I Don't Eat That

Silas has learned how to read labels and in that learning he has become, well, somewhat intolerable.

So we were starved creatures one day while we were in Virginia, having just finished an exhausting tramp through the local library. The cure is to get a snack, obviously. However, as quickly as I could put yummy snacks into the basket, Silas tore them out again.

"No, Mom, not this applesauce. I won't eat it."

"What? Okay. How bout some granola bars?"

"No."

"How about these nuts? Some juice? Crackers?"

"No, Mom. It all has high fructose corn syrup in it." He placed everything back on the shelf methodically but sternly, as if he were the newest Anti-Corn Syrup Enforcement unit. And finally, after nestling the last item--some lovely peaches in light syrup--back on the shelf, he gently sat down on the floor and buried his face in his hands. "I can't eat anything here!"

And he didn't. Somewhere along the way he blithely jumped onto the "I-don't-eat-high-fructose-corn-syrup" wagon and waved at us as it pulled away. I, however, was too busy doing something...something...who knows what. I never saw him make that jump until it was too late.

Our entire summer was spent with Silas sneakily reading labels and refusing the sweet stuff. At one point as he went whizzing down a gigantic hill in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he yelled, "I don't like the United States for eating but I love it for the bike rides! Yahooooooooo!"

So now we have returned to Oman, where finding much of anything that contains high fructose corn syrup is a challenge, and the boy is like a starved dog outside of a sausage factory. He sucks the air up in great greedy gulps, dissecting the odors that are all around us. "Oooo...I can smell curry. Oh, is that adobo? Mmmmm...I smell someone cooking rotis."

The air is thick right now with the heat and humidity of the end of summer, but the ocean breezes are starting to give us an occasional cooling puff and carry the smell of food far from the place it is cooked. This morning, in the quiet just after fajr...the dawn prayer...I was wrapped in a blanket of ocean air and then the breeze shifted and I was surrounded by the aromas of what smelled like Filipino food--garlic, vinegar, soy sauce, coconut oil. If Silas had been out with me, he would have left a trail of drool back to the house.

And it smelled like breakfast. But not the kind with corn syrup in it, for that would make the boy child cry.

German Lessons

Germany is closed on Sundays. This is what you learn when you fly with a six-year-old tyrant who has an earache and needs a strong infusion of ibuprofen. Or an attitude adjustment.

Germany is also a place that makes nine-year-old boys giggle because innocuous German words look like naughty English ones.

To go to Germany as a non-German-speaking-mother-turned-tour-guide was, as a good friend suggested, possibly one of the oddest things I have ever done. The internet was loathe to give up its secrets regarding what a family could do in Germany, aside from drink beer and eat sausages. While Tian was extremely eager to undertake the drinking of beer if only to secure bragging rights, I was not so enthusiastic about the proposition. Imagine.

So at first blush Germany did not promise much in the way of a good time for my accompanying minors, but the stopover was courtesy of the Sultan so stop we did, and learn I did. But I didn't run into Yoda.

Not surprising, my children had an agenda upon touch-down in Franfort. Item number one on their list was pork sausage acquisition. Within Frankfort Airport, aside from a small city's worth of pharmacies, grocery stores, and bookstores, is a sausage store that serves up grilled tubes of meat at all hours of the day.

Having forgotten that much of the Western world thrives on astonishing serving sizes we each ordered a plate of sausages with french fries. We also forgot that pork takes some getting used to after 9 months away from the stuff. That is as far as Tian could get on her plate. Sad stuff, I know.

A train ride out of the airport propelled us into the countryside before we could say "Sparkasse", and landed us in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

This was the most German town we four tourists had ever seen (outside of Germany at Busch Gardens Williamsburg) and we learned that it is the only town in Germany that has a chemist who is open on a Sunday and willing to sell painkillers for a six-year-old tyrant. We also learned the value of brushing teeth at least once in 24 hours, as well as what it takes to make three children look abandoned within the town square of any given European city. 

