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.

From Christmas to Christmas

The last time I was this far from home during the holidays, it was 1993, I was living in Asahi Residence, a white three-story apartment building a mile from Yokota Air Base in Fussa-shi, Japan. I'd been married for six months and Becky was four months pregnant with Jonah. I was in the first year of a four-year enlistment, we missed our family and friends, and we must have wondered what in the world we'd gotten ourselves into.

Now, twenty-three years later, our kids all grown up and about the same age I was back then and they are consumed by formative experiences of their own, and I think about where we are today.

The year has been consumed with thoughts of the Middle East. Since John first called us on Christmas morning, our lives have revolved around this idea of living and working 6,900 miles from our home on the opposite side of the world. The sun rises at home after ours has set and we sleep while back home busies about their day. Samson gets on the school bus as we go to bed. Matt drives across the tundra of Renville County sipping coffee and listening to the radio and the ghostly hymn of the call to prayer drifts into our open window at 5 a.m. Mom keeps the axis fixed at Sumter Mutual keeping the connection with Silver Lake, the site of my own personal big bang and the early formation of what would become the universe that sustains the life I've led.  Dad sits in his chair, reading into the night as the moon lights the frozen surface of Lake John and its sparse village of fish houses. I walk down to the canteen after 5th period to buy some fattouch, a Lebanese salad I rely on for sustenance, seasoned with sumac spice--the same color as the berries on the sumac back home. Katie and Hallie send snapchats and we see them hours later and laugh together. I walk through the courtyards between the villas making a 45 minute circuit listening to an episode of the TED radio hour on my headphones. Oma is settled in out at the end of 500th lane, a fire glowing behind the glass door of the wood stove in the corner, while she slices cucumbers for an artfully quartered sandwich snack before posting a message on facebook. The refrigerator hums in the darkened room of the 3rd floor staff lounge waiting for Henke to trip the automatic lights when he comes in to measure out coffee, fill the reservoir with water and begin again a day at AHS. We finish a movie late into the night and lay out our clothes for work the next morning and then go to sleep.

I am the sum of all my experiences, of my people, here in the final days of 2016. It has been one year since I began this journey and I'm happy and miss my friends and family and hearing the winter wind in the branches of the pines surrounding the cabin. But I need to remember this time, too, here at 6 a.m. while Amy, love of my life and fellow adventurer, is still asleep in the next room of villa W18C, Sara Compound, Aziziyah, Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, this 16th of December 2016.

Merry Christmas.

Cows Know Nothing of Eternity

A string of cows tread single file, bags heavily swaying,
dull hooves pulverize the ground into a floury cumulus.
Turned toward the familiar barn door,
the comfort of routine goads them from pasture to stanchion.
Morning and evening, the biochemical process,
whereby receptors fire under experience and
invisible circuits click open then close
a maw full of cud while heads rise and fall
with each lumbering step as they steer
a bovine docility, lumbering
towards a predefined zone of the known.

The Reptile in Our Brain

See how that angry red eye opens, then closes?

A flash of morse code winks coordinates.

The tail of a fox moves rhythmically in the road ditch ahead.

We close the distance.

A cell phone tower blinks mechanically.

Only rainwater on a spider web woven in the branches of a spruce.

Just the wind anxiously inflating a tattered plastic grocery bag

hopelessly twisted in the dried stalks of dead milkweed in the ditch.

Color drains back into the dawn and

The kodachromatic slideshow in the rec room sharpens

into the high definition insistence on veracity.

So the mundane march continues

until the elemental charge of the scrape of a bear's claw

on the yellow vinyl siding outside the living room window at night.

This Day

Dawn fades in,
or erupts-
but birds still chatter,
sounds will gather,
and the break of day
begins another chapter
of unnumbered pages,
even as the final morning star
waves goodbye.

Conversion Therapy

The assignment was for my seniors to read an article about the science of love as part of their unit on the theme of love and loss and then answer a few questions about some of the specific claims that were made. Zeinab sat alone at the table while the rest of her small, distracted class pretended to do their work on the couches that lined the center of the library and chatted about the election results. They all had chromebooks awkwardly perched in their laps as they pecked responses into a google doc.

The table was actually four tables pushed together around which fifteen students could sit, but Zeinab sat alone looking at the laptop screen, her hands gripping the edge of the table, her cheeks were red and she looked preoccupied. I knelt by her chair and asked if she needed any help then I saw that she was embarrassed as tears filled her eyes but hadn't yet run down her cheeks.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"What do you need, Zeinab?"

She just replied the usual, teenager speak.

"Nothing." But there was something so I gently pressed.

"Do you need to talk to somebody." This is my go-to line when a kid clearly is upset but not sure if it's in my league to handle. She just shook her head and wiped the tears that now ran down her cheeks.

"Do you want to go sit on the sofa in the hallway?" She agreed and I asked the librarian to watch my class. I grabbed some tissues and led her out into the hall, and sat down.

"What can I do for you?' I asked, but she just said nothing.

"What's on your mind?" I kept at it.

"It's so stupid." She said. "You'll think it's stupid."

"What is it?"

"It's the election," she said. It was Wednesday afternoon, so it was late at night in the states and Donald Trump had been declared the winner of the presidential election.

"My brother goes to college in the U.S. and I've wanted to go to college in the U.S. (University of Chicago) my whole life and now I'm not going to able to."

She was feeling every bit of the result of the election and had clearly been listening to the language of the campaigns. She was worried about her brother but also worried her opportunity to follow him had now disappeared. She went on to say that her family was from Syria and she had lived in Saudi Arabia her whole life.

I explained to her that I was surprised by the result, too, but, while I knew what was said during the campaign,  I reassured her that I didn't think she'd have anything to worry about. She went on to say that as someone who has lived in the middle east she'd witnessed some of the "shadiest" politicians around, but Trump "is fucking crazy."

We talked about the danger of getting too wrapped up in the news, especially facebook. She already knew this, though. She's a smart kid. I said politicians say a lot of things to get elected, some more than others, but in the U.S. the president doesn't control the government and he'll have advisors that would check the kind of rhetoric used in the campaign and he'll have to work with the Congress.

Then she asked me if it was true that Mike Pence supported conversion therapy for gay people. I said I didn't know, but that no matter what a politician thought about it, the country had already settled that issue.

We sat there together for a few more minutes and then the bell rang and class was over. I told her to try not to worry too much and I'd see her tomorrow.