A Christmas wedding in Oz

Posted on June 9, 2012 by worldenoughandtimeblog

Tuesday 9th January 2007

Hey everyone,

Just for those of you that didn’t know, I’ve just had a fabulous 2 weeks off work, and flew to Australia to visit my family and to be there for my brother’s wedding.

The wedding was gorgeous – it was all lovely and happy and sweet and they are like the most beautiful couple ever – they actually look like the couple you get in your picture frame when you buy it!

Continue reading →

Technophobia and the art of computer maintenance

Posted on June 9, 2012 by worldenoughandtimeblog

Sunday 12th November 2006

Ok, I realise I just wrote less than a week ago, but you literally will not BELIEVE what happened to me!

Most of you already know about my complete inability to use any kind of technology without having a total meltdown, and my track record currently includes single-handedly (but accicentally) crashing an entire room full of computers not just once, but twice so
far!

However, after my poor laptop, Bob, bit the dust over the summer, I decided to try out one of these new-fangled applemacs that people keep telling me about. Everyone says they are a million times better than pc’s, and so I got one in August, to replace poor Bob (RIP).

I must admit I’ve been loving my new shiny white mac laptop, and it’s been fine until last week when it suddenly refused to turn on. Continue reading →

My Buddy Holly moment…

Posted on June 9, 2012 by worldenoughandtimeblog

Wednesday 8th November 2006

Hey guys,
Have been mega busy as usual, so I don’t know which of the many amusing anecdotes I shall regale you with today!

As far as school goes, it’s getting pretty ugly, long story, things are falling apart quite badly at the seams, aside from the teachers leaving, a number of people have been getting screwed out of money by the school and it’s all very worrying. I’m not quite ready to start looking for a new job, but it may come to that yet. Madame finally appeared after almost 8 weeks absence, but it still feels like too little too late in terms of management organisation.

Anyhoo, I don’t really feel like getting into all that just now, so instead I’ll tell you all about my Buddy Holly moment. I always felt that I had somehow missed out on the intense zeitgeisty-type moments that members of older generations had – the death of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, JFK, and, of course, The Day The Music Died.

However, I recently had just such a moment!
I was in the bookshop, looking for some resource books for my clasroom when I found this lovely Winnie the Pooh science book on nature. I was flicking through it trying to decide if it was too hard for my kids or not, when I saw this massive black mark across the
front of the title page. It was a brand new book, and I realised it was the same black pen/paint they use for censorship here. Now usually they censor things that have references to Israel, or Jews etc, but what on earth could be offensive in a children’s book?
I looked more closely at the picture, which had Winnie the Pooh and a giant black smudge on his back and then it hit me.

They had censored Piglet.

I literally couldn’t believe it.

I mean, I get that Muslim countries take not eating pork seriously, but I mean, it’s a fictional cartoon of a stuffed teddy baby piglet!!

(I had previously discovered when doing farmyard animals in class that the noises are: “duck?”
“quack quack”
“horse?”
“neigh!”
“sheep”
“baa baa”
“pig?”
“…. huh? …..”
“What’s that miss?”)

So there you are; for some people, Buddy Holly’s death really was The Day The Music Died, but I think I may have been the first person to truly recognise the significance of The Day They Censored Piglet.

Sad but true.

I guess I should leave off there, as there is so much more I could say, and only so much of your attention span left!

hope this finds everyone well and happy and healthy etc
tons of love and hugs and happy vibes
zeitgeist-Maya
xxx

p.s. – I’m in an uber-good mood at the moment due to the weather. The weather here has been hot and oppressive for so long that I just stopped noticing it completely and forgot
about other kinds of weather altogether. Day after day after day of the same hot blinding heat.
Then on Tuesday morning, I stepped outside to walk to work and it was cool!! Not just cool, but there was a refreshing breeze too!! I’m told the temperature has dropped to 28/29, which I know sounds hot, but it really is surprisingly lush after 40-something!!
It was completely sudden and was the same today too – I’ve been in a stupidly good mood ever since! I never knew it was getting to me so much until it changed!
The kids also started coming to school in jumpers, and the caretaker had a woolly hat on today – it made me laugh sooooo much – 29 degrees is apparently woolly
hat weather here!
hahahahahahahahaaaaaaaa!!!!

kisses
xxxxxxxxxxxx

Where do all the pitchforks come from?

