Extremes

Yesterday, Saudi Arabia was the hottest place on the planet, literally. We reached 117 degrees.  Today, I proctored an exam in a room that felt like a walk in freezer.  Students fingers and lips were turning blue, so half way through, we had everyone stand up and do jumping jacks just to help them warm up.  Frustratingly, there are windows we could have opened to let in some warm air since we have no control over the air conditioning, but it was haram (not allowed, sinful) to open the windows. You see, the windows looked out over the men's side of the campus, and a man might have been able to look up two stories into the window and see one of the girls without her abaya or head covering.  Not that any of them weren't covered, it was so cold everyone was bundled up tight.  But the possibility alone means it's not possible.  So the girls struggled through three hours of arctic temperatures, as if struggling through a 30 page statistics exam wasn't enough. Finally, at noon, they were released to freedom.  We teachers, however, were left behind for no discernible reason other than someone somewhere up the chain of command decided to stick it to us.

Since all other personnel, cleaners, admin, every other department, and all the students can leave after the exams end at noon, they have been cutting off our air conditioning at noon as well.  Apparently maintenance didn't get the memo that the English teachers need to stick around for another four hours and do nothing.  I don't mind though. For me, it is sweet relief.  Usually, when we get to school, everyone disrobes and takes off the abaya and hijab while we are inside the University.  I, on the other hand, not only leave everything on, but add layers.  I throw on a pair of long underwear under my skirt and a hoodie under my abaya just to stay warm.  I even got in trouble for it one day when I happened to pass the boss in the hall on my way to a computer lab with some students.  She asked me why I still had my abaya and hijab on, and I explained that I was cold.  She told me to bring a sweater.  I explained that I had one on, but was still cold, and since it was a hoodie, and not very professional looking, I was sure she would prefer me to wear the abaya over it.  She told me to buy a nicer sweater, and before I could stop myself I told her I would love to, but since they haven't bothered to pay me yet, I didn't have any money to spend on a sweater.  She did not say anything, but turned around and walked the other way.

No air conditioning means that I can take off my sweater and abaya and actually feel comfortable in the office. Not only that, It's a great self-esteem booster because I've gotten several comments from teachers and co-workers who are seeing me abaya free, many for the first time.   "Oh, I had no idea you had such lovely long brown hair!"  "Wow, is that a new skirt?" (One of the only two I own and wear everyday)  "I've never seen you wear anything but black, that yellow shirt looks great!" "You look like you have lost a ton of weight." (yeah, about 5 pounds of clothing).  But today, for the first time, by 3pm,  it was too hot even for me.  Usually I go outside to warm up.  Today, I went outside to cool down.  I sat in the shade in 117 degree weather because at least there was a slight breeze which made it feel cooler than inside our office.  I'm starting to get used to such extreme swings, not only in temperature, but in every aspect of my life here.

This is a country built around extremes;  the heat of the desert and the artificial cold of  modern buildings,  the insistence on carefully followed rules and precision in official exams and the make it up as you go attitude toward the curriculum the rest of the year, the complete physical isolation of the sexes and the frantic mixing of couples in cyberspace,  the apparent wealth of Saudi oil and the royal family and the women and children going from car to car in traffic begging for money, the careful and elaborately public displays of religion, humility, and piety and the private displays of ostentatious wealth and excessive waste,  the pull of tradition and the push of development and the modern world.   It's a country that seems to be at once comfortable with, and tearing itself apart over,  it's own contradictions.

I believe there is a place in the middle of all these extremes for the country to become the place it imagines itself to be .  There is a chance for change and growth in this country.  But true to form, I think it's going to happen both through slow and gradual efforts, and in a sudden explosion of profound change.

The Night Beach

Last night, one of the other teachers invited me and some of the other teachers to go with her and her Saudi friends to the beach.  I was a little confused at first, since we weren't leaving until 7 pm, and the sun would clearly be down by then, but then I remembered that going to the beach when the sun was up, and it was 110 degrees, wouldn't be much fun either.

It's funny how exciting little things like this can be.  I was so happy to be asked to come, and then all day I was looking forward to it.  As the night wore on, I was more and more excited.  I felt like a kid counting down the days to his birthday, only it was hours that were dragging by for me, not days.  I was excited because I wanted to see the Persian Gulf (or the Arabian Gulf depending on who you talk to) and I wanted to feel like a welcomed part of this group of teachers, and I wanted to meet real Saudi's who weren't my students or coworkers.

My biggest dilemma as I was whiling away the hours at home was deciding what to wear. I wasn't sure how to dress.  One of the teachers had told me it was the Aramco beach, so when we got there, I wouldn't have to wear my abaya. But what to wear under the abaya?  I didn't put on my swimming suit because I doubted that we would be swimming at night. But I knew her friend that was taking us to the beach was a man (because he was going to be driving) and so I didn't know what was appropriate.  I wanted to wear shorts so I could run through the sand, and at least dip my feet in the water, but I figured that was definitely inappropriate.  I asked the girl who had invited me what I should wear.  Oh just a nice little skirt or dress.  I looked in my closet at my skirt options.  All of them are floor length.  None of them are "beach wear".  I finally decided to just wear the same skirt I had worn to work that day.  A linen one with buttons along the front.  It was about 2 inches shorter than any of the other skirts, and could easily be hiked up to walk in the water.  I wanted to change into a t-shirt to be more relaxed, but t-shirts don't really go with skirts, so I left the shirt I had had on at work on too.  Funny, after hours of deliberation, I just wore what I had on all along.

When she finally knocked on my door to let me know we were ready to leave, I was shocked and embarrassed by what the other three girls were wearing.  One of them had on a thin strapped sun dress.  To be fair, she wore it as a skirt to work too, but always had a shirt on over the top of it that made decent.  The other girl had a similar sun dress that came down only to just above her knees.  I know you are all thinking, knee length, that's quite normal and appropriate for the beach.  But after a month of being here and seeing no flesh, it was quite scandalous.  The other girl had on a tube top, and M.C. hammer pants.  Thankfully, because she has long beautiful full curly hair, it hid the fact that the top was strapless.  I felt ridiculously conservative and was glad when we suited up and put on our abayas for the drive to the beach.

He had a really nice car that was clearly new, and had a lot of cool features that seemed specifically designed for hot climates.  Most people have windows that roll up and down electronically.  This guy, he had that, plus, tinted window shades that rolled up and down, even on the back window.  At first I thought it was a great idea just for blocking the sun on hot days, but I realized it's also important to have if you plan on driving women around whom you aren't related too.  He had a GPS smart phone connected computer thing in the dash of his car, which seemed useful, but could also be embarrassing if you weren't careful since it automatically displayed any text messages and "What's app" feeds (the social media of choice here) along with automatically patching any phone calls through the car speakers.  Luckily, there were no embarrassing phone calls, and even better, he was a careful slow driver.  A nice change from the constant near misses on our daily commutes.  Of course, a lot of it could have to do with the lack of traffic this time of night.

We finally arrived at the beach, and it was lined with permanent picnic tables in little shaded and walled sections.  There were bathrooms, and showers for your feet and a huge playground.  Outside of these lighted areas, it was dark.  We took off our abayas, but saw only other Saudi's and only a few other women who all remained covered.  I felt uncomfortable at first, so one of the girls and I walked away out on the sand to get away from the staring eyes and dip our feet in the water and we were surprised to find that there was no surf.  It was like wading on the shore of a lake.  Apparently, there are waves on windier days, but today it was placid and warm as bath water.  We went out quite a ways from shore, but the water never came past my calves.  Eventually we turned back because we didn't want to reach a sudden drop off point and and get soaked, or get so far out that we couldn't see our friends

When we got back to our picnic spot a few other Saudi friends had arrived.  They brought plates of nuts arranged in fancy shapes, croissants stuffed with cheese and meet and spices, tea and coffee (in proper tea kettles) a tray of sweets, and a dozen bottles of water.  One of the guys was setting up the most elaborate hookah pipe I had ever seen.  Another was spreading a really nice rug to lay on out over the sand, and there were even square pillow armrests.   In a matter of minutes, the concrete communist looking picnic block was suddenly transformed into a scene from Arabian nights.  The guys were all geologists from Saudi Aramco who had studied in London.  They seemed really nice, and all of them were very polite and courteous.  I wanted to ask them a million questions about growing up in Saudi, about what it was like for their sisters and mothers, about how it had changed in recent years, about what they thought about the future of the country... Instead, we talked about safe things.  We discussed our preferences of coffee or tea.  We talked about what movies were playing in Bahrain at the moment and if any of them were any good (there are no public movie theaters in Saudi).  We learned a few things about aquifers and geological formations.  We talked about awful tricks siblings play on each other.  We talked about everything but the things I'm sure we all wanted to know about each other.  Culture, politics, and religion were the topics no one was ready to broach, but everyone was thinking about.

