and why it persists. It comes down to a “what the hell” attitude. Are our lofty principles really worth the battles? In many cases, no. Things really don’t matter as much as we think they do. So God says, “Hey, unless you’re willing to take that knife and cut hunks from your own arms and legs, just shut up.”

(cont. June 9)
Every time we go on a field trip, a dust storm hits. It happened again while we were bowling, and the dust still hasn't cleared. The sky was blue when we left the school that morning, but by the time I’d ordered my coffee from the McCafe, the wind was blowing and visibility was quickly diminishing. One of the teachers jokingly surmised that we actually instigate the dust storms by the energy create when we impose our chaotic selves on the world outside the school walls. It is kind of strange how dependably it occurs. This one kicked up on Thursday and still hasn't cleared. Temperatures of 110 and wind blowing thick dust. Yesterday, W (who believes in genies ) and I decided we would go swimming anyhow. My earache was gone. The school’s pool is in a kind of enclosed patio with a mesh roof to provide some shade. The mesh doesn’t keep out the dust. There was a kind of dirty film over the entire surface of the pool, but we wanted swim, so we just dived in and tried to mix up the dirt as much as possible by splashing and kicking hard. It’s amazing how you create the illusion of cleanliness by evenly distributing the filth. Swimming with W is so good for my ego. I basically taught him how to swim. He regards me as an Olympic-caliber coach, and I do nothing to discourage that thinking. I give him constant advice. It’s all run of the mill basic swimming stuff like “breathe in with your mouth and out with your nose.” What’s so cool is that W’s swimming has improved incredibly. He is just about as a good a swimmer as I am. Not that I’m a great swimmer, but before he was splashing around with his face scrunched and his head sticking up like he was afraid to get his hair wet.

We had a nice swim, but I decided I didn’t want to sit and meditate in the prayer room afterwards. W has to get in his obligatory prayers after swimming, especially if we’re going to eat koshary or something which means he has to get the praying out of the way. I asked one day if I could just sit in there while he did his little stand-kneel-bow-bow routine. It turned out to be a wonderfully peaceful, quiet room with comfy thick carpet. The powerful air conditioning also made it preferable to waiting outside in the heat and dust by the bathtub-sized turtle pond in the lobby. I found that I can sit in zazen style on a hunk of rolled up carpet by the door and get in a nice 15 minute meditation. But yesterday I didn’t want to go in. Something he said made me think that I didn’t want anybody to assume I was warming up to Islam. W had explained to me that it would never be acceptable for a woman to swim in swimming pool when there were men around, because even if she were wearing a full wet suit, you would be able to see the shape of her body, which is haram (sinful/forbidden). I told him that I thought this was very stupid thinking. Impervious to any criticism of his beloved Islam, he smiled and said that it was fine that western men and women swim together because they don’t know the Quran so the rules don’t apply, and therefore it was no problem. I told him that maybe it would be better if we didn’t talk about such things. “No problem, really,” he said, “I like to talk about what you thinking.” I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t out of politeness that I felt the need to avoid such subjects—it was because it bothered ME to have to keep listening to ideas that I think are so wrong and foolish. Still he didn’t get it. So I thought maybe it’s time to sit outside with the turtles. There used to be five of them. They’re down to two. I guess the heat is too much for them. One of them was balanced on a rock, completely still, its legs hanging down. I watched it for about five minutes. There, I thought, is a true zazen practitioner. I dipped my finger into the water and let one drop fall on its shell. It shifted its head ever so slightly, but did not open its eyes.

May 31

We have just two weeks of school left. Already the students in “vacation mode.” They complain with real indignation if I ask them to do any work. They just want to play soccer in the little rooftop playground in the 110 degree heat. Today the art teacher said that she is so excited about the end of the school year and going home. I nodded, but for some reason I don’t feel much of that countdown kind of excitement. A group of us had gone in to spend a little time at school. I was planning to swim some laps in the school pool, but it was being cleaned, so I just did a few things in my room. I cleaned the fishbowl. Isabella is dead, by the way. I came in one Sunday morning and the room was about a hundred degrees and smelled very bad indeed. The fishbowl was cloudy with putrescence. Isabella, who had been the star attraction of the fishbowl with her brilliant orange color and bulbous physique, was floating on her side in the middle, swollen even larger than she should have been, and cooked to a dull beige hue. Poor George and Cupcake were squeezing themselves as tightly as they could get into the little plastic seaweed plant, trying not to look at her. I cleaned it all up, got fresh cool water for the survivors, and emailed my director for permission to leave the AC on over the weekend. Now I can enter a nice cool room when I get to school. I am supposed to be getting a head start on phase umpteen of the interminable assessment revision process, but I can’t face it anymore. An old Texan tuba-player I used to know had the expression, “I am so done with that.” And that is how I am feeling too. I am so done. I guess I can’t blame the kids for balking at the idea of more work right now.

