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.
No comments:
Post a Comment