When we ran out of safe things to say, we ran to the playground and swung on the swings, and went down the slides, and did the monkey bars and acted like children.  It felt freeing to be out without an abaya or hijab, and even though climbing on a playground isn't the easiest thing in a floor length skirt, it was great to be a kid again and forget for a minute where you were and all the things you couldn't do.  One of the girls had brought some bad-mitten rackets and shuttlecocks, so we did our best to keep a volley going while a pair of Saudi children watched, confused by these grown ups acting like children on their playground.

Too soon it was past eleven, and we all had to work the next day.  We packed up all the food and the rugs, and put our abayas back on.  The ride home seemed much quicker than the ride there, and I'm not sure if it was the lack of traffic, or that time was moving more quickly now that there wasn't anything exciting to look forward to.  It was a wonderful night, and exactly what I needed.  I hope we will visit the beach again soon, and I hope someday I will get to know a Saudi well enough to ask them about the all the things we are not supposed to talk about.

Dammam Community College

One of the worst parts of my day is waking up in the mornings.  It's hard because the call to prayer at around 3am always wakes me up.  It usually takes me about an hour to get back to sleep, and then when I'm finally falling back into a deep sleep, my alarm clock goes off and it is time to catch the bus for the 45 minute drive to campus. Which is just enough time to fall asleep again on the bus, only to be woken up when we arrive, groggy and grumpy.  It's really a terrible system.

This morning I woke up twice as usually and made my way down to the bus, but Chris stopped me before I could get on and told me that today I would be taking the bus to Dammam Community College instead because one of the teachers was out sick and they needed me to help proctor exams.  Our bus left every morning at 6:30, but because their campus is closer, they never leave until 7:30.  So, lucky me, I get an extra hour of sleep, and an extra annoying third wake up.  At least I didn't fall asleep on the bus this time.  The journey was shorter, maybe only 20 minutes, so I didn't have enough time to fall asleep, and besides, this was a new route so there were lots of new things to look at.  It wasn't so much of a highway drive as a drive through neighborhoods of obviously increasing wealth, and then back again to apartments on dirty blocks like the one we live in. It was completely quiet on the bus and no one said anything to each other.  It was an uncomfortable silence, and I wasn't sure if they were always like this or if it was because I was new and they didn't know me.

When we reached the campus, I was surprised to see how clean and new it was.  Our campus at the university is an older collection of buildings re purposed for women.  Even though we have about as many cleaning ladies as teachers, it is somehow never cleaned.  Especially the stairs.  The same coffee stain has been in the stairwell for going on 2 months now.  Here, everything was shiny and even had that "I've been freshly mopped" smell.  There were colorful modern looking couches in semicircles and snake shapes.  I couldn't help but think how much more pleasant to nap on these would be than the airport gate style benches we had in our hallways.

I followed the teachers upstairs and found that at least some things were the same.  There was a fingerprint scanner for punching in identical to the one at the University.  I was the last to fingerprint in, but it didn't work.  I wasn't surprised since when I substituted at Qatif, they had to enter my fingerprint the first time I used it.  I tried twice, but gave up because I figured I would just wait the 30 minutes or so for the admin lady to come in and enter me into the system.

Across from the fingerprinting were some of the teacher's offices.  They had actual offices with actual doors instead of just cubicles.  I was jealous.  One of the teachers hurried off to her office and quickly shut the door.  Two others looked at me and then looked at another teacher and said, you still have that extra chair don't you? You take her.  I haven't felt that left out since picking teams in middle school gym class.  I sat down awkwardly in the little chair shoved way in the corner of this woman's office.  She made a show of being busy shuffling papers.  After a minute, she looked at me and said, you fingerprinted in right?  I explained to her that it hadn't worked, and since I was new they would probably need to program me in first so I wasn't worried.  She said I should worry, and I obviously didn't try very hard.  Sometimes it took her 5 or six tries for the thing to read her fingerprint.   To humor her, and just to get out of the office where I clearly wasn't wanted, I went back and tried again seven times, just to be sure.  Then I went back and told her it hadn't worked, but I would just wait downstairs on those lovely couches for the admin to arrive.

I sat reading down there about thirty minutes and was on the verge of falling asleep again when the lead teacher (a local hire who doesn't ride the bus in with us) arrived and found me there.  She was so friendly, she almost made up for how the others had ignored me.  She was horrified that I'd been down here alone (Saudi women rarely do anything alone), and ushered me upstairs.  She showed me her office and she showed me the teachers lounge, which is really just a room full of sleeping couches, and she showed me the cafeteria and the room I would be giving the exam in and a tiny door onto a small section of roof, which is the only outdoor area at the Dammam Community College.  I was impressed, because the facilities seemed nicer, but I think the lack of a green outdoor area to sit and eat lunch in, sort of outweighed the benefits of having a whole office to yourself.  After all, I definitely couldn't get greenery and outdoors where we lived, but I did have a private apartment alone there, which is better than an office with a door.

By now, I had proctored a number of exams, so I felt like I was pretty much an old hat at it.  Granted, I was usually just the second pair of eyes in the room, and not the actual administrator, but it wasn't that difficult.  Different administrators had different styles.  Some went from student to student during the exam to check IDs and make them sign in, others made the students sign in and check IDs when they submitted their test at the end of the exam.  I decided I liked the second version better since it didn't disturb students during the test.  No one could leave until an hour and a half into the two hour test, and most students ended up using the whole time, so it was usually easier to just check them on their way out.  Usually, we put a giant stopwatch on the screen from the internet, but in this classroom, the projector was broken, so I had to write the new time every 15 minutes or so, but other than that, proctoring a test is about as fun as watching water boil.  Finally, it was time to allow students who were finished to leave.  I made an announcement that they should come up one at a time to avoid chaos and a mass exodus, and asked my Saudi co-procterer to make sure they did.

It all went very smoothly at first, they actually did come up one at a time, and I checked their name and ID number on their student ID's and while they were signing out, I made sure they had correctly filled in the bubbles on the scan tron, and double checked they had written their name and ID number on the actual test for cross checking in case there was a dispute about the scan tron grade.   One girl had forgotten her ID in her purse, which was left in the hallway by regulation, so I let her go out and get it.  When she returned, I was also checking another student, and because they are always in such a hurry to leave once the test was over, and there were so many things to check, I must have forgotten to make one of them sign the attendance sheet.  With about 15 minutes to go, I got bored and decided to count up the tests and the signatures so far, more for something to do than anything else.  It's a good thing I did because that is when I noticed I was one signature short.  I looked through the tests that had already been submitted, and figured out which girl hadn't signed, and I asked the next student who turned in her paper if she knew her, and could she please send her back in to sign the attendance sheet.  The girl left and returned a few minutes later saying the girl had already gone home for the day.

I had been trying to keep this mistake of mine quiet, but by now the Saudi teacher had gotten wise to the fact that there was some problem.  She asked what was wrong and I told her that one girl forgot to sign out.  Now, in my mind, this isn't that big of a deal, but obviously I was mistaken.  Her eyes went wide and she began shaking her head.  She was clearly very concerned.   As the number of students still in the room dwindled, her worry seemed to increase.  She asked me what I was going to do and I told her I would just tell the Dean that I had made a mistake.  No big deal.  She shook her head again and asked if I wanted to loose my job.  I laughed.  They won't fire me for this, I said, and if they did, well, it wouldn't be the worst thing.  She just shook her head some more.  A few minutes later, she said, you can have one of the other students sign for her, she said.  I told her I wouldn't want that student to get in trouble, and since it was my fault, I would take the responsibility for it.  I told her not to worry.  She would not be in trouble.  She told me I should sign it myself then.  I told her I would rather admit I made a mistake than lie about it.  She told me I didn't understand how serious it was.  I told her I was beginning to get that impression, but that I really doubted they would fire me over a signature even if I did work here, and since I was only a substitute, It was really unlikely since I would probably not even be back here anytime soon.  This didn't satisfy her.

She went out of the room (there was only one student still taking the test at this point) and I can only assume she was going somewhere to either proclaim her innocence, or find someone to sign the attendance.  To be honest, any student could have come back and signed it, and I would never know if it was the right girl or not because I didn't remember what she looked like anyway.  But she came back a few minutes later and didn't say anything more. Finally the test was over, and we counted all the exams, sealed them up, and put both our signatures over the seal to be turned in to the dean.  She pleaded with me one more time to just sign the attendance sheet, and I told her that if it mattered that much to her, she could sign it.  Of course she declined and insisted it wouldn't affect her, she was just worried about me.

