20. Chapter 15: Honeymoon

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Transcript

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Chapter 15. Honeymoon. One of the best things about living in Kuwait was the beautiful sunrises and sunsets. They are brilliant burnt orange and illuminating purples, fire reds, and cotton candy pink. I think these colorful horizons are either created by the dust or the pollution in the air. In any case, I loved them. While riding the minibus down Highway 30 to and from Mabula in the morning and the evening, I was amazed. In the early stages, everything about Kuwait was exciting. The sunrise, the sunset, and the haunting call to prayer echoing through my apartment. I immediately felt at home within this complicated continent. Since I was a child, I had wanted to move to a continent that was hot. And I got what I had always dreamed of: blazing heat, hot sand, and palm trees. I was so happy and at home in the heat. At the time I moved to Kuwait, I was still addicted to coffee and have gone on and off with that addiction for many years afterwards. But for some reason, in the beginning, I didn't want to invest in a proper coffee machine. So I drink my instant coffee as Mabula was waking up. I think in retrospect, that shows how the situation felt very temporary to me. It hadn't yet sunk in that I'd be there for over 700 days. So it was probably the right time to get a proper coffee machine. By my second month in the country, my colleague Connor came into my classroom one day and asked in a loving, joking tone, are you seriously drinking instant coffee right now? What are you doing? Get a real coffee machine. Despite being a takeaway coffee snob all my life, getting a proper coffee machine honestly hadn't occurred to me until that moment. I think in my mind, I was on a temporary vacation, not committing to living in Kuwait for two years. With a travel mug filled with instant coffee in hand, I'd ride the elevator down to catch the 4:45 a.m. bus to school. I'd see the sliver of the moon hanging just beyond the mosque as I waited for my ride. Teachers would fill the lion seats with their sleepy faces, an eclectic group, including my colleague Richard, a mindfulness guru from the southern states, Brian, a surfer dude from New Zealand with a man bun, and Lori, a frazzled American in her late 50s, who looked lost and ready to retire any day. Getting up that early was exciting, not exhausting. Kuwait was so unbelievably different from anything I'd ever known. It is authentically Arabic, something so unique to this particular country in a globalized, modern, westernized world. Its uniqueness was something I only became aware of when I later saw Abu Dhabi and Dubai and could compare them. While Abu Dhabi and Dubai looked so spotless they could be staged, with neatly manicured astroturf, rows of palm trees, glitz and glam, Kuwait remained untouched by tourism. Why was this? Some people said Kuwait never recovered from the Iraq invasion of 1991. Others thought it was consciously choosing to remain traditional, in contrast to its neighbors, the UAE. Just north of Mabula, towards the airport, all I'd see around me was sand, with no trees or other vegetation. And sometimes it felt like I'd moved to a colony on Mars. I had never seen a group of people stop everything and start reciting prayers in the middle of the road before. I was raised without religious practices. I never went to church, and I hadn't been directly exposed to any religions throughout my childhood, like Islam. In Canada, we had a church just 10 houses away from mine, but religion could be happening inside of it, and I'd have no idea. I'd walk right past it. In Kuwait, religion was an essential part of the day for many people. At 11 o'clock a.m. on Fridays, when the largest prayer time would occur, I'd watched out the window of my apartment as hundreds of men bowed together, synchronized in the same postures. I wondered out loud, why are they all outside instead of inside? My new friend Rebecca, who I had been connected to by David, explained that they'd already filled up the inside of the mosque and the men outside were overflow. They faced a direction that seemed random to me, but I learned afterwards that it was the direction of Mecca, the holy spot in Saudi Arabia, where Muslims traveled to for their pilgrimage. During Friday prayers, the energy on the street changed instantly. What was chaotic Mabullah suddenly flipped a switch and became overwhelmingly calm as the neighborhood let go of movement and received stillness. Everything shut down, stores, music, activity. Even if we weren't participating in prayer as individuals, we were participating in the action of prayer. Mabullah became deeply focused as its residents individually and collectively spent time in the energy of reverence and acknowledgments of their culture. From my eyes, this was magical. The only other place I had felt this energy before was within the yoga studio, when the room filled up with crowded mats of students of yoga who were all there for the same purpose. Whether we found meaning in worshiping God, Allah, Buddha, or anything