There is great value in sleeping on a stranger's floor, especially when that stranger also has a boy who loves to make fart noises and can play a mean game of war.

  This may have been the most powerful lesson that we learned in Germany, and the one I most want my children to take away from these years of being able to travel the world. Strangers are not strangers after just a few hours spent together. Imagine what would happen if we would require soldiers and generals from opposing sides of  any battle to have a sleepover. One evening spent making fart noises, running around in town, and eating spaghetti does so much to allow one person to know another.

We learned so much in Germany in 72 hours that our heads still spin with the experience, and when the once-stranger's mother and I mentioned that this arrangement we had undertaken--an American family sleeping peacefully on the floor of a German family--would not have been possible not so many decades ago, the children were baffled. Inconceivable. How could this not have been possible at any point in time? We had such fun.

And Germany does have a lot to do. Especially for families. Anybody up for a German excursion next summer?

Did You See That? Never Mind.

Seals. They lay around on flat surfaces. They make funny noises. And they must eat a lot judging from their size.

Silas. He lays around on flat surfaces. He makes funny noises. And he eats a lot. Obviously my son gives all signs and indications of being a seal. And yet recently he has begun to move away from sealdom and toward what may be a promising future in...noticing things. Sometimes. Okay, rarely. Maybe.

A few days ago, Tehva poured herself a bowl of Heart-to-Heart Kashi cereal. You know, the kind that resembles little hearts in structure and sweetened cardboard in taste and texture. As Tehva poured on the organic whole milk, rejoicing in her new found ability to fill a bowl to the rim without spilling a drop, tiny black bugs floated to the top.

"Ewwwww!" Tehva whined. "There are bugs in my cereal!" I gave Tehva a Tupperware and showed her how to skim the bugs off the surface and into the Tupperware so that she could chow down on a bug-free breakfast. (Of course she ate it! That was organic milk and that stuff ain't cheap!) Silas silently looked on and then uttered a single syllable: "Ew." See? He noticed!

And then we visited Jamestown National Park, nestled along the James River. We were all peering intently at an archaeologist screening dirt in order to find tiny bits, heads bent in concentration, knotted tightly in a group of tourists, when suddenly Silas screamed, "Whoa! Mom! Look!" Everyone paused and did a collective readjustment, squinting or bowing heads to look more closely at the dirt in front of us. "Look! A cargo ship! On the river!" What an observant boy.

And then there was the top of the hour news stories that we were listening to on NPR the other day. After the five minutes of talk about Syria, Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, and American troops, Silas sighed. "Why is this always about war?" Wow. He noticed and judging from his use of the word "always" he has noticed this trend before. I was nearly dancing in the driver's seat.

A Google search on "observation skills in boys" yields nearly one and a half million hits, so obviously someone other than Silas has issues with this. The first thought that comes to mind when I consider his inability to see any further in front of him than a video game at arm's length is to Google, "Ways to improve observational skills in boys." All of the solutions that surface are decidedly feminine and include sketching flowers, writing journals, and staring for long periods at photos of random individuals doing odd things like wearing umbrellas on their heads (my apologies to you men out there who enjoy such activities...I didn't say you were feminine...please keep your head. Er, heads?). And Silas is so not into any of those things.

My intention by doing this search, of course, was to find a way to incorporate observational skill development into this year's curriculum along with the thousand other things we all hope to incorporate in the school day. However, this past year I came to realize that in my little homeschool there is not enough time for everything I (or they) want to study, and that even if we really really want to study something, most days we are mentally finished by 2 p.m. And that's on a good day.

And so if anyone out there has any ideas about ways to develop observation skills in boys that don't involve flowers, sketching, writing long entries in journals, or bizarre photos, please let me know.

Fahal Island Swim Complete

Swimming is hard work and my body is not designed for it. Period. Or, as Tehva now likes to say, "Full stop." But, in the name of non-aerodynamic people everywhere, I decided to give this Fahal Island thing a go.

