shoes of POD

As I collected the photos for this photo essay of POD, I was surprised how eagerly people displayed their feet for me and then recommended other shoes for me to track down and photograph. I regret, Gentle Reader, that I missed the purple suede spiked heels that flashed past me in the lobby. I spotted them trotting across the lobby with great authority, but by the time I had gotten my camera out and run after the owner of said astonishing footwear, I rounded the corner only to see them disappearing into the elevator. Those were the ones that got away.

And now, the shoes of POD: a sampling of the more fashionable






The Shoes of POD: Comfy and Tenured




The Shoes of POD: Urban Decay Chic

Pod 2010: publicity, man-bashing, and assessment

Bright and early, 6:00 am, I attended the POD yoga class that is lead by next year's POD president, Michele DiPietro. I would say 35 podlings showed up for yoga at that hour of the morning. However, there were people who were wandering in around 6:30. Right: faculty members showing up for a class a 1/2 hour late: what are they thinking? Breakfast this year is quite improved with bacon, cheesy eggs, and much in the way of tasty pastry that went untouched by me (pat on head). People complained that the bacon was too crispy, but I count that as whining: it existed and that was enough for me to love. Oooooo and the coffee is strong, spoon stand up in it strong. Unfortunately, it does not come in tureens. It comes in little pots from which it is meted out by the wait staff. rrrrrrrr. At one point, I could wait no longer for my cup of coffee, and I had to chase one of the wait staff around the room and then beg for my tasty coffee. I cover my bad behavior by clowning, and so far it seems to work.

The Morning session was on publicity. It was really quite good. Here are the take-aways:
Make mp3s of the Faculty Development workshops and post them (somehow).
We need a recorder like Ann witham has.
Who can buy this for us?
Create an LTC facebook page that has events (robin and I can be admins of this page). We can do this on a Wednesday morning.
Blog our fdc workshops as summaries, make sure each one has a photo.
Make sure we have lots of photos from events.
Do we need to schedule someone to do this?
Is the only way we'll get this is to do it ourselves?
We should ask each FLC to take a group photo.
We should most certainly post the FLC end of quarter aha epiphanies on our website.

Of course POD always makes me feel tired and inadequate. Surely I should be able to do all of this even if I am teaching a full course load of writing intensive courses. Surely.

Friday Plenary: a faculty engagement survey of 17,000 faculty .
Women and Black faculty use the most student centered pedagogies.
Social Science departments demonstrate the most civic engagement.
Faculty who felt their education had prepared them for the faculty role felt more engaged. 56.8 percent of this sample report participating in teaching enhancement workshops as graduate students. This is a high number. These faculty are more likely to be engaged.
White men participated least in faculty development, demonstrated the least engaged teaching, and are least likely to be engaged in civic participation.

The presenter was a quantitative researcher. When she was asked, "What should we do as a result of this data?", she responded, "Give faculty this data. Just seeing the data will change their minds and make them question their previously held values." Beam her up Scotty.

The afternoon session was a session on assessment.
The take-away: Her point is that it is not enough to just count stuff. You must count with intentionality.
A base count can indicate other places to look more intentionally. Her point of the whole presentation is that you need to think before you count so that you can get some real meaning.

More useful was the group conversation where we discussed how to "share the bounty" of the activities faculty participate in as a result of using their travel money. Is there a way we can invite people who requested travel money to write like three line about where they went, what they did, and what they learned as a result of that travel? We could put it in a newsletter, or on our website, or our Brand New Blog, or our Facebook page. wooooooooooo.

Adjunct Faculty Development and Iranian Paradoxes

Today I attended a morning workshop on how to support part-time faculty . Everybody there was very concerned about helping part time faculty, and the nature of the help they could give seemed to depend greatly on how much money they had. One university in Georgia had 90% attendance at their part-time faculty orientation because that is where they handed out the computers and phones. Computers and phones! No wonder people came to their events: they got a computer and a phone! Other people required attendance, others paid from $250 to $800 for attending a series of workshops. Some took a certification model, and others created adjunct faculty teaching awards. There were a lot of ideas. Here are the one I think we can do:

Get the adjunct email list updated. MOST IMPORTANT.
From this list, update adjunct bb site
Make sure they get all invitations to everything
Record all FDC presentations and figure out how to stream them
At orientation (which should be recorded)
Basic classroom gift pack: markers, erasers, IFATS, student evaluation forms
College relations cute things
Have a student panel
Have an adjunct panel
Consider an adjunct teaching award and years of service pin for a spring adjunct appreciation reception. Hard copy invitation
Have speaker, have "bright idea" award, have a door prize of a teaching book

Keep a database of all FDC attendees
See if we can do an entry FDC survey for new hires
Consider an adjunct advisory council that means with the dean once a semester

In the afternoon, I walked around St. Louis. The arch is always amazing.


The park is a beautiful green space there on the edge of the mighty Missouri River, which, in and of itself, is a flat fast moving chunk of muddy water, but majestic in the way a big piece of water can be. But the arch looming over it in all its shiny metal reflectiveness is just so sublimely cool.

There was also this curious little fellow up on the corner of a building.

Evidently this is Bevo the fox, the mascot of the non-alcoholic beverage that Anheuser-Busch brewed during prohibition. He is awfully cute and ever so cheery with his mug of non-alcoholic beverage while he chews on a leg of chicken.

At dinner, we also chewed on legs of chicken and then had apple pie with carmel topping for dessert. Yum: I photographed it on my phone, but I don't have the connector cord to put that photo here for you. However, it was rather prosaic. I will remember my real camera for tomorrow's awards banquet which should have an exotic dessert. Nevertheless, quotidian as the apple pie was, it was quite delicious.

During dinner I sat next to a guy from Iran who was here on sabbatical studying learning and teaching centers for his university in Tehran. I asked how many women were in his classes. "Oh," he said, "50 or 60% of my students are women."
"Oh," I asked disingenuously and already knowing the answer, but wanting him to say it anyway, "What kind of work do they do when they graduate from university? Is there much work for women with degrees in higher education?"
He replied, "No, there is not much work for women with degrees, but they agree that they will be better mothers if they are well educated. We will have a very smart generation of children since so many of our women have an advanced education."
I smiled and nodded, but, unwilling to let it go said, "It seems like with higher education being more available to more people, there will be a big change in Iran over the next 10 or twenty years."
"Oh, yes," he agreed enthusiastically, "But the conservative forces of the government are getting stricter, and we will see if they are able to squash this movement. People don't agree with them, but they do stir up a minority. I guess they don't read much history because this tactic never works."
He was really very cheery about the whole situation. Of course, he was in St. Louis eating apple pie, so he could afford to be cheery.

