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.

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.

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.)

India trip recalled - part 3

When the drummer, whose name was Raj, swapped with me the camel-skin drum in exchange for a pair of jeans, shoes, and hat, he also threw in a wooden toy cobra made of loose carved sections that allow it to wiggle like a snake. He told me that his wife made it out of an apple tree root back up north. If it weren’t for that lie, I probably would be looking for an April flight to go back to Varkala and spend a few days getting drum lessons from him. But the toy looked like the sort of thing I think I’ve seen sold by Chinese vendors at flea markets, and I saw another guy selling toy snakes just like them down on the beach. That doesn’t mean that there is no daughter in school pouting for an MP3 player, or that the drum head isn’t real camel skin. But one lie is sometimes enough to cool a person’s enthusiasm. I actually tried to tell myself that maybe his wife really did make that snake out of an apple root. It was possible. I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t true. Anyhow, I don’t mind that he lied. The toy snake was a gift, and he just wanted to make it more interesting. In fact, it is more interesting now when I look at it, because there’s the ticklish silly idea that maybe his wife made it out of an apple root, sort of like when you blow out your birthday candles and think “Well, maybe people really are granted a wish by blowing out birthday candles.”

Early the next morning I took an auto rickshaw through the quiet streets to the train station to meet the Ernakulam Express headed back up to north Kerala. The final stop of my India trip was in a village outside Cochin. Homestays are a lot like bed and breakfast inns that you find in the west, but instead of just breakfast you get all three meals, and the family takes a little bit of interest in you. I was going to the home of a Brahmin family who promised a very traditional experience. On the way I sat opposite an Israeli couple who sprawled out on the seat, one napping while the other guarded luggage. Indians all around us were packed 4 and 5 to seating area, and they looked perplexed about how foreigners could be so clueless about space sharing etiquette on the crowded trains. The couple didn’t follow the Indian custom of squeezing in to allow others to sit, but they did quickly pick up on the practice of throwing trash out the train window. At one point in the morning’s journey I heard the loud clicking of two stones being clapped together and turned to see a young woman with a baby under one arm and some kind of stone castinets in her other hand working her way forward. She was a singer. She stopped in front of us and sang. I didn’t have anything but large bills. The Israelis clapped and gave her money.

Once arrived at the station, I quickly spotted the driver holding a sign with the name of my homestay, and we were off. The place was in a quiet area near the Pariyar river. We arrived at the elaborate gate, and the family all came out to greet me along with a British lady who had a red dot painted on her forehead and was wearing a sari. For fun, they had dressed her up as an Indian lady. It turned out we had a few things in common. She was also an English teacher working abroad, in her case in Granada, and she was traveling alone. She assured me that I had come to a wonderful place.

The house was an old Indian villa with a detached kitchen and a variety of medicinal plants and fruit trees growing around it. I was shown my room which was upstairs in an ancient ornate wooden structure overlooking the road. The interior was dark, varnished wood with framed prints of the paintings of a Indian artist from the early colonial period. They told me to settle in and then come down for lunch.

The food served at the Brahmin house was all vegetarian, made from scratch using all fresh ingredients, and prepared by the matron of the house and her daughter-in-law. They didn’t have servants or cooks. At every meal there three or four fresh dishes served with condiments and rice on stainless steel pans and eaten by hand. The food was very good. It was interesting to have meals which surrounded items not usually thought of as a main entrée. Once the main course was warm pineapple with a mustard sauce - surprisingly satisfying. During my three days there, they let me sample all the local specialties including upuma, a rice dish, iddli lentel dumplings, and dosha pancakes. They were eager to show visitors that healthy vegetarian food could be easy and delicious.

The afternoon was taken up with a little tour of the area. The father of the house, a man I’ll refer to as T., accompanied the other guest and myself and we all went together in an auto-rickshaw. It didn’t take long to get a sense of T’s colorful and endearing personality. He’s a youthful sixty-something man with a booming voice and a face that registers bold emotion and exaggerated surprise about everything.

