Theo of Arabia: Part 14

Suddenly I open my eyes, because I hear a scary noise. First I heard it subconsciously in my sleep and dreamt a lot of funny things, but then when I realised that the sound was real and not dreamt, I awoke from my afternoon nap.

It was a long and tiresome day. Sometime at dawn the muezzin goes up the stairs of his minaret and calls the believers to prayer and a few minutes later the voice of the Imam is to be heard. I no longer wake up to the singing and humming, but continue my sleep. I’ve got used to it. However I get up before 6am. Partly because it’s freezing cold in my flat – in the desert the temperature drops rapidly at night, and since there is no oil or gas heating system, but instead, an air con that makes a hell of a noise is being used as a method of heating, which I refrain from using it due to the noise and partly because of the sunlight shining through the window due to the non existent curtains.

At 7.30am we start our daily morning trip to work in our shabby Nissan bus and arrive at the polytechnic in just under a quarter of an hour later. After making tea and coffee in the kitchen, follow four hours of teaching. Interrupted by ten-minute-breaks. The teaching is very demanding, because many students are missing during the first hour, you have to repeat many things in the second hour, otherwise they won’t be able to follow. Some students take part in the lesson, other rather not. There are two groups of the latter: the ones who sit quietly and passively and don’t disrupt or disturb the lesson and the other ones, the noise and troublemakers. However, all have one thing in common. They want to be marked present on the attendance list, because they fail if they have more than 30 missing hours. That’s why they all come every hour not only to me but to all the other teachers too wanting to see if they have been marked present or absent. If they’ve been marked absent, they won’t leave you in peace and bugger you to change it into a presence.

With me, they bang their head against a brick wall. One of my Bengali colleagues is more consistent when it comes to attendances. When he enters his classroom, he shuts the door and starts calling out student names immediately. Bad luck for whoever is not there right at that moment. He won’t listen to anybody and to any reasons. All students fear and hate him, I admire him.

If the students want to go home because they have a bad hairdo day or whatever, they come to you with all sorts of excuses to be excused to leave – without being marked absent of course. Once it is the mother who is either in a hospital or needs to be driven there, once it is another family member who needs to go to the hospital or is already lying there fighting for his life, sometimes the student is feeling unwell and needs to go to the hospital, and of course he has to be driven by his best friend because he is unwell and cannot drive himself. And once somebody has passed away and therefore they need to leave the classroom for the rest of the day.

Today some came to me with all those above mentioned reasons. One however took the bun. He came to me in the first hour and said that his brother had a terrible car accident last night and is now in the intensive care unit and he has therefore to leave and if I could mark him present for the entire day.

“I cannot, and now sit down and be quiet!”

In the first break he came up to me and showed me photographs of a traffic accident and a severely injured person and said it was his brother. I looked calmly through his photos and asked:

“Didn’t you say earlier that the accident happened at night?”

“Yes.”

“Why am I seeing here broad daylight? It’s dark at night, isn’t it?”

Then he became angry with me and disrupted the lessons the rest of the day. When I had enough I called the security men, who brought him to the manager of the school.

After each break there are always a few students who arrive late and are not allowed to enter the building. The security men have been advised to shut the main entrance and not let anybody in. That’s why the students come to the window, knock on it and require that I mark them present because they were only a few seconds late and the mean security wouldn’t let them in. If they don’t go away, I call security and in order to be able to continue my lesson in peace.

My well deserved lunch break starts at 11.50am and lasts for an hour. The food is sometimes good, sometimes bad. It really depends on the chef’s mood. But it is almost the same every day. There are two salads to choose from, plain rice, rice with chunks of meat or sauce or both, chicken cooked in every possible way, spring rolls, soup, vegetable soup, fruit, yoghurt, soft drink, dessert, pita bread. All this for less than a pound.

Since the teacher’s room in the cafeteria is small, musty and cold, I prefer to sit outside in a sunny corner. The problem is that the students won’t let you eat in peace and come to ask even during the lunch break for attendances. I then play the madman and tell them stories about flowers and bees until they go away shaking their heads.

Three hours of teaching follow after the lunch break. We go into a different classroom and teach the students of a fellow teacher. Since both, students and teachers are all tired and no one really has the energy to go through another three hours of lessons, came one of the colleagues with the brilliant idea to show films. Problem No. 1: Not every classroom is equipped with a beamer or projector. 2: There are no speakers, so we had to buy our own. 3: The students prefer to chat with each other instead of watching a film and 4: Our project manager has forbidden it for a fucked up reason and now we are forced to hold a normal teaching class.

At around 2.30pm came on a storm and it rained heavily for about 15 minutes. When the students heard the splashing rainwater they stormed out of the classrooms into the pouring rain. They danced and sang, took photographs and were very happy. Although I had heard that they Arabs loved the rain and loved dancing in the rain, I see and experience it for the first time. When the fun was over, they came back into the classroom and said that they had to go home now to change and couldn’t sit in the class with soaking wet clothes. So I sent more than half the class home. The other half regretted it not to have gone out in the rain to dance and become soaking wet and had to stay until the end of the day, that’s why I played a game with them until the time was up.

One of the teachers didn’t come to work today due to illness and I had to teach his class too. That’s why I fell dead to bed when I got home.

Now I wake up by the roaring wind and look out of the window. Sandstorm. I watch it for a while and go back to bed.

Tomorrow is a new day. A hopefully better one.

This blog is available on Amazon:
Theo of Arabia ebook

Theo of Arabia paperback

Stormy weather