First Day of Work

It didn't take as long to come as I had expected- not that I had known it would come at all- and when it did it surprised me.   But while riding in my supervisor's car on the way home today- I relaxed.  I took a deep breath, stared out the window at the beautiful desert landscape pockmarked by torn down buildings and ones on their way up, noticed the sun low on the horizon and the perfect air pressure, temperature and humidity, and cracked a smile.  A good smile.  Like the ones you smile when you're doing something exciting and fulfilling and adventurous.  I could have been hitch-hiking in southern Spain, or maybe Arizona at the right time of year.  I could have been in Vegas.  Vegas seems more appropriate.  But of course I wasn't, and my supervisor steering his car at high speeds into a quickly disappearing lane quickly jarred me back to reality, but it did happen.  I relaxed- while in public even.  It had everything to do with the day I'd had.

It started the same as the day before it.  A van picking me and a few colleagues up at our hotel/apartment building, an awkward ride with awkward "new guy" conversation, but then I arrived at our school.  It was sort of a satellite campus, a quad if you will.  Four buildings connected by an open-air courtyard with kiosks and cafes in it, but it was the people who I encountered that left me with the feeling that what I'm doing isn't really all that crazy.  So much so I almost felt disappointed.  They told me that my work environment would be a world of contradictions.  That expectations for the teachers as well as students were made impossibly high, that student-motivation would be incredibly low, that the bureaucracy of the whole mess would make your head spin with its seemingly unending demands, and that despite all this, the job was relatively easy.  I met some great dudes (the women are at a completely separate campus).  Young guys exploring the world and making money (not unlike your humble blogger), guys with a little bit of a screw lose, older guys with it both completely together and completely not, Jordanians, Brits, Anglo-Indians, philosophers, linguists, actors, and honest to goodness teachers, slackers and xenophiles.  Each took their time to take the new guy under their wing, show me the ropes, and give me the "real" scoop into what the heck was going on.  And with all the chaos going on around me while others tried to organize the whole mess, I found lots of time to just hang.  I added to my fluid Arabic vocab list which consists of about 12 phrases, numbers one through 10 and some basic nouns, prepositions, verb conjugations, and questions words, and got some help with my pronunciation.  And at the end of all that, I got to spend some time shadowing another teacher and floating around helping his students complete their assignment.

It was the students that did it for me most of all.  They were about what I expected in a lot of ways- lazy, unmotivated, entitled, always trying to talk their way out of doing work, copying off their neighbor just to get an answer filled in, and too silly to get much of anything accomplished.  But they were great.  And they liked the crap out of me, asked me all kinds of questions.  I was able to inspire nods of knowing approval about my home state, the land of Hoosiers, by referencing the NBA (a trick I learned over the years), and allowed them to locate it in their mind by first picturing where on the map Chicago is.  I even got them to tacitly approve of my abbreviated name by referencing Pamela Anderson's Emmy snubbed role of C.J. Parker in Baywatch (thank you, Eastern Europe).  I was having so much fun and feeling so relaxed that I almost let my guard down.  A student asked me what I thought of Obama, and where I would usually jump at the chance to get into all of my feelings, hopes, disappointments, opinions and anecdotes on the matter, I suddenly remembered to have caution.  Some topics are never appropriate in a Saudi classroom, politics and religion being chief amongst those.  One complaint from a student to the dean has been cause enough for many a teacher a whole lot cooler and more qualified than myself being canned and ran out of the country.  "I don't talk about politics," I replied.  A student leaning in just over my left shoulder nodded in agreement. "That is good," he said with scrunched face.   A few others in the back nodded too.

Day 1

It's hard to tell which feelings of anxiety are misplaced.  I find myself in a constant state of self-consciousness.  While walking out of my hotel this morning, I didn't know if I should or shouldn't open the door for a woman walking alone behind me.  I was pretty sure she was a westerner, a fellow English-teacher catching the same private bus as me to work, but I knew others were watching.  I went first, didn't hold the door. Upon arriving at the office and having spoken with the woman (who turned out to be just what I thought), I opened the door  and let her walk in ahead.  I noticed a look of disapproval on the male receptionist's face.  Was it because of that?  Sitting in the conference room I didn't know how to cross my legs.  I knew that pointing the soul of my shoe at anyone was a sign of disrespect, but I didn't know if it was o.k. in the process of crossing my legs or if I kept my legs close enough to point the bottom of my top foot strait down it wouldn't offend.  I crossed them so tightly both feet went numb.  You find yourself doing these things in Saudi, struggling to do anything at all.  At least I do.  At least at first. And that's only for fear of offending someone.  The religious the police, the Mutawwa'în are a whole different story.  It's hard to forget the paper I had to sign recognizing my awareness of what punishments violating certain laws could incur.  Death, dismemberment, beheading.  