We went to a shrine at the birthplace of Adi Shankara, the great Hindu philosopher-saint who taught non-dualism. It’s built as a tower with colorfully painted relief sculpture illustrating the saint’s life as you follow the spiraling rampway to the top. Between each episode you can see the graffiti scribbled on the walls by local school kids in Mayalayam language. In the spirit of non-dualism it is fitting to consider that the graffiti is of equal importance to the depiction of Adi Shankara’s holy life. We went from there to visit a yoga school. A group of Italian visitors happened to have stopped there at the same time, and the teacher gave us all a long-winded account of his personal career becoming a yoga teacher and setting up the school there. Unfortunately talk was all we were going to get from him, because he told us he was sorry but he did not plan to offer any instruction until a reconstruction project was completed since the roof had been damaged in a storm. Unfortunately a good part of the afternoon was lost in finding that out. We moved on to a Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess Durga. It was one of the more mysterious places I visited in India. There were monks stationed here and there around the temple doing their pujas and meditations. Non-Hindus are usually not allowed to enter temples, and T. really took us in there to show us a temple grounds view of the Periyar River and a place where people go to do ablutions. I would have like to have spent a little time soaking up the atmosphere of the place. It definitely felt very spiritual and mystical. But we had to hurry off to a dance school. T. wanted to take us to watch a practice session of girls training in Indian classical dance. When we got to the dance school, the class was over, but the owner called his wife to get one of their highest achieving students to come and dance for us. Where other classical dance forms are graceful and feminine, Indian classical dance is dynamic and energetic. It was really very impressive to watch. B., (the English lady) was leaving the next morning and wanted to get some gifts. We stopped at a spice market and she made a few purchases, but then T got a phone call from home and learned that some relatives had dropped in to say hello and they were all waiting for him, so she never got to do her shopping. The house was busy when we got back. The children were running around playing, and the adults were eating and talking noisily in Malayalam.

B. and I sat in the front porch area and talked for a bit. I told her that one of my reasons for coming to this particular homestay was that they offered to make appointments for their guests to see an astrologer. She was very encouraging. She had gone to see the family astrologer and had had a very good experience. She also told me about a place about half and hour’s walk away where I could go in the morning and see elephants getting bathed in the river. We had both had very good traveling experiences and were in agreement about how wonderful it was to have had the chance to come to India.

We all got up early the next morning to have breakfast and say goodbye to B. I was given a hand-drawn map and headed out to find the elephant bath. It was an adventure just finding it. A narrow road turned into a small footpath that led through tapioca fields, banana groves, and rubber tree plantations. There were two little bridges to cross and a school full of adorable uniformed children who wanted to say hello and ask for a pen. “One pen?” “One pen?”

I made a couple wrong turns and almost turned back at one point, but somehow I found the spot. I knew I was in the right place when I saw some other westerners waiting with cameras. I learned that there was a training center for elephants not far from there. It was operated by the Indian National Forest Service to provide employment and care for injured or orphaned elephants from a population of wild elephants living in a nature preserve up river. The young elephants were trained to take part in ceremonies and parades according to Kerala tradition. When the elephants arrived, it felt like the arrival of royalty. The trainers handled them with a bit more roughness than we wanted to see, using prods and sticks to direct them, but one had to consider that these animals were going to be attending festivals and weddings and needed to learn to take directions for their own good. Anyhow, it really felt like a privilege to see elephants in that kind of setting. They are so grand and beautiful. I walked back to the house in a daze of gratitude.

That afternoon I rode along with the daughter-in-law who had some errands to do. I remembered my early experiences when I was an exchange student in Japan, and how I was happy to tag along to the supermarket or the hardward store. In any other situation I would not enjoy sitting and waiting while someone went around to pay their utility bills and whatever, but I was happy as a clam to watch the busy Kerala street scenes while she took care of mundane necessities. Before we went back I bought a set of metal drinking cups and some of the wrap-around garments that the men wear, called kaavi, dhoti, lungi . . . I’m not sure which is which, nor how to tie them, and I’ll probably use them as tablecloths, but who cares!

Later, T. and his granddaughter were going to have a bath in the river. They asked me to join them. This was a wonderful, earthy experience. We went to a bathing area behind a temple dedicated to one of the gods of medicine. It was a beautiful, golden evening, and no one was there but us. The water was warm, and perfectly clean from what I could tell. We had a regular bath with soap and everything. It was like something you might associate with camping, but a regular practice for this family. T. sent his granddaughter into the temple to get some sandalwood paste to make dots on our foreheads, thought to have a cooling and calming effect.