By this time, I'd gotten a little worried myself.  She made it seem like such a huge deal, I started thinking perhaps it was.  But I had resolved to tell the truth, and couldn't imagine that a student forgetting to sign the attendance sheet could result in being fired.  So I stood in line to turn in my tests and awaited my fate.  Almost all the teachers were ahead of me in line so I watched with trepidation as each one presented stacks of tests which were recounted and double checked.  Each time another teacher signed the final sheet of paper verifying all the tests and signatures were received, my stomach got a little tighter.  I was starting to wonder if principle was worth sticking to in a case like this where something I know isn't such a big, is made into a big deal unnecessarily by regulations.  Would everyone be better off if I just signed it?  I would hate to make that girl come back and retake the test, and I might be getting my co-proctor in trouble, or the Dean in trouble also.  As I was weighing these concerns, a woman came in and asked to see my attendance sheet.  Here we go, I thought, and handed it over.    She left the room with it, and I stood there waiting, not sure if I should follow her or stay in line, but she made no motion for me to follow so I stayed put.  A few minutes later she returned the attendance sheet.  Where the missing signature had been was now a fancy Arabic scribble.  I felt relieved that the decision had been taken out of my hands, but also a little disappointed that everyone was so afraid of the consequences of something I saw as minor, that they were willing to break the rules.  Of course it is possible that the student had returned to school in time to sign the paper, after all, I don't know what happened to it after the woman took it.  I choose to believe that that is, in fact, what happened.

I don't know what would have happened to me if the signature hadn't appeared, but I will tell you one thing, I will be extra careful from now on to be sure I never have to find out.

Marking Papers

The last week of school is always crazy anywhere you go.  It seems particularly crazy here.  Instead of semesters, the University is on an 8 week quarter system.  At the 3 week mark of this quarter, someone decided that the students would need to write three essays each, and each essay should have a first, second, and final draft.  I say someone because no one is clear on who ordered the change in the curriculum.  Some rumors said it came from the new vice dean on the men's side, the same man who decided the women should stay until 4pm.  Other's thought it was our own Josia, who was so tired of being told that women are lazy and can't do the work men do in the joint curriculum meetings between the men's and the women's side that she decided to take it upon herself (and us) to prove them wrong.  Yet another rumor is that it came from our women's dean who simply read the curriculum wrong, and that it was supposed to be three drafts of one essay, not three separate essays.  Regardless of who made the decision, we had 4 weeks, to switch from teaching strictly vocabulary, to writing 3 complete academic essays in English, something the students had never even done in Arabic.

The advanced classes got started right away, and some of the classes even managed to get through two essays.  Most of the classes had just barely finished one essay.  The lowest level classes were even doing group essays, so that they were each in charge of only a paragraph, a much more manageable task at their levels.  The students were all stressing out about the essays that were due, and the teachers were all stressing about correcting all of these essays.  Then, some genius in academic scheduling decided that the physics and chemistry exams would take place during English class times in the second to the last week of classes.  When we pointed out that it was impossible for the girls to be in two places at once, and shouldn't we just cancel our classes for the week, the attendance administration insisted that we should still take attendance.  The students caught between a rock and a hard place, decided rightly, to attend their exams instead of English class.  So, now there was only one week left of class to complete at least one, and for many, two essays. Each draft had to be corrected by the teachers and handed back to the students so they could correct it and produce a final draft.

Now, a month ago, I would have thought that there was no way a University could have this problem.  In any normal situation, I would have assumed that the academic calendar is set at the beginning of the school year, and that the schedule for exams and classes would have already been worked out well in advance.  But I enough by now to know that it is ridiculous of me to expect that level of organization. And I should have seen the next schedule mishap coming, but I did not.  Apparently, no one else in the entire English department did either. The University schedulers once again decided to make the task of getting these essays done even more impossible by adding a "revision" week, in which no classes could be held, but students had the opportunity to review for more final exams that would happen the week after.  Our four weeks to write 3 essays had dropped to 2 weeks, both of which had already gone by.

Students were panicking, teachers were panicking, and for about two weeks, all anyone did was correct essays.  I found the material almost as hard to get through as the grammar.  It was depressing to read that girls hoping to enter the field of engineering, mostly thought that engineering was a field women shouldn't be in.  The grading scale we had to use for the essays was also a nightmare. It was written by the men's side, whose students only had to do one essay, which they had worked on since day 1 of the semester, because apparently someone had informed them of the requirements, but neglected to tell the women's side for four weeks.  We also didn't receive this rubric until after classes had been canceled, so our students did not know how the essays were to be graded.  It was a ten point scale, with equal points going to content, organization, grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, in-test citation (x3) and a reference page.  In what world is correct citation worth more points than intelligent compelling content and coherent grammar?  Based on this scale, a girls who wrote thoughtful papers with complex ideas and language structures (which usually meant more grammatical mistakes) got worse grades than girls who wrote very simple sentences, often incorrect with no original ideas, but somehow accurate in-text citations.  In addition, no one had decided for sure which reference style we were supposed to teach them, APA or MLA, so most girls ended up using a really strange combination of the two, and getting no points at all for the three in-text citations and the reference page, meaning the best they could do, all things being equal, was a 6 out of 10.   We were also not allowed to give any zeros, even if the whole paper was taken word for word from the internet.  The lowest grade we were allowed to give was 4 points out of 10, but based on the scale we were given, to take away a point for every 10 mistakes, even the best essays weren't getting more than 7 points.  It was sad.   Many of the teachers decided to ignore the grading rubric, and just gave all their students 10s anyway.  I think either method of grading does the students a huge disservice.  It is increasingly clear to me that the University doesn't care at all about learning, but instead about the appearance of learning.  For example, the goal is to finish level five of the Q-skills books (ESL texts published by oxford press).  So, the beginner students are started on level 2, and rushed through 4 books in 3 quarters, while the advanced students only have to get through the level 5 book in one year.  If anyone needs more time to cover a book, it's the beginners, who need help grasping the basics before we push them off to the next book when they haven't understood the first one.  Still, the University only makes one final test, so everyone has to take the level 5 final exam no matter what level they are. As an added bonus, the University can brag that their students completed 4 books this year, never mind that over half of them didn't understand most of the books they were rushed through.  On paper, the stats look great, but I'll let you be the judge.  Here are some real essays intermediate students submitted as final draft papers.  Notice how much is lacking, not only in English language skills, but also in self concept and awareness of the world.

I keep saying to myself that when I have a class of my own next year, I'm going to really make sure I start writing early on. I keep saying that  I'll do academic writing skill building from day one.  I tell myself my students will be ready when the chaos ensues at the end of the year. I keep saying I will be the one to do things differently.  I will be the teacher that doesn't just give in to the students or be dragged under by the frustrating and unfair treatment of the University.  I will demand more of my students, but fairly and consistently from the beginning.  I say to myself that I will be different, my students will be different.  But in my heart I know that every teacher here also said that to themselves when they first came.  I know that they tried hard too.  I know that this time next year, I will probably find myself in the same tough situation, frantically grading essays and trying to stay ahead of the changing requirements of the University, and ready to give up and give in, and just stop caring.  I hope not.  But looking around me at all the other teachers, and the situations they have dealt with in the last 3 or 4 weeks alone, it is a very small piece of hope.

Sophia's Birthday

I obviously don't get British humor.  Twice in the past two weeks, I've jumped in on what I assumed were long running jokes, but which were in fact, not jokes at all.  Or, well, I guess, paradoxically, they are jokes now. Jokes on me.

When we got on the bus to go home one day, some of the male teachers were laughing.  They told one of the my teacher friends that a male friend of theirs was still upset that she had read his aura and told him that his aura was very small.  Well, you know how men are when you tell them anything of theirs is small.  So now, months after the fact, he was still bringing it up from time to time.  She defended herself saying, "It was, it was quite small, that happens you know."  When she said "you know" she happened to look at me and I nodded, simply because that  is what you do when you are conversing with someone and you want to let them know you are listening and have gotten their secret message.  I figured she must have been having a go at the guys by talking about their auras in the first place.  I was sure she wasn't the kind of person to believe in that sort of thing.  One of the male teachers saw me nod and got the wrong idea.  "You can see them too." he said more than asked.  I decided to play along.  "oh, yes," I said, in my most sarcastic tone, "can't you?"  Apparently, the British sarcastic tone is different than the American sarcastic tone, because he clearly thought I was serious.