I couldn’t swim laps, couldn’t deal with assessment revisions, so I decided to lift weights. But the lights in the weight room are, for some strange reason, controlled by a switch in the business office, and they were off. It has been a long time since I had the feeling of “nothing to do.” I actually picked up a basketball that had been left on the gym floor and shot a few baskets. If I am all alone, in a dark gym, far from ridicule and expectation, I can actually enjoy the little diversion of trying to make a basket. A little while later I rambled upstairs to see what the art teacher was up to. She was absorbed in the serious task of tying pieces felt-covered toilet-paper rolls and paper tubes together with rubber bands to make Scooby-Doo collapse-puppets for her second graders. The art teacher’s idea book makes it look easy, but it’s way too hard for 2nd graders, so the teacher has to do all the work and just let the kids glue on the eyes and ears. I helped her do that for about an hour, during which time I completed two Scooby Doo’s. I pondered the fact that I was originally hired to be the art teacher, and it was probably a good thing that they jerked me into the English department. I don't think I could handle doing goofy little projects like that with learning disabled kids. It's no wonder she can't wait to get the hell out of Kuwait. I suppose some excitement about our upcoming exodus will kick in for me too some time soon.

Last night we had a great pot-luck feast to honor our teaching assistants, who have all invited us to their places for fabulous Indian lunches or dinners at one time or another. The challenge was to cook vegetarian. I was vegetarian from about 1989 to 1995... something like that. I used to enjoy the challenge of putting together a satisfying vegie meal, and I thought I was pretty good at it. Well, I am obviously out of practice. Anyhow, I’ve come to the conclusion that pot-lucks are not a good way to enjoy food. They invariably produce combinations of things that don’t go well together. After we ate, I introduced the game. We played a simple game that involves guessing “password-style” at hints from a partner to determine names written on little pieces of paper. I got the game from the same guy who used to say “I am so done with that.” He could play anything on a tuba. Now he works at Sea World. I tried to make the game as multi-cultural as I could. I avoided the names of American celebrities. I should have known it was going to be difficult when the first comment, made before we even started, was “I hope it’s not an educational game.” People were completely perplexed. Names I thought were known by every living person on earth were regarded with bewilderment. Freud - was he a philosopher? Elizabeth Taylor - she was a model or something, wasn’t she? These were the comments that I heard. One of the Indian husbands is particularly quirky. His hint for Adolf Hitler was, “This was that hot-headed German fellow.”

It is now after 10 PM; just a couple of hours, and it will be June. I already went to bed once, and I got up when the doorbell rang. It’s not really a bell, it’s a button that makes a tweet-tweet-tweet sound like a little bird. It was the lady from the across the lobby. She is getting rid of everything and going home to Texas to get married. I told her I wanted to buy her small wooden table and clothes hamper, and she came to tell me I should take them now. As we moved the stuff through tight doorway spaces in her apartment, she told me about the misbehavior of the seniors in her school. The night after their senior dinner, they snuck into the school and threw dead fish all over the place, and tossed in a dead cat for good measure. “It’s a good time to leave Kuwait,” she said. I was actually a bit surprised to hear her tell me all that, because I have a tendency to blame a lot of our school’s behavior problems on the fact that we have kids with all kinds of learning disabilities and disorders. The big controversy for us this year was when a senior boy peed inside somebody’s backpack. Throwing dead fish and dead cats around the school reminds of something I might have expected in a public school in the U.S.

