From Limbo to Turbo: A Rocky Start to the School Daze

Part One: The Harsh Start

In April of this year (2014) I accepted a job at Alfaisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to teach English in the University Preparatory Program. Sue and I had a number of reasons why we decided this would be a good move for us, both personal and professional. One of the professional reasons was that I wanted to finally take my 25 years’ worth of English teaching skills and experience and use them overseas. Another reason was the opportunity for career advancement, which the Dean who hired me had held out as a future possibility. The future came much quicker than anticipated.

Alfaisal University: My New Home

King Faisal, who ruled from 1964-1975, is known in Saudi Arabia as a great modernizer: he put the country’s oil wealth to good use, abolished slavery, and fostered education. Many of his kids are US-educated and hold prominent government positions today. To Americans he’s probably most (in)famous for the 1974 oil embargo. He was assassinated in 1975 by an allegedly insane nephew. To this day many Saudis firmly believe his murder was a CIA-orchestrated plot as revenge for the embargo. After his death his family started the philanthropic King Faisal Foundation. One of its most important projects was starting Alfaisal University.

Test Day in Mr. John's Class. Note the balcony for the gals.

Alfaisal University is based on the American model of education; the instruction in all the courses is in English. It currently has about 2500 students, divided among four colleges: Business, Engineering, Medicine, and Science & General Studies. While it’s technically a liberal arts education, the Humanities aren’t emphasized (interestingly, they do include Islamic Studies). By Saudi law, there is no such thing as a co-educational university; the sexes cannot mix—ever. Usually this means that there are women’s colleges and men’s colleges. However, there are two universities who have been granted an exception to this; one is Alfaisal. Generally speaking, the women stay on the top two floors, the men on the bottom two floors. (Both female teachers and female students are allowed to come to the male areas if they have a purpose for being there.) However, all of the classrooms on floors 2 and 3 have two levels: men on the bottom level with the teacher, women up in a balcony (like at a theatre), where the teacher can see them, but the male students can’t. Women cannot teach men, but men can teach both males and females.

Somewhere under the General Studies Department is the UPP: The University Preparatory Program. The UPP is responsible for taking about 450 academically under-prepared students and getting them ready for university study. The focus is mostly on English, but also includes math and science. It’s very similar to the community college model of “developmental” education: covering the material students were supposed to get in high school but didn’t. At its heart, it’s an intensive English program. While we’re somewhat peripheral to the institution, we are also essential to it as the UPP takes students who otherwise wouldn’t be eligible for university study and giving them an avenue of entry. So we are the feeder institution for the rest of the university, and therefore vital to it.

That is the admirable goal of the UPP. Little did we know what a basket case of a program we had just stepped into.

Red Flag Warnings, or Lando Calrissian Comes to Alfaisal

The hardest adjustment to life in Saudi Arabia was that the English Preparatory Program at Alfaisal University that I came to was in complete disarray when I arrived, if not outright chaos. And the “solutions” involved the teachers getting the shaft. In The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader tells Lando Calrissian, “I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.” Like Lando, we kept muttering to ourselves, “This deal is getting worse all the time!”

"I am altering the deal."
(This one's for you, Emmy K)

With less than a week to go before the Fall term was slated to start, none of the new teachers had received any communication whatsoever about class assignments, syllabi, textbooks—nothing. We just kept being told to be patient. I had never met most of the female faculty I’d be working with, and we were still awaiting four more male and five more female faculty to arrive. That was the first of many Red Flags.

Our first faculty meeting wasn’t a meeting at all, but a software training session. But at least we got to sort of meet each other for the first time. An affable but pedantic British guy based out of Istanbul explained to us how to use the online companion software that supplements the reading book used in Level 3. He kept talking about, “As you’ve seen in the textbook, this part of the website goes with the content in each chapter.” We hated to break it to him that none of us had ever seen the textbook before, and this was the first time we had even been told what textbook we would be using. (PS: The software sucked: poorly designed and lousy pedagogy.) This wasn’t boding well: Red Flag #2.