Finally, at the end of dinner, the president of POD spoke. He focused on the fact that the POD network is more important now that finances and support for higher ed are both getting smaller. He talked about how networks are about the strength of the connections. He made us think-pair-share about how POD could make strong connections in our networks. Those who had phones who could do it, tweeted their answers to #pod10, and those who could not tweet, wrote their ideas on scraps of paper to turn in. These suggestions will all turn up on the networking websites:
http://sites.google.com/site/podnetwork
and
http://tinyurl.com/wikipodia.

Tomorrow, how to effectively publicize a teaching and learning center and Shoes at Pod.

Getting to Saint Looey

This year the POD conference is in St. Louis, and I had to laugh as I drove down 71 South to Louisville to get on 64 West to St. Louis. There was a bit of a dearth of creativity when they were naming these big cities. I had actually forgotten how much relative nothing there is between these two namesakes of the infamous King. No, wait, there are a lot of truck stops, which means there are a lot of trucks. I borrowed my-very-good-friend Ralph's little Honda Fit for this drive, and there I was on I-64 West, an ant among the 18 wheeled elephants. It was actually pretty funny because it felt like I was driving through these huge mobile canyons. As I went deeper into the Midwest, I felt the culture change, or maybe it was just the rural depth of western Kentucky. I stopped for gas at a Flying J truck stop half-way to St. Louis (Gateway to the West, BTW), and I got some coffee. I was standing at the counter to pay for my coffee, and a large man in a red Flying J apron over a stained white polo shirt said, "That's a lovely ensemble you have on tonight. Very pleasant to the eyes," and he tucked his thumbs into the strings of his apron and nodded with great satisfaction. This was disorienting for me at so many levels. Here's what I was wearing:


Not wanting to just stare at him in shock, I mastered myself and tried to say, as cheerily as possible, "Thanks!" What else could I say? The red of my bloodshot eyes must have been set off nicely by the green scarf.

Anyway, here at POD, we are at the Hyatt near the Arch. I got in when it was dark, and the river, the arch, and the moon were exquisite, but I only got to glimpse this transcendent tableau because I was zooming across the bridge between huge trucks and trying to read the street signs through the gaps in the trailers. I did find the hotel easily enough, and wowey but this is a nice one! It has this Asian motif going on. Here, check out the bathroom sink:


Lovely room, I-Pod dock on the room clock, and the conference has negotiated free wireless for conference attendees. Cool.

Traveling to the Gate of Westward Expansion

Well back from the East and now to the West.




I'm off to the Professional and Organizational Development Conference to engage in scholarly discourse with my colleagues in faculty development. I will be blogging from the conference so that you, too, Gentle Reader, can feel like you are attending this conference as well. My goals for this conference are to learn how to do better faculty development for adjunct faculty and to see what kind of research would be useful for next year's conference. I'm thinking we need to do more on faculty learning communities, but we'll see. I'm driving, so I'll have plenty of contemplation time as I trace the trails of the old wagon trains that would leave from Cincinnati in past centuries, arriving in St. Louis for the final provisioning before setting out on the great Trails West through the gateway.

The last time I made this trip for a conference in St. Louis, I was traveling with Sylvia Thompson, a wonderful teacher of developmental English as Raymond Walters and saint up on this earth, God rest her soul. She was a model of love and patience for us all. I can only hope that I can be as kind a person and as patient a teacher as Sylvia was.

12 false assumptions about the Middle East

Since I have been back and talking to my North American friends here in the United States, I have met some interesting assumptions about the Middle East. I would like to talk about some of them here. Of course, this is a small space, and every one of them is really complicated, but here is my best short comment on each one. I'm always happy to talk about them in much more detail in a different context!

World peace is a good goal, or at least world-not-so-much-suffering-and-antagonism, but that's not a very catchy slogan. Anyway, one way to meet this goal of more people being okay is learning more about The Other. We have media to help us do that, but there are some commercial forces that sort of get in the way of the message sometimes, and the view Americans get of the MIddle East is, at times, incomplete. After traveling in the Gulf States for six weeks and returning to the US, here are 12 assumptions about this area that I have had the good fortune to talk about.

1. The Middle East is Iraq and Afghanistan.
Actually, the Middle East is a geographical term for the countries between Asia and Europe. Another way to describe this area is The Arab World (which does not include Iran). Another way to see this part of the world is Dar Al Islam, the abode of Islam. So you can talk about this part of the world geographically, ethnically, or ethno-religiously. If we go with the geographical term, it encompasses 17 counties that range from Egypt around the Arabian Peninsula up to Iran. This list gets bigger if you decide to go with countries that speak Arabic as the national language. No matter how you slice it, this is a large and varied area. If you took 17 states from the United States, or 17 countries of Europe or Latin America, you would see a huge variety of experience, culture, and attitude. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have a few things in common, but Cairo and Dubai are really rather different places. So, as Americans, it is important for us to remember that when we say "The Middle East" it is not like saying "The Midwest" of the United States. It is also important not to think only "US War Zones" when we say "The Middle East". There is more going on than war.

2. The Middle East is one big volatile war zone.
While this is certainly true for parts of this geographical area, there are also many countries that are stable and doing okay. While Yemen is having some challenges, they are fairly contained, and the surrounding states are very stable in that they have governments that work, social structures that function, markets that supply their populations with food, water, and security, and media that at least entertains and to a certain extent, informs. Certainly the Gulf States are models of stability, even if one may not agree with how that stability is achieved. Nonetheless, it works. There are many places in the Middle East where people live happy, content, fulfilling lives.

3. Arabs hate North Americans.
Nope. Americans, when they behave like polite, respectful, cheerful individuals are well received. Throughout the Middle East, many more Arabs have travelled to the United States and Canada than vice versa. Of course if you are from Canada, everybody likes you, but even if you are from their southern neighbor, most Arabs in the Middle East do not automatically recoil from you. In fact, they may well ask where you are from be able to talk about places in your state that they have visited or attended university. Many Arabs are unhappy with certain United States government policies and positions, but that is not the same thing as hating the citizens. Most Arabs are well educated and can tell the difference between people and their government.

4. Women are oppressed in the Middle East, and the head covering is the symbol of this oppression.
While there are government policies that some women would like to see change, in general, they do not feel oppressed. In fact, there is a cultural regard for women that is quite positive. Of course there are contradictions such as the mother is due the highest honor in the family, but the father's opinion is the one that counts in decision making. In the US we have this kind of contradiction at many levels as well. However, what sends most Americans and Europeans into a tizzy is the head covering. Without going into the complexity of all the kinds of head coverings (and there are many), suffice to say that in many cases when a woman covers her head she is choosing to do so out of cultural or religious feeling, not because she resentfully has to. Of course in certain countries, she is, indeed, required to cover her head, but in many more countries it is a choice (of sorts). In the Gulf States, there were covered and uncovered women. When I chatted with girls about their choice to cover or not, they all had a great deal to say on the topic. As a result, to merely see the head coverings as oppression is inaccurate, and to merely focus on the head covering when one is actually interested in women's rights is being distracted by a red herring.

