Thomas journals

December 2011:  An Update from the Thomases, former mission workers in Northern India During our weeklong Eid-al-Adha break from our teaching positions at ISG-Jubail School in Saudi Arabia, we took our son Coleman back to Woodstock School in northern India.  Believe it or not, Cole is a senior this year!  He wanted to visit his former classmates at the boarding school in the Himalayan foothills one last time before they graduate and go their separate ways. For us, it was a time to visit with former colleagues and students and check on the progress of projects that this church supported during our four years in India. Some things had changed – the new international airport terminal in Delhi was stunningly beautiful and modern. Many things had not changed – the air pollution upon exiting the airport still burned the throat and stung the eyes. The eight-hour drive from Delhi to Dehra Dun was still fraught with fright as we dodged camels, ox carts, huge trucks and peopl...

Americans in Saudi Arabia invariably complain -- rightly so -- about the incredibly casual and selfish driving style, and the apparent breeziness with which local drivers run stop signs, red lights, and other driving behaviors we have been conditioned to abhor.  Recently the government started publicizing its "Sahel" crackdown on speeders, by launching several radar cars and remote cameras at intersections -- this slows drivers to the 75mph limit in the immediate vicinity of the radar car.  But that is the only obvious enforcement of any traffic laws. Yesterday when driving home on the expressway -- 3 lanes in each direction -- traffic slowed for an accident up ahead.  Cars immediately filled the three lanes and each lane on either side.  As an ambulance plaintively wailed its siren behind us, slowly inching through the cars blocking its way in the "breakdown lane", Barb bemoaned the stupidity of the local drivers and the apparent inability of traffic police to ca...

Thanksgiving in Saudi -- ironically, as Thursday is the start of the Saudi weekend, taking off Thursday is what we do every week, so Thanksgiving is by definition a holiday.  We had long ago planned to attend the St.Andrew's Scottish Gala with colleagues -- 8 teacher-couples all told from our school and Cole's school booked hotel rooms in Bahrain for Thursday night.  We drove over to Bahrain mid-day, went to (fancy) beauty parlor and (Pakistani) barber shop, then got our hotel minivans to drive us out to the party, on a remote British compound.  Very Scottish, indeed...lots of kilts, including the UK ambassador who spoke of his Scottish roots.  After speeches and a surprisingly good dinner, a ceilidh band played and all danced for several hours.  What great fun...and the hotel van took us home.   The next day was easy with some shopping on the way back to Saudi. We were a bit hesitant about Bahrain, as news of demonstrations is troubling.  We saw seve...

We watched the sun set behind the winterline tonight -- the line of temperature inversion at around 6000 feet, where the dust and fog and smoke from ground level is trapped, forming a very distinct curtain behind which the sun's light completely disappears. We are now at 7500 feet, at the Rokeby Guest House in Landour Cantonment, Mussoorie. The guest house is a luxury renovation of Christopher's old school dormitory, so it is a special treat for us to stay a night here. We are visiting Woodstock School for a nostalgic return to the mountains and the campus, and particularly so that Coleman can meet up with his classmates before they all graduate from high school -- he will not be able to attend their graduation here, as he will be preparing for his own graduation in Dhahran next June. Our Eid-al-Adha holiday week allows just a few days in the mountains, given the lengthy travel time and the fact that Air India preponed our return flight by a day. It has been a marvelous ...

Sons Coleman and Chris attended a great summer camp one year -- it's title was SB2W, or Summer's Best 2 Weeks. They agreed with the title, and still talk about some of the good times and people there. So it is with our just-ended summer holiday visiting friends and family around the U.S.: An organized family reunion of Barb's maternal relatives, on the Oregon coast. Our planned reunion with families from two different countries who happened to have connections in Duluth. Our 40th high-school reunion in Beavercreek Ohio -- noting that neither Barb nor I actually graduated from there, but we attended those schools for many years and still have dear friends among our classmates [ link to photos ]. We attended the church that Barb's father founded in Beavercreek, now preparing their own 50th anniversary celebration. We enjoyed time with son Christopher, more physically fit and mature than ever, working two jobs to gain Texas state residency [ link to photos ]. ...