The came another rude shock: None of the three returning male faculty from last year were actually coming back. The program director, who was long overdue at this point, sent his resignation from the US. Moreover, the teacher with seven years seniority with Alfaisal resigned: a kind, intelligent, soft-spoken man named Mark, who had been unfailingly helpful to Glen and me since our arrival. The third faculty member, officially still listed in the schedule, had been keeping everyone guessing as to whether he was coming back or not. They guessed wrong: he decided on the day before classes started that he wasn’t returning.

That left the program with no leaders and only half the teachers in place. On the male side, therefore, there were no returning faculty to mentor us new hires. Plus, that left 7 teaching positions to be filled by 3 brand-new faculty: Glen, Brent, and me. On the female side, they had 10 teaching positions, but only 6 of the faculty had arrived as of the start of classes. If you’re noticing a 2^nd-grade math problem here, then you’re apparently way ahead of the interim administrators who had taken charge of the program in the wake of all the departures. (Red Flag #3: What the hell is going on with this program? Why were we left with so many vacant positions at the 11^th hour, right before the school year was set to start?)

Testing, Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3 . . .

Four days to go, and none of us still had a teaching assignment. And now we had MIA faculty without a clear plan for coverage.

So at last we had a teacher meeting with the interim administrators. They revealed our teaching assignments, passed out the syllabi, and divided us into teams according to which of the four levels we would be teaching. I got Level 7/8, along with two faculty on the female side.

Alfaisal had decided the previous Spring to double the enrollment of the UPP by adding two additional lower levels. The strategy was admirable: we would capture more under-prepared students who were intelligent and motivated enough to make a success of the university, but whose high school background had left them horribly unprepared in the sciences and English language study. (Un-Fun Fact: Most Saudi high schools are horrible: half the school day is devoted to religion and Arabic history, leaving not near enough time for the three Rs or English.)

We finally got our first look at the new and “improved” syllabus that “they” (who? not sure) had been working on, including the syllabi for the two new levels. 80% of the syllabus was devoted to quizzes and tests; 20% was devoted to whatever else. For anyone not in education or ESL, let’s just say that this is inordinately heavy on assessment. There’s a popular fallacy that standardized testing = educational improvement. It doesn’t. Most of us detested the syllabus we’d been handed. But with four days to go, there was little to be done about it. Because of our hue and cry, they backed off on the part of the syllabus that required us to administer a quiz at least once a week in each competency area (listening, speaking, reading, writing, and grammar).

Tamrika, Glen, & Brent: Lucky you:
you're teaching an overload

But they still hadn’t revealed to any of us how they were planning to handle the courses for which there was no teacher assigned. The students showed up on campus for Orientation Day on Sunday, August 31. The first day of classes was Monday, September 1 (just like Harry Potter). That Sunday evening at 6:00 pm, they sprang the cruelest surprise of all: several teachers were informed that they had to teach a double load: as of tomorrow morning, they had to prepare a three-hour lesson for an additional class at a different level, in addition to starting their own assigned class for the first time. That left them overnight to prepare six hours worth of lessons for two different classes they didn’t even have the textbooks for.

I only narrowly avoided landing in the same crappy predicament: I would have gotten assigned extra work too (either university composition or preparatory English), but they couldn’t find a course for me that didn’t conflict with my existing schedule. I dodged that bullet—temporarily. But fear not: My turn was coming—and how.

Next Post: Part Two: The Fix Is In – And Guess Who It Is

Doin' the Arabian Limbo: Waiting, Riyadh Style

Chillin', Alf-U Style

Do the Limbo "Al-Raq"

Fort the first week and a half in Riyadh, I am in limbo.

For an ex-pat new arrival in Saudi Arabia, everything hinges on getting an iqama, or residence permit. I received my work visa before I left (the modern version is laser printed into my passport) which lets me enter the country. So, while am cleared to work in the country, I am not actually allowed to live here yet. Thus, within 48 hours of arrival, every foreigner has to apply for an iqama.