else, it didn't matter. We were devoting our practice to something meaningful to us. This is what Patanjali identified as Ishvara Pranidana, or the practice of devotion to a higher power, which is the fifth niyama of yoga. I hadn't thought of or considered the parallels between my yoga practice and prayer until I saw prayer for the first time in Kuwait. During culture shock, people often go through a few phases, the honeymoon phase being the first of them. This is the phase in which travelers become infatuated with everything, the language, people, and food in their new surroundings. I was no different. It was the first time in my life I'd been away from Canada for more than a month at a time, and the first time I'd been integrated into a culture so different from my own. It was the first time I'd lived somewhere foreign and had to adapt to a new way of being and thinking. Every single thing was exciting, and moving to Kuwait was the best decision I ever made. Things were so different, yet the same. Something I knew before I moved was that the work week would be different. It was Sunday to Thursday instead of Monday to Friday. That was because the holy day in Islam is Friday. Also, the schedules for the children at school included Arabic lessons instead of French, like in Canada. The children who are Muslim also took Islamic studies classes at school, which were government mandated. The children who were not Muslim instead studied Spanish during that time. Religious studies were something that we didn't offer at public school in Canada. But there were also distinct similarities between Kuwait and Canada too. Just like it was memorable to David that there was a pizza shop across the street from the pyramids of Giza, I was entertained by the fact that the school ordered a familiar pizza brand for delivery for the teachers during our first week there. The branded pizza boxes looked exactly the same as they did in Canada, except for the Arabic lettering on the logo. Within the first day or two, the school took us to the grocery store, where I could find some variation of just about everything I ate at home, except my favorite brand of nacho chips. They also took us on a trip to Avenue's Mall, which I heard was the second largest mall in the world. Had all of the well-known Western restaurants and shops that I loved. While my apartment came furnished, I quickly sped through my small allowance provided to me by the school and cleaned out the furniture store with Rebecca for extra things to outfit my apartment: coat hangers, shower curtains, proper bedding, and bath mats. We got picked up in a taxi. On the way, the driver had to stop to fill the car with petrol, what we call gas in Canada. I remember being completely shocked that the driver left the engine running while an attendant filled the tank. First, in Canada, I'd never had an attendant fill my tank with gas. They had attendance at some stations, but my mom always said it was too expensive. We always used the self-serve pumps. But in Kuwait and the rest of the countries in Asia I've lived, both the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia, there was no such thing as self-serve, only full service stations. And second, I'd never seen someone leave their engine running while the gas was being filled. My mom had told me we always turn off the ignition while filling the car with gas or it might explode. Isn't this dangerous? I asked Rebecca. She shrugged. If they turned off the ignition, the air conditioning would turn off and it would be way too hot. That explanation made sense to me. Besides, she added, I've lived here for 10 years and they do it all the time, and I've survived. When my students were dropped off on the first day of school, the reality sank in that I was responsible for keeping 26 seven and eight-year-old children safe, all on my own, and that no amount of education had prepared me for it. I was 23 years old. I could barely even take care of myself. How was I going to take care of children? I had been a summer camp counselor before and a babysitter, but for some reason this felt different. The first time I saw a list of Arabic names, I found it challenging to differentiate between them because of how similar they sounded to me. There were many Abdullahs, Mohammeds, and Ahmeds on every class list. I realized in retrospect that if a Kuwaiti teacher came to Canada and taught my high school class, he'd probably say the same thing about my group of friends growing up. Emily, Emma, Amy, Alex, Ali, Becca, Becky. To native English speakers, the differences in our names were crystal clear. But to a non-native speaker, those names could all seem pretty similar, right? The same was how I as an outsider experienced my Arabic class list. Balinese names where I live now are even more similar than Arabic ones. In Balinese culture, children are named based on their order of birth. The children that are firstborn are either named Weon or Putu, the children that are secondborn are named Kadek or Made, the children that are thirdborn are either Komang or Naomang, and the children that are fourthborn are named Katut. When I was new to