Posted on June 9, 2012 by worldenoughandtimeblog

Sunday 1st October 2006

Well, last Thursday night there was a full scale mob/riot outside our building that was INSANE!!!

Betty and Bryn came over to watch The West Wing at my house, and I had corralled Bryn into helping me carry a couple of boxes of water from the Co-op on the corner back to my flat, so off we went to the shops.

As we came back, we saw a large group of people yelling and milling around in the alley across the street. So we walked up the steps of my building and stopped to watch. We quickly realized there was a fight going on, and suddenly there were TONS of people running towards the alley with massive big old sticks!! People started piling out of the buildings around us carrying heavy planks of wood and bits of iron scaffolding, and then all hell broke loose as the men started smashing their planks against cars and each other. We retreated inside the building to watch through the window as the fight moved out of the alley and into the street directly in front of us. We watched one guy with a 10-foot metal girder type thing start beating a guy round the head and then the guy just went down like a sack of potatoes SMACK in the middle the road unconscious.

The sound of his head smacking the ground was horrible – somehow you could hear it above all the shouting and yelling, and then it suddenly went very quiet.

He lay there for a good minute and a half while everyone stood around wondering if he was dead or unconscious, and there was a sudden lack of big sticks, as if everyone was like “stick? What stick? I didn’t see anything.”

Then he got up and they helped him to the bakery to wash the blood off and the sticks came back out and the riot continued and moved back down the alley again.

We saw another guy come limping out of the alley propped up on two guys, and then collapse on the pavement, and then his mates managed to shove him into a car to get to hospital. Eventually the ambulances started arriving, although where the hell the police were is anybody’s guess!!

There were probably about 150 men out on the street with sticks, and who knows how many were further down the alley that we couldn’t see. At least three ambulances had arrived before the first cop showed up by himself, had a look around and got back in his car to wait. After AGES two more cars came, and about three more ambulances, and the cops, all five of them, just sort of wandered through the massive crowd, not really doing much. Then they just started yelling at everyone to go home, and they did!! People just started to disperse, although it took a while and there must have been a lot of injured people down the alley out of our line of sight.

It was all very dramatic and exciting, and we then found out that there had been another riot in the same street a couple of nights ago, but it had happened at 4am, so we didn’t know about it, although we heard a rumour someone had died at the first fight, which may be what sparked off this one. Apparently it’s all about the Egyptian and/or Syrian tribal groups having some sort of a turf war.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find out any more about it was all about, but I don’t know whether it is likely to die down or escalate at this point.

As riots go it was fairly minor, certainly not as big as Cronulla or the Paris riots, but nevertheless, very bizarre that it happened LITERALLY on my doorstep!!

You needn’t worry though, I’m perfectly safe here, and I shan’t be going anywhere alone for a while, so fear not!!

The funny thing is, aside from seeing a guy literally get beaten unconscious in front of me, and the puddle of blood in the road he left behind, the thing that kept running through my head is “Where did all the sticks come from?”

I mean, seriously, there was a fight, then a mob, and in about 4 seconds, everyone was holding a plank of wood!!

It must have been the same in the old days of angry mobs and pitchforks, I mean, if you saw a mob, did you have to run home and get your pitchfork, or did people leave them out by the road for just such an occasion?

Anyhoo, as I say, it was all very exciting and dramatic and I couldn’t resist writing it all own just for you. I had heard last week that fighting always escalates during Ramadan, generally at about 6 or 7 o’clock in the evening. It’s ironic, considering that Ramadan is pretty much the holiest Muslim holiday, and is all about peace and love and harmony etc, but then again, you’re talking about an entire city of testosterone-filled men who have incredibly low blood sugar after fasting all day (which we all know makes you frankly, a bit tetchy!!), plus they’re all chain-smokers who aren’t allowed to smoke all day, and I’m guessing the enforced nicotine ban doesn’t help their mood much either. So it’s not really that much of a surprise that a riot escalated when you think about it.

