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.

A Quiet Spring Break

It has been a sleepy Friday afternoon. I haven’t left my flat yet today. They use the word “flat” here instead of apartment. A lot of Arabs confuse the words apartment and department, which may explain why they opt for the less confusing “flat.” I am going to try to drag myself to the gym in a few hours. It has been a very blah week. This was spring break at my school, and most of the teachers were traveling either to job fairs, workshops, or sightseeing trips. I saved a lot of money and got caught up on work by staying in Kuwait. There were a few highlights.

A week ago today I was on a cruise boat going back and forth on Kuwait Bay. One of the TA’s at my school heard that I was not traveling and invited me to join her and her husband and some of their friends, all Indian expats from around Delhi. It turned out to be quite a booze cruise – a big party boat with a dance floor and a bar below deck. I guess they can get away with that here the same way that floating casinos on the Mississippi and elsewhere bypass gambling rules by not being on the land. I had about 3 drinks, but they were making them very weak and charging a fortune, so I hardly felt the effect at all. The people I was with were all in their forties, while most of the crowd was in their twenties. The highlight for me was when I talked the men into dancing with their wives. I told the DJ to play an Indian song, and he played a whole set of Hindi disco music. We all got up and boogied with the young folk. When I saw arms in the air I knew I had succeeded.

My new Arabic teacher has become one of my best friends here. He’s the guy I mentioned in my earlier post about the desert outing – the Lebanese guy who told me I look like an Arab. My previous Arabic teacher had had a number of family emergencies and cancellations, and I finally told him I was going to stop lessons for a while. I didn’t tell him I found another teacher. The new teacher’s name is Mahmoud, and if I look Arab, I must say that he does not. He’s a chubby guy with light-brown hair and a frecklish complexion. He also had the past week off, and at one point we talked about maybe going to Jordan, but his brother decided it wasn’t a good time to have visitors. However we did get together a few times during the week. We went to the Kuwait Towers – probably the most famous landmark here, and not unlike the Seattle Space Needle. One night we went to a sheesha parlor and hung out and smoked hubbly-bubbly with a few of his friends. Another time he showed me where there’s a nice park with actual green grass under some water towers, and later he took me to get the best falafel in Hawally, the district in Kuwait where I live and work. Falafel is a staple here. It’s a kind of fritter made from chick-peas and herbs. Although it’s deep fried, it’s vegetarian and usually served with lettuce, tomato and some hummus on a bun, so it’s probably much healthier than a hotdog.

Mahmoud is a devout Muslim who will often leave me waiting on the street or in a lobby while he ducks into a prayer room (practically every office building, hotel, or shopping mall here is likely to have one), but he is a non-fundamentalist who goes out of his way to find a mosque where he can hear from a mullah who has some education and intellectual perspective. We talk about religion quite a bit. He said he might name his son Issa, which is the Arab’s version of the name Jesus. I was happy to hear of this name because I used to drive a Nissan truck, and one day I impulsively peeled the N’s off the tailgate which resulted in my truck having ISSA written across the back of it. I knew Issa was the name of a Japanese haiku poet, but I didn’t know it additionally meant Jesus in Arabic. It has been interesting to discover that Muslims have a kind of unilateral and unrequited fondness for Christians similar to what evangelical Christians have for Jews. Evangelical Christians consider Jews to be God’s Chosen People, but they are counting on them to hurry up and convert at the last minute when Jesus returns. The Muslims have a similar idea. They think that Christians are good people because the Quran apparently says “You cannot be a Muslim if you don’t accept Christians.” However they think we just misunderstood what Jesus was saying. Incidentally they have nothing but contempt for Buddhists and Hindus whom they see as idol worshippers.

Last night I went to see a movie called “Bass Ya Bahar” about Kuwaiti pearl divers during the 1920’s. It is one of the few films produced in Kuwait that received international attention. When I got to the cultural center where I thought it was going to be shown, I found out that I was wrong about the date, and instead of the movie, there was a lecturer there to talk about Kuwait’s beach environments. She was a soft-spoken American lady who did a very nice job of delicately raising environmental concerns without coming across as a troublemaker—something you just don’t want to do in Kuwait. She built her presentation around a slide show of pretty seashells that you could pick up on Kuwait’s beaches until recently. That was a nice approach. There's usually a non-confrontational way to bring up a point if one is sensitive enough to think of it. I guess I’ll go see “Bass Ya Bahar” next week. Since it is Kuwait’s one and only filmmaking success, I’ve already heard that it’s about a poor pearl diver in pre-oil Kuwait who is trying to make enough money to put together a dowry at a time when the world pearl market collapsed after the Japanese figured out how to force oysters to produce pearls by inserting grains of sand into their soft insides.

