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.