As you’ve probably guessed, Ramadan has begun and it’s all a bit crazy. We can’t eat, drink or smoke in public from ‘official’ dawn to ‘official’ sunset (Iftar), which today was at 5.32pm. (the riot happened at about 6pm , so chances are the men who were rioting hadn’t eaten yet).

Anyway, hope you’re all well and keeping your pitchforks handy, cos you never know when an angry mob’s gonna come down your street!!

Loadsa love

Ramadan’s-gonna-be-fun-Maya

A bizarre coincidence…

Posted on June 9, 2012 by worldenoughandtimeblog

Friday 29th September 2006

Hi everyone,

I’m so, soooo sorry I haven’t written for ages, I have been so unbelievably busy since getting back to Kuwait that I have barely had time to even read my emails, let alone write any!

As usual the school is a complete mess, we’re four weeks into term and still haven’t got a proper timetable for classes, a number of staff either didn’t show up or came back, collected their summer pay and then disappeared, so we’ve been very short staffed as well.

I’ve discovered that teaching Year 2 is very different to Year 3, as I taught Year 3 at the end of the year, when most of them were 8, whereas at the start of Year 2 they are mostly 6, which is way harder!! Six-year olds need to have EVERY minute of the day planned and busy, or else total mayhem breaks out!

So most of my free lessons, break times and evenings are spent planning and preparing for the weeks’ activities, and attempting to anticipate problems (I had a full lesson planned and prepared, got all the kids colouring and cutting out worksheets to glue into their books after a detailed explanation of scissor safety, and suddenly found myself with two children who had no idea how to use scissors. One boy was trying to hold the paper still in his teeth while using both hands to hold the scissors!)

So, even after my careful preparation, things still inevitably seem to go wrong and leave me unsure of what to do next!

Being back at school is much like fresher’s week at uni, in that everyone gets every bug the children bring back from their holidays, and they spread like wildfire. Most of the staff (including myself) have already had a stomach bug not dissimilar to amoebic dysentery, followed immediately by a cold (I’m convinced I caught mine off a student who insists on coughing directly into my face at least once a day before I have a chance to tell him to cover his mouth!!).

Illness aside, tensions at school are mounting, as Madame (our school director) decided to have an enormous rant at the Primary department during our Saturday staff meeting, telling us all that we’re not doing our jobs, and are too lazy etc. She then decided we needed to have staff meetings every afternoon on top of our morning meetings three times a week, we are to do compulsory tutoring three times a week after school as well as our usual after-school club, and took away two of our free periods as well. So, now there’s even less time for planning and marking etc, which is why I’ve taken so long to write I’m afraid!

One little boy in my class gave me quite a scare the other day too. His name is Mohammed (I have 4 Mohammed’s in my class this year!), and he’s quite a boisterous little cheeky chap, although he’s physically very small. He was hit by a car earlier in the week, thankfully not badly injured, although he’s so small and the cars here are so enormous that he would only come up to the wheel rim on most of them. He only cut his hand and had some scrapes, and I can totally picture him running into the road to get his ball without looking.

Anyway, he came back to school, and had gone to the bathroom. He was gone for ages, but then we were in the middle of a times tables test, so I wasn’t surprised he was trying to avoid it. As he was coming back from the loo, the fire alarm went off, so he hurried back and we all trooped outside. In the car park, he was showing off something to the other boys, and when I asked to see it he hid it from me. So I reached into his pocket and guess what I found? A cigarette lighter.

So then I’m thinking hang on, he was in the bathroom for ages, he had a lighter, he’s six, the school uses lots of paper towels in the bathroom, then the fire alarm went off….OH MY GOD HE’S SET THE SCHOOL ON FIRE!!!!!

I freaked out completely, and rushed off to find Debbie (our head of Primary) to tell her. Debbie was very calm about it all, and didn’t seem bothered at all. I explained patiently that I thought Mohammed had set fire to something in the bathroom, and she looked at me and said “Maya, didn’t anyone tell you we were having a fire drill today?”