When I got back from the culture center, one of our new building guards was sitting alone on a couch in front of my building. People do that here where there is little likelihood of rain—they put couches and upholstered chairs outdoors and sit around on them at night, drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, and watching the cars go by. Mahmoud had told them a few times to talk to me and help me with my Arabic, but they are shy. The last few nights there has been only one of them there because the partner has gone back to Egypt or something. I decided to take a couple bottles of NA beer down to talk to him a little. He speaks very little English, so it was a good opportunity for me to practice. I don’t really understand why somebody decided that our building needed guards. They’re both Egyptian, and rumor has it that they were getting 80 dinars a month (about $300) and the big boss came around to check on them one night and caught them snoozing, so he docked their pay 10 dinars, bringing them down to about $260 or so. That’s not very much money to live on for a month in Kuwait. Egyptians have a life of such struggle, it’s really heartbreaking. The poor in India have nothing, but they don’t know better and seem to get along in blissful ignorance. In contrast, I have met so many Egyptians who have college degrees and they are miserable in their poverty. The guy I talked to last night told me that he was qualified to teach psychology at the university, but he had come to Kuwait to be a security guard because it was all he could do to feed his wife and child. Maybe he’s lying, who knows. One of my English teacher friends who has lived here for years tells me that lying is part of Arab culture. She insists that it is a shame-based culture in which people often have no choice but to lie. I haven’t had enough experience to know what she’s talking about, but maybe someday I’ll come back and comment on the idea.

Yesterday I spent most of the day at school. I needed to finish my grades and take care of the goldfish. One day one of my students was trying to talk me into getting a pet, and I told her that I am not home enough to give proper attention to any animal. I made the comment that the most I would ever consider having would be a goldfish. The next day she appeared with a big glass fishbowl and three beautiful fat fantail goldfish. My Aunt Dot, who passed away early this year, once had a big fat fantail goldfish. His name was Captain John if I’m not mistaken. Anyhow, I am now charged with the care of three similar fish. The small white one I named George, after the saint. The other two were named by students. The biggest one is a plump orange thing who has been given the name of Isabella; the black-browny colored fellow somehow got the name of Cupcake. They live only to eat their fish flakes and produce long strings of fish poop which the students never fail to announce in loud voices and then crowd around to observe in mutual disapproval. I have to change the water about 3 times a week. I found an artificial plastic seaweed at the 500 fils store (equal to the Dollar Store) to give the three amigos something to look at. Tomorrow I will have to go in again, clean the fishbowl, and figure out some lesson plans for the week. It’s going to be long stretch this month. We’re going to have three weeks of back-to-back assessment testing and no field trips. Our last field trip was a bit of a disaster… we got caught in a dust storm and had to cut things short, go back to school early, and sit in the theater to watch Alvin and Chipmunks. It won’t be long until the school year is winding down. Of course the heat will soon start to get to oppressive levels again. It’s already been over 100 degrees a few times.

I can hear the wailing of a distant mosque starting the evening call to prayer. You hear a chorus of them coming in like a tide, distance mosques far off, then closer ones domino in until my next door neighbor mosque turns on his microphone so loud that I can hear the click of it even with all the windows closed. I’ve gotten used to the call to prayer now. I still don’t like the Friday sermon. I recorded one of them and I’m going to ask Mahmoud to tell me what the heck he’s yelling about. Wow, the wind is really howling.. maybe we’ll get another dust storm. Sometimes when its storming dust I put a bandana over my nose like an outlaw. I think I’ll do that now and head off to the gym.

(Oh, I just looked out the window and saw that the storm is not dust—it’s rain, actual rain! Fantastic! Oh, but the security guards' couch is probably going to get soaked.)