From Cornfields to Deserts, Iowa Music Teacher's Visit to the Middle East: April 2015

Fourth quarter 2015

As I compose this blog, I glance over at my calendar and I can see that I have exactly 46 days until I board United Airlines for the first leg of my trip back to Iowa. I have been ticking off the days since January. I know I shouldn't do this because everybody says it just makes the weeks go even slower and they're probably right, but I do it anyway. We are down to the last seven weeks and yes, we can see that light at the end of a long, long tunnel. Before I came to Kuwait, I spent my entire career teaching in the Midwest. The last six weeks were filled with small group music contest, at least four concerts plus graduation and sometimes a Memorial Day performance. We were usually done a week after Mothers's Day. Here at UAS in Kuwait, school doesn't dismiss for summer vacation until about the third week in June. The weather is starting to get pretty warm and the dust has been flying. We are already in the triple digits. Now is the time that I have to self-motivate or the days will drag on and on. We teachers have long perfected the fine art of whining about getting through those last excruciatingly long days on the calendar. Time to get creative and pull out the "fun stuff" we've been holding back for when our students are restless and our tanks are running on empty. The last six weeks of the fourth quarter are not for the faint of heart! Time to dig in and take our students as far as they will let us before the lure of summer vacation snags us all in it's trap! June 18 will come and when it does I will still be standing!

Zulfikar, our very talented custodian from Pakistan

Something Got Lost in the Translation....

Living in Kuwait, there is always a problem of a language barrier. For most of my students, English is a second language and it is sometimes a bit of a struggle for them to express themselves. This is an even bigger problem for our large custodial staff who come mostly from India, Pakistan, and Egypt. Communicating with them is best done in very short declarative sentences and lots of hand gestures. If you read one of my earliest posts, you may remember that one of the challenges I faced when I came to UAS was trying to figure out what to do with a lot of accumulated junk in my classroom. I had an ancient electronic keyboard gathering dust in a corner. I had this great idea that if I could just remove the legs, I could prop it up neatly against the wall and then it would take up a lot less space. So the next day I brought my phillips screwdriver to work. I was determined to remove those legs myself! Well, try as I might, I only managed to loosen them, but I couldn't get them completely off. So I went down to the room where I can usually find one or two of the guys tinkering on some odd piece of equipment and asked Zulfikar if he could please remove the legs so I could store it easier. Zulfikar dug out his own screwdriver and came down to help me out. He wasn't having much luck either, so he took it down to the shop. Later that day, he brought it back, so proud that the legs were now reattached. It was a bit wobbly, but almost as good as new. I tried to explain that I had wanted them OFF because the piano no longer worked and I wanted to store it because the head custodian (who had previously declared the piano dead as the proverbial doornail) said that it could NOT be thrown out. So I filled out the proper paperwork to get it out of my room once and for all, set it outside my door and hoped for a miracle. It sat there as a curiosity for all the people who came past my door during the course following days. A week went by. Finally, one day I came to school and it had disappeared. A couple days later there was a knock on my door. I found Zulikar standing proudly next to this electronic relic from the sixties. It seems that when I told him that his boss had declared the keyboard beyond repair, he took it as a challenge to see if he could fix it. Now the "Little Keyboard That Could" has found new life in the band room as a part of their piano lab. Cue happy ending!

Wadi Rum

This is Part II of my Jordan vacation experience. The second leg of our journey took us to Wadi Rum. Wadi is an Arabic term traditionally referring to a dry riverbed that contains water only during times of heavy rain. Wadi Rum is about as far as a person can get from the black dirt and cornfields of Iowa. It is a magical place, a valley cut into the sandstone and granite rock once inhabited by the ancient Nabataeans who left their mark on this desert landscape in the form of petroglyphs left on sandstone walls. We spent a night under the stars in a tent in Wadi Rum. We gazed at the starry night and could make out various constellations and possibly a planet or two. The sunrise was spectacular.

Sunrise at Wadi Rum

Wadi Rum was once the land of Bedouins living in goat hair tents eking out a living herding goats. In 1916 under King Faisal, they played a major part in the Arab Revolt defeating the Turks and the German army. T.E. Lawrence was a British officer who helped train this rag tag group of goat herders into a a fierce group of soldiers who used their knowledge of the landscape to defeat an army much larger and more sophisticated than their own. This British officer later came to be known as "Lawrence of Arabia." The epic film of the same name was shot here on location in the 1960s. Red Planet and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen were also filmed here at Wadi Rum.

The goat hair tents are stil found in this desert, but most of the Bedouins who live in and around Wadi Rum make their living as guides and drivers for tourists as well as serious hikers and trekkers who are eager to experience this desert wilderness.

This is either Sharif Hussein of Mecca or his son Faisal who fought along side of Lawrence of Arabia during the Arab Revolt. This figure is carved into the sandstone at the camp where they made their headquarters.

Petroglyphs possibly used as an ancient roadmap by the Nabataeans, one of the first inhabitants of this region.