I found out when we got back that the astrologer woman had been ill, and we would have to call her in the morning to see if she was willing to give me an appointment. The family could tell I was very eager to see her. “Do you have some problem that you need to ask her about?” they cautiously inquired. I told them I just felt very unsure about my life and had no real goals or direction for my future. This is the truth, albeit an understated version. I had a strong intuition that I could get some help from an astrologer. I told them that when I was in college, there was an Indian guy living in my dorm who was getting his masters in electrical engineering. He was very smart and scientific-minded, and yet he had come from a long line of palmists and astrologers. Somehow he shrugged off the incongruity of being a scientist and knowing how to read palms. The first time I heard he knew how to read palms, I eagerly asked him to take a look at mine. He peered at my palm for about 2 seconds, and then said, “Not right now . . . another day.” The next time I say him he said, “Maybe Thursday.” Then when Thursday came, he said, “Saturday would be better.” Of course he never did give me the reading he had promised, and I always suspected that he had seen something he didn’t want to tell me about. Anyhow, I know I could have had a palm reading or an astrological chart done any time, but it had never felt like the right time until I started planning my trip and saw that they could make appointments for guests. Knowing all this, T.’s wife told me that she would call the astrologer herself and explain it in the morning. T. also told me that he had some training in palmistry, and when I was done he would like to have a look at my hand if I was willing to let him. That night I lay awake wondering what exactly it was that I wanted to hear or not hear about my life.

The next morning I was up early to the sound of a flute being played at the temple. This was my last day in India. My hosts could easily see how anxious I was about the appointment. Mrs. T. had made the phone call the previous evening, and told me that I could go at 9:30 that morning. Mr. T. chose three fresh betel leaves to which I added a coin, and we wrapped these up as a symbolic token of humility and appreciation. The astrologer was a lady teacher who lived in a neighborhood not far from the elephant bath. They suggested that since I had extra time I should take the ferry across the Periyar to see the ancient church of St. Thomas. That seemed like a perfect idea to me. I found the place near the second bridge where the ferryman took passengers in a long, narrow canoe across the shallow river to the Christian village surrounding St. Thomas’s church. I easily found the old church. Keralan Christians believe that many of their churches were established by Saint Thomas the Apostle himself. There was a statue above the altar of Saint Thomas kneeling as Jesus takes his hand to show him the wound in his side. I felt no conflict about praying in a Christian church before going to see a Hindu astrologist. A nun came in with some school girls who knelt down on the hard floor. When they were whispered amongst themselves I thought maybe they were mischievously distracting one another the way one might expect Catholic schoolgirls to do in a western country, but I think they were agreeing on a hymn to sing, because as I smiled at their girlish behavior they started singing. I left the church feeling consoled and ready to hear anything that the astrologer might have to say.

I took the ferry back, found the house, and entered at exactly the appointed time. Now I will tell you something strange. You are welcome to take this as an indication of how much I am an eccentric fellow with a wild imagination. Six years ago, I was teaching in Tacoma, and I had a major decision to make about whether to leave my job there and go to attempt a job as translator at a Japanese Buddhist Center. I felt paralyzed with indecision. One night I had a dream that I was in a busy airport and I made eye contact with a white-haired Indian lady. She looked at me and said, “It’s not for you.” I did end up leaving my teaching job, but in the end I didn’t take the job and ultimately moved to Pennsylvania to live closer to my family. When I saw the astrologer, I immediately made the connection. You could probably find in India a million white-haired ladies with the same serious gaze, but in my mind this was the same person from my dream. However, after a brief discussion, she told me that she couldn’t tell me anything because I didn’t have the precise time of birth; I would need to make a call home and find out what I could, then come back in the afternoon. As I started walking back toward my homestay, the built-up anxiety was so intense that I could hardly concentrate on where I was going and almost got lost. There was a small shop near the homestay that had a pay phone. I somehow managed to place the international call and woke my mother to ask her to go find her notes that had my birth time that she had copied from my hospital baby bracelette. She gave me the time, and also went onto the internet look up the latitude and longitude of Greenville where I was born. Mom was excited for me, and I promised to let her know whatever I found out. I couldn’t eat lunch that day, and waited on pins and needles for the afternoon to go back. This time I borrowed a bicycle.

When I saw the lady that afternoon, I decided to tell her outright that I believed I had once seen her in a dream. I told her about it, and she smiled.
“You didn’t take that job?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I guess I was too fragile to do that work,” I tried to explain. I told her about how the meditation regimen had been very intense, and while there I’d felt myself becoming more and more emotionally vulnerable. It was a place of Buddhist practice, but during certain times of the day I could hear church bells from distant convent. The sound of the bells had had a powerful effect on me, and in the end maybe I had realized that I could never detach from my Christian roots to really dedicate myself to the practice of the zen center.
She shook her head and said something like, “There is just one God, and all the forms are just different manifestations.” I do believe this to be true.

