Marhaba Everyone,

Well, it's been quite some time since my last email. As most of you know, my father passed away unexpectedly in December, so without his emails to tell me "the natives are getting restless" and it's time for another email, I've gotten a bit lazy. Also, my internet isn't working at home, and it barely works at the school, so I'm typing this in Word in the hopes that I'll be able to get the internet to work long enough to copy, paste, and send it.

Word travels like wildfire in Saudi Arabia, so of course the entire school knew about my father's death. My students told me "I'm sorry for your loss," then quickly moved on to complain about the number of absences they accumulated while I was gone. I feel like I have been fighting nonstop with my pretty little princesses, who deem being marked absent when they are, in fact, absent to be "unfair." I've had several run-ins with plagiarism since I got back, but I'd like to share my favorite case. One of the classes I teach is the highest level communication class, and one of the goals of the class is to get the girls to work on "critical thinking," which is hilarious because they are, for the most part, incapable of such thought processes after years of brainwashing. Nonetheless, they have to listen to something, like a news report, and then write up some critical thinking about it. Areej listened to a track about women in the West wearing the hejab and niqab (the fabric that covers your face and head except for your eyes), and in her critical thinking section it said, "I must admit, when I teach, I get rather unnerved when my students are wearing a niqab." Say what?! I read on to learn that Areej, a Saudi born and raised in perhaps the most conservative Muslim city in the world, "was not raised Muslim. I am a Muslim convert." I actually started laughing. Not only did she turn in something she clearly didn't write, this girl did not even bother to read the paper she claimed to write before turning it in! When I confronted her about it, she said her sister helped her and wrote it. Hmmm…so her sister wasn't raised Muslim? Come on now…But it gets better! Lori, my neighbor who teaches with me, started telling me about a student who turned in something for her reading and writing class that was clearly from the communications class because it mentioned a listening track when the assignment was to read to articles and compare them. Lori said, "She turned in something about a listening track about the Paris riots" which sounded awfully familiar to me because at the beginning of the term the students asked me to do the critical thinking/listening track assignment to show them how it was supposed to be done, and I did it on the story of the Paris riots. I asked a few questions and determined that Lori's student had, in fact, turned in the paper I wrote! So I asked her who turned it in, and would you believe it, it was my dear Areej! You know what I think the problem is? She wasn't raised Muslim. (hehe)

On another note, I have been initiated into Saudi mating rituals, which is to say, I've been "bluetoothed." For those of you who are unfamiliar with what Bluetooth is and how it works, join the club, but I'll tell you what I know. People can send messages to your phone without knowing your phone number as long as you're within so many meters of where they are. Saudi guys have used this to their advantage, and if they see a girl, they will send a message to her cell phone with their phone number. Boy was I surprised when I was sitting on the bus, stopped at the gate to the Diplomatic Quarters, and all of a sudden I get a message on my phone with nothing but a phone number! Mind you, I have no idea who sent it because anyone within X meters could have sent it, and there were cars all around waiting at the gate. Could have been a guard. Could have been the man in the Escalade beside me (I'd like to think so). Could be a 70 year old Pakistani. And this method works? Apparently, because I've been bluetoothed since, and all I can do is shake my head and delete the message. I really want to see a statistical breakdown: how many times does a guy have to send his number out via Bluetooth before a woman calls him? One in fifty? I mean, really, how many women are going to respond to this when they don't even know who sent them the number? I might have to do a little research because this modern mating ritual is both ridiculous and intriguing. Speaking of gender issues, my students have enlightened me on how Saudi Arabian women are given more rights than women in most countries in the world. In fact, one of my students turned in a paper that said, "In our society, women have all the rights and are elevated to the level they were at 1,400 years ago." Well, that's a good thing! Because women's rights have really gone down the tube in the last 1,400 years. That's what I learned in my Women's Studies class. Boy, have we digressed! Another student presented her critical thinking assignment for the class on a listening track by a British reporter who visited Saudi Arabia and was apparently less than impressed with the great way women were treated 1,400 years ago. The reporter talked specifically about how upset she was that she couldn't swim in the pool at the hotel where she stayed, and of course she mentioned the fact that this is the only country in the world where women can't drive. My student, equipped with her critical thinking skills, sure proved this woman wrong! "She says we can't go swimming. But raise your hand if you have a swimming pool in your home."I was not surprised when almost every hand in the room went up. There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the rich and royal women in this country can swim, no problem! Oh sure, if we asked that same question to the Saudi women who live here who are not fortunate enough to have the last name Al Saud, we might get a different answer, but they don't matter anyway. Moreover, my students pointed out, why would they want to drive? They have drivers to take them anywhere they want to go. They said, "We don't care that we can't drive. We get treated like princesses." Well, that may be because you are princesses. And again, they failed to acknowledge the fact that many women in this country can't afford to have their own personal driver. A very small oversight for a princess..

If anyone is wondering what the Saudi winter is like, it does actually get a little chilly. I believe once, maybe twice, it even dipped below freezing; at which point I heard a man on the street screaming, "It's snowing! It's snowing!" Well, if by "snowing," you mean, "cold enough that if there were actually precipitation in this desert it might fall as snow," then yes, it is snowing! Woohoo! It's been warmer the past couple days though: it's back up to the high sixties, which the Saudis still say is "cold." I generally wear my Mickey Mouse sweatshirt (thanks, Dita!) over my work clothes, under my abaaya when it's chilly because my jacket is too bulky to wear under my abaaya, and it won't fit over my abaaya because of the sleeves. Mushkullah (that's a problem). One day when I was out walking, the guards sitting in the tank in the machine gun nest (I believe that's what it's called when they have the sand bags built up around the tank for the guards) jumped up and started yelling at me. My general inclination is to ignore any man who says anything to me, so at first I didn't even turn around, but when they started yelling louder I figured I better stop and turn around. They quit shouting "hey hey HEY!" when I turned around and looked at them, and the one man expressed what he so desperately needed to tell me: he wrapped his arms tightly around his chest, just above where his machine gun hung from a strap over his shoulders, raised up slightly out of the thick scarf that covered almost his entire face so he could say, "COLD!" Despite the fact that I try not to smile or do anything that these guys could misinterpret as a sexual invitation, I laughed. "Yes," I responded, knowing that if I said much more than that they wouldn't understand me.

Well, that's all for now. It will probably take me at least as long to get this email sent as it took me to write it! Ugh, it's so frustrating! Thank you all for your love and prayers.

Salaam, Lizz