5. Everybody has arranged marriages and women are forced to marry men they have never met.
It is true that marriages work a little differently in a place where family relationships are more salient than in the US. Bottom line, women do get to choose, but the choices are different from US choices. In many countries, your female relatives will scope the possibilities and make recommendations to both the young man and the young lady. In stricter countries, like Saudi Arabia, they get to meet in chaperoned situations and then most of the relationship takes place on the phone. Weddings are gender segregated affairs, but quite lavish. Divorce is legal, and divorce rates are similar to the US or only slightly lower. In choosing someone to marry, it matters very much what family they come from, so that can limit the field of choice. In some Gulf States it requires permission from the Emir to marry a foreigner. In Kuwait, if a woman marries a foreigner, her children are not considered Kuwaiti citizens. So, there are some complications in marriage, but it's not as dire as some Americans I have spoken with think.

6. Women in the Middle East have no sense of fashion because they wear a big black bag.
In the Gulf States, the Big Black Bag is called an abaya. Abaya fashion is complicated, sophisticated, and, quite frankly, very beautiful. There are different kinds of cloth, lengths, cuts, decorations, and accessories whose endless variation kept me in rapt attention in every mall and coffee shop we attended. And under the abaya (which is only worn outside the house) are the most glitzy, fashionable costumes ever. To add to the complexity, there are very subtle ways to show what is under the abaya in public, such as a slight lifting of the hem while one goes upstairs to reveal a bit of fashionably frayed jeans and wicked stilettos, or the slight opening of the front of the abayas while one glides through the mall to reveal the dress beneath. Any student of Victorian literature knows that the abaya, in its covering, reveals more than it hides. And the head scarves? There are whole shops devoted to piles and piles and piles of head scarves of different cloth, drape, and intricate decoration. And men participate in this too! For men and women, the adjustment of the head covering is a graceful, elegant, practiced movement. Fashion is big business in the Middle East, and for some, being fashionable is a full time job.

7. Everybody speaks Arabic in the Middle East.
Sort of. If you want to learn to speak Arabic, don't go to the Arabian Gulf or Iran. Actually, in most Middle Eastern Cities, there is a lot of English. In the Gulf States now, you start learning English in first grade. Imagine if the US started teaching Arabic in first grade and required it as a subject throughout high school? Just imagine the uproar if the US required ANY foreign language starting in first grade. Anyway, there is a lot of English, as well as Arabic, French, Hindi, Urdu, Tagalog, Chinese, and on and on. It is quite a multilingual place. However, your humble correspondent did continue to try to work on her Arabic whenever possible even when Urdu would have been the better choice.

8. All men study jihad in the Middle East.
Well, yes, and no. Jihad is actually a word that means "struggle", and in Islam the struggle can be a struggle inside yourself to be a better person. It can also mean a struggle to liberate your people from oppression. So, most people who follow Islam struggle to be a better person, but only a minority take up arms, and most people will say that is a misunderstanding of what jihad really is. Which leads us to number 8.

9. The Taliban is what all Middle Eastern Countries want to be like.
The Taliban were the government in Afghanistan in the late 90s and are now a group fighting to restore conservative Islamic government to Afghanistan. The repressive, conservative, violent policies of the Taliban are exactly what people in the Middle East do not want. These are forward looking countries who want education, employment, stable government, and national security, just as the United States does. Sure, there are Kings, Emirs, Sheikhs, and forms of government that do not mirror US systems, but the US has very good relationships with these governments such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Lebanon, Jordan, and many others.

10. Everybody in the Middle East loves Iran.
Well this is an oversimplification. Iran has complicated relationships with its neighbors. Kuwait is right next door and is quite rationally concerned about what happens to Iran, but it does not want to be subject to Iran or its policies. Qatar shares a ginormous gas field with Iran and so is quite concerned about the implications of developing this field. But while everybody is justifiably concerned about what happens to a big geographical neighbor, it is important for Americans to remember that Iranians are Persian and speak Farsi in contrast to their neighbors who are Arabs and speak Arabic. Its complicated. One really needs to take a political science course to get the complexities, twists, and turns of these relationships.

11. Arabs are oil wealthy sheikhs who live in pampered luxury.
Not really, but sort of. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, the UAE, and Kuwait have taken control of their oil and gas wealth. The result of these natural resources means that the citizens of those countries are reaping the benefits because they have leaders who believe in sharing the wealth of the nations. This is in stark contrast to, say, Nigeria or Texas. If you are a national in these countries, you get free education and health care, subsidized housing and utilities, deals on loans, and job security. However, this is not say that everybody is equally wealthy as there are gradations in family status, and everybody does have to work and take some advantage of the education. It is true that in relative terms, these nationals are doing very very well. However, the leaders of these oil wealthy countries realize that there is an end to the oil, although Qatar has natural gas to last hundreds of years according to the World Trade Organization. Nevertheless, there is a high level push for developing a "knowledge economy" (educating people), and looking for diversifying their economies beyond oil. There is some very dedicated thought on getting beyond oil.

12. Arabs are nomadic bedouin who ride camels and shoot guns in the air.
This is the classic image from Lawarence of Arabia and other "documentaries" of the Middle East. Actually, the nomadic desert life, which includes riding camels and hunting with falcons, is a favored myth of the ethnic past on the Arabian Peninsula, but it is not the present situation by any means. The majority of people in Middle Eastern countries have been settled agricultural people for thousands of years. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq are known as the cradle of civilization. In your "copious spare time" try googling "the fertile crescent". Anyway, the Arab On A Camel With A Gun was a real guy on the Arabian peninsula in the 19th and early 20th century, but he has been replaced by a a guy in a business suit driving a Range Rover and carrying a laptop. However, there is still a romantic tradition of camping in the desert and riding around the dunes, just not on a camel, but in your four wheel drive SUV or ATV. There is also an active falcon hunting community, passionate but small. What confuses some Americans is the national dress of the white robe with the scarf on the head held down by the black circlet. This traditional dress is indicative of national identity, but it does not automatically come with a camel, and it is much more commonly associated with a laptop, a cell phone, and a pack of cigarettes.

Just the middle of the journey

Tonight we leave for America. Unlike in Casablanca, our exit visas have already been obtained and are safe in our passports. Even though we will soon be in another country, the work has only begun. Gathering data is one thing, and processing it is quite another. Nevertheless, this is an ending of sorts, and this morning I took my last walk along the plagette (corniche/boardwalk). I have my modest little "no elbows, no knees" suit in which I join all the other walkers on the plagette at 6:00am. There are quite a lot of people out walking in the early morning, some in "sport hijab" and others less covered up. There is a quite the determined elderly person who is quite round, who huffs and puffs along like a little steam engine in her billowing abaya and burka. Her tenacity is astonishing. There are also twenty somethings how walk or jog along in hijab with a baseball cap on top. Teams of young men run by in tanks and board shorts. I assume they are training for the "peal diving competition" that is coming up soon. One morning I was marching along and I saw six women sitting out on the rocks in the early morning, just chatting away. The walking seems to have gotten in the way of a good chat.