I was going to get a haircut and beard trim tonight. Forgot. Oh, by the way, I bought one of those red-plaid head scarfs with a black ring to hold it on my head. If I take my glasses off and grin real big I look a little bit like Yasser Arafat. Come to think of it, I should have put his name in the name game. People here think I’m Syrian. I’ve learned how to say, “Do I look like an Arab?” in Arabic. It’s “Ana shekli Arabi?” I was thinking it might be funny to put on my head rag when I meet my brother at Toronto airport, but unfortunately the joke would probably not go over very well in an international airport. Too bad about that.

we're havin a heat wave (cha cha cha)

It is another Friday morning. Mahmoud will be here in about an hour to give me my Arabic lesson. We have gotten into a habit of having a little breakfast before the lesson. Sometimes he brings fruit and rolls. This morning I am frying some potatoes. When my mom used to make these fried sliced potatoes, they all stuck together in wonderful clumps, tender in the middle and crisp around the edges. I can’t get them to do that. They either fry up like french fries, or they cook into mush.

The IEP’s are finished, and next week I’ll have seven IEP meetings with parents. It’s nothing like at the public schools at home, where everyone is hanging over each word. So it's not quite as awful as special ed duties at home. But it's still been an intense couple of weeks getting everything done and in place for the deadline. I spent a few very late nights at school. I thought about a conversation I had with my good friend who taught at in Istanbul and was instrumental in getting me to explore the idea of international teaching. I was perplexed that he could spend a long period of time in a foreign country and not get to know every corner the place and everything about it. He reminded me that the there was a job he had to do, and that international schools ask a lot from their teachers. One night last week I was in my classroom especially late. At about ten minutes to 9, the building guard came in and started speaking to me in Arabic. I have been taking Arabic lessons for about seven months, but I had no idea what he was talking about. He did get me to understand that he was going to leave the gate open for me and would be back in a few hours. On the way home I got a call on my cell phone from my coordinator. Sheikh Sa’ad, former emir of Kuwait, had died, and there would be a few days of national mourning. We all got an unanticipated long weekend. Unfortunately the building was closed, and I had left everything in piles on the classroom desks, thinking that in the morning I would sort it all out before classes started.

It’s funny how sometimes the body knows when a task is complete and it’s okay to “shut down.” The day that I turned in my IEP’s I developed a sore throat and a fever. I had volunteered for some afternoon activities, but I begged out and took a taxi home. I am just now at the tail end of that summer cold, or whatever it was. I’m still not ready for the gym, but at least I can go get groceries today. I need to use up what I have in the kitchen as much as possible, so I won’t buy much. I leave Kuwait in three weeks.

The day after school lets out, I’m flying to Basel, Switzerland. Though I would love to tour Switzerland some day, I’ll only be there one night, because my destination is a farm in Vosges Mountains of eastern France. There’s a community there that’s going to have a lot of people coming to camp out and put on a summer solstice celebration in June. After that I’m meeting my brother and sister-in-law in Toronto, and we’re going on a road trip up to Algonquin Park for fishing, hiking and a visit to some of their friends. I won’t actually be back in the states until the third week of July. I planned all this because I didn’t want to jeopardize my “foreign income tax exclusion” status and have to hand over a third of my hard-earned Kuwait dinars to Uncle Sam. Americans lose their non-resident status if they spend more than 35 days of a given year in-country. After I made all the plans, I found out that the rules wouldn’t really kick in unless I made about twice what I did, but the reservations are in place, and I think it will be an interesting summer.

I will probably leave my banjo in Kuwait. I can’t do much with it. I’ve never had a lesson, and I have a hard time wearing those metal finger picks, so I’ve gotten used to just playing it with my finger tips as you would a guitar. The picking style I use is also guitar style. I had the idea when I left America that I would have long evenings with nothing to do, and I would fill the time with all sorts of creative endeavors--teaching myself banjo, finishing my black-hole of a novel, and maybe even painting a few canvases. I hardly managed to keep up this blog. Teaching sucks up all your time and energy no matter where you are, and the fact that there aren’t any pubs or interesting places to hang out in Kuwait doesn’t necessarily open up a surplus of opportunity for creativity. One ends up sitting around apartments with other teachers, overeating, sipping kitchen-bucket grog and rehashing school gossip. The Arabic goes unlearned, the banjo unplayed, the sketchbook closed. I am fighting the tendency to think of all those creative ambitions as youthful whimsies. It is starting to feel to me, at 46, that such endeavors are silly and futile. “What do you think you are, a college kid?” my internalized critic sneers. Ah, but I read in the Reader’s Digest that old people who study languages hold on to mental faculties into old age. That’s the ticket. I'll just do all these things as geriatric exercises, like crossword puzzles.