She spent quite a bit of time consulting books and calculating on paper. Finally she shook her head. “This is very bad.” The first words out of my mouth were “I knew it!” Then she said, “Your birth time is very, very, very, very, very bad.” (Oh my God, she said ‘very’ FIVE TIMES!) She explained to me that I had been born at a time that resulted in my having the influence of what she called “a dragon’s head,” and to make matters worse, I also had “a dragon’s tail”! I was joined to Jupiter, she said, with Saturn in the 5th position. Because of this, what should have been my primary source of strength was denied to me. After this bad news, she asked, “So what do you want to know?” There were only a few things I really wanted to know. What was behind my sexuality and its associated problems, and how could I begin to discern my life’s direction having no plans or ideas for the future even at this stage of middle age? She had little to offer me. She told me to pray, and trust God. I guess it wouldn't have taken an astrologer to suggest that. The good news was that the dragon influence was on a 16 year rotation cycle, and I would have some kind of liberation at the age of 47 years and 7 months. She said that anger was somehow at the source of all my problems, and that it would do me good to practice some kind of centering exercise such as yoga. She also said that I should make spiritual reading a part of my daily life. “Read your Bible,” said this Hindu astologer. “Your Bible is very good for you.” I thanked her and left.

I have heard people talk about astrologers and fortune-tellers who “knew things that they had no way of knowing.” This woman didn’t spell out anything about my life that proved psychic knowledge. It was all very general and could be easily dismissed by a skeptic. But was I quite floored. When I reached the homestay, the daughter-in-law came out to ask me how it had gone. I couldn’t pretend that it was good. She told me to be strong. Later, T. took me up to my room and lit a candle to look at my palm. He was not as cut and dry as the astrologer, but he confirmed that I was bound to endure a period of strife. “Don’t blame yourself when your mind makes you fight with yourself,” he said, “Just look at it like so much grass, it’s just going to be there.” He added some happy things for me to look forward to. “Even at your age, and even with your problems, marriage is still in your future,” he said. “And you will have two children, a son and a daughter.” He asked me if I had any interest in artistic things. He said that no matter what I had done, that success was denied to me because of all the conflict and negativity, but that in the next few years I would have a breakthrough. “Your goal will become clear to you, and all you will have to do is kick the ball into the net!” God, how I loved that man when he said that. I didn’t care whether he was making up some sugar coating to make me feel better.

I had been through a bit too much emotional turmoil that day and had no appetite for dinner that night. But I sat at the dinner table with them. They were waiting for some new guests to arrive. I mentioned that I had been advised to read the Bible, and how I’d found that very interesting coming from a Hindu. T. asked me, “Are you familiar with Saint George?” It just so happens that I took an iconography class in Pennsylvania a couple years ago, and the one icon I completed was of Saint George. “We think that Saint George is the equivalent of Shiva,” he said. “Saint George will help you.”

That night I packed my bags and said goodbye to this family that I had grown to love in a mere three days. The taxi arrived and we started for the airport. The taxi driver had a rosary hanging from his rear-view window. It was about a 45 minute drive. As we were passing through a little town on the way, I saw a church and thought I saw the word “George” out of the corner of my eye. “Please stop!” I said. “I want to say a prayer at that church.” The driver stopped and backed up without batting an eye. I was correct. It was a church called Saint George’s. An image of Saint George on a horse was painted above a small shrine that bore a statue of the early missionary who founded the church. Candles were burning in front of it. I said a brief prayer thanking God and giving myself to His mercy. This marked the end of my adventure in India.

[Post Script] When I was at the Buddhist center where my life had taken one of its many inexplicable twists, I made friends with a Catholic/Buddhist university professor who talked about some of his experiences with bipolar disorder and spirituality. He said that he thought it was very important not to tell just anyone about ones personal spiritual experiences. “Scripture tells us ‘don’t caste your pearls before swine,’” he said. I don’t know where the words came from, but I responded to him that I couldn’t agree. “I think we must begin to think differently,” I said. "Those who we think are swine may not be swine at all. Who’s to say that those people who we think will never understand or appreciate our stories might not have had similar experiences, or at least be able to learn from something we have to say. Maybe there is more universality to our experiences than we imagine. I think we must throw our pearls -- throw them to the swine!” And so I post these notes into cyberspace for anyone to judge, ridicule, or ponder as they will.