In the weeks leading up to the actual swim, info leaked down the chain to reach me and said information would either paralyze me with fear or lend a brief respite from the nerves: "My friend Mohammed says that he was fishing at Fahal Island last weekend and the waters were teeming with bull sharks!" This riveting story falls into the paralyzing category--bull sharks are known as vicious long-distance swimmer consumers, at least in my imagination.

"My friend Adel was out fishing near Fahal Island last weekend and he said the waters were full of jellyfish!" This allayed my nerves because I figured that bull sharks must hate jellyfish as much as I do and, thus, they would stay away.

"A few years back they cancelled the Fahal Island Swim because of ..." fill in the blank with a.) red tides; b.) choppy seas; c.) bull shark invasions. In fact, two days before the swim the sky over Muscat looked like this:

 and I thought, "Oooo, with those clouds I bet the seas around Fahal Island will be rough on Thursday. Maybe it will even be cancelled!" And yet Thursday dawned and the sea was like glass--somewhat choppy glass. Okay, it looked glassish between the teeny-tiny waves.

But there were no bull sharks evident and so I donned my highly attractive red swim cap and into the water I went,

along with 87 of my closest friends, only one of whom saw a shark. Kathy very wisely kept her mouth closed regarding the shark which, she later said, looked very confused about the sudden and unexpected presence of 5 power boats, 70 kayaks, one stand and paddle board, one canoe, and 88 humans 4 kilometers offshore. See the one with the goggles and red swim cap? That's Marlee, our "trainer". See the other one with the red swim cap and goggles? That's Nick. He backstroked the whole 4 km!

The Fahal Island Swim is a BYOKayak event (old lady sunglasses not required) and so I brought my own. Isn't he cute? If this were an endurance event in the USA, I would suspect that the requirement of a support boat was an avoiding-litigation thing. In Oman, I would suspect it has something more to do with safety, shipping lanes, and potential bull sharks. At any rate, finding my support kayak in the midst of the other 160 bobbing beings proved to be less of a challenge than I had been warned, mostly because no one else's kayaker was wearing granny glasses.

The swim, once it began, felt easy and smooth. The water was a perfect temperature. The "smell bands" that sometimes permeate the waters off the coast of Oman were absent that far out. Instead, my nose was filled with off-gassing from the brand new red swim cap I was wearing (required by the FIS organizers), the fumes from the support boat that was supporting two nearby swimmers, and the sudden need to vomit that overtook me about a kilometer into the swim.

I will spare you the gory details but simply add that it is possible to vomit in the sea and not drown while expelling one's...you get the picture, even though my kayaker didn't. Instead of photographing the vomit incident, he reportedly was waiting for me to drown and, at the same time, considering jumping to my rescue. This, however, would have endangered his old lady glasses and so he remained safely within his kayak.

Two hours on and I discovered that my plan to swim the right way had resulted in actually swimming the wrong way. In this photo you can see the point toward which I was told repeatedly NOT to swim.  But not to worry, it ended being a very scenic point to tootle around, and harbored all sorts of reef fish and a black and white speckled manta ray. 

Out of the water at 2 hours and 19 minutes. I finished in the bottom ten percent of the pack but I finished! No bull sharks sited.

Omanization

This country is going through the sometimes painful process of Omanization, and I have realized this because our toilets stink.

Now that the temperature of our tap water hovers at a steady 120 degrees F, the bacteria have taken over and the stink seems here to stay. On top of that, one of the pipes that connects the toilet to the wall (and ostensibly the plumbing system behind the wall) has begun leaking, leaving a sludgy puddle on the floor, and the shower plunger no longer works on the garden tub in the master suite.

As we are merely squatters here, we do not have to deal with these problems directly. Instead we can call the landlord, who is actually a very attentive guy, but who is not so talented with plumbing.