===
(next morning)

Yesterday was a nice day. Mahmoud tested my Arabic and since I could pick out about one word from all his sentences and guess what he was talking about, he concluded that I was making progress. He has a journalist friend from Germany who speaks fluent Arabic. I’ve met him a couple times. After talking with him, I’ve come to the conclusion that Arabic is a dying language. It is like Latin must have been during its descent. It has spawned local languages which are vaguely intelligible one to the other, while the parent language is preserved only for official communication. Knowing Arabic would let me comprehend radio and television communication, but I will never hear anyone using it on the street. Still, it has been a means of psychological breakthrough for me to feel a thread of connection to the Arab world, and I enjoy the lessons, so I suppose I’ll continue.

Last night I was walking with the small group of teacher friends that I’ve hung out with since the beginning of the year. I’ve managed to avoid using names all this time, so I might as well stick to that. We talked about what happened to our building guard. I told you about him in an earlier posting. His name was Amet, and he was the Egyptian who told me he had a degree in psychology. He disappeared. Today I finally asked the building harris what happened to him. Apparently he was arrested. He was accused of talking to a lady. He spent two days in jail and then got deported to Egypt. The harris explained that we westerners don’t realize how common this kind of thing is. He said he was walking to the supermarket with his wife one time, and the police stopped him and accused them of being boyfriend and girlfriend. They had to prove that they were married. He said once he was with his own mother and the police harassed them. But it only happens to the powerless people at the bottom of the pecking order. This is Kuwait.

Two of the friends in my group are a husband and wife team, he, a 5th grade teacher and she, the art teacher. She told us a couple weeks ago that she is pregnant. They will probably be staying for a third year in Kuwait. I am counting on getting out after two, though I have no idea what I will do when I leave. We’re going to have a huge turnover of staff this year. Most of the teachers are going on to other international schools -- in Laos, China, Ukraine, to name a few. People ask me if I plan to go to Japan after Kuwait. If I do go to another international school, I do hope it’s in Japan. Last night I dreamt about visiting some unnamed American national park with my dad and step-mother. It was so beautiful. I think something in the soul cries out for home. But then what if there’s no comfortable place for you when you get there? Well, as I was saying, we all walked together through Hawally last night in the hot night air - probably about 105 degrees. A hundred hair dryers blowing hot air on you. We came to a dead palm tree on Tunis Street. It’s just the stalk of the tree sticking with a few dead palms hanging from the top. It’s been that way since I arrived. I pass it a couple times a week. I told them that I once considered photographing it as a symbol of this country: dead, depressing, and pathetic-looking. They laughed in agreement and asked me why I didn’t do it. I told them that I kept thinking about it and never got around to it. Now I realize that if I’m going to take a picture of a tree to symbolize Kuwait, it’s up to me to find one that I like. I’ve got another year left to go here, and I’d better keep my attitude in a good place. They agreed. It’s a shit country, commented 5th grade teacher, but it hasn’t been a bad year.

school winding down

It’s Saturday morning, and I’ve closed myself in the spare bedroom with the door shut and the window open so that I can smoke a cigarette without stinking up the whole apartment. I have bragged for most of my life that I get away with smoking when I feel like it and never get hooked. I suppose I’m pressing my luck. I told T (my Malaysian friend) that if the cigarettes aren’t there I don’t miss them very much, and he retorted, “Then how do they get there?” But somehow I’ve gotten away with doing this on and off smoking all this time and never had a "nicotine fit." I’ve bought about three packs in a year—not too bad. These German-made Davidoff Lights cost half a dinar - about a dollar and half. For now, in the morning, it’s still cool enough to open the window. I’m perfectly aware that it makes little sense to smoke in the morning and work out in the afternoon.

