I remember complaining at collge in the States about how I wish things stayed open in the middle of the night because that's when I was awake and in the mood to go out - they should take a lesson from Saudi Arabia. I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow at 11:30pm. Things don't even open until 9 or 9:30pm. Of course, here I have no good way of getting out to take advantage of this fantastic schedule... but we can't have everything. And I will acquire the numbers of a few dependable drivers who aren't working for the College, and then I will have my freedom back. Oh, sweet freedom. Of course, I know some of the drivers for the college now and really like them. Mohan, an Indian man from Kerala (is that how you spell it?) has been here 25 years working for Dar el-Hanan and then, when it became a college, Effat. He's got two children in Kerala. He speaks four languages and says he used to be fluent in Korean but has forgotten most of it. He's been here since Jeddah was just a couple of huts on the Red Sea, so he REALLY knows his way around. He says he likes it here because he has a good job.
I'd just like to insert something here. The problem with being in an extreme environment that has access to air conditioning is that the hot-cold-hot-cold makes me sick. I sneeze so much more here than I ever did in New Haven, despite the whole ''winter" thing.
I should explain something basic about my situation here. There are three administrators at the school who have made themselves extremely available to me and have done their best to make me feel welcome. One of them is American, I'll call her Mrs. West for lack of a better name. One is Saudi, I'll call her Mrs. East. And one is a mix of everything, half-Saudi but grew up in Europe and America, I'll call her Ms. East-West. All three have my undying gratitude because without them I would probably have left after a week. These names make them sound old but they're really not. Mrs. West and Ms. East-West are probably ten years older than me, Mrs. East a little older than my parents. I've been referring to them in the blog as "an administrator who..." or something like that, but since my relationship with each of them is different and important, I figured I'd separate them.
I see the Saudi girls who attend school a lot, obviously, but so far I've only really acquired a few people I would consider to be 'friends'. There's Mona, obviously, I rave about her often enough. I'll figure out names for the rest of them when I get there. I don't know to what extent it's fair for me to use people's real names.
Anyway the last couple of weeks, what with my toe and a sudden burst in academic activity (for me, not for the classes themselves - I finally started sitting down and trying to learn Arabic), I've been practically a hermit. But when it rains, it pours, and for yesterday I found I had TWO invitations from wonderful people. Mrs. West and her husband invited me out to play badminton with Dr. A, one of the professors here I've come to like quite a lot. The British school runs a badminton team for teachers and other interested people every Wednesday, and then people generally do dinner or the one time I went there was a surprise party for one of the professors. This would have been an excellent opportunity to get out and see some Westerners. Of course, I couldn't play badminton because of my toe, but I could certainly have cheered.
And then Mrs. East invited me to Iftar at her mother's house! Obviously, that's the sort of invitation you can't refuse. I have met a lot of her family already and they've all been extremely welcoming and very easy to talk to. Her family is fairly Westernized - one of them even married an American - and though individual members may be very religious the family as a whole mixes freely with both men and women, and many of the women don't cover their hair. Not a very traditional family, then. The invitation was precipitated by the fact that one of Mrs. East's brothers is a plastic surgeon and he was kind enough to offer to look at my foot and see if it was healing properly. I felt a bit nervous crashing the traditional Wednesday night family dinner, and during Ramadan at that - but once I got there I no longer felt awkward.
Pretty much it's impossible for a situation like that to bother me. Everybody is very relaxed and at home and I never feel awkward among Mrs. East's family. She has a 13-year-old daughter who I have gotten along with quite well, and an older daughter who is married to a guy who went to college in Connecticut also, so he and I had a good bit of time reminiscing about I-95 (I told some horror stories) and northern winters. Also, one of Mrs. East's nieces, the daughter of 'the American', is involved with the British School and I had actually met her before through the Wests. We had a really interesting conversation about East family dynamics and how HER life had been. Her mother doesn't speak Arabic, and she grew up in Texas and speaking English until first grade, when she was dumped into Arabic-language primary education in Saudi Arabia.
And when nobody was speaking English to me I was listening to the conversations around me and trying to figure out what they were talking about. I wasn't hugely successful, but that's never really bothered me. And I felt significantly more comfortable using basic phrases with the matriarch (Thank you so much, I'll see you again Inshallah, that sort of thing).
