Directions

I was thinking about school and my job. After all, that is why we're here--to teach. We were hired because we have something unique to offer. Last year we discovered what that was and this year we work hard to maximize its potential and effectiveness. I try to keep in mind the portability of what I do, using it as a proving ground for when I get back home. At the same time, I try to remember to treasure this experience and notice the people and the environment around me. It's easy to get locked into a notion that this is somehow a lesser version of what happens back home, but that’s not true.

Like most people, every now and then I’m overcome by a mind-numbing drudgery in my job--the feeling that I’m traveling in the same well-worn ruts. Each measure of progress or sensation of movement easily anticipated and any sense of uncertainty or urgency is encountered or experienced disappears as fast as it came. It’s the reason we decided to come here to the Middle East. We were forced to leave those predictable tracks.  

In this second year I’m familiar with this place and, and while I’ve escaped the ruts of past experiences, I haven’t escaped my own mind. No matter how different the terrain looks, the tools and strategies for negotiating it remain the same.

The interplay between expectation and reality is tricky sometimes and so to know a thing is not necessarily to understand it. I read Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach about once a year because of this. His descriptions are filled with such precision and remind me that feelings of confidence, fraudulence, fortune or uncertainty are normal for anyone invested in what they do.

I’ll never be a “great” teacher in the technical NCTE sense of the word. I don’t have the sort of facility with the bullshit required to sustain it or even the brand of curiosity needed to maintain it. I am the teacher I am, just as I am the husband, dad, son, friend, and brother I am.

No matter how turned around I might get sometimes in my own head where I question or compare or second guess my motives or the mystery of why things are the way they are, I know to just accept it. That isn’t to say I shouldn’t work and strive to be better, but in the midst of the striving, it is important to understand that this is what I have to work with and so the result is always going to be within a few degrees of where I began. A few degrees doesn’t seem like much, but it can leave you standing in refreshingly unfamiliar territory.

Tall Tale

Last night we went out to a social gathering organized by Kat, the DHS high school librarian. When we stepped inside there was a long table filled with teachers from other ISG schools and no open seats, so we headed over to Sandy and Ashton, who were sitting off to the side sharing a pizza.

Amy headed out with Sandy and the smokers while I pulled up a chair and hung out with Ashton and was soon joined by Chris, Rich, Ian, Ryan, and eventually, Gary.

We chatted about Saudi culture, the news on women driving in the country; we debated which liberalization would come next on the country’s path to social legitimacy-- abayas or shops remaining open during prayer time. Ian kindly offered for us to join him in Yanbu on the Red Sea coast of Saudi sometime when he goes scuba diving and we just might take him up on that. Chris is working on his fifth children’s book and I asked him questions about the process and thought it was interesting that the writer of the story and the illustrator never meet. He spoke of changes in the industry and how in the past a writer would be committed to a single publisher for their books but today writers like him might have a different publisher for every book he writes and how rare it is that a writer actually makes a living on their books alone. It was loud inside and difficult to hear each other. I eventually had had enough of the volume, so I grabbed my drink and walked outside.

Amy and a group of ladies, including Sandy and Carolyn, among others, were talking at one of the round tables near the BBQ, so I pulled up a chair by Riley, a fellow Minnesotan, who was sitting at a table with three women who taught at Dhahran High School. Soon we were joined by both Ian and Rich, and I believe Chris came out, too.

We had a pleasant conversation about our respective Eid vacations--Ian recommended the Maldives, Riley and his family connected with relatives in Sweden and ours to Thailand.  We were all Americans. The women were all in their twenties and each displayed familiar and well-worn qualities, as did Riley, Ian, Rich, and of course, myself.

One woman, sitting to my right was athletic with long muscular legs, one of which she propped up on the arm of her chair and one up on the frame of the table. Her shorts were light and exposed much of her thighs and she wore a tight yellow tank top, had a dark blond asymmetric hairstyle and wore no makeup. All the while we sat, she spoke the occasional glib remark while she picked pieces of dough from a piece of pizza crust she held in her hand one minuscule piece at a time and slowly put them in her mouth. There was an empty glass on the table in front of her.

