Almost Time to Leave Kuwait

I have not written anything on this blog site since October of last year. I apologize to people who had gotten used to checking it out to see how I was doing. I went through a complicated period, I didn’t feel able to write about what was really going on. I’m not good at writing cutesy bullshit when major shifts are taking place in my life. But time has zipped by, and now I’m getting ready to leave Kuwait. It’s time to write something and put it in perspective a bit. Where to start?

Well, since you’re probably wondering, let me tell you about the dog in the photo. It’s the last picture I took before I lost my camera, but I’ll explain that later. I found the dog lying on the sidewalk about three weeks ago, about a block away from my apartment building. The Kuwait heat had already surpassed the comfort level, and the dog was in distress. She didn’t want to lift her head, but I saw that she was still alive. Dogs are unclean animals in Islamic culture. People don’t have much sympathy for them. I took her some water. She lifted her head, drank a sip, and gratefully leaned her head against my hand. She was too weak to stand. I had asked Chinta, the Nepalese security guard who was working at my building, if he had noticed the dog. He didn’t know about it, and came behind to see how I was doing with it. He doesn’t understand English very well, and when I said, “What do you think, Chinta, should I take her to my place?” he thought I was asking him to carry her for me. He tried to pick her up, but she growled weakly. She would only let me pick her up. I picked her up and carried her back to my building. People on the street looked at me carrying the dog and shook their heads in disapproval. Chinta carried the water bottle and held the doors for me. I took the dog straight to the shower to wash her and cool her down. She spend the night in the bathroom. The picture you see is the last one I took with my camera before I lost it on the way home from school. I wanted to take the dog to an Indian vet who is known for helping people who rescue animals, and charges lower fees. I was concerned that cabdrivers would not want to transport a dog. I asked my Egyptian friend Waleed to help me. He said that he would give me a ride there, but I would need to find my own way back home. Exasperated, I told him never mind and started walking home, because the staff shuttle had already left. The sun and heat were brutal that afternoon. About two blocks from school, I noticed something hanging out of the pocket of my backpack. I realized that I had put it on without checking the pocket zipper, and it had been wide open. I looked quickly and saw that I still had my wallet. What else might have been in the pocket that could have fallen out? Should I backtrack and see if anything was on the sidewalk? I was hot, tired, and irritated about not getting the help I needed. So I didn’t go back. My camera was probably less than a minute’s walk behind me. Easy come, easy go. And so it was with the dog. She came back to life after some water, food, a good bath and a little TLC. I thought of giving her the name of Priscilla, which is the last name of a friend back in Tacoma who has been courageously fighting a battle with cancer. I didn’t get to keep her long enough to find out if she would have any of the fun and vivacious personality of my friend in Washington. Pooch Priscilla was a quiet and gentle while I had her. She seemed very trainable to me – likely to become a wonderful and obedient companion. I even toyed with the idea of trying to take “Prissy” back to America with me. A young friend from my reading group met me for dinner a couple days later. She loves dogs. She had been looking for a dog. She wanted it. She was thrilled about taking the dog before she even laid eyes on it. Prissy didn’t want to go. But I dragged it out the door on a leash, into the elevator, pushed her into my friend’s car, and said goodbye. The friend called me later that night to say that her parents, with whom she is still living, had rejected the dog. They were taking it to a shelter the next day. For a second or two, I considered telling her to bring the dog back to me. But it made no sense. I had to let her go. I’m glad that someone served as an intermediary for passing the dog along, because it would have been really hard for me. I hope she’s okay. I choose to believe that she will end up in a nice home. She really was a very good dog.

Though it was only a few days that I had her, this experience reminded me that having a pet can help you to not be so wrapped up in your own internal dramas. I have to admit that that has been much the case during this second year in Kuwait. Since the whole Taize experience and my return to Catholicism, an old dream about joining a religious community and becoming a “Brother” has been heavily on my mind. I’m almost, but not yet too old to be accepted into a community. I went back to Pennsylvania in December and spent a week in retreat at a small monastery near Allentown. When I got back to Kuwait, my school director let me know that I had to either commit to another school year or submit a letter of resignation. So I submitted the letter of resignation. The whole process of sorting out questions and dealing with uncertainties can be quite a trial in itself.

I made plans to go to Jerusalem for our spring holiday. One of the catechism teachers I work with put me in touch with a man who organized unofficial group tours from Kuwait, a tricky business, since Kuwait has no diplomatic relations with Israel. You will not be allowed back in the country if they know you have been there. The only way to get around it is to enter Israel via a certain land border crossing where they will let you in without stamping your passport. Unfortunately the guy who was organizing the tours failed to pay the necessary bribes, or whatever, and got deported from Kuwait. So I went alone. Getting in and out required a lot of patience, but I managed without any problems.