The landlord's solution to the toilet leak and chronic puddling was to come up, pinch the pipe a few times, and advise that we begin to turn off the water supply to the toilet tank when it is not needed, which means that the toilet doesn't get flushed as regularly as it used to, and that leads to more stink.

More stink led us to our friendly neighborhood Carrefour for more toilet cleaner, which we go through at a frightening pace. In the States in our little three bedroom rancher with one bathroom, we went through one bottle a year. Here we have gone through approximately 143 bottles since our arrival in Oman nearly two years ago.

So we were prowling through the aisles of Carrefour, sniffing the different toilet cleaner flavors when we drifted around the corner to the sugar aisle and found ourselves face-to-face with what looked a heck of a lot like a fellow American. "Are you British?" she asked in a lovely Mid-Western accent. "Because I just heard you say the word 'sugar' and you sound like you are British (can you really tell that from just the word 'sugar'?--apparently not) and I really need someone to tell me about all these different British sugars..."

We then stood for ten minutes, as one will, chatting about sugar crystals; however, eventually the conversation ambled, as it will in countries where a certain percentage of the population makes way too much money, to hiring a reliable driver here. She recounted her trials with her current-but-soon-to-be-fired Omani driver who spent the majority of his time fiddling with the automatic locks in the car, and his absolute inability to open the door for her or to accept the wages she offers. She finally threw her hands up and swore that she would next hire an Indian. They, after all, will open the door for an employer and happily accept those wages. And I guess they can keep their fingers off of the auto-lock button.

This begs the question, how much should one pay a driver who is on duty just until 2 p.m. and is only accountable for driving one expat oil worker's wife to the gym, social engagements, and the mall each day? Apparently not as much as the Omanis are asking.

Back to the house and fast forward four weeks, which brings us to today. A person who knows about plumbing is in the bathroom fiddling with the pipes and apparently having some success. He is not Omani, naturally. I have just returned from another ordeal at the grocery store, where the executives in charge of decision-making cannot decide whether they want to employ Omanis who are generally nightmarish at the registers but are, in the end, Omani, or they want to employ Filipinos, who are lovely and efficient at the registers but are decidedly NOT Omani.

Last week my checkout girl was Filipino. She did all the things we Americans like: she smiled and greeted me before she started scanning everything. She didn't stop to examine her nails half way through the job. She   didn't stop at any point to chat amicably with her BFF who just happened to wander up. She very ably scanned everything on the belt and did not bark at me to slide my own bag of flour/6-pack of sodas/insert- any-item-weighing-over-2-pounds here.

Today my checkout girl was Omani. It pained me to watch her scan my order, mostly because, before she scanned anything, she first asked me in Arabic, "Is this yours?" Then, in spite of my answer to the affirmative regarding the case of water, she refused to scan it as it was too big and heavy for her to move along the belt. Instead she told the man standing behind me to pick it up and hand it to me. I frankly am not sure if it ever got scanned. Such is the price of Omanization.

This is such a trigger topic and everyone here has an opinion. Of course it is necessary to have a population that is trained to take care of itself, even in the most rudimentary ways. The gas money will not last forever and, when it is gone, it will be up to the Omanis to fix their own toilets, scan their own groceries, sweep their own streets, flip their own burgers, repair their own cars, do their own ironing, clean their own houses, and raise their own children.

And yet, as we are witnessing here, these jobs make for dirty dishdashas and broken fingernails and as of right now no one in a white dishdasha or with a nice manicure seems to want to do them, which makes for lots of jobs for the rest of us. But only until the petroleum money is gone or until there is another political swing and it is decided once again to strictly enforce the employment of Omanis in jobs which they clearly don't want to do.

Long live Omanization. It makes for good entertainment at the very least.

Fahal Island Swim--No Sharks Allowed

Driving north to reach the beach is contradictory to an East Coast gal like myself. For the entirety of my growing up it was east to the beach with the sun rising over the Atlantic. Now, and I still can't get my head around this one, the beach is solidly situated to the north. Even writing this I struggle with the ocean being in the wrong place, but I am trying to move on. This may take counseling.