I’ve been working out at the school with W, the Egyptian guy who works with the Arabic staff at school. We’ve gotten to be pretty good friends. I seriously considered moving out of the teacher flats and getting an apartment with him so that I could really get my teeth in Arabic language study. I finally decided against it. Being with the Arabic staff, he only makes a fraction of what I make at work, and even if I paid 75% of the rent, there would always be an uncomfortable gap between what we can afford in terms of what we put in the refrigerator, the amount of pocket money being thrown around, etc. Already I skip going to my fancy gym with its top-of-the-line equipment and facilities so that W and I can work out together in the school gym. Anyhow, W is probably a bit too serious in his embrace of Islam. We had a discussion about genies that opened my eyes somewhat. One of the staff got into a little bit of hot water for showing a video about genies to his class. Arabs believe in genies, and they’re not kidding. Most westerners probably think that genies are characters in stories and legends, like faeries and elves. But because the Quran talks about genies, even educated Muslims must convince themselves that they exist, and they categorize them as evil. When I talked to W about it, I said, “Oh come on! Do you really believe that?” to which he responded, “I know you American Canadian people think this very strange. It because you don’t know about genie.” I realized how far apart we really are. If the Quran says it, this guy believes it. This is the problem with religious texts that lock people into ancient belief systems.

Last week Mahmoud, the guy who’s giving me Arabic lessons, went to Mecca. He went in a mini-van. It’s about an 8-hour drive from Kuwait. He came back with a bottle of Zam-zam water for me. Zam-zam water is holy water from a well that spontaneously sprang up at the feet of Hagar’s wife after she got stuck in the desert and prayed to Allah. He also brought me an Indonesian men’s wrap-around skirt, and piece of toothbrush plant root. There’s some kind of plant that produces a tough, fibrous root, and if you take a piece of it and chew on the end of it you have a toothbrush. The skirt is a lot like the ones I got in India. I guess they sell all kinds of things from the Islamic world at Mecca gift shops. I need to get him something from America when I go home this summer. My lessons are coming along okay, but Arabic is unbelievably hard. The written language doesn’t include vowels, so you have to just hear the language enough to know what words are supposed to sound like. Given the amount of time and study I’ve put into it, I should know much more than I do. When I was applying to international schools, I liked the idea of going somewhere where I could study another language. Italy would have been perfect for that. There was an art teacher position open in an Italian international school in a small city near the Slovenia border, but when I got to the job fair I found out that it had already been filled. I already had a good foundation in Italian, and I’m sure I would be nearly conversant by now if I had gotten that job. Arabic and Japanese are probably the hardest languages in the world, for different reasons. Arabic is impossible to speak, and Japanese is impossible to read.

I was called about two weeks ago by a Kuwaiti lady who was looking for someone to tutor her son, a boy who goes to a different school. She got my name through the grapevine. A lot of expat teachers make extra money this way. I decided to give it a try, but it has been a rocky start. The woman has the kind of presumptuous attitude of privilege that Kuwaitis are notorious for. Her son is a 4^th grader who just needs some training so he can perform in class. He’s very good at English. I just spoke to the mother on the phone. I was dressed and ready to go for this morning’s session, and she cancelled it because I didn’t confirm. She sent me a text message asking for confirmation while I was at the souk (market) last night, and I didn’t even see the message until I was dressed and ready for my pick-up. I just don’t like the way she talks to me like I’m a servant. I tend to get a little proud and put an edge on my voice to let her know that I can “take it or leave it.” She clearly picks up on this, and a subtle struggle of egos ensues. I’m very tempted to drop the deal, but it is not difficult work, and I think I can do it well, not to mention that the money is good, even if less than the going rate for expat tutoring here. Well, we’ll just have to see how it develops. I have the luxury of saying no if I decide. So many poor people here have to work for tyrannical masters who treat them like dirt.

I was at the old city souk last night with some teacher friends. I bought an antique copper tea pot. There is a style of teapot with a long curved spout the shape of a parrot’s beak. Someone told me that these teapots were a symbol of welcome in the Arab world, and that they make good souvenirs of Kuwait. This one is real copper and has a tiny seal pressed into the metal with some Arabic letters on it, which gives it a nice authenticity. Afterwards we went to a Thai restaurant in Salmiya, the more modern shopping and restaurant district. I’ve been eating a lot of spicy food. T gave me another cooking lesson and showed me how to make a zesty Malaysian curry using fresh herbs and lemon grass. He also showed me how to make a kind of relish with hot chili, fruit, spices and dried fish. It sounds terrible, but the resulting stuff is a kind of power-chutney that must be tasted to be believed. It’s extremely powerful – a taste explosion. Not for timid meat-and-potato eaters. I love it.