One of the lightning rods of dissent in the Kingdom is the government's refusal to permit women to drive. We know of no other nation with this ban; and to compound the confusion, there is apparently no explicit law banning it, just a reference to a decree in 1991. Like the other irritating restriction of the niqab veil, it also has no basis in the Koran, and therefore is not easily upheld in Sharia law. Recently the first name "Manal" has become a symbolic name, as the divorced Aramco IT expert -- she received awards for her expertise a few years ago -- drove a car near Coleman's high school last month and published the feat on YouTube. The deliberately banal video inflamed the sensibilities of the Saudi police, who detained Manal in the women's reformatory for 10 days. Her lawyer carefully pointed out that there was no law against her driving, and further she carefully avoided any reference to the Facebook group urging women to all drive on June 17th. St...

The Saudi government recently announced new regulations on Media coverage -- criticism of official religious figures is forbidden.  We suppose this applies to criticism from any direction -- from those who say the official imam is too liberal, and from those who criticize the official stance as too conservative.   However, our American bias toward openness is uncomfortable with such a directive, and we worry about the consequences of stifling debate.   There are several dimensions to such debates here:  regarding basic interpretations of Islam, regarding attitudes toward different Islamic sects, regarding women's role in society, and the very role of religion in society, all particularly complicated when the society is clearly established as an Islamic state (they finesse the point of what sort of sectarian state it is, claiming simple hegemony over the holy sites:  we are constantly reminded that the King's primary title is Custodian of the Two Holy M...

Click on this link to our photo album , with captions, to review at your leisure. Or view this slideshow

Zahle morning walk until a taxi comes along to take us 10km south to Ksara Winery, a well-kept beautiful operation where several staff are waiting to show tourists through the real limestone caves where the wine is aged. Then a sparkling new tasting room -- all good-tasting wine (but maybe my tastebuds are out of practice) and gift shoppe. We walk a few minutes out to the main highway and rapidly flag down a shared "service" minivan. We realize that our earlier ride to Baalbek on a nice new minivan was an anomaly -- this one is a smoky rattletrap (the smoke emanated mostly from the driver and passengers) that careened down the mountain, regularly squealing to a stop in hopes of gathering new paying passengers. At one point the driver held on to a lady's package in order to keep her from getting out of the van to take a competitor's ride. Although he tried to get us to pay double for a ride directly to our hotel, he dropped us at the Kuwaiti embassy where we got ...

Wandering through the ruins at Baalbek is humbling -- again, like Byblos, there is a great mixture of modern educational museum exhibits and unhindered space for rambling through the temples and broken stairways.   We got a few photos of Coleman's dancing shoes, to add to his global collection (he carried this pair of shoes carefully through our trip, only wore them for this special purpose) -- I will add them to the blog entry later, as my phone ran out of battery soon thereafter.  The sun peeked through the clouds for a bit, yet it was quite chilly and windy, cutting through our thin jackets.  But we were duly impressed with the size of the temples and temple stones, and the elaborate carving of the stairways there -- it's quite easy to imagine how impressed a crowd would have been two thousand years ago.  We also enjoyed reading the various interpretations of the buildings' origins, that varied according to the origin of the archaeologists themselves. Afte...

Baalbek ruins are stunning monuments to architectural genius two thousand years ago, and organizational effort so far inland -- the granite pillars originated in Aswan, Egypt: just imagine the effort to transport them inland.  Our Hotel Shouman room has a tiny balcony viewing the entrance to the ruined temples, right next to the shrine to Barbara...yes, Saint Barbara who was martyred for her determined conversion to Christianity; she supposedly mocked the pagan temple at Baalbek and was martyred here.  That's the story. I am frankly amazed that so much of the ruins remain -- the various conquerors helped themselves to the pre-cut stones to build their own forts and houses, yet much of it remains.  Admittedly, archaeologists have rebuilt portions over the last hundred years, since Kaiser Wilhelm visited here in 1898.  But Coleman and I enjoyed also wandering the old souk, with its narrow alleyways and aromatic bags of spices, and hanging carcasses of sheep and cow ...