Turns out everyone except me had known about it, and it was all just a very bizarre coincidence!!

Anyhoo, I’m also taking Arabic lessons in the evenings three times a week at a Berlitz center we found here that is really good, and I already know 14 letters of the alphabet, which I am well chuffed about!!

I’d better leave it there, but I hope you are all well and happy, and looking after yourselves,

Lots of love

Busy bee Maya

xxx

Last Days…

Posted on June 9, 2012 by worldenoughandtimeblog

Friday 2nd June 2006

Hello everyone,

Life here is fairly mundane at the mo, the temperature is rising steadily, last week it was around 44 celcius most days, and this week it’s been around 47 or 48 almost every day. The heat is completely draining and exhausting, and the air-con in our classroom is struggling to keep the temperature below 35, which is still a welcome 13 degree difference!

Playground duty is gruelling, but aside from that everything’s going well. We’ve had our exams, and now have two weeks left with basically nothing to teach them, as the syllabus if finished, so I’m just making stuff up (worksheets, wordsearches off the internet, and a random project on cars – next week we’re going to do a project on the world cup!).

Luckily, most of the governement schools have already broken up for the summer (the heat gets steadily worse so they break up as early as possible so everyone can go somewhere else for two months!) and it’s only the private schools that are still open, and as a lot of our kids have brothers and sisters in public schools, the parents just decide they can stay at home after exams.

My class of 16 unruly 8-year olds has gradually reduced, and on Wednesday only 4 of them showed up.

Which is nice.

Last Tuesday we took the primary kids to Aqua Park, which was totally awesome, and me and Tudor (a 55 year-old ex-headmaster) raced each other down the flumes for most of the day. Yay!

In other news, a rumour has got around that one of the teachers in SEN has a crush on me. The description of him that Michaela gave Bryn was (and I quote) “He’s about 40, going bald, pretty tubby with horrifically bad teeth. He fancies Maya because he thinks she looks innocent and naive. His name is Mohammed. Oh, and he likes porn with animals in because he grew up on a farm.”

Seriously, word for word.

Oooh I so can’t wait for him to make his move!

Sadly, as Bryn and I discovered when trying to spot him at the secondary graduation ceremony, there are literally about 7 guys called Mohammed who are going bald and have bad teeth! Not exactly a lot of talent out here.

Aside from that, not much is happening, although for some reason the heat here is making me swell up, and I have put on another 3 slobby kilos, (which I’m hoping like hell is water retention through dehydration, but I have my doubts)!!

I’m an enormous heifer at the mo, and may have to wear a red carnation at the airport so my dear family will recognise me, instead of craning there necks and saying “Where’s Maya?” “I dunno, I can’t see round this elephant coming through the arrivals door”, or something similar.

If you ever want to put your own weight into perspective, I can recommend this terrifying option – I realised yesterday that even if I lost 3 kilos, I would still weigh DOUBLE what Nicole Ritchie weighs!! She may be an anorexically thin celebrity waif, but nevertheless, I can fit TWO of her into my bodyweight, with 3 kilos of flab to spare.

Horrifying.

So, I’ll leave you with the terrifying question, How many Nicoles can you fit into your weight?

(Oh, and if I don’t come home in two weeks, it’s because I’ve decided I’m too fat to ever have sex again, except with bald Mohammed, and I’ve moved to a farm in the desert to live out his animal porn fantasies).

Lots of Love,

“Sheep have feelings too” Maya!

Get ready!!!

Posted on June 9, 2012 by worldenoughandtimeblog

Sunday 14th May 2006

Ladies and gentlemen,

I, Maya, will be coming home in just over a month!!!

HOW EXCITED ARE YOU??????

I’m very excited and can’t wait to see all you lovely people and catch up properly!

I still don’t know my exact dates yet, as the school had to book all the staff onto three different group flights, which i think are on the 16th, 17th and 18th of June, but they won’t tell me which one I’m on yet!!!

However, I will be home on one of those days, and will be based in sunny Suffolk once again for about two months, until roughly 22nd of August when I will be flying back to Kuwait for the next school year.