This impacts my thinking directly every Thursday morning as I pull myself out of bed at a ridiculously early hour and head north to the ocean. Although we are just mid-way through April, the sun has gone from friendly and warming to intense and blistering in what se

ems just a handful of days and, for as early as it is, it is just peaking over the buildings around our house--to the east, but not over the ocean. This feels wrong.

The drive to the Rat Beach (child-named for the gigantic rats that inhabit the riprap there) takes me east then north then east and finally north again. Always waiting there on a Thursday morning is what I could refer to as my "training group" but that would intimate that we are fit individuals and strong swimmers with rapidly improving times. In fact, taken as a group, we are all of those things, but individually none of us has managed to be all three of those things. However, in spite of our individual limitations, we are "in training" for this:

Fahal Island/Shark Island

It has been commanding my attention for almost two years, sitting temptingly off the beach in Qurm and, what luck, it plays host to an annual swim every spring. In spite of appearances, it is nestled 4 km offshore and my "training group" has determined that we will, in fact, be participating this spring because that is, apparently, the cool thing to do during the month of May.

Thus, as it has been decreed by the most senior members of our group, and as we have evolved into a tribal little group, in five weeks we will be swimming, at 6:30 in the morning, from Fahal Island to Qurm, along with 100 other individuals. It is said that some of those swimmers will take just under an hour to complete the distance. Unreal.

I am hoping to just complete the swim without being bitten by a sea snake or eaten by a shark, although that would make a good blog, wouldn't it?

School Photos

Teaching. It isn't the job it once was--0ne that came with a long-term pay off in the form of a guarantee of job security and a generous pension. As we were leaving Greensville there were daily reminders as to how the state of education was changing, with talk of reduced or cancelled pensions. The spring was lay-off season for the next school year. With each day leading up to the inevitable announcement of job cuts, the school felt more and more like a shark tank...the questions was always one of "Who will get eaten next?"

I felt like I was teaching constantly, which was ironic since my job was often one of support instead of one of pure instruction. When I wasn't teaching, I was running recovery for some crisis or another with a student (referred to as "putting out fires"). And when that wasn't happening, I was planning for what I would teach next. And when I wasn't doing either of those things I was recovering from teaching and putting out "fires". I liked the work and loved the students, but I found in the day to day schedule that I felt I wasn't really teaching much, and in the three seconds a day that I had free I would reflect upon the questions of "what is learning?" and "what does it mean to be educated?" and "why are we doing this anyhow?"

And then some other student would show up, a teacher would call, or a crisis would brew. And those questions would be set once again upon the back burner in favor of the more immediate need to respond to a parent who was looking for a translation, or to feed a child who hadn't eaten since the day before, or to help someone pass a benchmark test or a quiz, and there would be no more time to think upon such things as "why are we doing this anyhow?"

It took me months to rehabilitate myself after four years of the exhausting teach/extinguish-->plan-->recover-->teach/extinguish-->plan-->recover cycle. In retrospect, the absence of time to reflect upon why I was investing so many hours a week in something that didn't clearly justify such immense and intense energy was sapping. However, just this year, I am feeling like I have recovered enough to start to reflect on the whys of education again. This, of course, brings me no closer to an answer but at the very least I am feeling like I have the clarity of thought to entertain these questions once again, and that clarity of thought is affording a bit more freedom to move beyond pencil paper and look at the possibility of education away from what is conventionally thought of as education.

Last month we did the unthinkable and took a whole day off from school to travel to Nizwa, about an hour away, and study things unrelated to our regular course of study. We looked at dungeon designs and torture techniques in the historic Nizwa Fort.

We studied cultural differences in non-verbal communication and toilet signage.

We looked at big rocks and then climbed up and down them.

We studied armory and battle techniques.


And we practiced looking like punks in photos. It was quite the day.