Saturday in the Monnot area, Beirut is hopping with fancy sports cars and heavily-muscled guys in boots and t-shirts guarding doors and parking places....and the Theatre Monnot nearby hosts a contemporary dance performance, with families and (mostly) daughters filling the theater.  The pieces were surprisingly lengthy and well-done: first a new piece, entitled "L'Etreinte" (the embrace), a classic romantic piece about man and woman flirting then embracing, arguing, embracing.  Especially impressive was the strength of both dancers, as each at some point carried and twirled the other around.  Then an older piece entitled Beyrouth O Beyrouth -- this one had a few spoken words, with 5 dancers, variously individual or grouped, enacting the civil war via the metaphor of 5 people in one apartment.  Both pieces were memorable.  We filed out of the auditorium at 10pm, negotiated a taxi ride home (the taxis nearby were clearly cruising for night-clubbers, charging high ...

There are police, and barriers, in Beirut.  Our first 2 days in one neighborhood were quite peaceful.  Yesterday we walked further, to see more typical signs of concrete barriers and razor wire and military guards around the former President's house, and then today around the Saudi Arabian embassy.  We also note the flurry of construction activity, both buildings and roads; yet in amongst the renovated sleek apartment buildings and shopping malls are old walls pockmarked with bullet-holes, and empty shells of buildings including the bizarre alien-looking building in the center of town.      Cole and I attended a lecture by Tariq Ramadan at the American University of Beirut -- educational, fascinating even though Prof.Ramadan was speaking quite academically and not wanting to get tied down.  The question-and-answer session was even more enlightening, to hear the emotional and articulate ripostes and sallies.  About 400 people attended. ...

Flying through Riyadh -- we walked outside at the airport, just to say we were in Riyadh.  The airport is huge, with 4 identical terminals in a row (from the outside they look like stylized sand dunes).  We sought out a duty-free shop, in vain (I had told Coleman we might get a new camera).  One (Indian) employee told us "everything here is duty-free, why do you need a special shop?".  Ah well.  We will use our smartphone cameras to document the trip. I nervously phoned ahead to the Embassy Hotel, they offered to send a driver to pick us up.  Indeed the driver was ready though we arrived quite early.  Driver Abdullah told us he lived in Detroit for 20 years.  The Embassy Hotel is in a busy shopping district near the university.  The hotel is a 2 or 3 star level, old but clean, with a creaky elevator and leaky shower.   But there's plenty of hot water, and a balcony where we ate our breakfast of bread and cheese this morn...

From today's ArabNews , datelined JEDDAH: The Ministry of Education has banned the sale of junk foods and sugary beverages at all public schools. The banned items include cookies, chocolates, chips, chewing gum, power drinks, canned foods, fruit juices, carbonated drinks and meat dishes, including liver. The ban order also covers various kinds of pastries. A few days ago, we got a suddenly-announced school holiday; perhaps they were softening us up before this blow.  This roughly matches the standard in U.S. schools now.   There is some reference in the article to encouraging resumption of government-provided free lunches at school as well.  And to think, one of my enterprising moments in high school was to establish a student council-run snack bar, selling donuts, candy bars, soda pop, all in the name of culinary freedom. Our current school is partly under the aegis of the Ministry of Education -- some inspectors visited last month.  But the food issue is a m...

Saturday is usually the start of our work week. This Saturday morning we all woke as usual at 5am, to prep for Coleman's 5:45 school bus, and parents' 6am bus pickup for school. But at 5:40 our neighbor (another early-riser) knocked on the door to tell us that The King Declared a School Holiday today. This was quickly confirmed by a call from the principal, who asked me to send out a mass e-mail to school parents. Barb then phoned her students' homes to inform them (But should the kids still bring their costumes on Sunday, will there still be a Book Character Parade? hmm. probably). Why the holiday? Rumors abound. The internet provides no information, neither the national nor international news channels. Someone reports that the King shook up his Cabinet last night, firing the Education Minister... that's the closest we come. Or is it because the Pearl Roundabout is now the flat-surface-don't-remember-anything roundabout? Events in Libya and in Japan are do...

