Still Here

I'm here...barely.

As usual, lots of stuff happening in our household. My Mom came up for a visit in mid-August, and we had a great time with her. We followed that with a week in Ocean City, N.J., where we rented a beach house like we did last year. This time, Hubby's aunts and their families did the same, so the girls got to spend lots of time with their cousins at the beach. It was a great trip and a perfect way to end the summer. Last weekend, we had the hurricane-related weather, which really just amounted to lots of wind blowing down limbs, leaves, and such all over our yard and sidewalk. We also welcomed a new member of the family into our house last week. Meet Charlie

our new poodle! He's around 4 years old, and we adopted him from a rescue group that transports dogs/cats in the south to their forever homes in New England. We've been promising the girls a dog for the past two year, telling them we would get one as soon as we moved back to the U.S. We knew we wanted a poodle because we'd seen how wonderfully behaved my mother-in-law's standard poodle is. We did not, however, want to buy from a breeder if we could avoid it, because they are just so many dogs that need a loving home. We got very lucky in finding Charlie! He's shy and behaves as if he may have been mistreated at some point. He cowers quite a bit when Hubby approaches him, but he's getting better as he learns that we love him and handle him gently. He's a very well-mannered dog, only barking when he hears someone at the door, and he's great around the kids (meaning he lets them pet him but he's smart enough to run and hide when Amelia chases him). Since I'm the one who drove to Connecticut to pick him up, he has taken to me the most, following me around wherever I go and laying next to me wherever I sit. It breaks my heart to think that some family could give this dog up, much less treat him with anything other than kindness. I pray that we'll have a good long time with our new addition!

Hannah has also started school this past week. It was not the start I was hoping for, though. She faced one part culture shock from being back in the U.S. and one part urban school shock from being at a good-sized middle school in an urban area. It was evidently an R-rated experience, and she witnessed kids being disrespectful to teachers, mouthing off during class, etc. She was unhappily surprised to find the school schedule nothing like what she experienced in Doha, where they followed best practices and allowed students a short morning break and afternoon break between classes (this allows time for students to decompress a bit, regroup, and relax before hitting their next subject). Such a practice is immensely helpful to children like Hannah who have ADHD. Her new school allows only 3 minutes to switch classes and only 15 minutes for lunch. I'm guessing the idea is to keep students out of trouble by limiting their "free" time. Hannah calls it "not trusting students" and she's probably right. That's the really sad part...that they probably *can't* trust their students. It's a completely different student demographic than what she's used to, and she's terrified of getting bullied, called out in front of people, excluded, and a thousand other things.

We've tried to reassure her that things will get better and give her strategies for making sure she's successful in class and in making friends. Overall, though, it seems that middle school is a shark-infested cesspool of delinquency and immaturity. Most of the boys act like morons and most of the girls are catty little bitches. I really am shocked by how bad the school culture has gotten here, and I'm terrified of what it will become my the time my youngest two are in middle school.

I closed last week with a day-surgery to remove an inclusion cyst...lots of fun, I know. It was a delicate procedure that required general anasthesia, so I was sore, groggy, and out of it for most of Friday. Hubby was really great about helping me rest and making sure the girls didn't smother me and cause any undue pain. I tried to take it easy over the weekend, but it turns out that I'm not good at taking it easy. I am feeling better now, though, so it's back to the grindstone.

Hubby and I start classes this Wednesday, and I've finished syllabi for my courses. The job season is officially upon me, and I'm hoping the MLA job list turns up something good. There is a full-time spot open at a very good local university. It's a renewable 3-year contract, teaching first-year writing and literature courses. The bad news is that most of the people who currently hold these positions have PhDs from places like Columbia, Boston College, UC-Berkeley, etc. And these aren't tenure-track spots! I'm going to apply, but I won't hold my breath.

Right now, I'm just trying to get course materials and handouts developed so that I won't have as much prep to do during the semester. Because we're carpooling to campus and I have no campus office, Hubby is graciously letting me stake out some space in his office to work while we're on campus. It's a TINY space and we are not tiny people, so I don't know how well this scenario will work, but it's the only option at this point. I don't work well with distractions and noise, both of which make it hard for me to concentrate if I'm doing anything other than grading. This means that common spaces like the coffee shop aren't good options for me. The library might work in a pinch, but the problem is when I need to be near my books--all of my books--not just one or two.

So, I have no idea how things are going to play out with work space and schedules, but we'll adapt, I'm sure. Work continues on the house, as I try to make progress in my home office/guest room, and I meet with the carpenter this week about renovations to the kitchen. We're finally getting settled in just as new work & school routines kick in. And every week I have college football, which makes me very, very happy!

Happy Fall everyone!

ETA: I have no idea why Blogger keeps adding spaces between paragraphs, but it's really annoying and I'd love to know how to fix it. I've tried editing the post several times with no luck. Ideas?