Although it is a source of consternation and dismay in many quarters, I rather enjoyed the stray kitties. On the surface they are quite cute, although I know they life a hard short life. I will go back and pat my no-where-near-as-tough kitty and love these strays through her.


This is such a lovely walk, and there is such good company. I feel like I'm part of some kind of exercise group as we all walk back and forth along the beautiful intersection of earth, sea, and sky.

The fabulous lunch that almost killed us

Our most excellent hosts at AMIDEAST booked lunch today at The Seven Seas. It is a beautiful restaurant that sits right on the edge of Gulf with a beautiful view of the city scape and the sea. It was elegant and beautiful. There was the minor detail that it was also a popular place to smoke shisha, but we sat as far from the smoke as we could. We sat down to the prix fixe menu, so we didn't know what would happen. First came this plate:

Was it our salad? It looked pretty chunky, but just as we were about to attack it, the appetizers began to come out. It turns out that was the center piece that we almost ate. Well, the food kept coming and coming and coming. It wouldn't stop!

Finally, we sat back and sighed. We had done it: we had met the lunch and ate it. But wait! Four trays of dessert suddenly appeared on the table along with Turkish coffee so thick you could stand a spoon up in it. Here are two of the four dessert trays.

Holy Smokes! We did our best. It was all so good, and there was so much of it. We waddled out of the restaurant vowing never to eat again as it seemed we had reached the pinnacle of quality and quantity.

A little more on journalism

************
please note: this post does not intend to criticize the government, the emir, or Kuwaiti culture. This post includes only observations made directly from published newspapers freely available in Kuwait and interviews with Kuwaiti journalists.
************

In reading the local Gulf newspapers, it is clear that local journalism is still developing its own distinctive voice. Sometimes an article will mention a topic in a headline that has already efficiently summarized the content of the article. For example, an article with the headine "38 Individuals take pre-marriage test" reports that 38 individuals took a pre-marriage test and were happy with the process.

The daily paper I prefer to read, Al Watan, often includes some very entertaining sentences at many linguistic levels. Here is an example from the opinion page: Islam is particularly concerned with alcohol and its strict prohibition stems from the fact that not only does it affect the mind, but also it influences the spirit of its consumers in a sense that in both cases alcohol consumers have no power and control over their behavior as well as their utterances.

However, in addition to the linguistic interest of these periodicals, there is also an interesting process of content selection. By general consent, one does not criticize the ruling family, although the constitution only specifies that one cannot criticize the emir. Of course, this is unless they shoot each other, and then the papers will report that as they did last week when a nephew shot his uncle outside a diwaniyya. This caution was repeated in many conversations throughout the Gulf. A journalist we spoke to said, "There is no censorship. We are free to write about anything we want. We just don't criticize our advertisers because the paper needs them." So, no criticism of the ruling family, the emir, or the advertisers. As a result, the Kuwaiti parliament is eagerly covered by Kuwaiti journalists. For example, "In the meantime, the parliament approved amendments to the foreigners law, whereby the offspring of Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis will be exempted from residency fees. These women have been also entitled to sponsor their non-Kuwaiti husbands, while their children will be entitled to permanent residency provided the woman was not naturalized by marriage in accordance with article 8 of Citizenship Law."

Yesterday, we met with four journalists from four of the local papers. We were very excited about the prospect of speaking with them, and at breakfast we planned what questions we might expect from them and how we might respond. When we arrived and sat down, they asked two questions: What do you think of women's situations in Kuwait? and How have the financial difficulties of the economy affect the Fulbright program? Then silence fell, and there was a long, awkward pause. Finally, one of the journalists asked, "Do do you have any questions for us?"

I asked, "Could you talk about the educational path that lead you to journalism?"

One young man responded, "Well, I have a degree in economics, but this job was available, and I kind of like it."

Another slightly older man said, "I have 15 years experience in hospitality management, but there was no work in that field for me, so I am doing this." Clearly the papers must have kept back their trained journalists for real stories.

So, even though the job of journalist does not seem to be at the top of the Best Employment list, they are quite creative. Here are some of my favorite headlines from the past few days.

"Young Kuwaitis Seen Exercising Tuesday morning"
"Healthy Citizens Warned Against Pretending to Be Handicapped"
"Encouraging Female Ex-Patriates to Breastfeed Citizens"

The continued development of writing

I'm just saying.....

Today Al Watan reported that a blogger in Egypt had been pulled from an internet cafe last week and beaten to death by police in the street outside. The police report that he died from asphyxiation as a result of swallowing a bag of heroin just as police entered the cafe. The family dispute this finding.

Today Al Watan reported that four Jordanians have been arrested for postings on Facebook that were deemed slanderous of the government. The postings were not reported.

Today the Kuwait Times reported that a blogger who criticized the Emir was let out of jail on bail because of poor health.

In other news, the Rolling Stone has suddenly developed a journalistic reputation in reporting that some members of the military may not hold the highest regard for the present administration. As a result, the Rolling Stone reporter has kept his job, but McChrystal and his civilian press aid has lost theirs.

Role Ambiguity at the Souk Almubarkiya

A few evenings ago, Beth, Jill, and I (all ladies of a certain age), when to shop around the Souk Almubarkiya. This is a huge souk. It is a maze of little shops chock full of *everything*. My inner crow was in heaven. There were piles of copper coffee pots, stacks of different types of rope, heaps of suitcases, racks of abayas and dishtasha (with accompanying underwear), poles of prayer beads, and masses of scarves. And so much more, all piled up and tended by enthusiastic men, and occasionally women, who would call to us as we passed, "Welcome Madame" or "Please Madam" or "Here Madam". We stood out as "not from around here" as we strolled through this garden of material culture. Men with trays of fruit drinks cruised the alleys in case anyone got thirsty. Once we got lost and wandered through a men's coffee area. That was awkward.

However, Debra and I went back the next day. Debra wanted to get an abaya and a sheyla, and I went along for company. However, I was made uncomfortable by the content Madaming, so I put on a sheyla to try to hide, after a fashion. It totally worked. Nobody Madamed me. When I stopped to look at something, nobody came over to pressure a sale. It was much more comfortable to shop this way.

