My desert family

This past week has been a whirlwind, but during the crazy storm I found comfort in the realization that the people I work with out here are like family.

My school had a huge accreditation visit we have been planning and preparing for for weeks. Then suddenly last week my grandma passed away.  It is so hard to be so far away from everyone and everything you love during such a difficult time, and at the same time having to finish the inspection.

But, it was during this time that my friends here stepped up and supported me in the same way a family would.  From booking my flight home, teaching my classes, cooking for me, and even driving me to the airport at midnight on a work night. Teaching overseas is very difficult when things like this happens. Things you never would have expected.  What can make or break your experience is the people.  I am extremely fortunate enough to have what I call my "desert family" here. So when these tough times come and all I want is to be home, I am not alone.

For those of you reading this who are thinking about working abroad don't let this deter you. Rather let it serve as a reminder to think about the unexpected, and to never leave home without telling your loved ones how much you care.

I am now sitting in the UAE airport headed to a much different destination than I planned for my Eid break. But, as unfortunate as the circumstances are and as much as I long for my family I am grateful for the community here in MZ.

Shamsa's Wedding: A Traditional Emirate Experience

Last weekend I decided to stay in Madinat Zayed (the town that I am actually living/teaching in) and try to relax, get some work done, and most importantly save money. But, after a long week of work me and some of the girls decided to go get pedicures at a small salon in town. It was there that we met a lovely woman named Shamsa who invited us to her wedding the next day. At first we thought “this is crazy who would go to a wedding where they barely know the girl” as well as “we have nothing to wear!” Yet, one of the ladies who had been to Emirate wedding before convinced us to go. She brought us all to her house where we had what seemed like a fashion show with all of her dresses. And after assuring us that we could wear cocktail dresses and show our shoulders and knees we were ready to go for the next day.

When we showed up to the wedding we were in for a shock. The bride’s family is known to be the more relaxed laid back family in the UAE. But, she was marrying into a very conservative family. But, I am getting ahead of myself. Let me give you a little background on what an Emirate usually looks like:

1: The men and women have two separate parties not even near each other.

2: The women eat, drink tea/coffee, dance, and don’t wear their traditional abayas.

3: The dress for women is ball gown/prom dress status. Since there are no men if you got it flaunt it.

4: The bride sits on her “throne” and doesn’t speak, eat, or dance.

Now when we walked in we saw half of the women in their Abaya’saa and the full covering Sheila’s that cover everything but their eyes. The other half were wearing the sexy, revealing, ball gowns. It was very easy to separate the grooms female family members to the brides. After what seemed like an eternity of very loud Arabic music and lots of food! The bride finally entered with a few of her brothers. All the women covered up again. And they escorted her to her “throne.” After they left the dancing, music, and pictures picked up again.

There was an older lady at our table who had about 8 plastic grocery bags that she was filling with the food platters that they served our table! It was so gross because she was getting food everywhere. It just shows though the generational gap. When this woman was growing up they all lived in tents and lived of very little food. So, she still hoards food.

After watching all the dancing and the food hoarding at our table we all covered up again and the groom and “groomsmen” came in. They took pictures with the bride. Threw money to the crowd. Then the groom took Shamsa home. The poor guy looked so nervous and uncertain it was cute. Everyone else stayed to dance (women only) but we left after Shamsa did.

I am really glad that I took advantage of that wonderful opportunity that was dropped into my lap. It is good to say no sometimes, but when in a new place with new people what reason could you ever have for saying no to a new cultural experience?

Miss! Miss! Miss!

Halfway through week one already. The first day of teaching flew by and the second made me question why I ever wanted to be a teacher. Then today I got over what the teachers here call the "first week hump" where you absolutely hate teaching the entire first week, and the students are so wild that they make you question why you ever wanted to be an educator in the first place.

Let me tell you a little about my students. First of all they always say "Miss! Miss! Miss!" very loudly all the time. They are starved for attention and praise and so they all fight for my attention and love positive reinforcement. There are some students who are at a grade 7 level and then there are some who don't know how to write complete sentences in English. It will be a challenge to differentiate the lessons for that big of a gap but, it will be exciting at the same time! The boys and girls are so different though for example:

The boys are very loud, energetic, and honestly just drain the energy out of you! Some people misinterpret their behavior as misbehavior and being "bad" students. But, I've found that while I don't get the same respect that the male teachers receive (they are much quieter and calmer for men) they honestly want to please me. And they do their work, they just do it with more noise than most US students would. Yesterday, I had to have a very serious talk with all the boys classes about their behavior and how they refused to quiet down for me. At the end of my rant they were all apologizing to me and today they apologized again and behaved splendidly. They are very sweet and always asking me if I need help carrying stuff and showing off their work for me almost in competition for praise.