The other joke actually started the night we went to the beach.  One of the girls, Fozia, was telling a story about her mother, and then one of the boys asked why she said "my mother" because the two girls were sisters and shouldn't it be "our mother"?  I had met these two teachers at separate schools, and I knew they lived in separate apartments, and until then, I had never seen them together.  Though they were both on the shorter side, they looked nothing alike and I was sure they were not sisters. But I also noticed the look they gave each other when the guy had called them out on familial terminology.  I quickly realized what was going on.  They were trying to pull one over on the guys and pretend to be sisters.  The sisters were still both looking at each other blankly, and I figured if no one said anything soon, their cover would be blown, so I jumped in and said, "You know how it is, if it's something you are proud of, you say my mother, but if it's something you don't like about her, you always say her mother.  Just like when parents say "do you know what your son did today?"  He bought it.  It set off a whole other conversation about times we got in trouble as kids.  Crisis averted.  I gave the "sisters" a knowing glance and slight head nod. Later that night we got into stories about how siblings torture each other, and I was amazed at the creativity of these two who earlier hadn't been able to save themselves with quick thinking.  They were telling ridiculous stories, where one would start and the other would finish the story.  I thought they were doing a great job improvising.  They were even making up hairstyles for each other.  "When she was little she had this awful perm done..."  "She used to have this pair of shoes that she bedazzled with all these jewels... you needed sunglasses just to look at them they were so bright and sparkly."  A few times, I thought they had gone overboard inventing stories so crazy the other was sure to deny it and blow their cover.  But they never did.  I was sure they had those guys convinced that they were really sisters.

About a week later, Fozia asked me to help throw a last minute surprise party for the other girl.  We had one of the other teachers take her out to a restaurant and got her key.  Then we blew up balloons and stuck them around the room and had a cake and "crisps" and got everything ready.  Then we tried knocking on all the doors of the other teachers, but because of traffic, they were late getting back and by now it was after 10pm on a work night so most people were asleep.  But we managed to round up five or six of us, and we had a great time yelling surprise (a little late because we were all trying to figure out how to light these candle things and she came in when we all had our backs turned) but it was all very good.  Then the girl had a present for the birthday girl and I thought, oh no, I didn't know! So I hadn't gotten her a present or anything, and by the looks of the other girls standing around empty handed, no one else did either.  When she opened her gift she said, "oh, wow, aren't these the shoes you bought yourself last week?  and isn't this the shirt I picked out for you?"  They both laughed and the other girl said, "yes, I know, I'm the worst sister ever!"  And suddenly, I thought, oh, of course, they are sisters!  No wonder she went through so much effort for her birthday, and had a key to her place, and bought her a present.  Now I felt supremely foolish.  They really had been sisters the whole time, and here I was thinking I was in on a private joke!

To make up for the sort of thrown together last minute birthday party, we all met up to go to a restaurant on the next weekend shopping trip.  The place was on the corniche and it was new and fancy.  Since I still hadn't gotten paid yet, I was a little nervous about going, but I figured I could always just not order anything, and it was better than sitting around waiting for the bus to come back in three hours and take us home from our weekly shopping trip.  So we made our way to the restaurant on foot, and even though it was only about two blocks away, it was over 100 degrees and when you are wearing an abaya and headscarf, it automatically adds about ten degrees, so I was sweating pretty heavily.   It just so happens that while we were walking, one of the guys who had been on the bus to hear my sarcastic comment about aura's was walking with us, and so was the man with the small aura.  You can imagine my horror when they asked me to read his aura and see if it was still small.  Would this joke never end?  So, sweating more than ever now, I looked at him and squinted and stared and finally said simply; "yes".  By the time we arrived at the restaurant, I was pretty much soaked in sweat from the combination of heat and embarrassment.

The Front Entrance to Naia Restaurant

I could tell I was in trouble when the name of the restaurant was lit up in a giant water fountain wall out front. That, and the doorman who ushered us into the lobby with modern art covering the walls while we waited for the elevator to take us up to the top floor.  This place was way out of my league.  I was wearing sweaty pajamas under my abaya, and only had about 40 riyals ($10) to my name at this point, to last me until whenever they decided to pay me, so I clearly didn't belong.   When we got to the top floor, the restaurant looked like a strange combination of zoo and strip club.  All of the seats were zebra print, and the chandeliers were covered in black and white feather boas with LED lights that rotated from red to green to blue to yellow and back again.  Even the tables themselves were lit from underneath with rotating colors.  Everything was marble or polished chrome. I kept expecting stripper poles to descend from the ceiling or rise out of the tables, it had that kind of a vibe, minus the music.  There was (as there always is) a separate room for praying in the restaurant, but during prayer times, they turn the muzak off altogether.

Naia Restaurant Decor

There was a waiter or bus boy standing around about every 20 feet, just in case anyone needed another napkin or dropped a fork.  The didn't have traditional menus.  Instead they had iPads, and you could just scroll through the menu and select anything you wanted.  There were actually three different menus, a Chinese menu, a Lebanese menu, and a Sushi menu, plus all your standard American fare.  There were about six pages of appetizer options and another half dozen or so pages of just drinks.  Which is surprising when you stop to think that alcohol is illegal.  Saudi's may not be able to drink liquor, but they sure have excelled in inventing creative ways to drink just about everything else.  For example; avocado and watermelon juice (those aren't two separate juices by the way, that's a favorite blend).  As you can imagine, ordering took a while.

Happy Birthday to Sophia!

When the food came, it was beautiful.  It was probably the prettiest looking food I have ever seen.  I hadn't ordered anything myself, so this part of the evening was sheer torture.  I watched people eat and eat this amazing food and struggled not to say "are you gonna eat that?" when peoples appetites started to wane.  Luckily, Fozia had gotten an ice-cream cake for her sister from Baskin Robbins earlier and the ever helpful waiters brought it out with firework style candles before my scavenger instinct overcame me too greatly, and I was able to satisfy my hunger with chocolate ice cream cake instead. Overall, it was a very pleasant evening, and well worth the mad dash back to the bus so we wouldn't be left behind.  I'm sure Sophia had a marvelous birthday, but I think we all got something of a present out of that day.

Week of Fun

Our reminder email for the week

All this week, we are proctoring exams.  This basically means that for two to three hours everyday we go and help an Arabic teacher make sure the students aren't cheating.   Other than that, we have nothing to do.  To alleviate boredom, and to help fend off the impending cattiness that inevitably ensues when you leave 30 women in a room together with nothing to do but gossip, a few of the teachers decided to have a week of themed events.  The schedule included Salad Sunday, Motivational Monday, Taco Tuesday, Workout Wednesday, and Thirsty Thursday.

On Salad Sunday, we were all supposed to bring various salad supplies so that we could have a big salad bar. I opted to bring red cabbage since I already had it in my fridge and wouldn't need to buy anything special since I'm still on a budget.  The trouble is, Sunday is our Monday, and after a long weekend, I forgot all about Salad Sunday.  I felt really bad.  But not bad enough not to enjoy the salad bar anyway.  It was delicious!

On Monday, we were all encouraged to put up our favorite motivational quotes around the office.  It's really interesting what people come up with as their favorite quotes.  I've put together some of my personal favorites from the office in this collage for you.

Some of our favorite quotes

On Tuesday, we had tacos, and even though it is slightly unconventional, my contribution was the shredded cabbage that I forgot to bring on Monday.  If nothing else, it added a bit of color to the meal.  Some of the ladies had never had tacos before, and it was amusing to watch some of the Saudi Women attempting to cut apart their tacos with knives.  Don't worry, we schooled them in the proper method of devouring tacos.  Much hot sauce was consumed, and everyone laid around the rest of the day feeling too full to do anything.  I took a nap outside and nearly missed the bus home.

I was most looking forward to Wednesday.  I have been somewhat successful at doing Yoga every morning, and thanks to my lack of funds, I have been eating less.  I think that I have shed a pound of two, but with no scale, it's hard to say.  I had wanted to go jogging around our outdoor area with some of the other girls, and even brought my tennis shoes once or twice, but it just kept working out that I was teaching when they were free, or they were teaching when I was free, so instead of pushing myself to do it on my own, I had just given up.  Having a group workout sounded like a wonderful excuse to get me going.  At first we had planned on going to another room to do the workouts, but it turned out that there was a man in the hallway, so we had to stay put, or put on our abayas and hijabs just to walk to another room down the hall.  We opted to do our best in the tiny hallway.  We did a few warm up stretches, then we did squats.  We did 3 sets of 20, and one set of 15.  I know that doesn't seem like much, and at the time, it seemed like no big deal.  But then we decided to run up and down the stairs (3 stories) three times.  By the end of it, my thighs felt like jello.  I was barely able to do our cool down, the electric slide.  Now, if you have never seen 20 women trying to do the electric slide in a 4x15 foot hallway, with no one who actually remembered how, I highly recommend it.  It was so hilarious, I forgot all about my aching legs.  At least until I got home that night.  Getting up and down from the  couch was torture.  Going up and down stairs was worse.  I was glad I only had one day of work left so I could sit in my room and recover the rest of the weekend.