Well, Debra went into one corner to purchase an abaya, and I was helping out. I held her bags (if you know me, you know I was totally "hands free" myself), and I offered helpful advice. I held her skirt down as she tried on abayas so there would not be some kind of inappropriate show. After she made her purchase and was ferreting in her wallet for cash, the shop keeper folded up her purchase, put them in a bag, and briskly handed me the bag with a curt, "For Madam." As we walked away, I puzzled a bit about about that interaction, and it occurred to me that he must have thought I was her maid! It was hilarious. Here is my photo of me being Debra's maid. I guess that's why nobody bothered me at the souk. I didn't look like I had any money to spend. Here is the photo Debra took of me in my role as her maid.

Museums in Kuwait

For many interesting reasons the arts have an ambiguous place in Kuwait. There are lots of museums, and I think we have visited them all! We went to the Dickson House where the most famous British Colonial Administrator and his wife lived in the early 20th century. Violet Dickson, the lady of the house, was quite the formidable character. There is a story told about her that when she and her husband moved in to the traditional sea front house they were to live in for their entire tenure in Kuwait, she had a bit of house cleaning to do. Evidently, the place had gone to ruin under the auspices of the previous colonial administrator, and the place was full of rats. One night Mrs. Dickson put out a white sheet in the courtyard, put food on it, and waited. As the rats came out to eat the food, she shot them one by one with a rifle. So much for the rat problem. Here is a photo of Mrs. Dickson in the desert with her son. In Arabic, the mother is referred to as "Mother of [son's name] so since her son's name was Saud, in this photo she is identified as Umm Saud.

We also went to the Sadu museum. This is the traditional Bedouin weaving museum. It was full of lovely weavings. While we were there, a group of chatty young girls came in to have their weaving lesson, and they seemed very excited about it!


We went to the national museum in a tremendous dust storm. It was eerie to walk around the windy, dusty abandoned courtyard. The national museum had some fairly unlabeled faintly organized archeological exhibits from digs on Failaka Island which dated back to 3,000 BC. Evidently there was water on this island and it was a verdant lovely place to live and trade with local boat traffic. That was until the Iraqi invasion when everybody was moved off the island and the beaches were mined. Now there is a small beach resort and strange heritage village on the island, but the town is a ghost town. More on Failaka in another post.

The national museum also houses a "heritage village" that is a warren of little alleys to emulate a souk with little stalls inhabited by mannikins in awkward ethic craft poses. This is followed by an eclectic collection of artifacts from the 20th century like a bunch of stringed instruments, many typewriters, some bakelite telephones, and lots of coffee pots. I had heard that in the invasion, the Iraqis had looted the museum but by now 90% of the original catalog had been returned. However, these artifacts must have been on loan somewhere because we did not see anything that looked like it might have warranted looting.

We also visited the planetarium at the national museum. We asked for the English language galaxies show, which was really cool as it showed excellent pictures from the Hubble telescope. However, if I may nitpick a bit, the cheesy introduction suggested that the history of astronomy began with the European renaissance, and I happen to know that Galileo et al were all reading the works of astronomers from this part of the world to inform their work. In fact, Galileo wrote in Arabic script. In the Sharja museum in the UAE, there is an extensive astronomical technology exhibit from well before the European Renaissance. I found it odd that the Smithsonian Institute, who claimed to have made this planetarium show, did not know about the Arab astronomers.

We also visited the Museum of National Memoriam which documents the Iraqi invasion. It is principally dioramas that re-enact the progression and atrocities of the invasion of 1990. It was quite traumatic, not just to learn about the minutia of the atrocities but to be assaulted by the very loud simulated air raid, machine gun, tank, and screaming sounds that went with each installation. After the dioramas came the individual memoria to the people who died or were POWs. It was heart wrenching to view the pictures. I asked several young people we met if they had gone, and they said, all their schools had taken them there as a field trip, but many said they did not really pay a lot of attention: they remembered it was loud and dark, and one young lady said, very softly, "It made me hate Iraq."

On a less traumatic note, we visited the Tareq Rajab Museum. This is a private home made into a museum for the private collection of Tareq Rajab. He was the first director of the Department of Antiquities in Kuwait and was an avid collector. The museum has a large collection organized according to the 19th century British catalog system: put things with the same shape together in the same place. It is a varied and lovely collection almost entirely unencumbered by text. The silver jewelry is lovely, the collection of ornamented flintlock rifles is astounding, and the traditional costumes are beautiful. They have a whole section devoted to the country of Palestine.

The most exquisite of the museums was the calligraphy museum. It had a riveting video about how to make the ink and reed pens. The pieces were so beautiful that I was re-inspired to continue my Arabic studies. There was also a collection of Arabic calligraphy done by a Chinese artist.

But what about modern art? Is there any in Kuwait, or is it all just heritage crafts, and with modernity art died in Kuwait? Mais non! We visited the modern art museum, much to the surprise of the single docent. Much of the modern art displayed in the museum seemed to date to the 70s and 80s, but there were some 21st century pieces there also. I thought the most striking pieces seemed to come from the sculptors who were responding Kuwait's struggle to find itself in the 80s and recover itself in the 90s. This was the most evocative piece for me by the artist Sami Mohammed, dated 1989.

So yes, Kuwait has local art, and there is community involvement. It is not very well advertised, but it is there, and it is all worth going to see. The Amideast organizers have done a great job organizing all these visits, and I have learned so much at each one.

A piece of satire: Dusk in Araby

Dusk in Araby
by Ruth Benander and Debra Beilke
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Authors' Note: This piece is intended as satire. No disrespect is intended towards the Fulbright-Hays Program, The American University of Kuwait, Kuwait City, the Dubai Police force, or the Ghani Palace. This piece of satire does not intend to minimize in any way the crime of human trafficking.
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The Ghani Palace Hotel crouched on the shores of the Arabian gulf, her faded glory gently decaying into the desert.  Once she may have been considered lovely, but her charm had gone grey, and the process had not been graceful.  In her later years, she received few guests into the warrens of her hallways, and when she did, it seemed to come as a great surprise.  As her splendor waned, she became more of an architectural bookmark for beach front property rather than a page of text for some form of holiday nostalgia.  Foot steps in her halls and many stairwells raised dust and sent the staff into a panic.  But her bulky shadow could hide money as well as dust, and in the freewheeling blackmarket of the Gulf, this made her attractive.  

Despite the mosque-studded skyline, the Kuwait City of the Ghani Palace, its own parallel universe, teemed with vice of all kinds—opium dens, beer-induced belching contests, and ladies’ saloons, to name some of the more rampant examples of sin in this den of iniquity.   Yet lurking even deeper beneath the surface was something worse, far worse—an international ring of academic human trafficking known to insiders by the code name Fulbright-Hays.   The latest crop of FH captives were trapped in a dhow that had been anchored close to the shoreline for weeks since they could not confirm their booking at the Ghani Palace.
 
