Happy Merry Christmas

Nothing is more wearying than being reminded regularly that we are living in a volitile, dangerous part of the world, where holy soldiers lurk around hidden corners, conspiring to off us at the drop of a hat. It is not the American embassy that is giving us dire warnings, but folks back home. Most exhausting of all is to have well-meaning individuals who have no experience in this part of the world tell us what danger we are in by staying here.

Christmas has brought out more words of caution than usual, as if the birth of the Little Lord Baby Jesus evokes not only joy for the season, but paranoia as well. Friends back home warn us to watch our backs, keep the children close, take different routes in getting to and from work, and to NEVER give out our phone numbers or addresses to strangers. Duh.

Just to put inquiring minds at ease, here is what Christmas looked like here in Al Mawaleh, Muscat, this year. Christmas Eve saw lots of action in the neighborhood with well-wishes from the neighbors who wanted to know what we were doing for the holiday. We received cheery "Happy Christmas"es from many people whom we knew only by face.

The real fun began with the arrival from Sohar of our friends K and G, and Baby H. They arrived bearing dates (because what would a holiday celebration be here without dates?), gifts, and goodwill toward man. In the evening, more friends arrived for an early dinner in order that everyone could make it to church in time for the Christmas Eve service. However, lamb, drinks, and laughs prevailed, and no one made it to church. Ah, well.

We were fortunate that my parents sent "Twas the Night Before Christmas" in order that we would be able to enjoy the annual reading of the tome. We opened the book and were delighted to hear Poppop's voice recorded, reading the story to us as we turned the pages. What's more, he included the usual disgusting deviations from Clement Moore's version, much to the delight of all the children who listened to it.

Christmas morning arrived with the consumption of the traditional saffron rolls (slightly burned of course as tradition dictates), the opening of stockings, and the annual Santa search. Santa DID come, as evidenced by the runner marks and reindeer prints left in the dust of the roof. The prints were deemed authentic by our panel of experts as there were absolutely NO shoeprints or footprints around the Santa marks, which means that the Santa marks could not have been fabricated by parents or other interested parties.

Breakfast was a disappointment as one cannot find chipped beef here, and everyone knows that a Christmas breakfast without chipped beef is not really Christmas at all. Instead we ate beef sausages, eggs with toast, and fruit salad, with a hefty scoop of of moaning and groaning throughout. I know, I know, we all must make sacrifices sometimes, and this was one of those times.

The gift opening segment of the morning was the usual excitement. No one received a pony this year, even though there is plenty of space for one in this house. Nor did we have any camels pop out of boxes. We did end the morning with the traditional scavenger hunts, with everyone finding some big loot at the end. Santa brought us a flat screen TV so now we are almost cool--it's not a very big flat screen, so that's why we are just "almost cool" instead of "totally cool".

As an added bonus, we got to celebrate Boxing Day this year, since we are surrounded by English speakers who go in for such things. Boxing Day involved shopping, beach time, drinking, napping, consumption of leftovers, and movie watching. Apparently, if we had employed a domestic we would have had to give her the day off, along with a Boxing Day bonus.

See, no holy wars, acts of unspeakable violence, or volatility here. We all survived the day and are fatter and happier for that. Merry Christmas to all. Sorry, we have been told that we should be saying, "Happy Christmas to all" from now on as that is the proper way to do things. And well wishes for the New Year, too!

Parent Failure

Everyone in Muscat knows The Clock Roundabout. It stands like a sentinel at a cross roads--go one way and you are on the road that heads toward the ocean, toward what is known as As Seeb. Go another and you will find yourself at the airport, or heading toward Nizwa or Sohar. And likewise, because everyone knows The Clock Roundabout, everyone knows exactly where we live, because we live so close to the The Clock that we can hear it chime the hour during the school day if we keep our window open.

At the base of The Clock, there is the lush, green Sahwah Park, well within walking distance of our house. It is built in a sort of triangle shape, with rounded corners. In one corner there are stables where the horses live that pull the carriage through the park each evening. In another corner there are a series of fountains that shoot color-tinged water high into the air, and another series of more gentle fountains that randomly bubble out of the ground. Within the borders of the park there are mazes carved from hedges, stairs bordered by thick beds of petunias, and acres of green grass. And in that third corner of the triangle there is a playground.

During the day, the park and playground are not open (unless you know where the fence has been cut and bent in order to allow admission...not that I would know something like that). But at 4 p.m., as the sun is going down, the park begins to burble with energy. The people come in hordes...women wrapped in black abayas, pushing a baby in a stroller; men in their cool white dishdashas, holding a child by the hand; the nanny toting along another, older child; another domestic carrying a picnic basket; a boy with a soccer ball and a giant woven mat. These groups enter the park and set up a camp for the evening and, once their space is set, the children run to the playground.

