Two Old Fools on a Camel: From Spain to Bahrain and Back Again

by Victoria Twead

  Joe shrugged. “We’re not sure,” he said. “We haven’t made our minds up yet. It depends...” A low-flying helicopter’s blades whipped his words away.

  “What did you say?” shouted Colton, and Rashida leaned in, cupping an ear.

  That helicopter decided me. I suddenly knew what to do, and took a deep breath.

  “We’re not coming back,” I said clearly, as the helicopter swung away. I caught Joe’s look of astonishment and relief. “We’re going to hand in our letter of resignation and go back to Spain.”

  That night we wrote the letter.

  “Dear Ms. Naima,

  Please accept this as our formal notification that we are resigning from ASS as High School Math/Physics teacher, and Grade 6 English teacher and will not be returning in August 2011.

  This decision was not an easy one, but we have decided that we would like to return to our home in Spain and retire. We very much appreciate the opportunities we have been given here, and the welcome and support the school has given us.

  We wish ASS every success in the future,

  Yours sincerely,

  Joseph and Victoria Twead”

  We pinned up a calendar in the kitchen so that we could cross off the days until we would be back in Spain. All we had to do now was stay in one piece. But first we had to make it through exam time, and with students like ours, this was not going to be easy.

  27. Exams and Cheating

  ‘Courgette Muttabal’

  There was no doubt about it, Talal was Joe’s most troublesome student. Both his parents were doctors and very supportive, and Talal was bright, but he was lazier than a comatose camel.

  “Talal,” said Joe in the classroom one day. “Have you done those study questions I set you?”

  “Yes, Meester Joe, honestly!”

  “Then where are they?”

  “At home, Meester, I swear to God! You can ask my mother!”

  “Okay, Talal. I’ll phone her and just check.”

  “Yes, Meester, she’ll tell you.”

  “What is your mother’s telephone number, Talal?”

  “No problem, Meester, I’ll just look.” Talal starts fiddling with his Blackberry. “Oh! I just remembered! My mother, she changed her number.”

  “You’re getting an ‘F’ for that assignment, Talal,” said Joe, and firmly updated his grade-book.

  Talal’s parents despaired of their son’s lack of achievement. In an effort to improve his grades, Talal’s father suggested that Joe should teach him the topics covered, and then he could help his son at home. This worked quite well. The pair of them could be seen in the school library on many a day, Joe’s bald head almost touching the father’s headdress as they pored over pages of calculations together.

  Did Talal’s grades improve? They did not. When the troubles in Bahrain escalated and doctors and hospitals were targeted, Talal’s family made the decision to move to Canada. Daily, the problems in Bahrain intensified, and the hospitals were the scene of much violence. Talal’s family decided to bring their moving date forward, and needed Talal to sit the exams early. To enter a good college in Canada, Talal first had to pass his exams at ASS. A special paper had to be prepared for him.

  “I’ve already written my exam papers,” Joe growled, scratching his nethers in annoyance. “And now I have to write another one, just for Talal! As if I don’t have enough to do!”

  He wrote another paper, however, and administered it himself. Talal sat in front of him in an empty room, nervously waiting to start.

  “Talal, are you ready?” asked Joe.

  “Yes, Meester Joe. Meester Joe, did I tell you that you are the best teacher ever?”

  “Here’s the paper, Talal. You can start now.”

  Talal finished his two-hour paper in barely 35 minutes.

  “Are you sure you’re finished?” asked Joe. “Have you attempted all the questions and checked through your answers?”

  “Yes, Meester. I’ve finished.” He handed his paper to Joe. “Meester Joe?”

  “Yes, Talal?”

  “Tell my mother that I love her.”

  “Behave yourself, Talal. It’s just an exam, not worth committing suicide over.”

  “Okay, Meester.” Talal pulled a long face, sighed and left the room.

  That evening, Joe marked the paper, which didn’t take long. At the top of the first page, Talal had written, “Mr. Joe, I love you so much. Please give me a good mark. I am sorry I was bad in your class.”