The woman to my left was more compact and a little uncomfortable about it. She wore a tight white camisole beneath flowing dark floral sheer fabric and her short chestnut hair was wavy and sensible and appeared to require little maintenance. She talked about the movie Tall Tale --  the details of which she looked up on her phone, proclaiming this was a “lesser” Disney live-action movie of their childhood.

Riley and I had been talking about Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox and their animatronic statues at Paul Bunyan Land and how Paul would disconcertingly speak to children by name as they stood before his massive plaid-shirted form.

“Hullo...Riley….How....are....you....today?”

That spectacular display of Americana kitsch has since been moved from its location along the vacationland jugular that ran through the heart of Brainerd, Minnesota to a new location, off the beaten path and for a new generation--in fact the generation we were sharing the table with this night.

The woman listing film facts taught advanced placement English and theater classes at DHS, the flagship school of International Schools Group and she probably made close to twice as much in salary as I did (or so I’ve heard) at my working class price-structured Dammam school where, on a staff of around one hundred, Amy and I are only two of four Americans.   

My new friend proceeded to list data points for the movie--a 1995 American adventure western fantasy film….Patrick Swayze played Pecos Bill...Oliver Platt was Paul Bunyan, etc.

It was clever and funny the way she recited these facts and then moved on to joke about her height and having a Napoleon complex that resulted in a kind of pleasure when she had to lower the boom on one of her hulking male students or critiqued an overly sensitive student’s work and they were brought to tears. Her examples were in fun and I knew exactly what she was talking about. I’d been there myself.

The woman next to the AP teacher had long loose curled blonde hair and an open, tan face with a winning smile of pristine teeth. She, like my English teacher colleague, wore capri pants with sandals featuring brightly colored toenails. The other two guys listened intently. Ian was a lanky Oregonian with a topknot and Rich, an amicable PE teacher with a long resume of international postings, who had lived in Minnesota as a kid and had once been inspired to become a teacher by his own PE teacher, Willard Ikola, famed Edina high school hockey coach.  

They leaned in as she modestly recounted her father’s apple orchard in Oregon near the border of Washington. She spoke earnestly of the transition from small farms on rocky soil to a wine industry and the collateral effect on the character of the place she seemed to know so well.

Riley, like me, was in his forties, married, kids. He worked together with these three women and two men and their shared experience was demonstrated in the ease with which they shifted from one topic to the next and laughed at each other’s jokes. They were nice people. I’d seen them before.

I still had half a glass on the table, but I excused myself and found Amy off to the side leaning on the counter in front of the BBQ listening to Gary talk with his clipped diction and his intensely courteous manner. I’m not sure what he was saying but when he stopped she gently urged him to ask a vivacious South African woman that we were fond of out on a date. He declined. He’d been there before, too.

I said I was ready to go, said our goodbyes to Gary and left.

It was a mild night. Summer was bleeding into fall and cooler temperatures. A pink full moon hung high above us as we walked back to our villa for the night.

One Down

At this time last year, Julia Real and I stood and handed out flowers and shook the hands of seniors after they received their diplomas at AHS. It was a bittersweet night that began a summer of preparations and goodbyes. Now, we say goodbye to Saudi for a while having completed the first half of our contract. We have overcome the shock of being transplanted into a new culture, we've accompanied groups of students to India and to England and another group through their sixth grade, junior and senior year of English class. We leaned on our friends and family back home for support and made new friends and family here.

When we left Minnesota I got the sense that people thought we were a little crazy or that what we were doing was risky or even dangerous; they wondered why, of all places, would we choose to come to the Middle East. Our feeling was, “why not?” It was time for an adventure and an adventure is exactly what we got. I made a list of some of what we’ve learned or have had reconfirmed since arriving in Saudi Arabia in August of 2016.