The girls are the opposite of the boys. I walk into class and they quiet down immediately. They want to learn so badly and are always smiling and wanting to share everything with you. I simple noted that I needed to get markers for their resource boxes and the next day the girls brought in enough markers to fill several classes resource boxes! They are very generous girls.

I am excited for things to slow down into a routine soon so I can begin to breathe and enjoy this new country I am living in. I haven't even had time to take proper pictures of my compound, or the school. But below are a few of my classroom, my apartment, and some of the things I've seen so far sights I've seen so far.

My Classroom before....

The balcony/viewfrom my apratment

These guys ride in the backs of trucks everywhere!

Camel crossing

Headed to the race track

All of these are little shops inside the Co-Op which is similar to a saturday market.

Perfume stores are EVERYWHERE here. And they make their own very strong almost overbearing perfumes.

The hallway of my apartment building :)

math wall

Since other teachers are in my room when I am not teaching this is my little office next to my class.

The girls hallway of the school

The school courtryard. (every school has one of these and there are three schools on the campus)

So the building on the right is the "male campus" (school I'm at) gym and then the ones in the front are the elementary campus and the pool for the male campus.

All the building that you see in the background are part of the Glenelg school. Every campus (Elementary, Male, Female) have their own gyms, pools, and school buildings.

The tennis courts and then in the background is the sports hall where us teachers play games after school.

Other parts of the huge campus.

My apartment

My day in a nutshell

I am finally done living the life of luxury at hotels! I moved into my apartment last Saturday and it is really nice to have a place to call my own. There isn't much to update or tell you about since my first day because since then I have been so busy with working. My days look like this until school starts:

6:00 wake up and get ready
7:00 wait for the bus or my roommate (she has a car!)
7:30-7:00: Professional Development meetings and trying to get my classroom decorated from scratch
7:00-11:00: Cutting out copied, laminated decorations and teaching tools or attempting to create my curriculum.

So basically, I work all day till I fall asleep. But once school starts it will hopefully slow down. I am going in to the school this weekend to finish up everything. Nothing has slowed down enough for me to realize that I am actually doing this. And I have a feeling it will be like this for quite a while ;).

First day as a Teacher!

Wow. Overwhelmed. Anxious. And Excited. Today was my first day at work! After everything it finally hit me that I am teaching here. And I am more excited than ever now after hearing out nice it is here for us teachers. I never teach more than 26 periods a week. I have a teaching assistant. I get paid all 12 months of the year. And the kids are amazing. It is much more cushiony than any job in the states. I especially loved getting to know everyone and actually witness the overwhelming generosity of the teaching community here. If I was nervous about making friends before I am not worried about it anymore. I got very lucky to be at the school I am at with such a great principal and community that even though it is in the middle of nowhere everyone stays. There are only 15 new teachers and that is with adding an entire new grade. 15 new teachers out of a staff of over 170! That says good things about the school if everyone wants to stay.

We arrived and had a short orientations with all the returning teachers and then a tour of the school. Which is HUGE! It is actually three school campuses because each school is designed to eventually hold a male 6-12 campus, a female 6-12 campus and a mixed elementary campus. The campuses each have to have their own pools, gyms, ect. because ideally the boys and girls in the upper levels are not supposed to ever see each other. This year it is a little different because it is only 6-7 who would be separated and there are not enough students to take up each campus, and the elementary school doesn't have enough room for the grades 4 and 5. So the "male" campus is where I am at and it holds all genders grades 4-7.

The classroom setup is completely different this year than in the states because of the difficulties with having boys and girls in one building but not allowing them to see each other. So I will go to each homeroom class and teach language arts; essentially I am a roaming teacher. Then my classroom (my homeroom) has 28 girls which is actually the entire female 7th grade class will stay in my room throughout the day and their other teachers will come to them to teach them the other subjects. So the male teachers can enter the female part of the building and I can enter the male part to teach our subjects but that is it. This means that my room is my room and not my room. It will be hard to adjust to this idea of roaming around to other homerooms to teach but next year when 8th grade is added it will be set up like a normal middle school where the kids come to your classroom not the other way around.