For me, Jerusalem was not a place that fostered prayerfulness. I found it very hard to maintain any kind of positive spiritual mood there. It has been a holy city for millennia, but it didn’t feel very holy to me. I stayed in a pilgrim’s hospice right on Via Dolorosa, the legendary path of Jesus’ final passage through Jerusalem carrying the cross. Christians, Jews, and Muslims stream past each other in the narrow streets, and each community seems caught up in an intense vision of great importance, but the visions neither complement one another, as one might hope, nor does any one of them succeed in suggesting universality. Rather, spiritual truth seems fractured there, spoiled by an attitude of “I’m correct, and you are wrong.” Of course I was only there a week, but that was my first impression. The old man who gave me a walking tour of the old city and Mount of Olives knew everything about every church, how many hundreds of years such-and-such a community of monks had lived in some old crumbling building, where were the disputed locations of this or that event from Jesus’ final days in the city, and so on – but this man was a Muslim, and he was just leading people around to earn his daily bread. At the end, no matter how much money I game him, he scowled and asked for more. The shopkeepers were so pushy that I didn’t even want to look. An Armenian Christian promised me that he would never cheat me because we can’t take our riches to heaven, but cheat me he did, and at a level that made me ashamed of my gullibility as much as his brazenness. A priest I met with for spiritual direction said that the Jews who lived around him would just as soon spit on him as say hello. He told me that religious life in America was a “cesspool,” and anyhow there was no time for it because the world was going to end very soon. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, tired-looking Orthodox priests kept the crowd moving along with stern gestures and hand claps. In short, Jerusalem was a great antidote for Taize. The highlights of the week were in getting out of the city to go on bus trips. Strolling through the market in Bethlehem and having Turkish coffee with a couple other single travelers was pleasant. I would recommend tourists to Israel to make their base in Tiberia, the surprisingly green and beautiful region in the north around Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee.

Once back in Kuwait, I took stock of my experiences and where things were heading for me. I began to wonder if I had made a mistake in not renewing my contract. I had to respond to a few emails from vocation directors who wanted to know what I was thinking. I wrote and told them about my doubts, and I never heard back from any of them again. My role as Catechism teacher at the cathedral kept me going to church, at least. I spoke with as much honesty as I could get away with, and the children were very loving. As the day approached for their first holy communion, more emphasis had to be put on the practical orchestration of the event. I’m not sure of the numbers, but I’m guessing there were six or seven hundred children receiving. They had to be trained and directed about how to line up, stay quiet, join in the responses, and stick out their tongues. At times it felt like an a big production being carried out for the sake of family tradition more than anything else. On the morning of their first holy communion, the children were all dressed up, girls in their fancy white dresses and boys in white suits with little white crowns on their heads. I, along with one other teacher, a lady from the Philippines, had to lead the procession of children into the church because we were first-time catechists. The ceremony was long and elaborate, with a lot of music, pomp, and photography. This was a huge event for these families. I found that regardless of whether I had great or little confidence about the active hand of God in life and in the world, the love of these people for their children was enough to make me feel very good about helping to prepare them for communion and try to make it meaningful for them.

With time, I have recovered from Jerusalem. One night, an Egyptian man spoke to me in Arabic in the cathedral courtyard. He thought I was an Arab. It turned out that he was from a small group of Arab Christians who were meeting weekly to pray in an upstairs room in the cathedral. They didn’t have permission, but in the chaos of the ever-crowded cathedral, nobody stopped them. He had intended to invite me to join them because he thought I was an Arab. Of course I don’t speak Arabic, unfortunately never made significant progress with it, but they invited me anyhow. I liked the idea of praying silently on the side while they prayed in Arabic. As it turns out, only the man who spoke to me that first night doesn’t speak any English. He is a Protestant (not common in Egypt) and keeps company with Catholics. It has been a source of great inspiration, and sometime amusement, to hang out with this group. Huda and Osama have great finger-wagging arguments about the Virgin Mary. Jorge picks me up in his un-air-conditioned car and talks to me about his chain-smoking unemployed son as we weave in and out of traffic. An Indian guy, Victor, has now joined us. They all speak Arabic except for me, but they insist on doing a lot of the prayer in English, no matter how much I protest. These are very pure-hearted people. I wish I had met them when I first came to Kuwait instead of at the end.

Meanwhile, I still spend time with Mahmoud. I’ve been to his home three times, and each time I was treated to his mother’s fantastic home cooking. The last meal I had there was meatballs cooked in yogurt sauce. After school lets out, I’m planning to do some traveling with Mahmoud, his brother, and one or two of their friends. We’re going overland via Saudi to Jordan, then hopefully through Syria to Lebanon. I got a transit visa for Saudi, but Syria refused to give me a visa, simply saying “No visas for Americans.” We’ll try again at the border. Mahmoud and I have had a lot of discussions about religion. He has very warm sentiments about Christianity. Something I’ve wanted to do since coming to Kuwait is try an inter-faith fellowship with Christians and Muslims praying together. We’re going to try it with a few of our friends at the end of this month. I mentioned it to Jorge, and I hope it wasn’t a mistake. The whole point is to put aside self-righteousness and any notion of a contest in which the people with the wrong religion convert to the other side. I don’t know if Jorge really understand that, since he has very much grown up in a world of “us versus them.” Anyway, I can’t un-invite him now, so we’ll just have to let things roll and see how it all goes.

Time is winding down quickly. The IEP testing is done, and I’ll be in meetings with parents all this coming week. Many teachers have already started their packing and shipping. They say that they can’t wait to leave. As for me, I don’t want the days to pass too quickly. As much as I may have complained about Kuwait, I feel sad when I think about leaving. Friends that I’ve made here ask me why I didn’t renew my contract. As often as not, I tell them the whole tiresome truth. The story is ongoing. I don’t know where I’ll be in six months or a year. We have teachers in my school who have left and come back. Anything is possible. I feel a little burst of emotion and threat of tears when I think about the whole Kuwait experience. I know the sentimentality is probably a sign of oncoming male menopause. It's hard to say whether the tears are happy or sad. As Waleed once told me, whether your luck is good or bad, the best thing to say is: Al hamduli’llah (thanks to God).