The playground is not just a set of swings and a jungle gym. This is a pair of play structures--the grand-daddy of all playgrounds, with slides so high that there is no way they meet any sort of safety code. The sides of the play structures are riddled with climbing hitches and half a dozen towers are connected by rope bridges. In the chalky darkness, children skip through the cool sand, playing soccer, running through the towers, screaming in the dark.

The park has recently loomed large in my children's realization that I am a less-than-perfect parent. I do not carry snacks. I do not carry anything to treat impromptu wounds. I do not haul entertainment, spare change, or water. In short, I am the anti-mother, and this situation has become unacceptable to Silas. When we go to the park, Silas expects that, when he is thirsty, I will have a bottle of water for him because he sees all these other well-prepared families with their overflowing picnic baskets doling out goodies to their own children. When Silas is hungry, he wants a snack to magically appear from somewhere within my proximity. In short, I am a disappointment to my chronically starving son.

Last night, we visited the park; after two hours we were ready to head home. Tehva and Silas were thirsty and I had nothing for them except for the promise of water when we arrived home. In her anger at my lack of vital supplies, Tehva attempted to step on the hems of passing women's abayas and Silas collapsed into a dehydrated heap every three steps. "But I am THIRSTY!" **collapse** **stomp** "Mom, I need WATER!" **collapse** **stomp**

In the confusion of the masses around us, the whining messes next to me, and the Arabic language program being blasted from the speakers in the trees (Am I in China?), a blanket of self-doubt wrapped itself about my brain. "What am I doing?" I thought..."I am frickin' in the Middle East with three kids who are not in school. I am surrounded by people whose calves I have never seen and probably will never see. It is nearly Christmas and we are still running around in short sleeves. The people around me have their children dressed in scarves, hats, and down jackets even though the temp is in the 70s. This is ridiculous. What are we thinking being here?"

This self-doubt that comes and goes when adjusting to a new place has finally come to me. It will evaporate as quickly as it has come and I will emerge a person with a new attitude and understanding. And maybe then I will also know how to carry a bottle of water for poor Silas. Whatever.

Rolling Rolling Rolling

Tehva's teacher approaches me with her face drawn in concern. Her skin shines like chocolate pudding, although there is nothing yielding or soft about her demeanor. She is a force to be reckoned with and Tehva's stubborness is no match for her. Deep in my heart, I think Tehva should go live with her until she turns 16 and then, when she is more manageable, I might consider taking her back. "Tehva cannot roll her Rs," Teacher announces.

"Do you mean in Arabic?" I ask. Arabic has more than its fair share of sounds that English speakers normally never would consider legitimate noises to be made in polite company. There is even one letter that we refer to in our household as "Spit". It's the H-sound that you make way down in the base of your throat. See, now doesn't "The Letter Spit" explain it so much more succinctly?

"No, not in Arabic. In English. She cannot roll her Rs." I consider this statement and quickly cycle through the catalogue of sounds that we use each day in English. Rolling Rs is not one that pops into my mind. Have I ever rolled an R in English? Nope, don't think so. Should I let Teacher know that? She is not a native English speaker, although she a is a fluent speaker...maybe she is not aware?

And so I blurt out, "Well, in American English we do not roll our Rs. This is a new sound for her."

Teacher does not respond but instead glares and then turns her back to me. She returns to redirecting four-year-old Mohammed, who is holding his pencil like a switch blade, trying to write his name in English. Even if he cannot hold a writing implement without looking like he is about to commit a major crime, I'll bet he can roll his Rs.

"Mohammed, what are you doing? This is not how we hold our pencil. Look, Mohammed." Teacher points to a giant poster of a hand gripping a pencil in the approved manner. Mohammed looks at the THE HAND solemnly and then goes back to his labored name writing.

"Perhaps you could work with her on rolling her Rs at home." I want to snort at this obvious attempt at humor and then see that Teacher is not trying to be funny at all. So instead of making rude noises I try to picture myself skipping about the school room between math lessons and writing assignments, rolling my Rs in English words that should not roll at all--Rrrrrrrobot, Rrrrrurrritan, Rrrrreverrrrie. "Yes, we will do that," I resond and then pack Tehva up to head back to the Marble Mansion.

I spend the next week very puropsefully never rolling my Rs and, in my deception, I feel a tinge of guilty before the feeling slips away.