On Thursday, different people signed up to bring different drinks so that each hour, we had a small sample of each different type of drink.  I was able to have the first drink at 8am, hot chocolate with marshmallows, yum!  Unfortunately, I had to proctor an exam at 9am, so I had to miss out on the 9 am and 10 am drinks.  I was pacing up and down the back of the room, trying to think how I was going to make it through standing for the next two hours on my soar legs, when there was a knock at the door.  Low and behold, one of the teachers was going around bringing the drinks to the teachers who had to proctor.  It was so sweet!  I was so grateful.  On top of that, it just so happened to be my new favorite drink, lemonade with mint!  There were several interesting drinks the rest of the day, including carrot juice, hibiscus juice, a gross spinach and cucumber thing called green goo, and something that tasted like black jelly beans (maybe it was fennel?).  Our final drink of the day was supposed to be mock-tails (virgin strawberry daiquiris and pinacolodas) but the ice had melted and the blender gave out earlier, so we just had extremely thick mix.  It was a disappointing, yet sugar filled end to a whole day of crazy flavors.

At the end of the day, we all also received certificates of participation in the week of work fun.  It was fun.  And I now have a pink certificate that tells me my efforts were "admirable" to prove it.

Home Sweet Home

When I first arrived at the apartments in Dammam, I was distracted by my recent train ride and my near escape from abandonment at the train station and was just really relieved to be somewhere, so I didn't really bother to look too critically at where this somewhere was.

Over the last few weeks, I've had more time to see what all the other teachers have been complaining about since August, when the company first moved everyone into these apartments.  The first most obvious problem is the perpetual puddle of sewage outside the front of the building.  This apartment is located in the farthest suburb of Dammam, the farthest you can go without being in the desert.  The neighborhood was built without proper sanitation and draining, so every so often, a truck comes to pump all the sewage from the building out of the holding tank and into a truck to be taken... somewhere.  This truck used to come once a week, which clearly wasn't enough, because it would always overflow and leak out into the street.  The puddle stretched for at least 20 feet and covered about three quarters of the road.  Thankfully, there was a high curb, and the parking is on a slight slant, so we never actually had to step in this puddle.  Unfortunately, we did have to smell it.  Some claim to have actually seen feces floating in the cesspool, but I never got close enough to confirm.

The last two weeks, the truck has been coming once every other day, and the pool has started to dry up, and some days it does disappear altogether.  Strangely, the side effect seems to be that it becomes smellier inside the building.  Everyone has plugs in all the sinks and drains and has to keep the lids down on the toilets, just to make it bearable in their own apartments.  My room was initially smell free, but on certain days, the smell hits with a vengeance.  On those days, I open the window to my chimney and lock myself in the bedroom, and put on the perfume I got from the cultural night to drown out the smell.

I'm pretty sure the wires are
supposed to be inside...

When I moved into my new room, I was excited to get rid of another smell, BO and finally be able to do some laundry.  Only, there was no washing machine.  When I asked before I left Virginia, they assured me there were fully furnished apartments with washing machines, stoves, pots and pans, refrigerators, everything. The only part of that that was true, turned out to be the refrigerator.  And in most apartments the refrigerator was actually in the bedroom since the kitchen plugs had been blown or short circuited, and no longer worked.  There were a lucky few apartments who had working air conditioners in both the kitchen and the bedroom, but in most of them had only one or the other.  I have a hot plate, but the other night, I was making soup, and when I went to stir it with a metal spoon, I got a little bit of an electric shock from it.  The plug my air condition is plugged into has wires sticking out of the bottom plug, and there are usually sparks when I plug anything into any outlet.  Periodically, the circuit breaker is tripped and you have to go banging on the corner apartment, which has the fuse box for the whole floor to ask him to flip it back.  Frankly, I'm surprised no one has been electrocuted yet.

They have been promising a laundry room since August.  The washing machine will apparently be a shared laundry room on the roof. At first, the hold up seemed to have been building the room.  However, the room has now been built, plumbing added, and everything ready.  They are just waiting for the company to release the funds, and have been waiting for the last 6 months.  I asked my program manager if there was anything we could do to speed up the process.  She laughed and said, you are welcome to try.  I did try. I wrote an email to the company explaining that I was sure they wanted to hire and keep the best teachers, and to do that, they would obviously want the best for their teachers, and therefore, I was sure they were doing there best to get a washing machine for the fifty or so teachers living in the apartments, and could they please just provide us with an update on when we could expect the washing machine.  He wrote back and told me to ask my program manager.  I thanked him, but pointed out that I had asked my program manager, and she had suggested that I contact you.  I told him I realized that he was probably not in charge of the funds, but could he please pass on my email to someone who could help me.  It has been over a week, and I've had no response from him at all.

The company switched to these new apartments initially because the old accommodation required sharing. Everyone says it was a much nicer place and had bathtubs and a laundry and workout room, and a pool (a real pool, not a cesspool), and was within walking distance of a grocery store.  But, that there were too many problems with stressful roommates, and people kept having to change roommates, or were quitting over the problems, so they moved to an accommodation with single apartments.  We still have roommates though. Some girls have worms that look suspiciously like leeches climbing up the sides of their toilets.  The boys have repeatedly caught lizards in their rooms and taken them outside, several blocks away, only to find the same one, or a new one, back the next week.  My personal roommate's name is Carl.  Carl the cockroach.

I met him for the first time this weekend.  The bidet that is such a great substitutes for toilet paper (and they are when they work) had a small slow leak when I moved in.  But every day, it's getting bigger.  So now there is constantly a puddle on the bathroom floor.  I asked several times for the Egyptian guy to fix it, but to no avail.  Finally I thought, how stupid I've been, and now I drape the handle over the toilet bowl so the leak drains into the toilet, and now, no puddle.  It's great for me, but it's also apparently perfect conditions for my new roommate.   I saw him the first time when I stayed up late.  I was watching a movie and sewing away, when I suddenly realized it was 2:30 am, and I needed to use the restroom.  I flipped on the light and opened the bathroom door, and there he was, all two and half inches of him,  standing on his barbed cockroach legs, antenna twitching,  presumably guarding the toilet.  I scared him into a corner, but couldn't get him to leave altogether, and couldn't  bring myself to step on him.  I just hate the crunching.  So I did my business as fast as a I could, and shut him into the bathroom.    The next morning he was gone.    I was relieved.  Until the next night just after midnight, when I went to the bathroom again and saw him back again.  This time climbing on the extra water bottles I was told to keep in case the water cuts out (as it did once for over a week).   Again, I watched him like a hawk.  He calmly let me do my business and then I left him to do his business.  In the morning, he was gone again.  After two more days of night sightings, Carl and I have come to an understanding: he has free reign of the bathroom from midnight to 5 am, and I get it the rest of the day.  So we have been cohabiting more or less happily, so long as he sticks to his hours.  If he starts to come around more often, I may be forced to borrow someone's roach killer spray.

The worst part of the apartments is the location, which can't be fixed.  We are next to a very busy highway and have to cross about 12 lanes of traffic just to drop off our laundry or get drinkable water.  I leave my window open for whatever breezes I can get, which aren't many since my window looks out on an alley and the apartment building next door.  The noise of the traffic keeps me awake at night, so I can't even have it open during the coolest hours at night.  Even worse, it's a notoriously bad part of town.  Teachers have witnessed men beating women in the streets.  Just dropping off the empty water jugs for a refill, which is literally two buildings away on the other side of the street, is risky. We women are honked at constantly and men will try to follow us. Thank goodness there is no place to turn around for at least a mile, so we can usually disappear into a store before they get around to the right side of the street to get out of their cars. I wouldn't risk walking any further away than a block or two for that reason.  Not that there is anything to walk too. Convincing taxi drivers to come this far out of town, and to this neighborhood is usually impossible, and always exorbitantly expensive.  We are quite literally trapped inside this building. When we go to work, we are trapped in that building.  I relish my few moments of outdoor time transferring between bus and building more and more, and I've been spend more and more time on the roof, just to get some semblance of openness and freedom in my life.  Its really quite depressing.

On Saturday, we suddenly had a visit from the company, whom, after 9 months of constant complaints have finally decided to come down and see for themselves.   Of course, there would be no puddle on the day they arrived.  They also came on a Saturday afternoon, which is our one trip to the mall for the week, so almost everyone was not at home.  They did take a tour through several apartments, and spoke to some of the teachers who have been here longer.  I stood in the hallway with the half-dozen or so other teachers who were home, waiting I supposed to speak with the man.  By the time he had had individual discussions with Chris and the male program manager and some of the other people, I was sure he had hear it all, so I didn't feel the need to show him my apartment or introduce him to Carl.  He told us that he personally would never be satisfied with this accommodation, and that they would be back next week to begin looking for alternate housing.  He said he wishes he had known sooner, but that none of the complaints had ever reached him.  He was only here now because they had received 13 resignations sighting poor accommodations as the reason for not staying on in the last month alone.  I asked him what they were going to do in the future to be sure that our emails, not just about housing concerns, but about everything; payment issues, vacation time,  iqama processing, were reaching the right people, because it seemed to me that all our concerns were "not being seen".  He did not give me an answer, instead he talked around it, making excuses for why in this case, no one had listened to us.