Undercover agents from the Dubai police department were appalled at the human misery they discovered (via hidden video cameras rigged to the dhow’s interior.)  The middle-aged captives were rolling in agony on the deck of the dhow as it rolled back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in the waves and the 120 degree heat.  Already miserable from sea-sickness, the hapless academics were tortured even further by the techno-funky rap music pounding so loudly the reverberations were felt in Baghdad.  Although the Dubai police (henceforth known as the “Dubai Boys”) felt the pain of the FH captives, they did not rescue them—not yet.  They needed to watch and wait in order to uncover enough evidence to convict the king pin of this human trafficking.  Daily, the Dubai Boys were learning more and more about this powerful Godfather.  They knew he was headquartered in Washington, D.C.  They knew his name was Joey.  They knew his days were numbered.

It was noon in DC, seven in Kuwait, and Jerry was worried. The men holding the academics reported that yet another academic had requested to move to another location on the dhow, and several were complaining that the internet connection on the dhow was slow. Three had begun to clean the dhow, much to the dismay of their captors. This was not how humans being trafficked were supposed to behave. Worse yet, they were all taking notes and competing to interview their captors, each crafting clever questions to expose their captors' world views and cultural identities. Joey knew things were going from bad to worse when he discovered that the academics were blogging about their unique perspectives on the nature of human trafficking through ethnographic explorations and chronicling the disorienting dilemma of such participation. They drove their captors crazy by constantly trying to critically reflect on their experience. Joey knew he had to pawn them off soon on some university looking to contract faculty to teach English as a second language for low wages. How else could the knowledge economy be supported except through cheap academic labor to construct the foundations for the best educated populations in the world? It was dirty work, but someone had to do it. Joey just saw himself as another epistemological middleman. He contacted his man, Jamal, in Kuwait.

Jamal sat on the roof of the Ghani Palace watching the sun set over the broiling city, throwing cigarette butts into the roof-top pool. He fondled his prayer beads as he reflected on the Fulbright Hays dilemma.  Clearly, something had to change; the dhow was no longer a safe place to keep his captives.  But where to transfer them?  As the hot desert winds began to whip themselves into a frenzied sand storm, Jamal had a brainstorm.  Why not move his human cargo to the Ghani Palace?   Nobody would ever think to check for them in the Palace.  It never occurred to anybody to check into the Palace.  It was the perfect solution.  There were a few minor problems--such as the need to train his operatives how to put towels in the hotel rooms, how to clean the sinks, how not to look confused when a hotel guest tried to check in—but these could be easily resolved.
  
Two hours later, Jamal was riding the waves of the Arabian Gulf on his jet ski as he raced towards the dhow at full speed. He was followed by a twelve-pack of Filipina operatives in matching outfits on their own jet skis.  He was feeling good, full of resolve.  He and his operatives would climb on board stealthily and grab the captives from behind.  Before they transferred them to the jet skis, the Filipinas would, of course, offer them coffee and a selection of chocolates.  Working in the underbelly of academic trafficking is no excuse to behave like barbarians, after all, and protocol had to be observed. 

Suddenly, in the dark and stormy dusk, a door slammed, a maid screamed, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon. The maids scattered in confusion, their jet skis making a maze of wakes that shook the dhow like a flag in the stiff breeze. Jamal leapt from his jet ski to the dhow, desperately clambering up the ladder, slick with the two-stroke engine sheen left by the hordes of jet skis. He was unprepared for the sight that met his eyes. The dhow had been transformed into faculty offices. Surrounded by reference texts, maps, and jumbles of flash drives, the academics looked up.

"Do you have any cold water?" one asked distractedly, "It's rather hot. How can I be expected to complete my curriculum project if there isn't a cold bottle of water to drip all over my notes?"

                “I’d rather have a beer,” muttered one under his breath.  “When I was trafficked in Ghana, at least they had plenty of good beer.”

                From a heap of books and papers, another academic peered at Jamal and asked, "Where are your parents from? Do you have national rights? Did you go to university in the United States? How do you feel about the efficacy of the parliamentary system in a country where family clan loyalty is still an entrenched decision making protocol? "  

                A third academic marched briskly up to him and said, "Your maps are out of date. You only have maps from the 1940s. Have you noticed that things have changed? You can't still list pearl diving sites in maps of the 21st century because that is merely a rhetorical invocation of the past. There is no place for rhetoric on maps."  She glared at a stunned Jamal. 

                Yet another captive, who lay groaning with sea-sickness, mewed feebly from across the dhow, “Do you know of ANY Kuwaiti authors?  Any at all?  There must be at least one Kuwaiti Jane Austen wannabe…”

                A distinguished academic in the back shouted, "This hummus is terrible!  Give me a proper kitchen and I'll make you hummus that will knock your eyes out."

                Jamal sat down. Who were these people?  He was promised young pretty girls with pert American accents. It was supposed to be easy: take their passports, promise them authentic exotic experiences, and hand them over to the American University.  This crop of contract workers did not look at all like pretty young girls and taking their passports appeared to be as easy as finding edible food at the breakfast buffet of the Ghani Palace.  "I have to think," Jamal said, voicing his confusion aloud. The result was immediate. All the academics retreated to their piles of notes and left him alone.  Someone had to think: they understood that. 

                Jamal looked disconsolately, and then with growing hope, at the approaching pirate ship which appeared to have Dubai Police stenciled on the side.   Yes, he was correct:  it WAS the Dubai Police, those high-tech superheroes of justice who were so effective at stomping out crime in their own emirate that they had been recruited to clean up in Kuwait as well.  Jamal knew that the Dubai surveillance apparatus was second to none.  He knew, too, that their gig was up.  They were busted.  What to do?  He made his decision:  he would give himself up to the Dubai boys and tell them all he knew about Jerry.  He hoped they would be lenient on him.  After all, he was just a low-paid contract worker himself.  Why should he go down for the Godfather’s wrongdoings?  If he were lucky, he might get off with 100 lashes and deportation to Egypt. 

            He stood up on the front deck of the dhow and waved a white flag at the Dubai Boys. From the bow he had a better view of the approaching ship. The Dubai Boys had spared no expense. The finest calligraphers in the world had stenciled the gleaming white cutter, the whitest in the world. The cabin towered above the deck and was the tallest cruiser cabin in the world. And what was that tall white structure in the back? It looked like a ski slope….it WAS a ski slope—the tallest manmade pirate ship ski slope in the world. Those Dubai boys knew how to travel in style. Unfortunately, the entire boat was not occupied, as several cabins remained empty since the construction of the boat. The interior was not quite finished, but none of that mattered: from the deck of the dhow, they looked good. The best in the world.

As the Dubai Boys pulled alongside the dhow, Jamal had second thoughts. He figured it might be better just to lie low. His English was good, he was wearing cargo shorts, and if he could just get his hands on bulky man-bag, he might be able to pass for a professor. Quickly, he huddled behind a nearby stack of papers and tried to look interested in minutia.