What the presence of those forces means is that dialogue can now take place in a calm and sane atmosphere.  (final sentence of editorial in ArabNews) Cognitive dissonance:  foreign troops arrive during demonstrations; own police kill unarmed demonstrators; and a calm and sane atmosphere? Bahrain is now occupied by Saudi troops and UAE police.  Although they are not directly involved in killing Bahraini citizens, they are a clear sign of the weakness of Bahrain's Khalifa royal family compared to the Sa'uds.  The move was not even staged as an invitation -- rather, the troops simply moved, and Bahrain's foreign minister tweeted the move as a fact.  BBC HardTalk presented a fairly illustrative talk today countering spokesmen for the Bahrain ruling council and the exiled opposition.  The pro-government politician/businessman simply repeated his talking-point: we don't want to kill people, we just want stability and security (to which any objective viewer re...

US Secretary of Defense was quoted on his recent trip to Bahrain "Time is not our friend." We are worried about the situation there, now that the Saudi forces have crossed the bridge to Bahrain.   Technically, they are GCC forces -- like the "Coalition" in Iraq, these forces are 95% from the big gorilla.  The NYTimes has a good image of the convoy, grabbed from Bahrain TV. In the meantime, Saudi's Arab News runs an article quoting the king's council of advisers -- the closest thing the country has to a legislature:  The Shoura Council congratulated the Saudi leadership on Sunday for commanding the confidence and respect of the people who eloquently displayed their loyalty toward maintaining security and stability in the country. But back to Bahrain: we had the chance tonight to talk with one of the few people to leave Bahrain today as the border was closed -- a Canadian who talked his way through.  He noted the extensive convoy of Saudi military ve...

First: we had a wonderful weekend, a day at the beach, wonderful weather; and are getting ready for school tomorrow. Various news media and our expatriate community was all abuzz with talk about possible demonstrations and disruptions in Saudi Arabia, apparently triggered by a Facebook message.  It was an obvious reminder for us to brush up on our emergency plans, and it prompted our teachers to check their Virtual School logins, just in case. After surfing various news websites now, here's what I find on Friday night at 9:30pm here:  It seems that most of the newspeople are devoted to reporting on the tsunami in Japan.  CNN's website is surprisingly old, referring to Friday as tomorrow, and posting no follow-up to a rather alarmist article (I'm disappointed in the lack of follow-up).    The LATimes has the most up-to-date piece , calling the protests a fizzle...it even includes a photo of the (apparently) largest protest, actually held yesterday in a to...

Thus went the headline in today's Arab News , our main daily newspaper. Following is the first paragraph: JEDDAH: Saudi Arabia announced on Saturday that it would not allow any demonstrations or sit-in protests in the country that are aimed at undermining the Kingdom’s security and stability. “Laws and regulations in the Kingdom totally prohibit all kinds of demonstrations, marches and sit-in protests as well as calling for them as they go against the principles of Shariah and Saudi customs and traditions,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement. The ministry said such demonstrations not only breach the Kingdom’s law and order but also encroach on the rights of others. We also note the letter-to-the-editor prominently displayed on the same webpage: Your Majesty: As a Saudi national, I am writing to say how pleased I am to see your return to the Kingdom after successful medical treatment abroad. I am sure this feeling is shared by all Saudis, since your citizens not...

Some relatives and friends have written to express concern about our safety, given the turmoil in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and now Libya. Those places are distant from us. The uprising in nearby Bahrain has settled to a peaceful protest-- the government came to its senses after a shameful violent performance by some of the military (we are still debating the origin of the bad decision to shoot protesters), so the opposition has settled into a very large sit-in protest, by all accounts peaceful even pleasant, but determined -- so says even the Saudi news reporter. We live and teach in a relatively new industrial city, with few truly local residents, and no unemployment, thus little political dissatisfaction. Security is also particularly tight here because of the petrochemical plants. So our personal safety is assured. We are truly more worried about automobile accidents, particularly during rush hour, with drivers who treat painted lines and signs as mere suggestions. And the weath...