• Speaking one language is the exception, not the rule.
• Having a genuine interest in others helps build relationships.
• Arab kids love to talk and argue (loudly).
• Saudi’s love their sweets and pastries.
• Almost all of the cars in the Eastern Province are white and 99% of the trucks are Toyotas.
• A sandstorm looks a lot like a snowstorm, except it is brown.
• Teenagers keep me young (mostly).
• The only wild animals I've seen here (besides birds) was one rat, tons of geckos and a bunch of feral dogs.
• Prayer time is inconvenient. 
• The website for the Aitkin Age is confusing and difficult for me to navigate.
• Indian cuisine begins at spicy.
• Religion is what we have in common.
• Being positive is a healthy choice.
• American culture influences everyone everywhere, like it or not.
• A cell phone is a “mobile.”
• Pride in one’s country is something everyone has in common.
• There is only one football.
• Bahrain is pretty damn cool.
• Marjoram is the only spice I can't find when we make Grandma Jaskowiak's chicken.
• Fresh baked Arabic bread dipped in hummus from Tamimi is a delight.
• Thailand is the promised land.
• Not everyone is as lucky as we are.
• There is no Crystal Lite in the Kingdom. 
• Living in the moment is a decision.
• The entrepreneurial spirit burns bright on the Nile.
• When it comes to littering and child safety in automobiles, Saudi Arabia is so 1976.
• Being from the West (and the U.S. specifically) often translates into a credibility that isn’t necessarily earned.
• The transformation to "Mr. Jacob" took one day.
• Being away from home is hard.
• Lays sells a baked potato chip here called Labneh and Mint that is delicious.
• Whatsapp is how this whole part of the world texts (actually the word “Whatsapp” is the verb in place of "text." As in, “Just Whatsapp me.”
• Ramadan is rough.
• 350 degrees Fahrenheit is 177 degrees Celsius on our oven.
• An abaya is an invisibility cloak.
• The world is much larger and smaller than I thought.
• Oranges, grapes and watermelons are not seedless here and whole chickens in the grocery store are not on steroids.
• A government and its people are not necessarily the same thing.
• Being nice is important.
• Thanksgiving is the only holiday we didn't see here.
• I’ve seen more mangled, fiery car crashes here in the last ten months than I’ve seen my whole life.
• Living on a compound is weird.
• Time schedules are overrated.
• Don’t get bogged down in things that are outside of your control.
• Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Russia, India, South Africa and the Philippines are not just headlines in the news; our friends are from there!
• Facebook messenger and Snapchat are necessities to stay connected with home.
• Less is more.

Where Are You From?

In the classroom we are finishing up our Immigrant Experience unit and I have learned a lot about the experiences of my students’ families and backgrounds. As part of the unit, they had to interview a family member about what brought them to Saudi Arabia. I learned that they have moved so that their fathers could have lucrative employment to provide better opportunities for their family. I learned that when you are from Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Sudan, Pakistan and India, Saudi Arabia is the land of opportunity, or at least until recently. It has begun to change as the government makes it more and more expensive for expatriates and their dependents to live here. Depending on your employment agreement, either you or your employer are required to pay a monthly expatriate fee for yourself and also for each of your family members. These fees have become increasingly costly and are scheduled to continue to increase in the upcoming years. This hits families particularly hard.  

I learned that family histories are complex and often impacted by political strife and conflict. I learned of families with an Egyptian travel document provided to Palestinians after 1948 or the impact of the partition of India and Pakistan and the violence associated with that. Some families hold two to three passports all in the same family. We talked about this idea of being asked where you’re from because you “look” like you’re not from wherever “here” is. We talked about the assumptions people make if you are Arab and how, even in Saudi, people are surprised when an Arab is actually a Christian.

The American passport is a “strong” passport while the Arab countries have “weak” passports because there is a VISA required to travel anywhere and often it is very difficult to get these documents to be able to travel where you’d like. This is where the headlines we read from our couch in Aitkin actually impacts real people. Some students have an American passport even though they’ve never lived there yet claim it as where they are “from.” Students commented on the ridiculousness of this. That led into a talk of respecting where your family is from, while still taking advantages of opportunities that are available to you. One student has an American passport because he was born in California but has never lived there. His father has an Egyptian travel document but is Palestinian and his mother has a Jordanian passport. They have lived in Saudi Arabia for nearly all of his eighteen years.