After what seemed like a very short orientation I stayed after school and played a few hours of volleyball with new and returning teachers. One of the teachers, Vinny, then offered to drive some of us back to our hotel and even stopped at the grocery store so we can have food for the next few days. We commented that we wished we knew what our apartments would look like so he took us to his fiances apartment and she showed us what they will look like which got us very excited. He then took us all back to the hotel and bought us each a drink at the bar and sat and answered all of our million questions (and yes there are a million more after orientation than before) patiently. It got me more excited than I was before to meet the students after he started talking about them so passionately. I heard several times that the 7th grade girls that I get every day are the best class in the entire school. No one has ever had a negative thing to say about them which makes me very excited to meet all of them.

All in all my experience here is getting better and better as the days go on. I am tired of living in hotels out of suitcases, but the beautiful view here can't be beat. We see camels every day and just miles and miles of untouched sand dunes out where the hotel is. Back in town you don't get to the that natural beauty of the desert.

P.S please excuse the grammatical errors in these posts. I know I am now an English teacher and should be perfect but I am writing these very late at night and after long days so please find room to forgive me :) And I promise once I have a few consecutive hours to post photos of the hotel I am at, the previous hotel experience, and the school I will!

Goodybye to Al Raha

I woke up today with one goal. To get all my medical tests, my paperwork, and my government mandated paperwork done. The company requires all of its employees go through an extensive medical test outside of the government mandated HIV test and xrays. So after 12 hours of fasting I showed up at the ADNOC health center and got my physical; which consisted of hearing, seeing, heart, blood, x-rays, and a typical physical check up. Then we had to run to get fingerprinting for our Emirate ID which they didn't tell us about when we were there the day before. And as I've been discovering here in the middle east there is no such thing as a clear outline or communication between the various places we are required to go. So we would go to one place for a paper, then they would tell us we had to go back straight from where we were for a different form. Needless to say after 8 hours and three malls (a lot of official buildings are located near or in malls) I had turned in everything to HR and I don't need to come back to Abu Dhabi to get all of it done like many teachers will need to.

It was nice to come back and not feel super exhausted. So I went and FINALLY got to enjoy the pool and beach area with some of the other teachers. I even got to swim up to the poolside bar and have a drink! It was very refreshing and the first day here without a lot of humidity so I was finally able to get some better pictures! But this 5 star hotel vacation is at an end. Tomorrow morning they will bus us all to our campuses where we will once again be put into a hotel until our accommodations are ready. Then the exciting day that I've been waiting for comes and we report to work on Wednesday morning!!! I am sure it will mostly be orientations but regardless I am just excited to be in the school. They will give us our keys to our apartments but we are welcome to stay at the hotel free of charge until we buy the proper necessities for furnishing. My plan is to work Wed/Thur and then go into the city Friday with some teachers and buy what I need to move in Saturday. But as I am quickly learning here don't make plans. Because NOTHING and I mean nothing is concrete here in the UAE. Here everyone says "Inshallah" which means "if it is God's will" or basically saying if it is meant to happen it will.

It's been so nice today to spend time with the other teachers. Even if most of them are not at my campus it has been really fun to meet everyone and hear about all the places they come from. I will post pictures soon!

P.S This was written a day before I posted and that may happen alot while I am over here!

Ugh I even get sick here

So I planned on going sight seeing today or even just to the beach here at the hotel. But while I was out getting my hiv and xray test I developed a fever. Staying in this beautiful hotel and I haven't done much because I've gotten sick is pretty miserable.  But I know I start work on Wednesday so I have to work on being better by then. I just keep telling myself there will be plenty of time to come explore Abu Dhabi later. I have one more medical early tomorrow morning then I am ready to go!

It was interesting to experience the different lines for men and women in government buildings today though. Walking in to get my x ray and hiv test the mens sections was crowded noisy and chaotic. When we went upstairs to the women's sections it was sooo much calmer, quieter, and faster! I think the separate lines thing will work out in my favor!