Step 1 is a medical exam. The university’s professional driver, Mr. Yahye, whisked us off to a grungy clinic on the second floor of a decrepit-looking building in the middle of Riyadh. The clinic is full of foreigners, of course, but Glen (my fellow teacher at Alfaisal University) and I are the only Westerners. The staff is all foreigners also; indeed, most of the doctors in KSA are Egyptians. We queue up to do the blood draw: in his white lab coat the phlebotomist looks like a mad scientist from a bad Lebanese movie. He is not particularly gentle (some of the teachers were comparing bruises even a week later after the blood draw). You also take a chest x-ray and provide a urine sample.

We returned to the university to fill out lots of paperwork and meet lots of people, all of whom seem very friendly and welcoming. Virtually all of the faculty at Alfaisal University are foreigners, while virtually all of the staff are Saudis, an interesting division of labor.

Then came my first of many lessons in dealing with Saudi bureaucracy: to everyone’s surprise, I got my insurance care for the Saudi health care system, aka Tawuniya, that very afternoon. [Fun Fact 1: All Saudis, and foreigners, get their health care covered 100%. Fun Fact 2: Most prescription drugs in the US are sold over-the-counter here. Valium, anyone?] The only problem: the name printed on the card was for some guy named Johan Roy Jordan. Great. At first, the Saudi office staff said, “It’s no problem—so long as you have the number, it’s okay.” Ironically, while Glen was right next to me at every step in the process, his card did not show up for another three days. At that point, they decided to take my card back and get the name spelled correctly on it. Uh-oh. It should be back tomorrow, they told me; check back then. So I checked back the next day. It’s not here, but it should be upstairs; come back in 15 mintues. I gave them 30. When I came back, no card. “The woman who take care of this—she left. It’s 4:00, and you know, women, they are special, they have children, so she had to leave . . . .” So, I returned the next day. This time: “She’s on vacation,” and the person filling in for her didn’t have the authority to handle insurance cards. Try back in two days. In the end it took nine days, five emails, and an intervention from my Dean, and I finally got my insurance card back, this time for John Roy Jordan.

So, while I got my insurance card quickly, waiting for an iqama puts a person into a strange limbo, residentially. For until I have my iqama, I can’t:

·      Bring my spouse or any dependents to Saudi Arabia

·      Open a bank account

·      Get a cell phone account

·      Rent an apartment

·      Be put into the HR system at AU (which means I can’t request reimbursement for all my moving expenses)

·      Get an employee ID

And while I’ve reported for work for a week already, they still have no office ready for me. I occasionally wonder if they really knew we were even coming. At the start of week two, then, Glen and I are a pair of homeless faculty just sitting out in the big commons area. So now we’re also in limbo administratively with our institution.

House Hunters International – Riyad(h) Edition

Much of our first week in Riyadh is taken up with apartment hunting. The university puts us up in The Golden Tulip Hotel, a short but very hot walk away from campus. We have two weeks to find a home; then it’s move out of The Golden Tulip or start paying for it ourselves. Our survival guide is Riyad, or “Mr.” Riyad, as most people at Alfaisal University go by the honorific Mr. or Ms. plus their first name, as in Mr. Brent or Ms. Ayesha. Mr. Riyad is a former realtor, though he comes across a little more like your friendly roughish uncle, the used car salesman. Some of the faculty whisper that he won’t do a deal unless he gets a little action on the deal; others say you can trust him with your life. (His real name isn’t even Riyad: he changed it when he got into the real estate game.)