Occasionally a student will have trouble at passport control (as happened on our MUN trip to the UK) outside the gulf because some stamp or declaration on the passport (in this case Syrian) refers to the Islamic calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar and so the authorized dates become confused. Passports and VISAs are a matter of necessity and topics for conversation. The thing that almost all students have in common is that they do not have a Saudi passport. Only a few students are actually Saudi nationals but even they often have a passport from another country like Canada or the U.S.

I told my students the story of my own family’s immigration history in America--at least the parts I’m aware of. The Jaskowiaks came to the U.S. from Poland in the 1860s; the Rasmussens came to America from Denmark in the early 1900s. Both sets of grandparents spoke their native language but it did not continue with their children or their children’s children (me). Once upon a time we would have been Polish or Danish or Polish American, etc, but even that idea faded and just becomes history. In our case, losing touch with where we came from is a feature of assimilation and time.

The kids talked about holding onto their culture. Some students speak English at home, while others speak Arabic of varying dialects or Urdu, Pashto, Afrikaans. One girl spoke of her mother’s connection to the Circassian language but has since lost the ability to speak it. They mention that while they may speak Arabic in the home, it is often laced with English words as well.

I’ve definitely been schooled at school.

Now, as these kids graduate, they will move from here and go off to college in Egypt, Pakistan, Canada, U.K., America (NDSU and Bemidji state, among others!), Czech Republic and more, but as their families leave Saudi because of the changing economic conditions, they will never be able to return to the place they’ve grown up.

Saudi does not have a tourist VISA. You have to have a reason to come here. The only “tourism” is that associated with religious pilgrimage to the two holy places, Mecca and Medina and that is for the Hajj, which involves millions of people per year. This pilgrimage is required (if you can afford it) once in your lifetime and is one of the five pillars of Islam.

Ramadan begins on May 27th this year and lasts until June 24th. Our last day of school is June 15th but our school day is going to be shortened by an hour and a half when Ramadan begins. This is an extremely important holiday in the muslim world and particularly here in Saudi, where the religion is the government. The King has decreed that schools will close early because of Ramadan--although so far ours is exempt from this decree. On a side note, it’s a real mind trip to live in a place where a king makes a decree that people are bound to comply with.

Growing up Catholic there were some religious holidays or occasions  where we were supposed to follow rules like not eating an hour before communion (to avoid spiritual cramps?) Or during lent when we did not eat meat on Fridays and had to make a sacrifice by giving something up for the 40 days like sweets, popcorn, or television, etc. Ramadan entails fasting, too. From 3:30 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. one is not to eat or drink anything, including water for the entire month. Once 6:00 p.m. arrives you break the fast and eat and drink all you want and then begin again at 3:30 a.m. This makes people very tired and sluggish--and it is a very real sacrifice that becomes more and more at the forefront of conversation as we approach this time. This, too, is one of the five pillars of Islam. From what I’ve been told, everything shuts down during Ramadan. Tamimi, where we go shopping, is overflowing with extra groceries leading up to Ramadan so people can stock up, as no one will be going out once it starts.

In case you were wondering, the remaining three pillars are: the declaration of faith, which states there is only one God and Muhammed is God’s messenger; daily prayers (consisting of five throughout the day); and giving to charity (depending on your means--money or deeds). We learned about the five pillars from Eslam, our guide in Egypt during spring break last month. The terrorist bombs had gone off in the Coptic churches of Tanta and Alexandria two days before, so we chose to visit Islamic Cairo and saved the Coptic area for another time. He sat us down on the enormous carpeted floor of the Muhammed Ali Pasha Mosque in inside the Citadel and told us about everything we were seeing and answered all of our questions.

We’ve come along way since August and now, with only a few more weeks to go, before we leave for the summer, I will say goodbye to my students and hope they understand how grateful I am for everything they have taught me.