A week later Tehva will not stop rolling her Rs. She began rolling them spontaneously and constantly repeats, "Amerrrrican, Amerrrrrican, Amerrrrica. Arrrrrba, Arrrrrba, Arrrrrba," as she skips through the bedrooms on the second floor. She pats her shoulders and says, "Butt, butt, butt." She pats other body parts and pronounces their names in Arabic, too. All of the words she has chosen to practice (with the exception of "butt") have rolly Rs in them, but the only word I have retained is "Butt". I know, grow up.

Teacher smiled at me this morning when I dropped Tehva off for her 8 a.m. Arabic class. Tehva is the token Whitie in the class, studying her body parts, chanting snippets of the Quran, and rolling her Rs with the other little Omani kids who surround her. Teacher was pleased today that we worked so hard on rolling the Rs as Tehva can now keep up with everyone else when it comes to Rrrrrrrrrrrr. Whew. She can finally speak English properly.

Go Churrrrrrrrtle Go.

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.

Being Hosted

We opened sheets of newspaper and lay them overlapping to cover Mr. Achir's carpet. He apologized profusely as we did so, not about eating at a table made of newspaper but about us having to endure his housekeeper's cooking for this impromptu meal. "My wife is not here to cook for the children tonight and the housekeeper's cooking? Well, I don't know."

I had watched the housekeeper earlier dig balls of dough from a steel bowl and roll chippatis, an Indian flatbread. She had looked competent enough to me, simultaneously drizzling ghee (clarified butter) around the dough as it bubbled and rose in the cast iron skillet, monitoring the pressure of the ghosh (mutton curry), and setting up a pot of rice.

Mr. Achir bustled back and forth from the kitchen with bottles of water and big bowls of fluffy white rice. Then he followed with a bowl of ghosh, thick with brown gravy, and a heaping bowl of sauteed and spiced and shredded cabbage. Finally he set a smaller bowl down on the newspapers and, full of pride, announced, "My wife made that one. Green chile curry. It is a little spicy so maybe it is not fit for the children. Come let's eat!" I could make out some small green chiles and peanuts swimming in a dangerous looking red sauce, topped with more of the melted ghee.

We filled the dishes for the children while Achir chastised us for being so stingy with the size of our servings. He piled buttery chippati after chippati on our plates. His own children began to eat, left hands tucked neatly in their laps, right hands fully engaged in the art of mixing rice with sauces and gravies.

Tian dantily ate from her spoon, but Tehva stopped short. "Chinja is eating with his hands." The only thing missing from her observation was an, "Oooooooo! He's in trouble!" but her tone definitely suggested that she was expecting a spanking to follow shortly for seven-year-old Chinja.

As Tehva watched Chinja's deft one-handed eating, she dropped her spoon. Truth be told, the dishes looked even more delicious as Chinja mixed and pinched, and then neatly shoveled his food into his mouth. "Can I do that, too?" And before I could even respond Tehva was mixing and shoveling, too.

Silas silently eyed Tehva, Chinja, and Chinja's sister, Ruksana, and then put aside his fork. "Mom, I'm going to use my hands," he stage whispered, as if preparing to dive off of a cliff or wrestle a crocodile. If it is possible for a seven-year-old boy to look awkward eating with his fingers, Silas fulfilled that possibility. He gradually doubled himself over, all the while shoveling rice into his mouth, until his chest rest solidly on his criss-crossed legs. Then he folded tighter, his face just a few inches off his plate. Finally he decided to lay on his stomach and close that precarious inch between his plate and his mouth. Bad manners? Probably.

We wiped up the last of the gravy with the chippatis only to have Achir throw more chippatis at us. "No, no," I protested. "You're making me fat!" As fast as I could eat those buttery flatbreads I was finding more food on my plate. Then I remembered. Stop eating--leave things uneaten. As painful as it was to American sensibilities, I took a bit of mutton and a bit of cabbage, played with it, and let it be. No more chippatis came flying in my direction.

As we walked out the door later in the evening, the kids were astonished. "Wow! That was the best day ever and we didn't even know them at the start!" It was true. All three kids had been there since early afternoon and had been entertained, fed, entertained, fed, entertained and fed again. "The only thing better than lunch was dinner! That was amazing! And we had such a good time! We did they do that for us? In the United States that would never happen!"

I tried to explain cultural differences to Tian and Silas. I tried to explain the concept of karma and how some believe that good deeds come back to revisit those who lay a path of kindness. I talked and talked but in the end they set their own conclusions.

They decided that Mr. Achir and his family are good people and no longer strangers to us. And boy can they lay out a mean dinner spread.

Human nature leads us to make generalizations--sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. and I let them generalize away on this one. This is what they now believe--people from India are so nice--that equals out to more than 1/5 of the world's population being full of kindness!

What a nice mindset to have achieved in the course of just two meals and an afternoon of play.