Mr. Riyad - Realtor to the Stars (of the Faculty)

We spend two afternoons, which last on into the evenings, touring the southwest, western, and northwest swaths of the city. We start with a dokey residence hotel not far from campus, the Al Yamama Palace Hotel: “Palace” definitely belongs in quotes. They’re furnished apartments, but small. And while the building is run down, they keep it clean. Glen will take a studio apartment here. Next we hike through a construction site to the model apartments in the still-being-built Gen-X Condos (no foolin’). The models are luxurious enough to belong in a design catalog, but the rest of the building is still windowless cinderblocks and won’t be ready till January.  We then look at the upper floor of a villa. [Fun Fact 3: Villa is the standard designation for what we would call a single-family home; the next step up we would call a McMansion, which they call a palace.]  It’s spacious, light, with three bedrooms and three bathrooms; it even has a deck and a mini swimming pool. The only problem: it’s already taken, though the one next door might be available. Our next stop is a gigantic villa on the outskirts of the northwest part of the city: 5 bedrooms and four living rooms spread across three floors—really, Mr. Riyadh? What are we, the Kardashians? And finally, another gigantic apartment way way north, a good half-hour drive from campus. So, no luck on day one.

At the start of day two, Mr. Riyad pulls the old realtors trick: showing us apartments that are not too far away but definitely out of our price range, just as a reality check on our expectations. Most of them are residence hotels, but cater to a different class of people. One of them, he mentions, is where the British Embassy puts up their visitors. We also see a nice three-bedroom apartment in a quiet but bland neighborhood full of big apartment blocks. It’s run by a friendly Egyptian guy who speaks no English, but he does lower his price for us—probably a steal even. It’s nice enough, but in a neighborhood where I’m afraid Sue will feel trapped all day. She is not supposed to go out walking on her own, but she can call a taxi to come take her somewhere specific like a grocery store. We end the day with no better luck, but Mr. Riyad treats us to Mama Noura, a new Turkish shwarma restaurant where everything is made super fresh right in front of you.

So, in addition to administrative limbo with my eagerly awaited iqama, I now find myself in housing limbo, with no luck with apartment hunting.

Night (or Day, actually) of the Iqama

Two days into our second week at Alfaisal University, and we’re still homeless here as well. Sitting office-less in the Grand Concourse at Alfaisal, I think we cut such a pathetic figure that this energetic and friendly Filipino guy, Morin, whose official job is PR, took it on himself to go to work for us. (He talks a lot like Agadore Spartacus.) First, he found us temporary cubicles with computer access. The next day, he got our regular office assigned—together, as office mates, of course, as Glen and I seem destined to be joined at the hip. IT showed up the next day to set up our computers, grant us our copying and printing privileges, and take our biometric data: it takes a fingerprint scan to get into the copy room (no idea why).  We even get office supplies—now we’re real faculty members.

Halfway through week 2, though, and no word at all on our iqamas, so I decided to be more proactive. Some universal advice from everyone here is don’t take no for an answer, or at least to get things done you sometimes have to be a little pushy. So I started to complain, just a little, to the Dean, and to the Assistant Director, and to the office staff, about the lack of any progress toward our iqamas. It seemed to work. Morin showed up on Tuesday (which is Hump Day) and took our passports and photos, and said they were headed off to the Foreign Office. [Fun Fact 4: In Saudi Arabia, the first day of the workweek is Sunday, and the last is Thursday. So, Thursday is Friday, and Friday is Saturday, though it’s really more like Sunday, since Friday noon prayer is the biggest religious observance of the week, making Saturday Saturday, even though it’s the second day of the weekend. Got all that? It’s very disorienting.]

Two days later, on the last day of the week (Thursday), at 3:30 in the afternoon, a smiling Morin breezed into my (new!) office, holding out our freshly minted iqamas. Just like an American drivers license, the picture is horrible: I look like an enforcer for the Russian mob.

We were told later that this lightning fast turnaround was practically a record for iqama processing. One colleague said she waited five months for her iqama; another guy told me three months. I have yet to figure out if the system just works when it decides to: you can rail and fight against it all you want, but it just moves to its own rhythm. However, another part of me strongly believes that this is actually how the system works: nothing happens until you complain and fight—that’s what really sets things in motion. Honestly, I can’t tell which view is more accurate, so I’ll keep running experiments with both methods and keep a tally.

