Saudi Reading List

Buzz Kill Bye Bye

In keeping with ISG Dammam's general dysfunction, the recent ma'a salama was both amusing and a monumental absurdity. There were 29 staff members scheduled to be sent off in a room of about 100 people. Principal Rutter, the ostensible MC, winged it as he stumbled through an inadequate explanation of Vice Principal Neha's absence due to her mother's illness before he segued into a tangent about the importance of end of life wishes.

Rushed presentations were shuffled through for departing groups of people: middle school, high school, office staff.

Fatma, a departing high school English teacher, then asked if she could say a speech but was asked to wait because we were going to watch a video.

Sarah, the Global languages Vice Principal, did an admirable tribute to Principal Rutter and his uneven tenure before starting a five minute video retrospective of the past seven years of his presence at various celebrations, meetings and events.

Once the video was over Fatma stood and asked if she could now be allowed to say her speech. Many people came with speeches as it is a tradition to have the opportunity to say a few words of thanks and memories before departing. Since the number of people was so great this year, Mr. Rutter had stated to save them for another time in a smaller setting. Even so, Fatma insisted and solemnly stood before the microphone.

She unfolded a piece of paper and placed it in front of her. Rather than wishing a room full of onlookers goodbye and good luck, the speech was an emotional, heartfelt, boastridden and inappropriately timed diatribe against the administration and how it had so unfairly and cruelly mistreated her and caused her to resign after working here for two years.

The speech had a formal structure and she began with a quote by Paulo Coelho. I believe she was attempting to put her intellect on display so as to create an ironic backdrop for her being treated poorly but it was too filled with vain and prideful obstinacy and proclamations.

Following the quote she told us her name and its proper pronunciation and that she was a 31 year old woman. Then she said her children's names and what their meanings were and then her husband's name and its meaning.

I was thinking of that scene in Pulp Fiction when the character of Butch, played by Bruce Willis, is tenderly questioned by his Eastern European girlfriend about what his name means and he replies, "I'm from America baby, our names don't mean shit."

She moved on to speak of her parents--specifically her father, who is a sort of official advocate in Alexandria, who is stubborn and a teller of truth--no matter the consequence, thereby implying and conferring a correlation and inheritance of those noble traits for herself and her purpose here today.

She went on to speak of her experience and specialties and emphasis in teaching, her degrees and the fact that, unlike some in the room, her degree was attested by the Saudi government.

"No offense," she stated.

Her voice broke under the emotion 2-3 times while saying that she and her family didn't want to have to start over again--giving the erroneous impression that she and her family were in KSA for this teaching job at ISG. She then went on to thank specific people she'd received support from, leavened with a small flourish of explanation. Mrs. Souvi-- thank you for the stationary from your office, which I stole. Jake-- thank you for your support last year. Rana-- thank you for the fun we had during the fun moments on the senior trip to Athens. She even thanked Mr. Rutter, who was ultimately responsible for the tone and tenor of the speech in the first place.

There was a rhetorical device she used in the speech related to her role as a teacher where she listed a series of "I will nevers."

There were many.

The only one I remember though was, "I will never teach my children that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel." Of wildly inappropriate and tone-deaf remarks, that may have been the most egregious.

Fatma so deeply wants to be something she is unable to be here, or maybe anywhere based on her temperament and display of poor judgment at this event.

She monopolized fifteen minutes of precious time with no regard for anyone else. She appeared persecuted, oppressed, selfish and insecure. Spurned by ISG, it was as if she was owed this opportunity.

The role of newly minted Advanced Placement instructor, the training for which the school paid for her to fly to California and attend, seems to have endowed her with the capital and credibility and institutional investment to perform this oration. She spoke to a room where many people were being involuntarily let go and would do anything to continue working, while she had chosen to resign out of a personal principle that others in the room did not have the luxury of contemplating.

It was a travesty of social convention and propriety.

Amy was so taken aback by it that she was dumbstruck and disgusted for hours afterward.

When it finally ended, Mr. Rutter, the ostensible target of the preceding screed stood up, turned to the room and unceremoniously blurted, "Let's eat!"

We were then herded to the canteen for a giant professionally catered buffet, which was inconveniently positioned directly in front of the entrance to the room and created a glut of hungry and, depending on your affiliation, embittered, bemused or exhilarated diners.

Thankfully, the food was glorious, and there were piles of it. But the natural lightness and celebratory nature of a shared meal at a celebration was blunted by the preceding forty minutes of nonsense.

We wolfed down our food, gathered up our bags and regrouped in the van for the ride back to the compound for a much needed 3 day weekend before Ramadan begins and the whole school powers down to accommodate the fasting of many of the students and staff.

Full Dance Card

Childish Gambino's music video for the song "This is America" portrays the contradictions that exist in the fabric of American culture. A doctoral thesis could be written on its winks, nods, and blasphemies (and probably will be).

The discomfort it creates is not unlike how we feel when we hear our own recorded voices for the first time.

"That doesn't sound like me!" But, of course, it is you.

The choreographed beauty and violence on the screen is a meta-nonfiction that celebrates all that it means to be an American.

Casual brutality co-exists with the sublime beauty of our country, like nesting Russian dolls. Each scene of joyous, lit beats and lithe dance moves is briefly interrupted by the murder of innocent people. The figure who mesmerizes us with dance and song commits savage acts of violence before continuing to entertain.

And we watch it all through the depersonalized ubiquity of our screens. With every graphic murder or brutal sex crime portrayed on screen or cynical corporate exploitation of market research to slice through the body politic or saccharine-laced hyena sneer and snake oil salesmanship--separating head from heart from limb, the consumer will consume.

The consumer will consume the next viral dance move, pet video, facebook quiz, horrific news crawl, snap streak, insta whatever or take note of what thou hast twat from calloused fingertip to a child's lips.

Just before the final scene of a black man running for his life through a darkened parking garage, there is a Kevin Bacon-esque Footloose like scene of dancing on the roof of a car in a row of cars from another era, perhaps an era when once America was great.

While I've Been Away

Just like at home
I see stars in the sky
Morning doves murmur to each other
Flowers bloom and die
Spaghetti sauce simmers on the supper stove
Passenger jets cross the sky
People say "hello" as we pass on the street
Dinner with friends, we look forward to
And the weekend still feels full of promise
And our work keeps us shuffling along
And the year narrows
Until a slice of light just shows through
And we wonder to ourselves
Now what are we going to do?

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.