Kuwait, I found myself judging the similarity of names in Arab culture. Now I realize I just didn't understand that there are different methods of naming children around the world, with no one way being superior to another. During my final year of my Bachelor of Education, I done a project on names. I invited all my classmates to research the history and meaning of their names and share what they learned in a book that I put together. In my neighborhood in Canada, most individuals had names that had a familial significance. They may have been named after a parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent, and my classmates wrote about this in their books. My professor Shelley said to me when giving me feedback, I love this project because names are so important. I've thought a lot about that when learning how to pronounce names in different cultures. Names are important. So I took the time to carefully learn them all, even if it took a while and was extremely confusing for me. In Arab culture, people and places are often named after things. For example, Noor means light and reem means gazelle, and they are both common names. This was different from my experience and understanding of most of my friends' names in Canada. Also, the same person could have three different spellings of their name on three different ID cards. This was because they were phonetically sounding out the letters from Arabic into English letters. Each Arabic letter did not have a direct match for English. In Canada, it would be considered rude if someone spelled my name with an I, like Alex instead of Alex, but in Kuwait, no one was offended if you wrote their name Noor or Noor. To them, these were the same thing. The children brought their own school supplies with them on the first day of school. There was no storage in the classroom, and so they dropped their gigantic shopping bags on the floor, and highlighters, notebooks, zipper plastic folders, and erasers spilled everywhere. I asked the children to label their notebooks, and then I stood back and looked around at this chaotic scene, overwhelmed. Most of the children were not labeling the books as I'd instructed. They were sticking labels on the backs of their books or upside down, or not at all. I didn't realize at that point that as a teacher for children of any nationality around the world, you must give every individual instruction as slowly and as simply as possible for the children to follow along. An instruction such as label all five of your books with your name and write science, social studies, math, reading, and writing on each one was far too complex for an eight-year-old to handle on their own. You have to give each instruction step by step. Instruction one would be: first take out your top book, flip it so that it opens to the left. Then stop and make sure each child has done that before moving on to step two. I had a lot to learn. After we organized our supplies, I asked the children to write a story on the first day of school and watched as they began to work on it, amazed. Only half of them were writing in the books from left to right. Half were opening their books backwards and writing right to left. When I was in teachers' college in Canada, I'd been taught that if children wrote in their books from right to left instead of left to right, it was possible that they had dyslexia. I looked around the room mystified by it. While I knew that Arabic, unlike English, was written from right to left, I didn't connect the dots on how this difference would impact how Arabic-speaking children would read and engage with English. Not only would it be totally normal for them to be confused about how to label and open their books, but even grammatical differences and letter differences would confuse them much more than a native English-speaking child. Learning two completely different languages simultaneously is very challenging. At the end of my teaching career, I understood that as a teacher, I had to frequently remind and reteach children how to label, open, hold, read, and write within a book. But as a first-year teacher in Kuwait, I didn't get this. No one introduced us and educated us on these aspects of the local culture. After living in the Middle East for more than six years, it made perfect sense to me, but in the beginning it was a culture shock. Although there was a brief cultural lesson provided by the school during my first week in the country, there was so much to learn about how this culture diverged from the North American way of living, that minute details such as grammar and language readability were overlooked. We were coached in larger cultural differences, such as to not outstretch our hands to the opposite gender for a handshake, as some traditional Kuwaiti men and women did not touch. But these smaller details seemed to be forgotten, even though they were significant. After two days of teaching, suddenly it was the Eid al-Hada holidays, and we had a full week off of school. I learned that the Eid holidays are two of the most important dates in the Islamic calendar. Eid al-Fatur is at the end of Ramadan and marks the first day that religious