The Expat Box

Anything you want you can find in Muscat, except for fresh cranberries on the eve of Thanksgiving. Generally, though, if you have the riyals to pay for it, you can buy it. I have even run across canned corned beef hash several times, which should jar you into the realization that my previous statement is absolutely true, for the law of item acquisition overseas is, "If one can readily find corned beef hash in stores rather than on the black market, then one is in a place where ANYTHING can be had."

A second guideline of living overseas is "Find the box". That is, when you meet another expat you immediately converse upon a finite number of topics in order to discover which box that person fits into. Nationality is the most obvious first box one seeks out, followed quickly by how long one has been here, and previous overseas experience (always seek out common passport stamps). If the personality checks out thus far, the next box to explore is occupation.

Muscat houses an astonishing variety of jobs filled by an astounding array of personalities from countries all over the world. I have met communications people, international school teachers, botanists, biologists, tour guides, and engineers. Hand any of these individuals the homeschool bomb, though, and they balk. "Ooooh, homeschooling are you? (no, this was not Yoda that I met recently, although being British set him not too far from the mark--and he has big ears, this Brit) That must be amazingly difficult!"

From an older, childless British woman: "Ah yes, homeschooling. I didn't realize that anyone here was doing that. And what are you doing for your children's socialization?"

From an Indian mother of five whose youngest is 7 and oldest is 32(!) "Yes, I have heard that homeschooling causes immense stress for the person who is acting as the instructor. Is that so? Do you find this to be the case?"

And the best one was from an American man: "Well I have heard that your children are really doing well with the homeschooling and are literate, but that your son is a little bit lazy. It sounds like you are doing a great job! He will probably grow up to be a politician!"

Once we have run through the boxing exercise, I usually find that the conversation ends after I have revealed that I am homeschooling, and subsequent conversations revolve around that topic in a polite, removed sort of way. The homeschool box is a tough one to be in as everyone believes they know what it looks like on the inside yet no one has actually explored it. Nor do they much care to.

Lately, the box looks...well, you be the judge. Having recently taken on a colleague's child, who is also a No Child Left Behind refugee, our little school has grown to four instead of the three that I had started with.

The biggest change is that Silas no longer spends his mornings under the table. Eleven weeks into the school year, the genius finally comprehended that, once he has finished his material for the day, he is done whether it takes him an hour or ten hours. Now he views the underside of the table as a waste of his time and chooses instead to study. When he does go into hiding, it is in places that are far more sophisticated than a table. The roof offers corners and compressors to hide behind, there are five bathrooms to choose from, our furniture sits at odd angles to deaden the echos (and consequently offer rich hiding opportunities), and his bedroom has its own nooks and crannies.

Tian has become an academic workhorse. She most recently penned a five paragraph essay on the plausibility of Marco Polo's writings in his book, A Description of the World. Today she and Silas were spontaneously evolving lines to poems about dragon eggs, and correcting one another as they recited snatches of a speech by Abraham Lincoln. She has mastered long division, read extensively on the center of the earth, and is constructing a clay map of Eurasia. She is the homeschooled child I always want to make fun of. While she and Silas follow the same curriculum, Tian follows it with so much more finesse and abandon. She is something of a dweeb.

As for Tehva, we have shipped her off to a morning preschool program at the university. She was simply becoming too much of a distraction with her non-stop frittering and random abuse of her brother and sister. Once we took on the fourth child for daily schooling, Tehva's screeching rants drove poor Catherine to distraction and set her rocking, fingers jammed in her ears, in order to calm herself. An eight by twelve room is not big enough to hold Tehva and a special needs child and a boy who cannot figure out the concept of a to-do list and a hopeless over achiever and the homeschool mother whom everyone assumes is one beer short of a six pack for even considering schooling her own children in the first place.

A reread tells me why no one asks about much beyond the fact that I homeschool. TMI.

The Nots of Eid

So we just finished our first Eid holiday. I was perhaps expecting a little ornament, made in China and stamped with, "Foreigner's First Eid," you know, to put on our Eid palm. However, that is not what one does at Eid. To be truthful, we are still not quite straight on this particular Eid. However, we do know what there is NOT during Eid.

1.) No Traffic
On the morning of Day One we awoke to find our neighborhood looking fairly apocalyptic. No drivers out "washing cars" with dry rags, no maids out sweeping, no school buses shooting by blaring their horns, and, most shocking of all, NO GOAT HERD POOPING IN MY DRIVEWAY!

We packed our car and drove straight through Muscat without a single slowdown , passing through the golden horse gates at the south end of town, singing to the club music of 95.9 FM, and suspiciously eyeing every turn for the traffic jam that must be hiding around the corner. We made it to Seifa Beach in record time, pitched our tent, and sat gasping in the white sand, not from exhaustion but from the feeling that we neatly escaped the gridlock that plagues Muscat nearly 24/7.

Seifa Beach

2.) No Shortage of Good Help
We went camping with two other families and one maid. Really, who would even consider camping without at least one domestic along? As I crawled from the tent on Tuesday morning she cheerily chirped, "Cuppa tea, Mum?" Duh. Yes.

3.) No Goats
"Mom, the goats are gone," Tian stage whispered upon our return from our beach camping. The bleating that we had heard for days from over the neighbors' walls suddenly and inexplicably ended during Eid. Well, not so inexplicably. The neighbors brought us marinated, skewered, grilled goat meat on Thursday.