Field Trip to India

India was a fascinating experience. The American International School Chennai is the consulate school there and the campus was pristine--green spaces, swimming pool, soccer field, art work, open air, covered walkways, fancy things like markers, tag board and post it notes. We enjoyed every last bit of the two days of the middle school writer's conference and it was great to get to know the eleven kids that traveled with us.

We stayed at the El Doris hotel, a “boutique” hotel that is an example of how the pictures online and the reality are two different things. I imagine it was once a five star hotel, but immediately upon opening it ceased to be maintained and now, maybe ten years later, the rooftop railing is eaten through by rust in places and painted over with shiny black spray paint, the wooden decking bowed and bent, the rooftop pool water was thick and I couldn’t see to the bottom. The electrical fixtures in the rooms didn’t work consistently and it smelled...interesting. Palm trees came up from courtyards of neighboring structures and trash lay strewn in open lots. But all of this overlooked the waves crashing on the beach off the Bay of Bengal and sitting there on the last morning before we left, drinking instant coffee and reading my book, none of that mattered too much.

There is beauty and exoticism that exists amidst such serious squalor and poverty, traffic jams and horns honking, bicycles, motor bikes, cows, dogs and goats. There is trash everywhere and people everywhere. The roads are narrow and drivers communicate with each other with their horns, non stop. Light taps or blaring bursts indicating warning, watch out, beware, “I’m here!” --whatever the case may be. Most of the people out and about are either barefoot or wear flip flops or sandals. Traditional dress is the dress. Nose piercings, red bindis on the foreheads of both men and women is common--which signifies marriage. We saw numerous Christian churches, mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples. Everything is worn out or cracked or dirty. On one evening we all ate at a restaurant called “Animal Kingdom,” complete with animatronic T-Rexs alongside plaster mohawked natives and unnerving piped in Teradactyl calls that sounded like the death cries of animals being slaughtered in the back before being prepared for us. Once we got past that, the food, service and hospitality shown to us here was outstanding. It was the most incredible buffet I’ve ever experienced. I was introduced to pani puri here,  and it was the highlight of the meal. There were so many appetizers delivered directly to us one after the other that the buffet itself was a little anticlimactic. At the hotel each morning, I also enjoyed a common Indian breakfast called idli with coconut chutney. The people we encountered at the hotel and restaurants and businesses were warm, gracious and often proud of what there was to offer. The Indian head bobble is as ubiquitous here as the folded hands in Thailand. It means all is good, ok, no problem, take care.

We encountered beggars outside the gates of Mahabalipuram, a 1300 year old Hindu temple complex with a ring of stone bulls. Outside the gates an old woman used a machete to chop the ends off coconuts, pop a straw inside and sell to us tourists. Our students drank away and then threw their empty coconut shell on the mountain of others that sat next to the woman selling them, threatening to eventually dwarf her. A little girl, tiny, maybe six years old, barefoot, dirty and in rags, appeared amidst these 7th grade girls in their Harry Potter T-Shirts, braces and back packs and gestured to her mouth with her fingers. Another pair of men tried to sell us their hand made drums and persistently clung to our group for a half an hour. Meanwhile, the kids bought little wooden elephants and other trinkets for their families back home.

We saw some small grass houses where people lived, dirt floors, common wells, and also tiny little single rooms that house an entire family, as well as walled villas with ornate, fancy gates. Pondicherry, on our last full day, is a heavily French influenced coastal city with a distinct tourist vibe (or at least more than Chennai).  We saw a huge statue of Ghandi and one of Mother Theresa and we toured a grand, shabby Catholic church where we stepped off the bus and a man with no arms and withered legs lie on the ground begging with an open hand.

Our final India evening was in Pondicherry after the kids finished playing in the surf and the sun had set. We were on a second story deck that overlooked the dark beach. We drank 750 ml. bottles of Budweiser, ate fresh prawns and fish and visited with Nesireen, our co-chaperone and colleague at ISG whose family is from Kerala the next state over and has dreams of opening her own school someday, and I think she will probably do it.

The manager patiently waited on all of our kids and made family size orders that they could share. He had recently settled down with a wife and child but had previously worked as a baker on cruise ships for twelve years, which had brought him to the east coast of the U.S. and down south. He said he was addicted to the sea and would return to it one day.