practitioners can eat between dawn and dusk after a month of daytime fasting. Eid al-Hada is linked to the story of Prophet Ibrahim in the Quran. In the story, Allah asks Ibrahim to sacrifice his son, and he plans to obey this command. At the last moment, Allah gives Ibrahim a ram to sacrifice instead. Eid al-Hada is celebrated on the last day of the Hajj, which is the pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, that Muslims take once in their lifetime, as dictated in the five pillars of Islam. Even when Muslims aren't taking the pilgrimage to Mecca, it's still one of the most important religious periods each year for Muslims. Many of my colleagues were grumbling about the timing of this very early 10-day Eid holiday because all of the new teachers were stuck in the country as our visas weren't processed yet and we didn't have our passports. They wanted to travel. But I didn't understand. Why would I want to leave? I just got here. I loved Kuwait and I was so excited to have 10 days off of free time to explore. At the start of the week off, I went with some colleagues down to Souk Mubarakiya. I loved the Souk because it contrasted the Avenue's Mall, where I got to experience the modern lifestyle that was so similar to North America. The Souk was an opportunity for me to learn about the history and traditions of this new country I was going to call my home. It was a maze of alleyways with small shops selling spices, olive oil, carpets, and bags made of camel skin. Silks, spears, and toy Bedouin guns hung on the walls. Before the discovery of oil, Kuwait's economy was based on pearl diving, maritime trade, and construction of wooden ships. So miniature figurine ships, relics of this time, were for sale everywhere. A few days later, I was at a party within my compound and I met a teacher named Ali, who had lived in Kuwait all his life. After speaking with me, he said, I've never met someone so excited to be in Kuwait. One day over Ede, he took me to visit the main tourist sites in the country. We visited the Kuwait Towers, which were under renovation and had been for the last seven years. The towers had large blue balls on top of them, which had been observation towers at one point before the renovations began. He also took me to the scientific center to see a small aquarium. The last place he took me was to visit the Al-Hashmi II, the largest Tao ever built, and the one world record Kuwait held. It was a stunning large wooden boat on the shoreline near the city. In the center was a large eye. I asked him, what's that eye? I've seen it everywhere. He explained to me the meaning of the evil eye. In traditional Arab culture, some believe that when anyone compliments you on your beauty or success, their jealousy could curse you. This is called the evil eye. To ward off the evil eye, Arabic speakers say mashallah, which means God has willed it. I had heard this expression several times since I'd moved there, but I didn't know the context. People hung the evil eye as a decoration on their walls or on jewelry to protect themselves. Mashallah wasn't the only Arabic word I learned. I quickly picked up other Arabic terms because it was the language I heard spoken all around me every day. I had never heard Arabic spoken before moving to Kuwait. People spoke Arabic passionately, but because I didn't understand what they were saying, I thought they were having arguments when really they were just having ordinary conversations. I learned phrases like salam alaikum, peace be upon you, Kifek, how are you? Yani, I mean Habibi, my love. I learned inshallah, which was the answer to almost every question I asked. You never got a yes or a no, just an inshallah. I learned it means God willing. It is basically maybe, but over time has evolved into a softer way to say no. Even after moving away from the Middle East years later, I still sometimes answer inshallah when asked questions. There was one Kuwaiti family that invited me into their home right away. Their son Ahmed was in my class, and after teaching him for a week, his mom Salama had added me as a Facebook friend. I was somewhat spooked by this. In university in Canada, I was taught to keep a clear professional boundary between parents of students and their teachers. But here in Kuwait, we were encouraged by the school leadership to accept invitations to our students' homes for dinner to experience the local culture. I decided shortly after meeting them to accept their dinner invitation, and I quickly fell in love with their Arab hospitality. This family took me in as if I was their daughter, inviting me over for meals weekly with them. Hospitality is deeply ingrained into the Kuwaiti and Arab tradition. And like Salama, many of the families at the school welcomed me into their homes after one or two meetings. When I spoke about this kind-hearted practice with one of my Lebanese friends years later, she explained to me it is written in the Quran that we must welcome strangers. She told me that there is a very famous Arabic quote that states, the stranger is blind, even if he has eyes. This saying illustrates how vulnerable it is to be an immigrant