The tradition in the house is basically this. One room was set up as a mini-mosque with the entire floor covered with prayer rugs, and family members were continuously wandering in and out to pray. A small table in the entrance hall was set up with sambousas and some sweets and dates and the traditional juices generally used to break the fast. When prayer call appeared on the television (every station shows a live picture of the Qa'aba in the Haram in Mecca as soon as prayer begins - it's a fairly stunning sight to see the millions of people circling the Qa'aba. I heard one woman in the family telling people that someone (this was in Arabic so I didn't catch everything) had gone to pray in the Haram mosque for Fajr prayer one day this week (praying in the Haram mosque is obviously a special experience and since Mecca is so close by people can do it fairly easily, and praying in a mosque during Ramadan is much more important than praying in a mosque any other time of year). Fajr is dawn prayer. And she said that at 4:30 or 5 in the morning, when dawn prayer happened, there was barely standing room in the mosque it was so full. I don't know if you've seen pictures of the Haram mosque, but if you have you probably have an idea how huge it is. And yet for every prayer during Ramadan it is completely packed, as you could clearly see at the beginning of Maghrib. It is moving to see so many people so devotedly involved in an act of worship, even if you aren't part of it yourself. I can only imagine what it feels like for Muslims to see that sort of thing.
I had actually been fasting that day, since my current schedule actually fits with Ramadan fairly well, so I broke my fast like everyone else (futoor is the normal name for 'breakfast', iftar is the name for Ramadan break-fast - see the similarities?). Then we all moved back to the sitting/living room where we all sat on the floor in front of an enormous cloth that had been spread, and we all ate. Then Tash Matash came on (I have no idea what that means so I don't know if I am spelling or even pronouncing it correctly). Tash Matash is the most famous show on during Ramadan. It's been playing during Ramadan probably for almost a decade, and you can tell it's funny even if you can't understand what they're saying. There are some interesting charicatures of people. One scene I remember had a woman in her home getting out of bed and getting ready to get dressed when an old Saudi man wandered in, clearly confused. She started screaming and threw herself into a corner, and he looked around, chewing contentedly, and then sat on the bed and just kindof stared into space. It was entertaining.
So that was my first 'authentic' Iftar experience, and it was fantastic.
Wednesday was a good day for other reasons as well. Obviously, I was looking forward to the weekend - even when I don't have anything in particular to do, it's great to be able to be a bum and do your own thing for a while. I had a quiz in translation and, despite the fact that I'm sure I messed up horribly, I felt a huge sense of victory over the fact that I finished it at all. My Arabic has clearly improved when I can pretend to fit in with a class of bilingual people. Pretend badly, but it's a beginning.
I also had a really interesting conversation about religion with an Indian girl, Y, and a Saudi girl, D, both of whom I have become fairly good friends with. Y came to Effat because she couldn't find a school anywhere else that taught the amount of religious education she wanted. D came but wants to go to Duke if she can. D seems to agree with a lot of American principles, like separation of church and state. Y seems much more faithful to the Saudi-taught interpretation of Islam.
And when I mentioned the video I had seen of those two girls, D had heard of it and knew about the incident. Apparently there was a national issue over it. Some people accused the girls of being too friendly, and that caused an outcry. Others were just outraged in general. The boys are not, she says, going to be killed. She didn't know what was going to happen to them. But she did have an interesting story to add to my collection of creepy-Saudi-guy stories. She knows a woman who is a gynecologist. This woman was in an ambulance rushing to the hospital; she was helping to deliver another woman's baby. They stopped at a red light and some guy in the car behind them, who could see in enough to tell there was a woman in the ambulance, waved a bunch of money at her out of his car window. Hahahaahahahahaha. I have no idea what he expected from this - that the doctor would climb out of the ambulance and offer to have sex with him? It's a ludicrous situation.
One thing I like about life here is that it does seem to have a sort of surreal quality to it. On the way to Mrs. East's house for iftar we passed a woman standing by the side of the road who had a small plastic bag, tied shut, sitting on her head, and was holding a broom with the sweepy side up much like Moses held his staff. This looked, I realized at the time, completely natural for her. And yet anywhere else....
This reminds me....I may to search this picture out. I was sent a picture taken by a friend of a young boy in Pakistan. This is apparently how boys who don't know how to swim keep themselves afloat - by stuffing their pants with styrofoam.Some things just HAVE to entertain you.
No comments:
Post a Comment