Arranged marriage is a fact of life and absolutely accepted. I’ve even been asked if my marriage was a “love” marriage, as they call it. This surprised me because I always thought it was controversial or at least not particularly prevalent but most of the Indians we’ve met and work with are the products of arranged marriage. It’s just the way it is, although I’ve asked a few parents what they wanted for their own children and they have all said love marriages for them.

Like Thailand, India’s energy is dynamic and varied. These places are another universe from our life in Aitkin. We all know it’s a big world but I continue to feel fortunate to get to step inside of it and see it for myself, only to realize it’s not that big after all, as people are just living, working and raising families like any place else--doing the best they can, like the rest of us.

We made the final decision to continue for the second year here last month and have been very open with our colleagues and students that two years is the extent of our contract and our time in Saudi and that we fully intend to go back to Aitkin and pick up where we left off having fulfilled a dream and goal we had for ourselves to teach overseas after the kids graduated. The question I continually get asked over and over again by my students is, “What do you think of it here?” I'm not sure what they want me to say. We are getting the experience we asked for.

We are over “hating” this place and have chosen to embrace the nonsense. It is comfortable but isolating and isolated. Our school is often ridiculous. That’s not to say good teaching isn’t happening and the relationships, friendships, and experiences are extraordinary, but its culture and leadership are often absurd and what occurs in the classroom occurs in spite of the system that surrounds it rather than because of it.

We miss our family and friends and miss Minnesota and appreciate the natural beauty of U.S.--the laws, regulations, systems, roads, sanitation, and a hundred others--all the things one might take for granted, which is what travel is supposed to help us with. I am looking forward to trying out a beer or two at the Cuyuna Brewing Company this summer, probably start with the Yawkey Red and just hang out in the great outdoors and maybe have some of that homemade hummus, chips and a Yuengling at the Miller house.

Boat Against the Current

Over here on the edge of the Arabian Gulf, or anyplace for that matter, sometimes the toughest obstacle to overcome is your own mind. Rational thought, perspective--it is all there through a glass darkly and when the lens lightens suddenly you find yourself standing in a different world. How to moderate or control that passage is a mystery, a trick, a sleight of hand that I often fail to understand. My birthday has come and gone. Forty-five years--not much to some and old to others; I wonder if it marks a halfway point yet or maybe I’ve already passed it--or is it yet to come? That is the question and if anyone tells you they know the answer, well, they’re full of hot air or as my grandpa used to say, “windy.”

We left for Thailand right after my last entry. The practice of Buddhism in Thailand was part of the fabric of the place and the temples and spirit houses were visited by people and were freshly maintained each day. We learned of the sitting Buddha, standing Buddha, reclining Buddha and teaching Buddha--the only attitudes in which Buddha exists. During our almost three weeks there, I was always moved by the visible expression of gratitude practiced by the Thai people. The frenetic activity of Bangkok didn’t always allow for it but when appropriate you put your hands together at your chest and gave a slight bow while thanking one who has done a service for you--even if only after buying a bottle of water at 7-11 or paying your bill at a restaurant. It is always reciprocated and respectful. I don’t know this person and they don’t know me but I’m thankful and that feeling is acknowledged and returned before we continue on with our day.

We toured the ancient city of Ayutthaya, the former capital of Thailand, and on its grounds were sign posts with the 38 blessings, which remind me of the Beatitudes, both of which affirms our commitment to making the world a better place through our actions. Deceptively simple.

We are topping off our tank here, so that when we return to Waukenabo we won’t wonder what we are missing, because it will be nothing.  

Yesterday I noticed a big dead ram decomposing on the side of the highway (kind of like a racoon on hwy 169). It’s fur was a rusty shade of brown and its head encircled by thick dark ridged horns the size of a man’s forearms. It must have fallen from the back of one of the many open truck loads of goats we see from time to time. Oh, for a moment, he was free!