I will try my best to make a trip up to St Andrews, via Edinburgh to visit some people and I’ll definitely make at least one trip to London to see everyone there, as well as hopefully a trip down to Scilly.

And, of course there will be at least one legendary party to plan and have and clean up before I disappear again!

That’s about it from me – just get ready for some fun, cos I can’t wait to see everybody!!!!

love Maya

xxxx

Evil penguins

Posted on June 8, 2012 by worldenoughandtimeblog

Sunday 30th April 2006

Hello hello everyone!

Another long one, so prepare yourselves!!

Am now back at school after my fantastic holiday in Sri Lanka, working hard, and we’ve just had “fun day” (on a weekend of course!!) where we all had to put in eight hour shifts selling raffle tickets and having sponges thrown at us etc.

Yay.

Last night and tonight are parents’ evenings, and most of the parents have been lovely so far, and very keen to be supportive etc (one mum asked me for photocopies of all my lesson plans so she can keep up at home and help more with the homework!!).

I found that a bit scary, and ever-so-slightly like she might be trying to keep tabs on me, although it is nice to see parents getting involved!!

Continue reading →

Things not to do in maths…

Posted on June 8, 2012 by worldenoughandtimeblog

Sunday 9th April 2006

Hello!

Things are getting better, my class is coming around under my iron fist and after a few days of being really evil and dishing out detentions to the whole class, they’re finally learning to behave themselves.

Well, except these four boys today of course….

I was teaching maths (I know, me, teaching maths!), and while we were learning about sequencing and how to EXPLAIN our answers (the kids have serious problems with that part), I noticed these four boys with the most unbelievably guilty expressions, and their hands were all hidden under the table. So, of course I asked them what they thought they were doing and told them to put their hands on the desk.

They had, of course, been trying to superglue their fingers together “to see if it worked”.

The sheer stupidity of eight year old boys astounds me sometimes!

Luckily for them, it turned out not to be real superglue, just some crap budget knock-off superglue, so it did wash off, (thank god), but honestly!

I had to write in the detention book the reason for detention, and I felt so silly writing “trying to superglue themselves together during maths”. I wish I could have just written “mind-boggling stupidity” in instead!!

Ah well, I have no doubt that the boys in my class will keep me amused with endlessly stupid antics to fill my emails with over the next year!

In fact, another hilarious anecdote springs to mind!

I was collecting in homework the other day, and this kid comes up and tells me he didn’t do his. I asked him why not, and he says, with a dead straight face, “Miss, my maid took too long doing my sister’s homework so she didn’t have time to do mine.”

I almost pissed myself laughing, and then realised he was serious!

I had to explain very carefully that whatever else the maids are for in their house, doing homework is not one of them!!

Sadly, that’s a bit of a problem over here, as the Kuwaiti’s are all just rolling in money, (and drowning in oil – they literally can’t pump it fast enough!! And they’ve just discovered gas as well!), and their maids do everything for them. The parents have very little involvement in the raising of their kids, but sadly the maids have no power to discipline the children, and the parents most often treat the “help” like dirt, mostly because they’re Filipino, or Tibetan or Nepali. Unfortunately the kids watch the way their parents treat the maids, and follow suit, ordering them about like slaves, and this tends to follow them into the classroom. Most of the kids see us teachers as just someone else being paid to look after them (which is exactly what we are to the parents anyway), and so treat us with about as much respect as the maids!!

I’ve had a hard time adjusting to the rudeness of some of these kids, and am setting about teaching them how to respect their teacher properly!

It’s gonna be tough, but I’ll get there!!

Everything else is going fine too, I went to a Bulgarian dinner in honour of spring, and met a really hot guy called Chris who asked me out. The next day we went to the art gallery, where his sister had an exhibition on. I was a bit intimidated about meeting his sister on a first date, but then it got worse when we got there and I realised his mum and dad were there too!!!

His sister and mum were lovely, (I didn’t really talk to his dad a lot), but his mum was a bit much. I kept explaining that we had just met the night before, and she’s nodding and smiling with this horrible glazed look, and I could literally SEE her planning the wedding and buying clothes for her grandkids!!!