or an expat in a strange land. The stranger needs help and guidance. And that's why Arab people tend to be so welcoming to newcomers. In 2024, I started attending thrice-weekly Quran classes online with a teacher in Egypt. She taught me that since Allah is all loving, we must also love everyone. Muslim people believe that they also must love everyone, even those who are not Muslim. This practice of hospitality was so touching to me and completely different from the way my family was at home in Canada. I grew up in downtown Toronto and we had an independent Western city mindset, every man for himself. But in Kuwait, even though I was a stranger, everyone wanted to include me in their lives, their traditions, and their culture. It was so different from anything I'd ever known. Anthony Bourdain said, you learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together. In Kuwait, I found this to be true. When I went for dinner at Salama and Ahmed's house, they sent one of their drivers to pick me up. Once I arrived at their home, I sat at a table with flowered centerpieces flown in from out of the country. The air was scented with warm, earthy, woody ood, which I came to realize was the unofficial scent of the Middle East. Every surface was shimmering with golden tones. I was served plate after plate of food, brought in on gold trays, served by helpers. It was a good thing I wasn't vegetarian during my time in Kuwait because every dish included lamb, chicken, or beef upon rice. After stuffing my face with food, Salama would always say, You didn't eat. I found it confusing at first, but I ate so much. I soon realized that it was considered part of the Kuwaiti culture for hosts to expect their guests to eat a lot of food and feel offended or worried if the They ate very little. They were worried I would go home hungry. After every meal, they would say you didn't eat. But what they really meant was, are you finished your meal? Or are you sure you're not still hungry? Being invited to Kuwaiti homes was always exciting. Some of the homes were quite glamorous. They had large Diwanias, which are Kuwaiti seating areas, filled with oversized gold-plated furniture imported from Europe. From the towering ceilings hung glittery chandeliers and majestic decorations. The sitting rooms alone could accommodate at least 50 people. The tops on the sinks were made of gold. We had rounds of Arabic coffee, tea, and sweets until late into the night. At a time when I was separated from my family and homesick, this meant a lot. In Salama and Ahmed's home, I got to ask questions about arranged marriages, rules of the hijab, and local customs. They asked me questions too, about my life growing up in Canada. Why did you come to Kuwait? What does your family think about it back home? What did you know about Kuwait before coming here? I was really scared in the beginning that I might offend them by speaking about my open-minded upbringing. So I was cautious about what I said or did. For instance, later on, I didn't want them to know I had a boyfriend because I thought they'd be offended by me dating before marriage. But Achman's father would bring up the conversation himself by asking me about my new boyfriend when I came over for dinner, making it feel okay for me to discuss. I realized now that it was an assumption I'd made that just because they lived in a conservative country, they would be conservative individuals. The irony was that I had chosen to move to this country, and while I respected the culture, I didn't necessarily agree with all aspects of it. Just because I was living in a conservative country did not mean that I was conservative. I realize now that there are liberal and conservative people everywhere, and we should never assume that people are one way or another based on their context. Where we are is not who we are. In October, Salama invited me to her brother's wedding, my first Kuwaiti wedding. It was so different than any wedding I'd ever attended. Traditionally, Kuwaiti weddings are segregated by gender. However, some younger, more modern couples that I met in Kuwait choose to forego this tradition and have mixed gender weddings. This wedding held only the women in one hall and the men in another. I should have been excited about this, but I was mostly nervous about it because I would have to go to this event sober. How would I have fun without alcohol? This was the first wedding I'd attended in my life without drinking. Because I knew the event was alcohol free, I was expecting it to be boring. But what I discovered was that the women were having just as much fun, laughing, dancing, and singing as we do at a wedding with alcohol in Canada. During the wedding, I asked Salama if the bride was also from Kuwait, and she told me that she was not. She was from Palestine. Where's that? I asked her, confused. I had never heard the word before. Salama explained to me that Palestine was a country that had existed in the Levant many years ago, before Israel occupied the land in 1948. Of course, my next question was, what's the Levant? She told me that the Levant is the side of the Middle East that borders the