There are acres and acres of mound after mound of construction and demolition debris dumped in the desert spaces along our route each day. From the air they form a semi-symmetrical pleasing pattern, but on the ground, it’s just plain ugly. There has been a small herd of camels strung out between those mounds, large dark brown almost black camels with their single shaggy humps replicating those they scavenge within. I’d never seen a baby camel before but lately there are often one or two out there as well.

Not far from the turnoff to our compound there is what appears from the window of our van to be an entire city being built. Long complexes of structures, dump trucks and earth movers surrounded by clouds of dust from all of the activity. Building is happening everywhere here. It’s as if at some time in the not too distant past, the land was released to developers and they have continually raced to fill it in ever since. There are many that are only partially built and stand empty and many more that get completed and eventually have cars parked in front of them.

We just wrapped up George Orwell’s 1984 in my senior classes. One of its enduring expressions is doublethink: the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. The majority of people who live here must exercise this mental maneuver regularly. One has to believe that if the physical landscape can be altered and adapted so fast that the cultural landscape can as well. It must. This is a place that operates with impunity, which in turn does not promote reflection and without reflection, how do you avoid a kind of stultifying stagnation intellectually, psychologically, physically and socially. You don’t.

Here is where I was (for a moment) in my head in January:

ISG Dammam students and my colleagues are all wonderful people for whom I have much respect and admiration. They have taught me way more than I ever taught them. They have opened my eyes to a part of the world to which I’d never really been exposed, particularly the local hires who have all been so welcoming, and who make up the majority of the staff at Dammam. My students are intelligent, compassionate, awesome people and future citizens of the nations they represent and I will never forget them. It has been a rich and rewarding experience filled with love and inclusivity and my door in Minnesota will always be open to all of these people.

What I see for many, if not most, is that they reside here because of financial, political, social or some other necessity. I do not have to. I understand that the choice I had to come here was a luxury not afforded to many and I take that privilege seriously. Unfortunately, I don’t think I adequately evaluated the reasons for that decision or just wasn’t aware of the impact living in Saudi Arabia would have on me. When I came, I did so with thoughts of adventure and excitement, but that has turned to resentment and self recrimination. It is not an option to continue on in a place whose governmental system and the manner in which it treats its environment and its people, both expatriates and nationals, I despise.  

When this school year is complete, I will have accomplished what I set out to do.

While Sara Compound comfortably covers up much of the reality of the Eastern Province and has provided us with a wonderful experience, I always feel like I am somehow complicit in an environment to which I am absolutely opposed. I know that I am just a visitor and this is someone else’s country, but now that I’ve been here I can honestly say that I am deeply uncomfortable with the manner in which this country operates and exists and to continue living and working here, I only contribute to the sense that this environment is somehow a legitimate expression of what it means to be a fair and functioning society. It violates who I am as a person, which is not something I spent a lot of time consciously considering before residing here. It is a choice to stay here and by continuing, I feel like I am condoning it.

Of course my country has plenty of problems as well, but its problems are my problems. That is not the case here.

I do not say this lightly--I admire those that continue to do the honorable work of operating an international school in Saudi Arabia and I am deeply impressed by the space and quality created by the ISG system which operates in an insular environment that heroically conflicts with seemingly so much of what the country of Saudi Arabia stands.

Not this month.

Like I said in the therapeutic exercise above I am fortunate to have this experience--to see this with my own eyes. I am fortunate to have had the opportunities that I’ve had. It is true that I’ve worked for these opportunities but I’ve had the luck to be born to the parents I was born to and the community into which I was born. I know I’m more lucky than not. The cards in the deck of existence are shuffled differently for everyone.

Holy shit! I’ve just been dealt a full house, better not mess it up.

My juniors are going to begin reading The Great Gatsby soon and Nick Carraway recounts the advice his father gave him in his “younger and more vulnerable years.”

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

That sentiment is placed right on page one, and I try to keep it on page one for myself as well.

Bhilal, our taxi driver, who happens to be Muslim and Indian, was ruminating on religion in the car the other day--about how we all believe the same basic thing: Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, etc. “just different names,” he said. Be good to each other. Obvious stuff.

