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.)