Vampires

I've been thinking about vampires recently. I've been trying to keep things unplugged, but it's difficult because it looks so messy and sometimes, I trip over the cords because they're on the ground. (No one said I was coordinated.)

When I lived in the Middle East, outlets looked like this:

Oh, the simplicity!

Why on earth don't we have these in North America? It's like our whole culture is designed around the idea that because we have so much land and prosperity, everything is unlimited.

Choueifat

I went to a private school while I lived in the United Arab Emirates. It wasn't just private, though. It was a corporate chain of private schools.

It's a difficult concept to wrap one's mind around, that schools could be chains in the same manner as a local Pizza Hut. But that's how it was. My school had four branches in the UAE, and many more around the world. The original branch, the flagship location, if you will, was located in Lebanon. For this reason, the school's primary language of instruction was English, but it also had rigorous French and Arabic components.

At least, that's what I assume about the Arabic classes. I was never able to take any Arabic there, because the class was limited to native speakers of Arabic. Conversely, only one native Arabic speaker was in our French class, and she told us that the school gave her mother a hard time every fall about enrolling her children in French instead of Arabic. From her mother's perspective, her kids already spoke Arabic fluently, so she wanted them to learn a new language. My friend was a strong pupil and did pretty well in French, so I assume the school's problem with this was that it violated their system of severe rigidity.

This rigidity came from the chain's underlying philosophy, the SABIS Educational System. SABIS came complete with propaganda in the main offices about how awesome it was, and how we were all going to be better students because of it. They would hang up the university admissions of various students to make their point in display cases.

The point of SABIS seemed to be giving us students lots of tests. Supposedly this would alleviate our test anxiety in the future, but I still have text anxiety, and the effect was that our teachers would teach for these multiple choice tests, and we never did any projects. We never wrote papers, or did research, or presentations. I'm not even sure if we could have, because our school library was so limited. It was just endless tests. There was the AMS, which was three times a week, and multiple choice. There were the weekly examinations, starting in Gr. 5. For younger students, there were monthly exam periods, which came as quite a shock when we first moved to the Middle East when I was starting Gr. 3. I still question the logic behind testing such young children. We spent so much time doing exams instead of learning.

In Gr. 3, I was firmly turned against this system by an English exam. The topic was Cinderella, which we'd been reading in class, and we were supposed to answer the crossword-style questions about it by filling in the crossword. In this version, Cinderella wore wooden shoes that the fairy godmother turned into the glass slippers. The clue was, "Material of Cinderella's shoes before the fairy godmother changed them." The spot on the crossword had six blank spots, but the answer was wood, right? Her wooden shoes were made of wood. But wood only had four letters.

I wrote wood, erased it, and then wrote it again. I stared at the question in confusion, not really knowing what to do. Eventually time ran out, and I'd gotten that question wrong when it was handed back.

My mother has always put undue academic pressure on my siblings and I, and she was very angry about my ostensible poor performance on this test. (I think I got 19/20. All our grades at that school were out of 20.) She complained, and she wasn't allowed to speak to the actual teacher, because that just wasn't done at our school. So the staff in the main office informed my mother that the correct answer was wooden, not wood.

My mother accepted it because English is her second language, and I'm sure that they were pretty condescending to her for reasons I will write about later, but I'm still annoyed about it. The text from the story referred to her wooden shoes, but how did it not follow that the shoes were made of wood? It now seems symbolic of their general rigidity that they wanted the students to directly quote the text at the expense of linguistic accuracy, instead of making the very simple mental leap from wooden to made of wood.

An Intro to Two of Seven Emirates

My brother posted this article on my Facebook wall, and it's definitely been some food for thought.

You can see Al Ain off in the middle of nowhere, right up on the Oman border.

We moved back from the UAE more than ten years ago now, and the Dubai described in the article is in many ways unfamiliar. Back in those days, there was no palm-shaped island. There was no Harvey Nichols. There was no Burj Al-Arab. The largest mall in Dubai was the newly opened (and not quite complete!) City Centre, with its Ikea and massive, amusement park-like food court.

Dubai was where everyone went to shop in those days. There was no mall in Al Ain, and it was difficult to come across the simple things that everyone in every small crap town in North America takes for granted in those pre-internet days... like the newest English CDs and books. Dubai had an English radio station that played Rick Dees' weekly top 40 show, and that was basically the only exposure you got to the occasional rock song. The more privileged among us had MTV Europe instead of MTV India, but that still involved less rock and more techno.

You could go to the beach there, and the water in those days wasn't filled with sewage, like the article claims. My youngest brother loved to stand near the water and let the tide wash over his feet, though, and after a day at the beach, his feet were always black with oil. The atlas that my father had brought back for me from a business trip to Canada showed me that the Gulf Sea was choked with oil pollution, so I assumed that it was the whole sea that was dirty.

I've been told that they've recently built a virtual wall of buildings along the beach in Dubai, effectively blocked off the rest of the city from the ocean breeze. In my mind, that makes Dubai much more like Abu Dhabi, which is an island of overgrown skyscrapers in a desert country. In Abu Dhabi, there was no breeze, and the light would reflect off the skyscrapers into the street, baking the asphalt. There were no trees because it was the desert, but it was painfully humid because it was an island. The heat clung to you like a living object, and the air was literally thick with the humidity - you could feel it. Stepping outside of a vehicle or building was like walking into a physical wall of heat. Your clothes and hair would stick to you, and the heat seemed unbearably inescapable.

Al Ain was better. It was out in the desert, away from the ocean, but it was also an oasis, so it was full of parks. The summer temperatures were actually higher than in the larger coastal cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but since the air was dry, it didn't stick to your body in the same fashion. I don't know if we really appreciated how lucky we were in that regard. We were tweens, busy being bitter that we were disconnected from the rest of the world because we had to go to Dubai to buy a fashion magazine. Because I was a nerd, I was also bitter that I couldn't go to Space Camp, and that I couldn't look things up whenever I wanted to, because there was no public library. It's kind of mundane, really. I didn't hate it there because it was fake, or because I felt like it was a con game. I hated it because it was intellectually limiting.

I did see some of the darker side of things, though. As a child, there wasn't really much that could be done about it, and I didn't personally know anyone who told me the kinds of stories of victimization that Hari writes about in his article. He also seems to leave out a whole class of people, drawing lines between the local Arabs, the migrant workers from the subcontinent, the Phillipines, and apparently Ethiopia now, and rich, white expats from Western countries.

There's no mention of the families from the subcontinent who have lived there for decades with no rights in terms of citizenship. There's no mention of Western expats of colour like my family, or like my classmate's family, a black American girl. There's only a passing mention of the residents from other Middle Eastern countries who have settled there... and nothing of the many Baha'i residents that fled Iran to settle there. There's just so many different facets to discuss.

I've tried to determine how many of the differences can be explained simply by my living in the emirate of Abu Dhabi as opposed to Dubai, but it's still the same country. So I thought I'd write it myself, and add some of my own analyses. I'm not the greatest writer, but in this case, I have plenty of source material.