I don’t like too much certainty or sweeping statements or extrapolating social circumstances into character judgements. This predisposition, coupled with a reserved nature sometimes puts one at a conversational disadvantage.

Lately, it feels like division and sensationalism reign supreme and I wonder how we maintain equilibrium? Why does cynicism, ignorance, fear and even hate get elevated to the legitimate by some while kindness, humility, thoughtfulness and earnest, open inquiry, reflection and patience are ridiculed and mocked?

There are times when I’m frustrated with the level of effort or attitude of my students and I implore them to rise to the occasion and not sink to the obvious or easy. We all do it sometimes. It is a sign of weakness, and you are not weak, I say.  You are only choosing to be weak because it’s easier in this moment. Managing conflict both physically and mentally is what a responsible adult tries valiantly to do. Our lives are stories and a story isn’t a story without that conflict but in our greatest stories someone overcomes that conflict (or is destroyed by it) and inspires everyone around them (or those reading about them) to do the same, often by subverting the base instincts that are often the easiest to succumb to and so rise to something better.  

There is a bright crescent moon this morning accompanied by a single star (seriously). The air smells fresh and cool. It is darker later into the morning now and lighter later into the evening. There is no daylight savings time here--no saving of time at all, so you adjust to the shift in the presence of the sun rather than artificially account for it.

The call to prayer came through the window around five this morning. It is ubiquitous and ordinary here now yet was a defining characteristic when we arrived. A chorus of Imams singing almost in time, creating a cacophony of sound--the kind of sound that is amplified and demonized on TV and in movies--even the host of a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, Aziz Ansari joked about it.

It’s a church bell calling the parishioners to mass as if it were Sunday Morning at St. Adalbert’s in Silver Lake, Minnesota.

It is fear. I’d be afraid too, if it’s all I knew. In fact, I was afraid--and still am sometimes but my fear comes from ignorance and ignorance can be an indiscriminate weapon, maiming and frightening anyone in rhetorical sight. This comes up on our van rides to and from school sometimes--attitudes based solely on a worldview shaped by narrow or, at least, extremely specific experiences and apocalyptic headlines and news stories. The age range for us in the van seems to dictate our views.  It isn’t categorically the case, but the younger the rider is, the more they are prone to believe those attitudes can or will change and the older passengers tend to see those attitudes as fixed and entrenched, stuck in a rut of complacency, grooves worn into a comfortable repetition of judgement and discrimination with no consequences because they’ve wrapped themselves in a blanket of protective distance and unexamined perceptions, reinforced and fortified by a steady diet of simplistic overgeneralizations custom made to perpetuate and feed itself through a Rube Goldberg-esque infotainment machine whose parts are so shiny and interesting we forget that someone built it and it is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Based on sentence length alone it is pretty clear which view I am most preoccupied with.

I don’t want to be one of the “older” passengers but I am. I have changed and I appreciate that change. I’m better for it. But sometimes I just feel a little used up in a way--worn, comfortable and capable, reliable, but a little out dated and doesn’t always quite match, like a comfortable leather boot and all that implies--you know, tough, smelly, wrinkled, etc.

At any rate, I believe in my international school and what it tries to do. I believe in kindness. I believe in taking responsibility. I believe in the idea that if you don’t have anything nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all (unless it’s in your blog). I believe in the beauty of nature. I believe in physical labor.

I watched the hard work of Dad and Dale and other family when I was growing up and have always respected that work, the work of making something worthwhile. I still respect it more than any other kind of work. It has made for a kind of self imposed tension. I remember as a high school wrestler, instead of remembering moves and holds I would just depend on my physical strength which would sometimes work but more often it would not and I would be defeated by someone who worked at getting better at wrestling, rather than relying on what they already knew. Teaching is similar that way sometimes. It can be easy to rely on your personality and technique yet not really have a grasp of the content. You’re participating and even feeling like you are making progress, but in the end the experience is a little empty of what it could be, so you recognize it and try harder. I keep working on it. People don’t really change, but we can adapt and learn, and that’s enough.