Mediterranean Sea, whereas the Gulf is the opposite side of the Middle East. The Gulf includes the Arab states with which I was most familiar, including the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The Levant includes countries such as Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. When Israel occupied the land that formerly belonged to Palestine, the displacement of the Palestinians from their homeland was referred to as the Nakbah, which in Arabic means catastrophe. During the Nakba, many Palestinians were evicted from their homes. Many were killed. Palestinians who survived fled to neighboring countries around the Levant, including Lebanon and the Gulf, including Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Nowadays there are millions of Palestinians living throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, displaced from their homeland, which is now occupied by Israel. Growing up in Canada, I'd heard a lot about Israel. But up until that moment, I genuinely never even heard mention of Palestine before, let alone the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Salama explained to me that the bride's family actually couldn't come to the wedding because they were stuck in Gaza. They had limited freedom to travel and limited access to their passports. The officials in Israel would approve or deny their travel requests. And if they didn't have connections to someone higher up in the government, then they were out of luck. So most guests at this wedding were friends and family of the groom, people who lived in Kuwait and could attend. Honestly, there were a few things that were hard to accept and believe in my brain. One, I couldn't comprehend why my Canadian education had never covered the history between Israel and Palestine. And two, I couldn't believe that individuals were still living in these conditions today. The revelations were so shocking that I think my brain couldn't process or accept what she was telling me. I nodded my head and listened, watching the pain in her eyes with my hand to my heart. I couldn't imagine what living in these circumstances was like. There were no words I could say. Patanjali refers to suffering as dukkha, and in sutra 2.15, he explains that suffering is unavoidable. He writes that wise people realize that everything is suffering. All humans experience suffering, and everything in life will bring us pain. A large amount of the Patanjali Yoga Sutra focuses on how to make peace with that pain. When we achieve a state of wisdom and knowledge around life through our mindfulness practices, we start to understand that pain is a part of the experience of being human. When we achieve that state, we can start to sit with pain and suffering and be present with it, both our own and others. Sitting in the present with pain and suffering is the only way that it will eventually come to pass. I was alone for most of the night because Salama and her son Ahmed were part of the wedding party. I stood out as the only white, blonde, blue-eyed woman at the occasion. At one point, a Kuwaiti woman with blue hair came over to talk to me. Blue hair hiding underneath a hijab. A year before, I dyed the ends of my hair pink, but I didn't think it would suit the culture in the Middle East. I would have never predicted that a Kuwaiti woman would have also colored her hair in vibrant colors. I started to see that maybe we were more similar than we were different. She pulled me by the arm and dragged me to the dance floor to participate in line dancing to Arabic songs. At first I felt uncomfortable doing this sober, but I quickly forgot about my discomfort and started laughing and joking with her. After dancing, we sat down to drink Arabic coffee and eat medjul dates. She asked me, Why did you move to Kuwait? I told her the story of meeting my mentor David and him inspiring me to move to the Middle East. The next thing she said was, Where do you live? Mabula, I told her. She looked horrified. Why do you live in Mabula? That is not a nice place to live. No one wants to live there. What about Salmiya or Salwa? Those neighborhoods are so much better. Mabula is just where the school houses us, I explained. I can't believe the school has you living there. That is not a good part of Kuwait. There are much nicer neighborhoods that would be better for you to live in, to have a better experience of our country. I didn't know what to say to her, so I said nothing. A moment later she asked, Do you know what Mabula means in Arabic? No, I said, Crazy lady. Crazy lady? Yes. A long time ago, there was a mad woman who lived there. She scared everybody, so no one wanted to go. So we called it Mabula, so no one would go there. I'm not sure if this story was true or folklore, but that's what she told me that night. Mabula, mad woman. That's where I was living. It became normal for me to feel embarrassed whenever someone asked me where I lived, and I told them Mabula. No one wanted to live there. But I kind of like the name Mabula. It had a ring to it. Now, looking back on Kuwait, I like it even more. It has a special significance. Mabula, mad woman. That's what I would become.