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.