My Interim Palace

House Hunter’s Episode Epilogue: So Sunday, August 24 (or 24 August, in the Kingdom) arrives, and I’m kicked to the curb: my lovely two-week stay at the Golden Tulip is at an end. I had packed my five suitcases the night before, and Mr. Riyad borrows the official university truck, a rather beat-up Toyota pick-up, and moves me to the Al Yamama “Palace.” It’s really easy to find at the very busy intersection of King Saud Road and Al Jawharah Bint Ibn Muammar Street and Al Amir Faisal Ibn Fahd Ibn Abdul Aziz Street and Prince Satam Bin Abdulaziz  Road. Can’t miss it on Google Maps. You can tell you’ve found it by the incessant honking.

For my future “permanent” home, I have decided to hold out for the upper floor of the villa, which is under repairs right now (something about leaking pipes and tearing up tile). If all goes well, it should be ready in a month. In Saudi time, I’m figuring two months. Fortunately, I have three months until my wife arrives, so I can afford to be a little patient.

My new home is among four busy streets lined with tons of little shops: grocers, tailors, restaurants, juice bars, laundry, furniture, cell phones, toys, perfumes—you name it. The entire neighborhood is foreign workers, mostly Somalis, Indians, and Pakistanis, but a little bit of everywhere thrown in—including an odd pair of Westerners, Glen and me (seems we can’t get away from each other). Glen is going to rent an apartment in the Diplomatic Quarter with another faculty member, April, and her family, but it’s not vacated yet. In the meantime, I took Glen’s apartment, and then let him room with me.

Crossing King Saud Road, aka Playing Human Frogger

I’m cleared at last to reside in the Kingdom, but I still have no residence. [Sigh]

Riyadh - First Encounter

It’s hot here.

By far the most frequent remark I received—from Arabs, from Americans, from ex-pats of any stripe—upon telling them that I was moving to Saudi Arabia was: “You know it’s hot there, right?” Yeah, I kind of suspected that. Thus, I am happy to confirm this universal appraisal now that I have arrived in Riyadh. It is, indeed, hot here.

New York to Riyadh – August 10, 2014.

Lining up at the check-in counter at Saudi Arabian Airlines (or Saudia) I’m immediately struck by the number of Arab families already queued up or sitting in the lounge area, most of them already bored and laconic. I notice something that will soon become very familiar. Almost every family features a young father, a gaggle of kids from school-agers down to infants, and a mother. The father is always dressed in very casual clothes (shorts and polo or t-shirts); the kids are indistinguishable from any other youngsters from Los Angeles to Bombay with their neon tennis shoes and Hello Kitty backpacks; and the mother is swathed all in black from head to toe, and is usually veiled as well--only a pair of indeterminate eyes can be seen. The kids are energetic and loud; the father is always directing traffic and shouting orders. The wife says little.

Once on board I find my seat, 40L by the window (my preference always). In my row on the aisle sits a young Saudi woman in a navy abaya and hijab with a vacant seat between us. The woman’s husband and two youngsters (about 3 & 4) are in the row ahead. As soon as I ask the woman if I can scoot past, she and her husband visibly freak out: her eyes get as big as billiard balls with panic while he leaps out of his seat and hastily asks if I would mind switching seats with his family. He hurriedly orders the two boys into the row with the mother, leaving me in the row in front with him and a newborn baby. [Many Saudis follow the injunction that women should not be seen in public without a male relative. Being caught in the company of an unrelated male is haram: taboo.]

I didn’t get a moment’s peace for the next hour. The two boys, now in back of me, continually argue and fuss; the 4-year-old kicks my seat every two minutes, and not gently. Whenever the dad notices my seat lurch and my head snap forward with whiplash from the kicking behind, he promptly jumps up and shouts a string of harsh directives at the two rambunctious boys. The mother never makes a peep. Then the kicking ceases for all of 2 minutes before it starts up again. Finally, while Dad is off attending to the newborn, I ask the flight attendant if I can switch seats. With a friendly smile she says to take any one of a number of empty seats further back in the plane. I consciously pick a vacant seat among nothing but adults. I wonder if I haven’t gotten my first glimpse into modern Saudi parenting technique: mothers are silent and permissive, dads are authoritarian.