The same colleague and I later went on a walk.  We were told the neighborhood our hotel was in was safe and fairly liberal.  One superior even told the colleague that she would be fine walking alone.  Another warned against it.  We decided it best to play it safe.  Keeping in mind that if anyone questioned us we would have to say that we were either husband and wife or mother and son.  We chose the latter given our respective ages, but we were assured no one would question us.  This isn't a village after all.  Our walk was uneventful.  We got kababs and hummus and grape-leaf rolls (all bomb.com).  We got some curious stares but no one really seemed to pay us much attention.  The guy who took our order only talked to me though.  I was supposed to order for us both, and when she paid with money from her own wallet, the man still gave the change to me.  Dealing with women is not something the men of this country are used to.  The only time I felt scared was when we passed an all white van with a green crescent on the side.  "Mutawwa", I thought, and clenched my teeth.  

It will soon, in all likelihood, come to light which ones of my early anxieties will prove to have been warranted and which won't.  One that is without doubt is the one I feel while riding in a car.  In a city where its not uncommon for a couple dozen people to die in a single day from car accidents the sense of your life being on the line is palpable.  I had heard that a fatalistic attitude combined with a sense of entitlement in a city where gas is 12 cents a gallon and everyone drives there own car was a recipe for disaster.  The good news: our driver put his seat belt on.  At least he wasn't putting his life completely in Allah's hands.  People for the most part, from what could be seen in a day, drive at high top speeds-- I'll say that-- but not erratically.  Most change lanes slowly and deliberately- with signals I might add.  The problem is that those deliberate moves are often made under the assumption that another driver will change their trajectory in order for it to be made.  The result is that lane markers become less than obligatory to respect, less than general guidelines for that matter.  Seeing drivers four-wide on a two lane road was commonplace. Overall I think our driver is legit though.  The other drivers and the series of screeching tires I'm currently hearing out my window do less to inspire confidence, but at least I haven't heard them followed by any crunches.

The flight

It didn’t hit me until we were flying over Jerusalem.  The captain said (first in Arabic) that we would be flying over “the holy city of Jerusalem and Occupied Palestine.”  On this plane it wasn’t a political statement, at least not overtly, but I couldn’t help but place it in the context of my own world view and experience.  Everyone sitting close enough stared somberly out the window.  From where I was in the middle isle I could only see some lights.  I couldn’t see their patterns of concentration or contrast.  I couldn’t discern between the occupied territories or Israel proper.  Between settlements and refugee “camps”.  I wanted to, but I was too far away.  I wished I had snagged a window seat.   What I could see was how everyone stared, though, silently.  It had finally hit me.  I was here.  The Middle East.  The Holy Land.

I noticed that they served alcohol on the plane.  Something which probably came as no shock to my fellow passengers but having set out on a journey to Saudi Arabia, I had mistakenly assumed that alcohol would be as scarce as what I’d heard it would be in Riyadh.  The first of many manifestations of my ignorance. It turns out that Jordanians are pretty lax by American standards.  Only half the women wore headscarves and I saw no abayas or burkas.  Many were willing to speak English even to the bilingual flight attendants.  I heard laughing and a few men cracked jokes when some of their friends were reprimanded for standing before the plane had come to a complete stop at the gate.  One surprising thing:  every child who I saw on the plane was a boy.  No little girls.   Maybe daughters weren't valued enough to take abroad.

During my layover I skyped and face book chatted.  I told my girlfriend I loved her.  She reciprocated.  Getting used to our new situation wasn’t gonna be easy.  Some tears were still pretty fresh.  Then I went to my departure gate.  Most of the people sitting in the waiting area were Saudis it seemed.  I found myself suddenly nervous.  I had read about taboos within Saudi society and the thought hit me that something I might do could be seen as offensive.  I resisted the urge to cross my legs as I usually do for fear of displaying the bottom of my shoe to someone. I knew there were no religious police (Mutawwa) around.  But I was nervous. I started to sit in close proximity to a woman in an abaya when I remembered what I had read about “Family” vs. “Singles” seating in restaurants and public places.  “Family” meant women and children while “Singles” meant men only.  I looked to my left and noticed that on the other side sat only men.  I thought it wiser to sit with them.  The Kingdom was already having its effect.  The oppressiveness, its laws and customs were beginning to weigh. A few of the women and young girls still had their hair uncovered.  I knew this wouldn’t be the case when we landed.