I'm hopeful that something may eventually come of this, and maybe we will be moved to a better location and nicer accommodations.  But I'm still new and naive.  The old hats aren't holding their breath for any changes.  Looks like Carl and I may be in it for the long haul.

Kushari

It's always an adventure with my friend at Aramco.  This weekend he invited me to experience the culinary excellence of his Coptic Christian Egyptian friend, who was going to make kushari, a classic Egyptian food. Atef, the Egyptian,  has been working in Saudi Arabia for the past 9 years, and his wife and two kids still live in Egypt. He goes home to spend summers and two weeks in the winter with them, a grand total of 45 days a year.  This year to squeeze in a little more time, Atef's family are coming to Saudi Arabia next week to spend 7 weeks with him before his annual leave starts and they all head back to Egypt together.   His daughter is 14, and his son is 11 or 12.  I think it will be quite a change for his family.  Despite the limitations on what they could do here, he was excited to have them visit, and even thought they weren't excited about having to wear abayas, they were looking forward to coming, too.

He cooked, and my job was to watch and learn.  First, we fried some onions.  These were going to be used to crumble over the top like the french fried onions people sprinkle over green bean casserole.  While we waited and watched for the onion slivers to turn golden brown, he started telling me his opinions of how the middle east is changing, and has changed over the years.  "You know Jennie, that when Aramco first started, Americans were treated poorly here, just like every other foreigner.  Then, the Gulf war happened, and they saw that they didn't have the military to defend themselves if they ever needed to.  So they realized how valuable it was to have the Americans as allies.  Now you see Americans are still paid the highest salaries at Aramco, even more than British or Canadians or Australians."  I asked him if he thought things were changing, or just repeating themselves, he said, "yes and no".

When the onions were done we drained them and set them on some paper towels to dry.  Next we cut up tomatoes and onions and added them to the tomato paste.  While we waited for the sauce to simmer, he told me about how he had never planned to be a teacher in Saudi Arabia for long.  But somehow the money makes it hard to leave.  He doesn't know where the 9 years have gone, but he knows that if he wants his children to continue to go to the best schools, then he has to stay.  I have heard a lot of people say this, that when they arrived, they never intended to stay.  They stay because it is easy work and good pay, and that makes it hard to leave.  No one seems passionate about the work they are doing, or about Saudi (unless it is to passionately hate it).  Living here starts innocently enough as a means to an end, a way to make good money quickly, but somehow it isn't quite enough, so you say, one more year.  And one year becomes three, and soon, it has been 9 years.   I wonder If I will end up like this...

Finally, we started the last step; boiling the pasta, rice, and lentils.  I was thinking that rice, lentils and pasta together was kind of overkill on carbohydrates, but then I remembered that rice-o-roni was pasta and rice together, so I guess it isn't that strange. I was a little more surprised that he put in several different kinds of pasta together.   He explained that the dish was the equivalent of our goulash. It began as a sort of poor man's street food.  It has rice, pasta, and lentils because it was all the most filling leftovers thrown together, with sauce to make it appealing.  So now, even when you make it as a meal from scratch, they still add different kinds of pasta, for the sake of tradition.  We had elbow macaroni and spaghetti in ours, along with the rice and both chickpeas and lentils.  It was a mess of different but similar elements, and it reminded me of the way the middle east was all one kind of thing, but at the same time very different pieces thrown together.

Kushari

While we waited for everything to finish, we washed some greens that aren't spinach, but look like it.  They have a strange sort of mild radish-ey kind of flavor.  I forgot the name.  We chopped some and added them to the lentils and chickpeas.  The rest were set on the table raw to just grab and chew at random.  They were meant to be a sort of palate cleanser, I guess.  We also cut up some chili peppers to add to a few cups of the sauce that we set aside for the spicy version.  At first, I was all for spicy.  But I saw how much salt, pepper, garlic salt, and chili powder he had added to the non-spicy version, so now I wasn't so sure.  He promised I could have a mix of both sauces and it wouldn't be too spicy.  He was right.  The kushari was delicious, and just a spoonful of the extra spicy sauce was enough to give it a good kick without making it unbearable.

The order you pile it on the plate:
macaroni, rice, lentils, sauce, then onions.

Just in time, our other guests arrived.  My friend's wife and another couple had been out windsurfing while we cooked.  After we ate, they talked about the windsurfing classes and their life on the Aramco compound.  I listened to their stories with relish. It was so different from being shut up in the apartment I lived in with no chance to go out except on scheduled shopping trips.  Atef had left the table long before and turned on the television to sit alone on the couch.  I wondered if what appealed to me about their stories; the interaction with lots of people, the adventurous outdoor activities, the sense of freedom to go anywhere and do anything, the way they had managed to replicate the suburbs so exactly halfway across the world;  were the same things Atef had found less entertaining than his own escape: television.  Or maybe he was just tired from all the cooking and chatting we had done earlier.  I have to admit, I was pretty tired myself.  Kushari is delicious, but it is also hard work.  I know Atef thinks he has taught me well, and that I can now make Kushari on my own, but I don't think so.  It's not that he isn't a good teacher, it's just that I've never been good at cooking.  Besides, I just don't think it would taste as good without his conversation.

All that's left.

The Accident

Traffic being what it is here, it was really only a matter of time before we were in an accident.  This morning, our time ran out and we were in a minor fender bender.  Let me say up front that no one was hurt, and both vehicles suffered only minor damage.

I was reading, as I normally do on the morning commute, and sitting on the opposite side of the bus, so I didn't actually see what happened, though I did feel the jolt.  Afterward, the people who were on the left side of the bus described it to me.  We were at a major intersection, and by major I mean there were four lanes just for turning left, and another four for continuing straight (there was no right turn).  We were in the farthest right lane of the turn lanes, as we did everyday, since after we turn left we end up merging right to get on another road.  There was a car in the lane to the left on the inside of us, and when the signal changed, everyone began turning left, except this car, who evidently thought he was in the straight lane.  Since the bus makes wide turns, he must have gotten the impression that we were also going straight, only we weren't, we were turning, and the other car was not, so he got clipped by the back end of the bus.

At first, we just kept driving.  It hadn't been a very big jolt, and I wasn't sure if we had hit something or not, and I was in the middle of the bus, so it may have been even more slight in the front of the bus and the driver might not have noticed.  Some of the girls spoke up and said, "Hey, we just hit someone and then after a few hundred more feet, "He is following us, I think we need to pull over."  So after a few hundred more feet, we pulled into a side street and the car came up beside the bus and started shouting.  Our driver happens to be from Pakistan, and so does not speak Arabic, so he just sat there while two men jumped out of the car and yelled, pointing at the damage to their car and gesticulating wildly.   Our backseat driver was also uncharacteristically quite.  After a while, he said, "Would someone please translate and explain to this man that if he want's to go straight he shouldn't be in the left turn lane?"  Turns out, one of the guys in the car spoke English himself so he countered by saying, "Your driver did not use a turn signal!"  Which I suppose is fair enough, given that even though everyone always uses the leftmost 4 lanes for turning left and I have never seen anyone go straight from them, as far as I can tell, they aren't marked for left turn only.

The two men suggested that they call the police, and it reminded me that every other morning I had seen police at that very intersection, but today of all days, they were not there.  The back seat driver said there was no need to do that, and that we could just exchange information.  The man was still trying to get the driver to admit it was his fault, and insisting that they should call the police.  A man in a uniform presumably guarding the building we had stopped in front of approached us and asked us all to move and pull further down the road.  We watched the driver who had just been in an accident, get back in his car, accelerate wildly, cut back into traffic without a backward glance and then pull over again a few cars up, inches from clipping the bumper of the care parked behind him.  We followed and pulled over in front of him.

This time the driver (and the backseat driver) both got out to assess the damage of the other vehicle and continue the discussion.  Like curious cats, about half the men got out to also have a look, and to offer their support as "witnesses".  I wanted to see too, but none of the women got out and I was sure it would be frowned upon if I did, so I stayed put and tried to overhear what I could.  It was clear that our driver and backseat driver did not want the police involved, and were pushing just for the exchange of information so that the company could take care of it.  I thought perhaps it was because we had unmarried men and women in the same vehicle, which, if not actually illegal, was at least severely frowned upon.  I was glad for the tinted windows and am happy they didn't know there were women on the bus.  One of the men who had gone out to see came back on the bus and told us what was happening.  Turns out, the real reason they were nervous about calling the police was because our driver, the person our company had hired specifically to be a driver, did not have a driver's license.

