Teachtravelplay's Blog

Leaving the Wild West.

Posted on September 24, 2011     130 Comments

In January 2011 I left behind my chapped, winter lips, wearing instead a gold wedding band, and rode in the passenger’s seat to Seattle, where Matt and I would board a plane bound for the Al Gharbia Desert. We didn’t speak Arabic, couldn’t have told you where this desert lay on a map and were not entirely sure the origins of the company we were about to join. As we always do when we embark on these new journeys, we armed ourselves with openness to the culture we would enter, faith in the decision we made together, and three boxes of Annie’s macaroni and cheese. I imagined the entire way to Dubai the modern city, with the tallest building in the world, and sparkling scenes as seen on “Sex and the City II.” When our jet-lagged toes stepped onto this new land however, it wasn’t sky-scrapers and jeweled sheiks I saw, but a vast expanse of camel colored sand.

This stretch of endless sand carries creatures with humped backs, and men who can walk for miles through sun soaked robes. Thoughts of cruising the UAE in a Lamborghini and dining in one futuristic, roof-top restaurant after another were immediately gone, and what was left was a feeling of minuteness, that this land was bigger, older and wiser than us. It was however, in this seemingly hostile environment that we were welcomed into the United Arab Emirates and into the Arabic culture, as teachers, travelers and now residents.

Matt and I have been on numerous adventures since we began our friendship over seven years ago, but the desert remains our wildest to date. I recall my first morning on my one-hour commute through the desert to work. I searched for something in the sand, anything, a landmark, or sign of life. I wondered if I would ever see the rain that I had grown up with in the Pacific Northwest. Nothing breathed, including me that first morning. Luckily the lack of natural life growing in the desert was more than compensated for by the life pouring from the Bedouin children I so gladly taught every morning. I was saved quite literally from the unforgiving jaws of the desert by a group of four year olds who taught me everything you need to know about how to live in a sand castle.

Lesson One: Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

My students were far along in learning the English alphabet when I began working with them, and shortly after I arrived we were already on the letter “W.” We played with W-W-Water, pounded on the W-W-Walls and at the end of the week I brought in W-W-Watermelon. I cut the watermelon into small pieces and then, just to be tidy I passed out plates and forks. The students stared blankly at me, and then the Arabic teacher gave me the same unknowing look. “Miss, why do you give them these?” I thought she was referring to watermelon being a finger food and so I explained that I just thought it would be easier to eat this way because there was no rind on the watermelon for the children to hold on to. “No, no” she explained, “The children have never seen this, this, fork, they do not know how to use it.” It was then that I thought back over my first week of meals shared with the Arabic staff in my school. There was a thorough hand washing session before a meal, including cleaning under fingernails and scrubbing knuckles. Food was ONLY given and taken with the right hand, as the left was used in the bathroom in place of tissue. Everyone then dug into a central dish, tearing pieces of meat, balling rice in their palms and licking their fingers clean. No forks, just clean hands. I ate with my hands when I was young, then a fork, in Korea with chopsticks and now I have come full circle.

Lesson 2: Love thy neighbor, because they are probably your cousin…and you will probably marry them.

Obaid and Sara were fighting again in class. Obaid was the same age as the rest of my students but about a foot taller, and Sara was the only child that would stand up to his bullying. Their arguments were always in Arabic, and if things became violent I would ask for a translation from one of the local teachers so I could better assist in resolving the dispute. On this particular day, it seemed like things were tense between them from the moment they walked in the classroom. Had they gotten into it on the bus ride to school or was this residual from the day before? “Why are they arguing?” I asked my Egyptian co-teacher. She responded “This morning Obaid threw a stone at Sara’s favorite goat on their farm.” I thought for a second, “On THEIR farm?” She replied “Yes, they live together. They are cousins. It is a good thing they will be separated into a boy’s school and a girl’s school after kindergarten next year. Maybe one day they will become married to each other. Enshala (God willing)”. I looked around at my five year old students who played together now regardless of gender, and who would be separated next year to not see each other again until their wedding day. I wondered if they would carry a memory of the little boy or girl they used to build play dough houses with and if Obaid and Sara, first cousins, really would one day be man and wife?

Lesson 3: Patience is a virtue.

I hate waiting. In the UAE we wait for the bus in the hot sun, we wait for the internet to work, we wait for someone to deliver water, we wait to see an English speaking doctor, we will wait all day at the post office to be told our letter has not yet arrived. I was complaining all morning that it took a full two minutes for one email to upload on my ipod! “I mean, who has that kind of time?” I got to school and noticed Al Anood was late again. “Why is this child never here on time???” Again, it was my patient Egyptian co-teacher who explained “Al Anood leaves her home at 5am, she drives with her Father to her cousin’s house an hour away. They take a bus together with their Aunt, and then this bus meets the school bus where they can make the rest of the trip. Some days the city bus is already full, so they must wait an hour or two for the next bus to take them. This is why she is often late.”

Lesson 4: Man’s best friend is not always a dog.

Several of my students would turn up to school with a black eye. The Western teacher in me would automatically assume there was a domestic problem and protocol was to bring in a social worker to talk to the child. I crouched down next to Salem, one of my smallest kindergarteners. “Salem, did someone hit you?” I made a hitting motion with my hand. Salem giggled and covered his face. I immediately went to find a local teacher to report this abuse I was sure was taking place in this child and several other’s homes. Oddly I received the same giggle from the program director. She asked them all something in Arabic and all the students began neighing like little billy goats, with perfect accuracy! Apparently desert children spend little time in their homes with their parents but instead are on the farm playing with their goats. I have seen the backlash of a child pulling a cat’s tail, I can only imagine the result of pulling the tail of a goat.

Lesson 5: You are what you eat, if it is made of pork.

My kindergarteners loved to sing, and so do I, a match well made when I signed on to teach them. We sang about a lot of things that had little relevance to my students and their life in the desert: “Rain, rain, go away”, “The itsy bitsy spider” (their spiders are the size of my head!) “Oh Mr. sun, sun, hiding behind a tree”, and of course “Old McDonald had a farm, and on that farm he had a pig.” Pork is haram according to the Quran, not eaten by Muslims, not sold in grocery stores and not mentioned in conversation, television, story books or Old McDonald. In the kindergarten alphabet P is not for pig, it is for parrot, pirate or purse. On my favorite reality TV show aired in the UAE, when someone wants to make a dish using pork, it is broadcast as “Today I will be making bleep and eggs benedict.” Consequently Old McDonald had horses, goats, cows, but no pigs. It became such a big deal to omit this word from my lessons on letters, vocabulary, when teaching the color pink, I mean what besides a flower and a pig are really only pink, that I finally had to ask, WHY?

“Pigs are dirty.”

“Um, yes, but all animals are pretty dirty.”

“Pigs eat their own feces.”

“Yes, and goats eat everything else.”

“Miss Emily, do you know this saying, you are what you eat? Well if a pig eats its feces, then it is feces, if you eat a pig, so are you.”

Point taken.

My time in the desert has been my wildest adventure to date. Walking along the single highway that connects Al Gharbia to the big city, sand in my shoes, a scarf wrapped loosely around my hair, I feel I have been part of a fleeting culture. As the city moves closer towards the desert the UAE is catapulted into a new era of space age buildings, Western influence and sidewalks replacing sand-walks. I’m ready for our move to the Oasis city of Al Ain, and thankful to a group of four year olds who introduced me to the desert.