Since I won’t have my tutoring session today, maybe I’ll walk to school and do a little work. Mid-term grades are due Monday. I gave an exam. I tried to design it for success, but some kids still failed. At the beginning of the school year, I was inclined to think that my students were all pretty capable, and I didn’t really feel like I was teaching special ed. It has been a gradual awakening. We did formal assessments last month, and I found that there are a few of them who have made zero progress. One boy seems to actually be deteriorating, and it’s very sad. At the beginning of the year he was witty and ambitious. I stood over his desk to see how he was doing during the exam. Even the way he held his pencil, his unnaturally long, thin fingers bowing against the pencil rod like they were made of rubber, reminded me of his real handicap. He was supposed to produce a topic sentence, but none of the painstaking review or obvious hints written on the white board in front of him were enough to get him through it. He looked at me desperately and said, “I give up.” I tried to argue with him. “No, you can’t give up!” But he was so miserable being asked to do something that was just beyond him. Maybe it was a year of being pushed too hard that had killed the wit and energy that he’d shown me in September. I probably need to praise these kids more. Well, at least he passed the test.

Mahmoud just called to tell me he's bringing me some stuffed grape leaves that his mother made. They're Lebanese. Lebanon is on the verge of civil war right now. I guess I'll put on a shirt.

not much to say

When I look from window of the air conditioned middle school work room down at the street baking below, I guess the temperature at about 100 degrees . The brightness of the sun conveys an idea of the heat. The shabby buildings around the school look bleached out. The laundry of poor laborers hangs stiffly from balconies. When clothes hang in very dry air with no breeze, they dry hard. If you look down around the buildings at the unused inches of space here and there, you will want to see some straggly weeds, but there are none. Nothing grows here without a lot of help. The buildings are not old, but they all seem to crumble in the heat. Paint refuses to hold on to anything. Rooftops are crowded with satellite dishes. Everybody pays bootleg service providers for satellite TV. Diagonal to the school, a new apartment building is going up. If I look up, I can see a laborer is perched on a some flimsy boards with a big pan of soupy liquid cement, sloshing it over the concrete bricks to create a stucco-like finish. I count and see that he’s working at the 12^th floor level. He has a red-checkered cloth wrapped around his head. He tries to step into the shade of the building's interior corner every minute or so. I think about times I’ve heard people refer to Arabs as rag-heads. There is a guy pushing a wheelbarrow down below who doesn’t have a rag on his head. He’s wearing a ball cap. It looks a little funny with his dishdasha robe, but he probably thinks it’s much more stylish than a rag, even though it must be hot. He has a path around the piles of rubble and trash. I can’t tell what he’s moving. I am surprised to see some birds flitting about. I wonder how they live. People sometimes put breadcrumbs and buckets out of water out for pigeons. I don’t know how the smaller birds manage, or the cats.

Inside, the air conditioner is blasting directly on us. It is too cold. I ask the students repeatedly if they are cold, but they keep saying no. From the look on their faces, I’m guessing that they don’t want to say no for fear of being thought of as wimps. Rich Kuwaitis must endure the cold of air conditioning. Last year one of my students told me that her house was so cold that it was barely tolerable. She said that the system was broken and would not turn off. It just ran constantly. The air conditioning people were too busy installing new systems to come and fix it. It is a strange category of hardship, the burdens of uncomfortable castles.

Finally I decide that the AC has to be turned off. The air conditioners are operated from a remote control switch. The isn’t a remote in the room, so I have to go get one from the math teacher’s room. As I may have mentioned before, the corridors and lobbies of the school building are unenclosed. It’s a kind of indoor-outdoor architectural design. When I step out of the middle school work room, it’s like going from a freezer into an sauna. It feels good. I want to stand there and warm up a little bit, but I shouldn’t leave students unattended while they’re taking assessment tests. I quickly go into the math teacher’s room, grab one of the remotes, and hurry back to the work room. The students are still sitting there, working on their English writing assessments. These are Arab children, but many of them speak better English than Arabic. I have had a discussion with Mahmoud about these children. He thinks it’s horrible that they don’t know their mother tongue. I think it’s just interesting. It says a great deal about a certain segment of the Kuwaiti upper class, that they would steer their children to adopt English over Arabic. Is it because they know that many people in the world distrust and despize them, and call them “ragheads”? And maybe they themselves don’t want to be associated with traditional Arabs and their black-veiled wives. Children of modern parents make fun of the black-covered women and derisively call them “ninjas.” Not having much sympathy for the burqa tradition, I had to suppress some giggling the first time or two that I heard this.