  Joe flicked on, and there were messages on almost every page of the script. “Mr. Joe, I know this answer is wrong but you can see I tried.” And, “Mr. Joe, please be kind.” On the last page, Talal had written, “Mr. Joe, I am begging you. I must get 60% or my dad will kill me. I know you can’t live with that on your mind because you are a wonderful person.”

  Talal’s paper scored 23%, and Joe was being generous. Talal came to collect his grades and say goodbye, as he and his family were leaving the next day.

  “Meester Joe! Look! You have made a very terrible mistake! You have given me only 23%!”

  “Yes, Talal.”

  “But I tried my hardest!”

  “Talal, your paper was dreadful. You know you didn’t work for it. I gave you 23%, and you hardly deserved that.”

  “But Meester! That’s an ‘F’!”

  “Yes, Talal.”

  Talal begged and pleaded, until finally, knowing that he was starting a new life in Canada, Joe generously raised it to a ‘D’.

  “I’m changing it because I know you can do much better,” he said. “And you make me laugh. Now, go away, and good luck in Canada.”

  Two days later, while Joe was teaching, his phone rang. It was Talal, phoning from the plane heading toward Canada.

  “Meester Joe, why you give me a ‘D’?”

  “Because that’s all you deserve, Talal. In fact, you should have been given an ‘F’.”

  Deep sigh. “Okay, Meester. Have a nice life.” And he hung up. We never heard any more from Talal. No doubt he is now tormenting his Canadian teachers.

  Cheating amongst the students was legendary, as we discovered very early on at ASS. My Middle School pupils cheated as a matter of course and didn’t consider it a great crime. They routinely copied from each other, wrote answers on their hands or ankles, and the girls expertly slipped cheat-sheets inside their hijabs. Often, older brothers and sisters, or parents, would do their homework. I once had a note from a mother complaining that the homework I set was too hard, and that it had kept the maid up all night.

  Even marks entered into grade-books weren’t immune. One day, Joe momentarily turned his back to write on the board, leaving his grade book open on his desk. A little mouse of a girl swiftly erased her own grades, substituting them with much better ones. He only discovered the forgery when he noticed the sevens were not crossed, which he always did.

  Cheating in the High School was sophisticated and intensified as the exams approached. Daryna discovered that the photocopier man was making a tidy profit, printing off extra copies of the questions, then selling them to the students.

  Teachers were warned never to leave papers in unlocked desks, or in unattended bags. Students used their smartphones to snap pictures of the exam questions. One teacher was careless and his department’s exam paper soon circulated round the school. He denied it and poor Andrea was blamed. We knew the truth, but the teacher never confessed. Few people knew that he was responsible, not Andrea. As a result, the questions were scrapped and Andrea had to rewrite the paper, much to her annoyance.

  Many of the teachers were also guilty. They freely handed out questions to their classes or created study guides with questions identical to those in the final exam. Hali-Barry included exam questions in emails he sent to his students. He thought he’d got away with it, until a few honest students reported him. Hali-Barry accused another member of his department of hijacking his computer. All nonsense, of course, and he was issued with yet anoth
er formal warning letter. Daryna was forced to create new exams, not allowing teachers to see the questions until the day of the exam.

  During exams, cheating was easy. In multi-choice question exams, the students developed a code of foot-tapping, or coughs, so that everybody knew which answer to circle. Even with two invigilators (or proctors, as the Americans call them) per room, it was impossible to watch every student all the time, the exams being held in small and often overcrowded classrooms. It was a simple matter for students see their neighbours’ answers even while seemingly looking at their own. One teacher had a brainwave. He set up a (dummy) TV camera at the front of the room and warned the students they were being filmed.

  The students were forbidden the use of mobile phones. However, they couldn’t be searched, particularly the girls, and many cellphones slipped through. That meant they could text each other.

  Daryna devised a system that seated students alphabetically, with each exam room allocated a letter of the alphabet. Students of different ages, and sitting different subjects, were mixed together in the same classroom. It did cure the problem of students seeing each other’s work but not that of smuggled-in mobile phones. It was also a nightmare for the invigilators. One student, sitting Algebra, would complain that graph paper was needed and another that a map was missing from his World History exam.