I know that by now, I should not be at all surprised by anything this company does, but I am.  I am particularly surprised since to get my teaching position, I had to have my degree verified by three different agencies. If they are that careful with our credentials, I foolishly assumed that they would at least bother to ask applicants to the driver position if they had a license. When the driver and the backseat driver got back on the bus, he said simply, "the boss will take care of it, don't worry."  And so I assume that the company will probably pay them off, and then use that as an excuse for why they can not buy a laundry machine for the apartment complex, which they have been promising to install now for over a year.

Cover Teaching

I finally got the chance to teach some classes.  I was only substituting for teachers who were absent, still, it was a nice break from sitting around the office waiting to be given essays to mark, or observing other teachers, and it gave me the chance to visit another campus.

The first time I substituted or "covered", I was told about 10 minutes before the class started.  She handed me a writing book and told me I needed to introduce the argumentative essay.  Luckily, students typically don't show up for class until 20 minutes after class starts, so I had a little more time to figure out what to do.  I thought the best way to introduce the argumentative essay would be to start with a debatable topic, review the arguments and counter argument of both sides, and then discuss how we would structure the paper.  I instantly remembered a website my friend put me on to, called Intelligence Squared where they get experts in the field to debate currently relevant topics.  I figured I could easily show clips from an episode to help get them thinking about the topic, listening for the language used in academic arguments, and see how they support their opinions with facts and evidence.  I went and scrolled through the topics, and scrolled, and kept scrolling.  It seemed to me like every one of the topics being debated, were topics we were forbidden to discuss with the students, at least, all the interesting ones anyway.

The actual list of forbidden topics we were given......

..... and it continues to the next page.

I finally settled on "Don't Eat Anything with a Face", a debate about whether or not everyone should be a vegetarian.  After helping them decipher the meaning of the debate title and subject matter, we got started.  The girls seemed to enjoy the video clips, and actually did well identifying the main arguments for each side.  We outlined how each speaker presented his arguments, and what kinds of sources and evidence they used.  We talked about effective and ineffective arguments, and even practiced proper citation using quotes from the video.  The girls seemed interested, alert, intelligent, and I felt so proud to have successfully covered a class with only 10 minutes notice.  It felt different than the classes I had been observing so far, the girls still came late and some still left early, but most of them participated with an energy and even interest that had been missing in other classes.

The next day, I was asked to cover again, this time at the Khatif Community College.  My experience there couldn't have been more opposite.  I arrived and was ushered into the office to clock in using the fingerprint scanner. We have a similar one at the University, but my print hadn't been registered yet at this campus, so it wasn't working.  I went up to the teachers lounge, and was told to cover a "science" track English class, which is actually business, but no one was exactly sure what chapter they were covering (they are supposed to cover an entire unit each week, one chapter a day, which is a ridiculous amount of material to try to cover...) so we spent about 10 minutes tracking down another teacher, who in the end, didn't know either, so we finally asked one of the students who told us she wasn't sure either, but she thought maybe chapter 10 (IT and software development).  I know almost nothing about computer hardware and software terminology, and most of the words in Chapter 10 were new to me too, but I rushed off to class anyway since I was already about 15 minutes late.  When I got to the class, I was hoping to rely on the internet to pull up images of words like "motherboard" and "fiber optic cables".  Unfortunately, the technology wasn't working.  I struggled for a few minutes to get the computer to come on, but finally abandoned it after 5 minutes since there were now 7 of the 34 students in class (30 minutes after it was supposed to start), and began attempting to draw BIOS processors and card controllers on the board.  I realized I was in trouble when one girl raised her hand and said, "Miss?  Me bathroom go?"  and another, when asked to get out a paper and pencil said "Me no paper."  The students here were closer to the kinds of beginners I was used to teaching, but instead of being able to go back, and reteach them the basics they probably never got, we are stuck teaching the exact same curriculum as the girls who go to Dammam University.  They take the same tests, and are required to write the same three academic essays.  The girls in front of me now would be hard pressed to get a complete sentence down, let alone a five paragraph essay.  Instead of teaching them the basic grammar and vocab that are essential to even simple conversational exchanges between teacher and student, we had to be sure that they had memorized words like "Central Processing Unit" and "Random Access Memory".  Never mind that they couldn't use these to form a coherent sentence, even if they grasped the meaning, or that they were not likely to be in a situation that required them to spout from memory that a display is "any screen or monitor that is connected to a computational device and shows information to the user."

As I was struggling to figure out a way I could teach these words, while giving them some meaningful practice of the basic English that so many of them clearly needed, an administrator came in and told me to come with her, that they had finally got me registered in the fingerprinting system and needed me to clock in.  "Now," I asked, "In the middle of class?"  "Yes," she said, "no problem, the students will wait."  So I went. After three attempts and about thirty minutes, I finally got clocked in, and rushed back to my class, which I had yet to start more than halfway through the hour and forty-five minute class.  I was surprised to see that I now had all 34 students.  I quickly found out why.  A few minutes after I arrived, a second administrator arrived to take attendance.  A few minutes after that, several girls suddenly needed the bathroom, and several more forgot there books in their lockers, and a handful left without saying anything at all.  Only two of these girls came back to class.  So, with only about 12 students left in the class, and only about 30 minutes left to teach an entire chapter of material way above the student's level, I pressed on.  It was probably the worst I have ever felt as a teacher.  I was completely demoralized by the end of class. It all felt so hopeless.  I wanted to go outside to clear my head, but unlike the University of Dammam, there was no courtyard with trees and benches.  Instead, they had a gym area which was converted into a cafeteria.  The windows all looked down onto this indoor cafeteria.  The windows to the outside were all tinted so you couldn't see out but a little light could still come in, although most of them had bars and then blinds over them.  There was literally no where to go.  It felt like being in jail.  If it felt this restricting for me after one day, imagine how the permanent teachers and students felt.

 The college clearly did not care about the students, so the students saw little reason to care about their studies.  It was a vicious, awful, unfair, and completely fixable cycle -  If only the powers that be were willing to make the necessary changes.  The lesson was awful.  I knew it, the students knew it, we were helpless accomplices. I felt ten times worse because these were the students who needed good teachers the most, but even the best teacher can't do miracles.  To teach this curriculum at this level to these girls was impossible.  I was sure that faced with these odds, I would do what all the other teachers here had done long ago, give up.  I would show up, read the answers from the book, and go home.  I would put all my energy into something else, something less soul crushingly hard.  I would do what Chris had suggested and make my goals here all about me, finishing books and watching TV series I never used to have time for, learning the guitar, and writing this blog.  I would let go of my grandly naive ideas about changing lives for the better through engaging education.  I don't want to have to give up this idea, that even if I can't change the system, I can still reach them, some of them anyway.  But after that class... I'm not so sure.

Thankfully, a few days later I covered another class, this time back at the University of Dammam.  These girls renewed my faith.  We had another great lesson where they contributed, interacted, willingly participated, and seemed to enjoy being in class.  Word spread to the other classes and when a teacher was gone the next day, they requested me as their cover teacher.  My ego needed that little burst of confidence.  For the rest of the school year and the summer sessions, I know I will be at Dammam University.   But when the school year starts up in the fall, if I stay, they could send me to Khatif or another community college permanently.  Part of me wants the challenge.  I want to see if, given the students from day 1, I might be able to work with them, find a way to bring the curriculum to their level, to really make a difference.  But another part of me knows that I won't be able to, and that if I try and don't make it, if I give up, I'll give up completely, and that it might mean the end of teaching for me forever.

Moving Out... and In Again

I had finally given up hope of being moved to a new room anytime soon, and was starting to unpack when I heard a knock on my door.  I opened it to find the Egyptian Guy telling me that I should come look at his room, and that if it was okay and I liked it, he would move downstairs and I could move into his room.  I told him I really didn't mind waiting for Rachel to move out and it wasn't a problem, but he insisted, ushering me across the hallway to enter his apartment, it was dark, and the long florescent light bulbs that were white in my room had been changed out for creepy blue ones.  The apartment smelled like smoke, and he had made no attempts to clean up before the grand tour.  I briefly glanced at the bedroom long enough to see clothes scattered about and hanging from every available service.  I didn't want to turn my head to look at the kitchen.  "I'll change the lights and clean everything up, of course." he said, possibly seeing my expression that I thought the dim blue lights had hidden. "It's no problem, it will be fine." I said, "But are you sure you want to move?  I don't mind waiting until Rachel goes."  He insisted, saying there was a room downstairs he could move into and not to worry, that it was all part of his job, and telling me that I could move in the next day after work.  I reassured him again that his apartment was very nice, as I quickly backed out of it and dashed back across the hall into my room, which suddenly seemed cozy and warm.