The police were getting busy. It took some time to rescue the academics. As soon as the Dubai Boys thought they had them all in one place, two or three would wander off. One kept requesting coffee. Another briskly informed the police that it was time to pee, and half the group disappeared into the bathroom. In a desperate attempt to get the academics off the dhow, an officer announced that there would be coffee and snacks served on the other boat. The effect was electric; most of the academic, now plus Jamal, were on the police cruiser so fast the dhow hardly rocked, but on the way over two of the academics got distracted and leapt overboard. Fearing some kind of bizarre escape from rescue, the Dubai Boys looked over the railing. There were two middle aged ladies paddling around next to the boat.

“Look at us swimming!” they called, “Does any one have a camera to document us swimming in the Gulf!”

The Dubai Boys pulled them out and firmly locked them in the cabin to drip all over the sofas and not create more distractions while Jamal clutched his makeshift man-bag to his chest and hoped he would not be noticed. The Dubai Boys did not have time for details like counting human trafficking victims. Since there was no human trafficking in Dubai, they actually had little experience with the crime. Only 23 cases were recorded each year in Dubai! As a result, they figured they would just liberate the academics in Kuwait City and let them figure out the details. Jamal had no cause to worry. Maybe, he thought, this was his ticket out of the Ghani Palace and on to better things. He planned his new future during the trip back to shore.

On shore, a new crisis presented itself: where to put the academics? The Dubai Police were not interested in some measly victims of human trafficking. Who could believe them anyway: they probably came to work as contract educators for the universities on their own, planned a dhow trip, and got stuck out there. And lost their passports. And had unrealistic expectations about their work situation. They probably brought it on themselves. The Dubai Police were more interested in the mysterious Joey. The academics could tell them nothing except that he had booked them rooms at the Ghani Palace Hotel. If the Dubai Police couldn’t get a lead on Joey, they at least discovered a block of rooms reserved and paid for at the Ghani Palace. But there were only rooms for ten and there appeared to be eleven in the group. Jamal tried to make himself look smaller and more erudite.

“Make the guys room mates,” barked the Dubai Police sergeant in a sudden fit of inspiration, and the confused desk clerk tried to figure out how he would give the guys rebates, as the sergeant requested. The desk clerk was better at intimidating young women than booking guests into a hotel. These were two completely different skill sets. He knew guests needed keys, so he just started handing out keys. It worked: they all went away. The academics, the police, the guys from the pool hall down stairs who had come to watch the show: they all went away. A dusty calm resettled on the reception area of the hotel. The desk clerk went out to give tuna to the stray cats, so he did not hear the phone begin to ring as the new guests he had given room keys to discovered that they were living in a building whose maintenance had been neglected and this neglect needed to be instantly reported, noted, addressed, and critiqued.

Jamal went back up to the rooftop pool to smoke. He was back where he had started, but he felt changed. He had narrowly escaped, and it seemed that Joey was incommunicado. What to do? He had rather liked the eccentric tribe of the professoriate. They were geeky but fun. He liked his man-bag. It was so much easier than carrying everything in his pockets, and there was room for water and a hat. He contemplatively flicked another cigarette butt into the pool and wondered if he were too old for graduate school.

The Veil as Red Herring

Much is being made of veils/hijab/hegab etc. In the newspaper yesterday, it was reported in one country that wearing veils for women was just made compulsory: there was an outcry of protest. (Somalia just made beards and mustaches compulsory for men). In an article right underneath the one about compulsory veils for women was one where the man in charge had just ruled that veils were illegal: there was an outcry of protest. In a recent documentary on Egypt, the women interviewed had many different reasons for wanting or not wanting to wear the veil, and another documentary on Muslims in Michigan interviewed women who were talking about their personal choice to wear the veil. Interestingly, when one consults the Qur'an on this topic, there are only verses that refer to modest dress for both men and women, but none specify wearing a veil as a requirement for Muslim practice. When asked some local Kuwaiti women about this, they laughed and said, "It is about cultural identity. It is the way of our people." One woman made the personal observation that when a Qatari woman wore her veil pinned tight, it was for religious reasons, and when it was loose and required constant elegant adjusting, it was a cultural identity item.

Legislating costume is always difficult, and it seems that the "reasonable person" criteria often takes care of "decent dress". Of course one can still be utterly scandalized: I don't understand the increasing cleavage exposure in Ohio. But back to the Arabian Gulf: the veil seems to be about choice. An elegant, time consuming fashion choice at that! Modesty? Heavens to Betsy: some of the veils and abayas (and concomitant shoes) in the Arabian Gulf are anything but modest in their fancy cut, elaborate decoration, and extreme fashionistaness. So for people to get all bent out of shape about whether one wears a veil or not is a distraction from other topics of more pitch and merit. The more important issues involve women's participation in public life, education, and social institutions, not what they wear when they are doing it.

For example, in the Kuwaiti parliament, here are two members of parliament, equally dedicated and effective in their work. One wears hijab, the other doesn't. When I went to visit a girl's school recently, it made more sense to choose to wear a more conservative style of dress. Certainly when visiting the mosques, one dresses according to tradition, but putting a scarf on my head does not muffle my brain. There are other issues that muffle the brain, like having one's father or older brother have the last word on whether one goes on to higher education or not, or not being able to travel without male sponsorship.

I am also very interested in the fact that men's veils are not addressed with the same fervor as women's veils. These guys arrange and rearrange their veils with the same fashion sense the women do, but they are not required in the mosque the way women's head coverings are. As long as the head covering is a choice, then letting people choose does not seem to hurt anybody, but when it becomes external legislation, then there are problems. It will be interesting to see how the Somalia issue plays out where men's facial hair is now legislated.

The one thing I have issues with is the niqab, the face covering. To me, a western person in whose culture honesty is a value equated with seeing a person's face and where masks are seen as inherently duplicitous, the niqab has the cultural feel of a mask. I still find it a bit of an adjustment to have a conversation with a person who is wearing niqab. I can get over it, but at first it is like "don't stare at the niqab: oops, staring at the niqab".

Which way is Mecca?

Here are two signs from two different hotel rooms. They are supposed to indicate the direction of Mecca from the hotel room. I asked one of the hotel staff how to read the sign, and he just shrugged. I suspect he did not understand my question. Gentle reader, any suggestions on how to read these signs? They are plastic disks glued firmly to the wall, so their rotation must have been on purpose as they do not move. Why do the arrows point up or down? Does the visual rotation of the ka'bah relate to the interpretation of the arrow? Why is the arrow not three dimensional? Is it an implied compass direction assuming north to be the top?

Potties I have known

Here is your basic potty. Space for lots of bottom, and a lovely edited bidet spigot for perfect hygiene.