  “How was your day?” I asked Joe as Jasim drove us home after the first day of exams.

  “Terrible,” he groaned. “I got ‘M’ and had a whole roomful of Mohammeds.”

  Jasim was driving particularly erratically that afternoon. A Range Rover pulled out in front of us and Jasim screeched to a halt. Spitting Arabic, he thumped the dashboard with his outsize fist and jumped out of the cab. We watched as he and the other driver bawled at each other, waving their arms.

  “What is he saying?” I asked.

  “Oh,” said Saja, fluent in Arabic. “The other driver questioned Jasim’s parentage, and Jasim told him he drove like a castrated camel.”

  The next morning, the bus was early, rare for Jasim, but the figure in the driver’s seat looked unfamiliar. We climbed on, curious to know where Jasim was. This driver was polite, but spoke no English. When we were all seated, he pushed the button and the door didn’t close. Joe jumped up and showed him how to operate the stick and poke the door closed.

  Saja chatted with the driver, then turned to speak to us. “Jasim’s getting married today,” she smiled.

  Ah, that explained Jasim’s absence today and his testiness yesterday.

  Once the exams were over, the time for the High School trips began. The destinations of these trips were usually European. Accompanying teachers travelled for free, so places were much sought after. In our group, only Colton was lucky enough to be selected.

  “Colton, how did your trip go?” I asked.

  Colton and Essam had accompanied a school trip to Italy, via a stop in Cairo.

  “Huh,” he said, with a chilled Bennigan’s Coors in his hand. “I’m tellin’ you, it didn’t start good. At Cairo airport, I had to queue in a different lane ’cos I’m American. The kids were standing in a separate line, parallel to me, laughing their heads off ’cos I was with the Indians and everybody else. My line was three times the size of theirs. I got the last laugh though.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cos one of our student’s names was Ali Khalil, ’n’ that’s the name of a wanted terrorist.”

  “Ali Khalil?” interrupted Joe. “The same Ali you and I teach?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” he said, spluttering beer. “For goodness sake! Ali? He’s by far my best student, as well as the best behaved!”

  “Tell me about it,” Colton continued. “And our Ali’s only 15. Our lot were delayed for hours. Except for one of our girls who had a different-coloured passport. She’s the daughter of some minister here, ’n’ she got waved straight through.”

  “How about you, Jake?” asked Joe. “How on earth did you get picked for a trip? One minute you were here, and the next we heard you were in Spain.”

  As always, Jake took his time, and demonstrated his talent for storytelling.

  “Y’know, when I was at High School myself, our teacher took twelve of us on an amazing tour of Spain and France. I can remember thinking at the time how incredible it would be if, someday, I, too, had the opportunity to take young people on trips abroad, you know, to appreciate other cultures.”

  The rest of us were grinning already.

  “Good grief.” Jake rolled his eyes.

  “So, how did you get picked for this Spanish trip?” Joe asked again.

  “Well, good grief. When the Hall Monitor whispered to me in an ominous tone that Mrs. Sherazi wanted to see me in her office, I thought I was in trouble.”

  We all nodded.

  “So I was summoned, and I go up in the elevator to the third floor. Rawan, my head of department, is already there, and we’re made to wait with that secretary with purple hair, for 15 minutes, until Mrs. Sherazi is ready to see us. Have you ever seen Mrs. Sherazi’s office?”

  We all shook our heads.

  “No kidding, you could easily put Colton’s, Dogsbody’s and my classroom into it, plus a few more, and it’s still bigger than that. We teach the future of Bahrain in classrooms one-tenth of the size of that office. Good grief. Rawan has already told me that the Arabic teacher, who was supposed to be going on the trip, didn’t have his visa sorted. So, Mrs. Sherazi was asking yours truly, no, telling yours truly to take his place. She leans forward, and says, ‘Jacob, you are leaving tomorrow for Spain. You will be at the airport at 8:45pm, sharp. You will keep me informed of our students.’ I didn’t have a chance to respond before she rattled off in Arabic for ten more minutes to Rawan. So that was that. I’m off to Spain. No questions asked.”