The next day I came home from work and began packing up the few things I had unpacked, and the various kitchen and food supplies I had acquired since arriving.  It didn't take more than 10 minutes.  I sat down to wait for the Egyptian to let me know the room was ready.  I thought about knocking on the door, but decided to give him time, after all, I wasn't sure what he did all day.  He might just stay around the apartment, or he might have an actual job like us teachers, and only arrive home in the afternoon.  In that case he would obviously need more time than I did to pack up and clean the room. I got out my book, started reading, and promptly fell asleep.  At about 11 o'clock pm, I was woken up by loud knocking.  It was the Egyptian guy.  He told me he was very sorry, but he had seen the room downstairs and it was very dirty and he tried at first to clean it, but it was just too awful, and he wasn't going to be moving after all, and could I please just wait until Rachel had moved out and take her room.  I told him it was no problem at all, and thanked him.  He apologized again, and I said not to worry, and I really didn't mind, and he thanked me and said he was really sorry, and I told him again it was absolutely not a problem, and he nodded and and gave me a look that said he was about to apologize for a fourth time, so I cut him off and thanked him and said goodnight and slowly shut the door to the sounds of him saying he was sorry and thanking me once again.

After another 2 or 3 days with no sign that the passport was going to arrive in time for Rachel to make the second flight they had booked for her (they had already had to cancel one because the passport hadn't arrived), I decided to go ahead and unpack a little more, just to make life a little easier. The very next day, her passport arrived in the mail.  Go figure.  The flight was scheduled for the early morning on May 5th, a Monday, but I had thought Rachel told me she was leaving on Sunday morning, so I went up Saturday evening to her room to say goodbye because I wouldn't be awake yet when she left in the morning.  When I arrived she was working on an email to the company because she still hadn't been payed (it was supposed to come on the 25th of April) and she didn't want to leave Dammam until she had been payed because a) she needed to pay back the people she had borrowed money from here, and b) she needed money once she arrived in Jouf, and c) she wanted to send money home to her mother -  who had a bad fall the day before  and so needed money to get to a relative in another state who could take care of her  - which she can't do as a woman, so she needs to ask a man she trusts to send the money for her, and she trusts people here, but will not know anyone in Jouf, so she won't be able to send the money from there.  This was actually her fifth or sixth email to them, requesting payment and explaining how difficult it would be to arrive in a new place with absolutely no money to live on, and no guarantee that payment would arrive anytime soon, since they would probably send the payment to Dammam first, then need to send it back to Riyadh and then finally to Jouf, making the wait even longer.  It seemed like a legitimate request, after all, she wasn't asking to be paid early, just that she would be paid within 10 days of the date she and everyone else was supposed to receive their salary in the first place. The email she got in response the following morning was that if she did not get on the plane, they would begin deducting payment from her salary.  She was clearly upset and distressed, but there was nothing anyone could do.  The other teachers who had been in the country longer didn't seem to find the situation unusual, and while they complained a lot about the company, how disorganized it was, and how they control the teachers by keeping everyone's passport and withholding payment as threats, they didn't seem to see any point in trying to fight or change the system and seemed resigned to it as the price of working in Saudi Arabia.

That evening Rachel asked to switch rooms with me, even though she was leaving the next morning.  She felt she needed to pack up and leave her old room just to be doing something she could take control of.  She didn't want to stay in her room even a moment longer.  So, even though it would make more sense to wait until she had actually left to change rooms, we switched rooms for the last night.  I hastily repacked everything I had unpacked and made a few trips in the tiny elevator to my new home on the 4th (3rd) floor, and then made a few more trips down in the tiny elevator to help Rachel bring her stuff down, including swapping out all the sheets and bedding.  It was sad to say goodbye to her, especially knowing she was leaving in such a desperate way, but I was glad to be able to finally, and for good, unpack my suitcase.

The first night, I was too tired to do to much unpacking, and contented myself with cleaning out the refrigerator so I could at least put my groceries away.  The next day after work, I tackled the rest of the kitchen.  It was clear it hadn't had a thorough cleaning in years.  I scrubbed every surface, but did not have any soap, so it was tough going with only elbow grease.  I rinsed the rag I had found on the top of the cabinet as best I could and got to work.  The water here is all desalinated seawater.  Which is great, because after all, we live in a desert, so where else would we get it.  But actually, the process is not as completely purifying as many would have you believe.  When you shower or brush your teeth, you can taste the residual salt in the water.

Salt Crystals on Door of Bathroom

There is a whole layer of salt crystals left behind when the water from the shower dries up that have built up in the recesses of the bathroom door and corners of the floor.  If you try to drink the water, it just makes you thirstier.  And things never quite get clean because there is always a slight film left behind.  On the plus side, it makes cooking easier, as you never have to add a pinch of salt to the pot when you make pasta or oatmeal, since it's already there.  By the end of three hours of scrubbing, my tiny kitchen area looked practically new, but my hands were dry as a bone.  I had already added lotion to the list of things I would buy when I eventually got paid, but crossed it off and added it to the essential items list of things to buy right away despite my limited budget.

The next day I tackled the bedroom and living room.  First, I wanted to sweep the floors. I knew that Rachel had never managed to sweep, because she didn't have a broom, and since she knew she was leaving, didn't bother to buy one.  I remembered tripping over a broom when I went on the roof to see the sandstorm, so I decided to go see if it was still there.  Not only was it still there, there was also a whole pile of slightly broken furniture just sitting in this semi covered room I hadn't noticed before in the dark.  Rachel had been using the vanity from the bedroom as a kitchen counter since there really was no counter space to speak of in the kitchen.  I wanted to keep the extra counter space in the kitchen, but also wanted to be able to have a desk in the bedroom.  I saw that there was an extra vanity that happened to be missing its mirror in the corner next to a cracked toilet and a presumably broken microwave.  Perfect!, I thought.  I didn't want a mirror in the kitchen anyway.  The vanity was upside down and covered in dust and clearly not doing anyone any good on the roof, so I figured it wouldn't be a problem if I borrowed it.  I set the broom aside, and hoisted the vanity up and moved it a few feet.  It was a lot heavier than I thought it would be.  I realized if I was going to get the vanity anywhere, I would need to put it on my back since there were no good handholds any other way. It's one thing to carry a heavy piece of furniture.  It's another thing to do it in an abaya.  Since I was crouched over with the table on my back, the front of my abaya, which I occasionally trip on anyway, was now in a piled up in front of my feet, just begging me to take even one step and fall flat on my face.  I struggled to balance the table with just one hand and used my now free hand to hold up the abaya.  I made my way to the elevator and set the table down, relieved to have made it.  It would be a piece of cake from here on out.  I pushed the elevator button and waited for it to come up.  I opened the door, and then pushed in the old fashioned folding doors, and lifted the vanity up once again.  Did I mention that the elevators here are tiny?  I started forward, but was stopped by the ends of the vanity coming up against the elevator door.  I backed up, and tried again from another angle, and then another.  I was clearly not going to be able to fit this piece of furniture into the elevator.  Luckily, I only live one floor down, so I took a deep breath, lifted the vanity onto my back, pulled up my abaya, and braved my way downstairs and finally into the apartment.  By now I was dripping with sweat, and I couldn't wait to get my abaya off.  I whipped it off and then discovered the entire back was covered in dust.  I tried my best to brush it out, but it still looked pretty awful.  Let me tell you though, after I whipped down the vanity and set it up between the sink and the fridge, it was completely worth every drop of sweat, and smear of dust.  Even if everyone looked at me funny the next day when I had to go to work in a slightly less dusty, but still clearly dirty abaya the next day.

The living room in my new apartment and my hard earned vanity/kitchen counter.

I went back to the roof to retrieve the broom and swept the floors.   I shook out the curtains and the rugs as best I could.  By the time I had moved all the furniture, swept under everything, and rearranged the furniture into my prefered layout, I had collected a pile of dust and sand that had to weigh at least two pounds.  I know that Rachel had never swept, and there was just a sandstorm, but still, there was so much sand I could have filled a sandbox for my niece!  Finally, I took the two area rugs up to the roof to beat the dust out of them.  There happened to be a driver and one of the guys the Egyptian had working for him up on the roof, and they both pretended not to notice me beating away at the rugs, while simultaneously staring at me.  It's really quite a unique skill.  I haven't mastered the art of seeing without staring yet myself, but I'm working on it.  Then again, I have been working on it since I was old enough to know you aren't supposed to stare without much luck, so I won't hold my breath.  The smacking and banging also drew the attention of two of the male teachers who came out to see what all the noise was about (where were they when I was making all that noise banging the vanity around trying to get it in the elevator?). They asked me what I was doing and seemed utterly confused.  Either they don't beat rugs in the UK, or the guys specifically don't beat rugs.  In any case, I know they have just added another bit of strangeness to their growing list of evidence that the new American teacher is a little crazy.  I don't mind.  I finally have my own place to unpack, relax, and be eccentric in.