The students had to write a narrative as part of their language arts assessment. One boy has written a very short narrative called, “Monster dog!!!” It all seams fun to pet animals but do they think its fun. What do you think? and they even hate it more when one dog fell in a radioactive well. even thou he should’ve died he’s alive and he’s angry he’s Monster dog! That's his story in its totality. It was supposed to be a three paragraph narrative, but actually it's not too bad by our school standards. This is one of the kids who prefers English to Arabic. I'm told that the Arabic teachers just leave him alone and don't make him do anything. If they forced the issue, it might blow up. There is something here called "wasta," which translates roughly as "downward pressure." It means you absolutely do not argue with people in power. Children here can have you fired or deported if their parents side with them, and they usually do. But I do like this boy who wrote about the monster dog. I think he might be on to something with this theory about animals not liking to be petted as much as we think they do.

After school, two guys from the Arabic staff wanted to work out in the school gym. Both of them have been working at the school longer than I have, but they have never ventured near the gym. I don’t think they had any idea it was open to the staff until I told them. I think they were afraid to go there themselves, but if I decided to go, they would go. I have a gym membership at the fancy Holiday Inn, but I decided to go down to the school gym and check out the weight room for their sakes. When we got there, the guys were in awe of the fancy weight training and exercise machines. One of them got on the treadmill and with great excitement started running on it. He doesn’t have gym shoes; he was in his bare feet. He was slowly forcing the belt around and around without turning the thing on. He thought that is how it works. That’s how foreign it was to him. These guys both grew up in Egypt. They are dirt poor. A lot of Egyptians borrow money to pay for huge bribes so that they can buy their way into work visas in Kuwait. Then they basically lives like slaves, paying back their debts and sending money home to their families. Yet they consider themselves to be much better off here. They can even get an old clunker car and drive around. The other day one of these guys insisted on taking us to lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was a big feast. I have thought about getting an apartment with these guys next year. But I’m a little worried that it might be disastrous. Even if we got along great, what would happen after I left? Having me around would inevitably create an artificial increase in the standard of living, because what I could afford to contribute, just in buying everyday stuff, would have a big impact on them. Then I would leave and they would be poor; they would have to move out of the nice place that they lived in when the American roommate was there. Anyhow, I showed them how to turn on the treadmill, and how to use some of the weight machines. They are both fat and very out of shape. Poor people don’t get healthy exercise in a place like Kuwait. I’m a little bit afraid that if our director knew I took members of the Arabic staff to work out in the school gym she would put a stop to it. She is a pragmatic administrator. If Arabic staff thinks they can use the gym, what will we have next? The school maids going for a dip in the swimming pool?

Tonight I thought about going down to talk to the building guard. He told me that he’s expecting them to build him a little booth when it gets hot so he’ll have air conditioning and won’t have to sit in the heat all night. I was wrong about the temperature today. I guessed it at 100, but when I got home I checked and saw that it was 108. And it’s still April. I hope they do build him a little booth, but I’m worried they won’t. And, I’m also afraid to befriend the guard. That’s why I decided not to go down and talk to him. Even in the little bit of time I have talked with him, I have already gotten so I'm uncomfortable thinking about him having to stay up all night, every night, without a break, for about 78 cents an hour, and most of that has to pay for his work visa debt. The rest goes to his family in Alexandria. He lives in an apartment with 11 other workers. It’s a three bedroom apartment with 4 to a room. I want to buy him a radio so he can at least listen to a soccer game or something while he’s hanging out in front of the building all night. He told me that I am the first American he ever met. Before me he only heard about us, and it was all bad. He says he hated Amreekee until he met me, and now he loves Amreekee. It makes me laugh and cry at the same time.