Saudi Nuclear Family: The thobe or abaya comes with puberty

Incidentally, if you’re wondering how flight attendants observe modest dress, on Saudia they wear a blue tunic and slacks with long white sleeves and an I-Dream-of-Genie style headdress and scarf (minus the blonde pony tail sticking out the top). 
Weirdly, sunrise comes at about 3:00 am New York time, with the sun streaming through the windows. Fortunately all the passengers wake up long enough to draw the window shades, and the plane is soon completely dark again for several hours.

I had been foretold of an interesting phenomenon to expect on the plane. About an hour before landing, younger gals who had been wearing Western clothes start to pull on abayas; a number of younger guys in shorts head to the lavatory with slacks or thobe (long white robe) in hand to change. Fun time’s over; back to the Kingdom.

Arrival – The VIP Treatment

In the long line at Customs I meet up with one of my new colleagues at Alfaisal University, Glen, a recent graduate of Portland State University. We had actually met at the Alfaisal booth at the TESOL Convention in Portland last March, when we both initially got hired. We are in line with a lot of silent, grave Pakistanis and Indians. Seeing the Saudi families with the ghostly moms in black abayas amidst the vibrant kids and relaxed dads, it’s odd when a planeload of Indians shows up, the men in either Western clothes or pastel-colored cotton matching tunics and pants, the women in bright colored saris like they tumbled out of a big tub of rainbow sherbet.

Surprisingly I sailed through Customs. I had expected to have my bags searched and to get questioned about what I was afraid would be borderline acceptable (a philosophy book, a Christmas ornament, a pair of scissors). They scanned my suitcases by x-ray and waived me on through. Just outside Customs stood a short man in white thobe and head scarf with a sign that read “Alfaisal University: Mr. John Jordan.” Check off a life-long dream fulfilled: my own driver to meet me at the airport with a sign with my name on it. (Oh, there was a sign for Glen, too—whatever.)

Driving through Riyadh for the first time, you can’t help but be struck by how new everything looks. The city had 80,000 people in 1950. It’s around 6 million today, which is double from 20 years ago. About 20% of the city seems to be under construction (and/or demolition and reconstruction); cranes poke up above the skyline everywhere. Everything is tasteful, neo-classical Arabic architecture (I think I just invented that), in all the various shades of tan imaginable: ecru, beige, camel, buckskin, eggshell, and even brown! The traffic is congested, and all the drivers seem impatient (including mine); horns are freely used to signal everything from “coming through” or  “hurry up” “watch it, buddy” or just “hey, I’m in a car”. The cars are mostly Toyotas and mostly white. Usually the billboards and even the license plates are in both English and Arabic. Glen and I use it as an opportunity to practice our Arabic number identification: o = 5, V = 7, 7 = 2, etc.

We check into the Golden Tulip Hotel, or Qasr Al-Nasiriah (note to self: qasr = hotel in Arabic). The hotel is nice, though once inside the room it’s indistinguishable from a hotel room you’d find anywhere: for all anyone would know, I could be in the Holiday Inn in Salt Lake City. I go in search of dinner outside the hotel. When I ask the manager for a recommendation, he first recommends the hotel restaurant (of course), but when I persist he relents and walks me outside with a wary look (“it’s your funeral, buddy”). He points me down the street toward some distant shops, and he cautions me to put my mobile (cell phone) in my pocket, not on a belt clip. Oh boy.

I get to the shops and little shawarma restaurants just as the call the prayer has sounded from the mosque down the street (there’s always a mosque down the street); all the shops quickly close up. Almost everyone out is not a Saudi; instead, I encounter lots of the worker class from India, Pakistan, Egypt, Somalia, Malaysia, etc. The most dangerous aspect of this little journey, by far, is crossing the street. Saudi drivers are at least as maniacal and incautious as I had been foretold. One gets the feeling if a Saudi driver were to hit you, the police would give you the ticket for damaging his car.

First day of work on Tuesday 12 August: reporting for duty at Alfaisal University.