Then she gave me her home number, and mobile, and work number, pager, and fax number “just in case” I should want to call her for any reason!

Of course I wouldn’t let a psychotic family put me off, except we got back to his place, and he got all nervous and hyperactive, bouncing around the house, completely unable to sit still at all, and then started making a lot of quite racist comments about Arabs and things.

So, yet again a seemingly normal guy turns out to be a complete weirdo on yet another unbelievably uncomfortable date!!

I think I’m going to need a full psychiatric assessment from prospective candidates before agreeing to any more dates!!

Anyhoo, after only three weeks at work, we’ve got our spring break coming up at the end of this week, so I shall be jetting off to Sri Lanka with Betty and Bryn for a week of beaches, booze and baby elephants!! It’s a hard life eh?

laters

love superglue super-maya

xxx

First impressions

Posted on June 8, 2012 by worldenoughandtimeblog

Monday 27th March 2006

Hey everyone,
Well, I’ve been here almost a week now, so I thought I’d give you all an update!
So far it’s been pretty good, the weather is really nice, only getting up to about 29 or 30 so far, but really dry so it’s not so bad.
Apparently my taxi driver told me in the summer it can get up to 50 degrees, but the government won’t allow the weather stations to ever report the temperature as higher than 49 because if they report the temp as 50, they have to give everyone a day off work or something. So the weather is only ever “officially” 49 degrees in summer!!

As I said before, my flat is LOVELY – I’ve added a nice picture of our front room for you, and a picture of the cool bombed out building across the street – to the left of the building is our school, so it’s dead close to walk to. We also have a nice balcony, and all
the furniture’s new and stuff.
There’s a mosque across the street from my bedroom, so we get to hear the call to prayer broadcast from the loudspeaker five times a day. Apparently the 5am one wakes up almost everyone in the building, but they say you get used to it, and frankly I sleep so deeply I haven’t heard it once!!

Our entire building is owned by the school, so all sixteen apartments are inhabited by teachers at our school. Which is cosy.
Anna (my flatmate) is still really nice, and we get on well, so hopefully that won’t change any time soon!!
School is really really busy, as I’ve walked in at the end of term during exams and reports, and my class haven’t done half the material on the exams (their teacher obviously stopped caring completely while she was planning her dodgy escape, so hasn’t taught them
much). As for my class, there’s sixteen kids, all about 8 ish, fairly unruly, although it’s not all
their fault – I’m the third teacher they’ve had this year after all!! There’s a couple of little horrors, and they are all compulsive liars, which is hard to deal with sometimes!

Other than that the school is pretty good, they have a ratio of about a third primary, a third secondary and a third is special needs, which covers just about everything from dwarfism to down’s syndrome and lots of other disabilities. All the staff have been really friendly and helpful, and are mostly just super glad that I’m here at all!!

The staff are quite multi-national, ranging from a healthy number of Brits and Canadians, to the Turkish IT guy, lots of Arabic staff, Zofia (who’s Polish and incredibly racist!) who teaches the other year three class, and Lourka, the Bulgarian librarian who has the most awesome accent ever! She guards the library with a very fierce hand (I’m constantly amazed that fire doesn’t actually come out of her mouth!), but she is really quite nice, and her cousin Zarko (also Bulgarian) is the Lord of Everything.
His position in the school I’m not so clear on, but if you need anything photocopied, you have to give it to him, and he may or may not do it within 24 hours.
He’s also the guy to go to if you want your air conditioning fixed, anything in your flat fixed or replaced, and holds all the keys to everywhere!!!

I’d better stop there, cos I keep thinking of more stuff to say but I don’t want you guys to die of random computer-related deaths before the next update (which I may well start writing now so it’ll be done by next week!!).

By the way, I do have a phone line installed, but I can’t make any outgoing calls outside of Kuwait at all. However I can still recieve them if anyone fancies calling me!!

take care everyone!!
lots of love
“who knew I could get up at 6am??” Maya
xxx