  “You didn’t mind, though, did you?” I asked.

  “What, an historical trip for 10th Graders? I teach World History, so I was excited. I had my reservations about a trip with Rawan, though. Rawan is, as we all know…well…bat-shit crazy. She’s terrifying and everyone stays out of her way, but she likes me, or she did, so that helped.”

  “How was Spain? Did your kids behave?”

  Jake guffawed and set down his glass in readiness for the tale. Secretly, I was very jealous of his trip to Spain, while Joe and I were stuck in Bahrain, but I knew the story would be good.

  “Behave? Good lord! You must be joking...”

  28. Bad Behaviour

  ‘Baklava (Sent Direct from Heaven)’

  Jake took a sip of beer, ever the showman, timing perfect. Colton, Joe and I waited.

  “Good grief. When we arrive in Spain it’s late, and both the kids and teachers are tired. We go out for a brief dinner and then everyone heads to bed. All good so far. The next morning I am jolted out of bed by a knock at my door. It’s one of the boys and he tells me, ever so politely, that Miss Rawan needs me right away. So, I shower, and then head to the lobby.

  “In the lobby, there’s hysteria, mass confusion, and three crying and pale teenage girls to greet me. Of course, I am overwhelmed with horrific thoughts as to what could’ve happened. Did someone die overnight? Did someone go missing? Did someone’s parents pass away? Who is sick? Who got raped? What did our boys do now? Being a teacher, you always try to prepare yourself for every outcome. My head slipped into teacher mode for about five seconds, that is until Rawan informed me of the problem.”

  Jake halts his tale to lubricate his throat. The rest of us are smiling, we know this is going to be good.

  “Good grief. Anyway, Rawan is looking at me, all bug-eyed. ‘Ghosts! Ghosts!’ she says. ‘Jacob, we have ghosts in this hotel!’

  “Let’s take a moment to review what’s happened. The one day we’re free to have a sleep-in, I am jolted from a deep slumber. Not only do three of our girls believe they have had a visitation from malicious spirits, but my leader, my friend, my partner in calmness, also believes this to
be true.

  “As politely as I can, I ask, ‘Um, say again, ghosts?’ I am told that while the girls showered, they heard banging on the windows, the floor, the ceiling, and the walls. I am also informed that as one came out of the shower, she caught sight of a foggy handprint on the mirror. This evidence has lead three teenage girls, and a ‘responsible’ adult, to construe that the hotel is haunted, and Spanish ghosts are having some fun. Good grief.

  “Rawan demands that I immediately arrange for a hotel transfer because we can’t endanger the lives of our precious students by succumbing them to the freewill of supernatural beings. I’m at a loss for words and can’t process all that is being thrown at me. I calmly tell her that we can’t transfer, because we have already paid in full and that this hotel is part of our scheduled program.

  “Rawan is now staring at me. She’s convinced I’m a ghost-loving traitor, probably with evil powers, who knows? Whatever, I don’t side with her, so I am the enemy. She rings our tour guide, Fabio I think his name is. He tells her the exact same news. She turns a peculiar shade of purple and is beside herself with anger, but quietly fades away, back to her room until lunch time. By lunch all is forgotten and Rawan and my students find hundreds of other things to complain about. The food is gross (paella). There is far too much walking (3-5 miles). They’re still hungry and want a McDonald’s.”

  We were all laughing, but Jake held his hand up.

  “Wait, wait! I haven’t told you about the Mystery of the Disappearing Students yet! Now, this one, you won’t believe. Good grief.”

  “More ghosts?” asked Joe.

  “Nope. We took the kids to this really nice restaurant in Malaga to experience a delicious, authentic Spanish meal. ’Course they wanted burgers, but that’s not the point. I was sitting with the teachers, and every time I look up, there are kids going to the bathrooms at the back of the restaurant. And the strange thing is, they weren’t coming back! Every time I looked, there were less kids sitting at the tables.” His eyes grew large at the memory of it.