Doha Diaries, no 2

Okay, so it's been a month since I've posted...sorry. I'm sure nobody's been waiting at the edge of their seats. To sum up the time: some important things have changed. I don't even know where to begin, so I have to resort to the drudgery of bullet points:

• Banking/Lending: opening a bank account in a developing country is a bizarre and archaic experience. Trying to finance a vehicle purchase only makes this more complicated. For example, you need not have money to open an account, but you can walk away with an activated debit card for said account, on the spot. One cannot get a car loan until at least one direct salary deposit has hit your account. When this happens, you can apply for the loan. If you are approved for the loan, you then physically write out 48 (for a 4-yr loan) checks in the amount of loan payment and hand them to the banker. The bank will then deposit/cash one check each month on the due date of ones loan. In order to facilitate getting a car loan for a new minivan, Hubby promptly opened an account and filled out the paperwork to have his payroll direct deposited into his Doha account. Good right? Yeah, except that the finance dept. works about one month in advance, and he was two days past the cutoff for getting October's payroll into the Doha bank. This means we cannot even apply for the car loan now until November 1st, when his payroll hits. Seriously, this is beyond ridiculous. Now, we're stuck leasing two vehicles for this month, one of which is covered by one car allowance, the second of which (a Chevy Tahoe) will cost approximately $1,000 for the month (after the car allowance is applied).
• We made it through Ramadan just fine, but living within the limitations of Ramadan operating/working hours was inconvenient to say the least.
• Hannah and I went back to the US for the Eid break that follows Ramadan. I'll skip the nightmare that was the possibility of us not getting our passports back from the immigration office in time to leave....We had a great time back home: shopping, eating (one day I managed to eat pork at breakfast, lunch, and dinner--yum), the State Fair, and college football! I even organized a clothing drive for the troops that are on the base in Doha (they aren't allowed to leave the base without civilian clothing, and most of them don't have any). But, the trip was bittersweet. On one hand, I wanted to stay, but on the other hand, I desperately missed Hubby and my two little ones back in Doha. The airport scene to come back to Qatar involved Hannah in tears, clinging to a chair, and begging to stay in Home State with my parents and them trying to pry her off the chair. I'm not hopeful that this scene will improve with future trips.
• My classes continue to go quite well. My students are sweet, funny, interesting, and (usually) eager to learn. I brought my film students blueberry muffins, and it was the very first time most of them had ever tasted them. One asked, "What do you call this again?" I plan to make pecan pies for them in the future :)
• Hannah is unhappy with school. I'd heard her make a few general complaints after we got back from the US, but last night she opened up and explained that she feels out of place, behind, and lost in the classroom. Part of this is because many of the kids have been going to ASD previously, so they've learned the methods being taught. Part of it is that she doesn't feel comfortable asking questions because she's afraid people will think she's stupid. She doesn't want me to tell her teacher that she has ADHD because she doesn't want to be given special treatment. She has great friends in our compound, and she admitted how much she loves spending time with them, but she hasn't made any connections to other girls in her class.
• I've grown a bit unhappy here as well. I like my job...I really love only having two classes (with a grand total of 25 students combined), and God knows the money is just what we need to pay off our credit cards and get some of our student loan debt erased. However, I don't have any close friends, and there isn't really an academic or intellectual community for the humanities faculty here (much less one more specifically concerned with literature). Granted, I knew this beforehand, but there's one faculty member in another humanities department that specializes in my period, and I thought that person might be someone with whom I might connect in academic matters. Someone to share work with, discuss matters in the field, etc. Well, not so much.
• Also, I have no quality time with Hubby. No babysitter in a world full of South Asian nannies. We're brainstorming ways around this problem, and we may end up "skipping" work one day to just be together, but for now, this really sucks. I don't remember the last time we really kissed each other.
• Add that fact that Hannah is increasingly unhappy with her school, and Hubby and I are at the point that we're willing to break contract if we were to secure tenure-track jobs back in the US. Indeed, after my talk with Hannah last night, we've made an agreement with her.

Option 1: Hubby and I will apply for t-t jobs in the spring. Most likely, we'll keep it to ones that we have particularly promising chances at...If either of us lands one, we will go back to States. This will mean paying taxes on our salary for the time we've been here and we'll have to pay back the relocation allowance advanced to us when we moved here.

Option 2: If neither of us get a job (or there turns out to be no spring job market), AND if Hannah is still unhappy with school at the end of this academic year, we'll stay for the second (and final) year of our contracts, but Hubby and I will home-school Hannah. We'll learn the curriculum over the summer and seek help from others in our compound who home-school their children, and we'll do the best we can. The good part about that option is the flexibility it would allow for all sorts of things, but especially travel back to the US.

This doesn't cover everything...one post really couldn't. Life here is a daily something. It may be an adventure one day, and a nightmare the next. Some might say that this is true about life anywhere, and maybe it is. But here, there's an overwhelming feeling of helplessness. The feeling that you don't know the rules, so you can't really respond logically. Of course, it doesn't help when sometimes (and this is really true) the rules are, literally, not written down (as in the case of traffic laws).

I'm still giving it my best effort. I will remain hopeful, not only for my sake but also for the sake of my family. I still believe it is in our best interest to remain here, fulfill our contracts, and use this time to work on getting published and hitting the job market with as much marketability as possible. It's just that some days are harder than others to remember this...