4.) No Clean Pavement
Benjamin and Laura called on Tuesday night and asking us to Misfat, an old town built into a canyon. We packed a picnic and drove two hours into the inland, to the Western Al Hajar mountains, unloaded our rowdy and generally unmanageable children, and began to hike into the canyon.

This is where the goats who survived Eid had been hiding, I suspect. We ran into them in shallow limestone caves, hanging out of neem trees while tearing leaves from the branches, and scrambling up and down piles of loose scree. Tehva, unimpressed by the goats, angled for bigger prey as a boy on a donkey slowly lumbered past, heading high into the hills. She bummed a ride for a ways until Tony made her disembark.

Back in the village we were impressed by the intricate canal system designed ages ago to allow equal irrigation access to all families. Every 10 meters or so there was a downspout dammed with a melon-sized rock and a pair of underwear to hold back the leaks. Star towers across the canyon mark where the stars have to "move to" in order for the next rock-underwear combo to be undammed and the current one plugged up again.

Also in the village we found evidence of what had become of the goats who had not been smart enough to take to the hills before Eid. Dark blood had soaked into the gravel and pavement througout Misfat and, as we walked past the remains of each puddle, shooing away the flies, Laura announced, "Ooooo, there's another Halal slaughter for Eid."

5.) No Rest for the Wicked
We ended the Eid hoilday with a Hindi Moviethon at Laura and Benjamin's place that lasted until 4 a.m. We brushed our teeth with our fingers and slept on their floor, only to have Tehva waken us all at 8 a.m. She bounced through their apartment as if she had slept 14 hours the previous night, forcing me to once again weigh up the relative merits of Ridalin.

We get to do another Eid after Ramadaan (next August), which is fortunate as we all are exhausted after this one. Pictures coming soon.

Kids' Games

In our first weeks in Oman I attended church regularly. It was a cross cultural experience, perhaps the cross-culturist experience I have ever had, and involved lots of people dressed in colorful clothing, speaking a Babel tower of languages. We had the Western women dressed in pumps and skirts, chatting in refined English, rubbing elbows with the women wrapped in saris, speaking a multitude of Indian languages and dialects. Next to them were the men wearing khakis and going on in German, jostling into the men wearing long African style shirts over loose, billowing pants, speaking French.

The first Friday church service I went to (Friday being our Sunday here) involved flags and dancing. The second was fairly straightforward. The third was a service of raised arms and hallelujias. All quite different from what I am used to without a doubt, but we went nonetheless (sans Tony after the flags, as he suspected that sacrifices might be on the agenda for the next week).

In the second week there was a call for volunteers to help run an event called Kids' Games. Billed as an event to help rid the world of heathens through sports and fun for kids, I jumped right on board. I wasn't so concerned about the heathen hoardes as I was about getting a day of socialization in for my poor homeschooled children. I was assigned a job as game facilitator, given a whistle, and asked to attend an organizational meeting the following Tuesday.

On Tuesday evening I rolled into the parking lot 15 minutes late as traffic toward Muscat had been especially heavy. No worries, though, as the meeting had not even begun yet. However, twenty others were sitting in neat rows in front of Aaron the Coordinator, who was calling off names of the volunteers who had not bothered to show to be organized at this meeting. As I walked in he checked my name off the list. "Now we will not have to call Rachel's name again." And then he giggled. The other twenty tittered.

This did not bode well.

After ten minutes more we moved into what I believed was to be the meat of the meeting--job assignments. I had arrived thinking that my whistle had made me a game facilitator automatically but not so--at this meeting women were turning in their whistles left and right in exchange for jobs either working registration or first aid. By the time I left an hour and a half later we had a room full of registrars and ad hoc nurses surrounding three game facilitators--me and two other suckers.

Oh no.

Aaron went on to reveal the things about which we should be most concerned as volunteers: that we would be working with over 200 kids, that we should pray especially hard for the 30 of them who were Muslims or Hindu, and that we had to let them all know that, if they lost a game, Jesus would still love them. My American brain really really wanted to hear about a schedule of events, arrangements for parking for the 200 parents who would be dropping off kids, how the three toilets in the church would accomodate the potty needs of so many, and how the kids would be organized.

Instead I got to play a practice round of the game I would be facilitating: Touch the Tail. In spite of the suggestive name, the game involved nothing more that forming two congo lines, tying a silk tail to the person in the back of the line, and then keeping the two lines intact long enough for one team to manage to touch the other team's tail without letting go of one another. My team lost in that practice round. I hoped Jesus was loving me.

Predictably enough, on the day of the event, organization was an issue. Lunch came late, no one knew where to go, kids wandred aimlessly between the game venues, and the martial arts exhibition was a disaster (who would have thought that a bunch of Christians would be so ticked about someone teaching them how to maim someone with a fountain pen?).

Silas contracted a rash from the iron-on decal on the event t-shirt, Tian complained that the kids on her team were rude and disrespectful, and the friend I had invited was roped into volunteering while her kids played the games. I fumed at the amount of standing around I was doing and swore I would never volunteer for this kind of poorly organized foolishness again.

But then the kids got to me. Most of the attendees were either Indian or Fillipino and began to call me "Auntie", as in, "Please, Auntie, will you help me get my hat adjusted?" or "Auntie, where should I go for my next game?" Silas cried and was comforted by a woman who said very gently, "Come, come, let Auntie help you. May I know your good name?" They walked off into the distance with Silas curled lovingly into her side. Tian, who was on the Ghana team, learned that, if pronounced with a British accent, "Ghana" rhymes with "banana", and spent the day cheering for her team, the "Ghana bananas".

And a good time was had by all. Especially the bananas.