The forced me to reflect back upon the last time I traveled anywhere with a large group of school-aged children, since we had traveled to get where we were, and all 11 of the kids were definitely of school age. I was teaching in Greensville and we had taken the entire second grade on the annual voyage to North Carolina to visit a life sciences museum. The museum itself went down a treat but two of the buses inexplicably broke down an hour from the Virginia border on the way back.


All 240 students were wonderfully patient and, even though countless baseball games, scout meetings, and church functions were missed, everyone was understanding. The museum was great fun, of course, and properly aligned to our science standards for the year. The kids were threatened within inches of their lives that they must behave properly in this public place and they behaved accordingly. It was a really nice field trip and went off without a hitch--more or less.


Now fast forward two years to the trip to Nizwa. It was totally unaligned with any suggestion of a standard that I might have been following. The kids ran and screamed like banshees through the dungeons, which were a health and safety nightmare with no lighting, extremely uneven flooring, and thick authentic chains hanging from the walls. There were no guard rails on the stairs but we managed to not lose a single attendee.


Tehva found the historically accurate toilets and went so far as to pull her pants down before I could stop her. No one read many of the well-written informational plaques. Many of the children nearly wet themselves with fright after they stepped on a motion sensor and triggered a recording of bomb blasts, meant to simulate this passage during a battle. No one signed a permission slip.


My teacher brain kept muttering that this was quite possibly the worst field trip I had ever coordinated, simply because there were no standards, no outcome goals, and no clear way to define what the kids had learned.


And yet, this is the trip they keep coming back to day after day in school on their own, without my prompting. They have painted pictures of the mountains surrounding Nizwa. Silas wrote a fictionalized account about a battle fought in nearby Tanuf after we visited the remains of the mud village there. They look at the photos and laugh at how goofy they are. They have looked on the internet for additional information about the "murder holes" we saw built into the side of Nizwa Fort, from which defending troops would dump boiling date syrup on intruders.


And throughout this spring I keep asking myself about the nature of learning and what it means to be educated, simply because we have done more of these types of trips this year and less of the worksheets and book work with which I had become more comfortable while in Greensville. I am sure that the quality of the education they are getting is enough, but does it allow for enough quantity? Muscat is a competitive place for quantity of educational input and, in comparison to the ones going to the gold standard schools here, I question what I am doing.


Many of the children around us attend the Choiefat School, which is known as "the test factory"--kids are hit with several tests every week. Their job is to study study study and then score high on these exams. Failure brings instant remediation classes. Others attending the Indian School here memorize large portions of text to prove their academic acumen. We do none of that (although Tehva has inadvertently memorized long sections of The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere this week) and sometimes I feel bad as a result. In comparison, what I am doing seems not enough, especially when we go joy riding off to Nizwa or other surrounds on a fairly regular basis.


At the end of each day I ask myself, after reflecting on the lessons du jour, "Did we do enough paper-pencil work today? Hmmm...not sure. We did do a bit away from the school room today. Hmmm...Maybe tomorrow we should really sit down and write for six hours straight. Does it really matter, when 13 years of primary and secondary education are done, whether one has been outside of a school building? Does it matter whether or not school has been undertaken as a paper-pencil experience rather than a hands-on one? What to do...what to do?"


The general feedback I get from people in reaction to hearing about these types of experiences we have undertaken in school this year is, "Wow...that is an amazing education those kids are getting!" Many of these people are other parents who say they wish their child was getting such a rich and varied education. And yet I wonder, what kind of education is it that they are getting? Yes, others are exuberant about what we are doing, and yet it often still feels like I am jumping off of a precipice when it comes to actually doing these things.


In the end, because I lack the enormous fortune it would take to enroll three children in the English-medium schools here (does anyone have a spare $60,000 to $70,000 just sitting around that they would like to roll my way?), this experiment in education will continue as, quite likely, will my anxiety level. Stay tuned.