Here is a lovely bathroom that gives you a multicultural choice of strategies.


Here are some lovely tiles in our Kuwait bathroom for the more aesthetic potty experience.


Here is the most aesthetic potty room we have visited so far. The potty was just a potty as in the first photo of this entry, but the mirror, well, the mirror...


This is a brutal potty from the early 20th century located in a traditional house on Failaka Island.


This is a dhow (traditional wooden boat) potty. This view is looking up a 10 meter tall ship. It is the most basic potty of all, but it is the one with the best view.

Frisson, Art, and Politics

In order to create art, it seems that a bit of frisson, friction, discomfort, or disorientation is required. I mean art as in expressive communication of alternate viewpoints whether in poetry, fiction, sculpture, painting, film, or whatever a person has chosen for expression. Professor Tolkien wrote that things that are good to have and times that are happily spent make short stories and are quick in the telling, but things that are hard to bear and times that are painful make riveting stories and are long in the telling. So if you have an educated class that is entirely provided for, perhaps there is no motivation for art. One Kuwaiti person asserted that as along as women are bought off with enough money for travel and shopping, there is no motivation to examine their lives and realize that there is more than just shopping and travel. When they realize that, they will organize and work for more political rights for women and children.

Others have asserted the same opinion concerning literature in the Gulf. One finds a great deal of hyphenated Arab writing in English by Arabs who have moved to other countries, and with that distancing and the frictions of living in other places, they are able to write about these discomforts and the accompanying insights. Nationals in the Gulf are very comfortable. Some teachers at state universities say that men who are Gulf nationals take their jobs for granted, so they are not motivated to apply themselves to their studies. In fact, about 70% of university students are female. Maybe the limitations on women's movement and choices provides women with the push-back required for artistic reflection. Certainly there is more writing available from these women. In the short stories and novels I have read so far in English, marriage and relationships figure prominently, but such is also true of women writing in other genres. I wonder if there is a Molly Ivins equivalent in the Gulf? Maybe this person is just now in grade school, and we will hear from her in a few years.

We were wildly fortunate to be able to have a private session with three of the women who serve in the Kuwaiti parliament, and they opined that women need to be more involved in the work force and in public life in order to have more support for women's rights. As long as women are comfortable, they will not support political and legal changes in women's rights in Kuwait. Today there was supposed to be a vote for some pieces of legislation that would give citizenship to the children of women who married non-Kuwaitis and another that would provide support for women who would stay home and raise children instead of joining the work force. The female ministers of parliament were supporting the citizenship legislation, but they were not so supportive of the subsidies for homemakers because it was potentially a way to convince women to stay out of work.

There seem to be competing social forces at work here because if women make up 70% of the universities, but are then paid to stay home with toddlers, it is not clear that this is a recipe for social success. One a person learns to think, it is hard to say, "Okay, now stop thinking." Raising children is a very difficult and important job, and research is clear that a well educated mother raises better educated children, so in this way, it could be a very good thing. In fact, raising children should merit hazardous duty pay at times. However, there may be some women who might want other duties, and these may head out to the work force. Certainly these four women who ran for parliament did, and they are making a difference for mothers and children, or trying to. The vote for this legislation was supposed to take place, but parliament could not meet to vote because a quorum was not present, so those who showed up all went back to their offices. Three of the four women ministers actually agreed to talk to us since parliament was not meeting, so we went to the huge diwaniya room in the parliament building to discuss women's rights in Kuwait. These were dynamic people who felt frisson in their culture, and were ready to move forwards. They all had PhDs from the United States, were witty, knowledgeable, generous, and full of passion for their work.

Between the US ambassador to Kuwait, Deborah Jones, and the Kuwaiti women in parliament, there is hope for planet earth after all: the trajectory of the proverbial handbasket may yet be diverted by people like these phenomenal women.

The Ghani Palace Hotel

The Ghani Palace Hotel crouches on the shores of the Arabian gulf, her faded glory gently decaying into the desert. Once she may have been considered beautify, but her charm had gone grey, and the process had not been graceful. In her later years, she received few guests into the warrens of her hallways, and when she did, it seemed to come as a great surprise. As her splendor waned, she became more of an architectural bookmark for beach front property rather than a page of text for some form of holiday nostalgia. Foot steps in her halls and many stairwells raised dust and sent the staff into a panic.

The feet of the Ghani Palace herself were like a pair of Roman sandals, harkening back to a mythological past, strips of balconies strapped wide spaces together. Small shops and offices made up the lower layer of mud this faded lotus stood in. Grimy little stores sold philosophical signs like, " If you drink, you die. If you don't drink, you die." There was a video store that rented Hollywood and Bollywood films with all the sex and violence left in, unlike the cinema versions that edited those parts out, resulting in a certain amount of plot ambiguity (if any of the film was left after the excision). There were small offices with crowded desks and empty chairs.

There were few actual people in the Ghani Palace Hotel. Guests were a disturbance that confused the staff. When ten guests suddenly arrived one day, it caused a shock that ran through the hotel and made her sigh and shift uneasily. Her elevator, already old and tired, groaned so audibly that any guest foolish enough to use it quickly learned the error of her ways and retired to the stairs, although this move disturbed other furry and feathered denizens of the hotel's upper and lower reaches. The stairs trailed through the Palace in intestinal twists and shifts. No one flight completely reached from top to bottom which resulted in elevator-leary guests wandering up and down random hallways searching for the next set of stairs. Pentacles appeared in the faux marbling of the walls. At the bottom of one set of stairs, many chairs clustered around the door ready to break free and run wild.

But the greatest shock to the frayed nerves of the venerable Ghani Palace Hotel was the invasion of the guest rooms by actual guests. Towels that had lain dormant to peacefully house sophisticated mold cultures were disturbed. Windows hosting sediment were shaken. Floors that supported a complex strata of desert dust and indigenous dust bunnies were trodden upon. The Ghani Palace shuddered.

The crumbling, abandoned apartment buildings across the street laughed at the Ghani Palace's discomfort. They happily hosted their cats and pigeons who did not try to wash their non-existent windows, sweep their dirt floors, or wipe their broken counters with disinfectant. The Symphony Building, the glass and steel high-rise next door, did not even glance toward the Ghani Palace who she considered an eye sore compared to her up-to-date superiority.

But the bulking, embarrassingly ornamented presence of the Ghani Palace Hotel could not be ignored even as the paint flaked off the balconies and her house-keeping staff puzzled over guest requests for bath mats. Her lumpy profile dominated the skyline available to her, and her distinctive costume jewelry of balconies, arched, windows, dusty carpets and odd ornamental empty pots added to her disturbing charm. The Ghani Palace was not so much a hotel as an invitation to an alternate reality, another Kuwait within Kuwait.