Business as Usual in the Kingdom

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 town near us (though we've never been there, it's the oldest town in the region), which the NYTimes reported, again with no follow-up yet. It seems that a peaceful demonstration demanding release of some political prisoners was disrupted by tear gas and security forces firing over the heads, resulting in 2 or 4 demonstrators wounded and one security person wounded. How wounded, not clear.
However, we note an interesting coincidence. Arab News reports a type of article I haven't seen before, about a wounded soldier being airlifted to a hospital for treatment -- airlifted from Dhahran (near Qatif) to Riyadh (the capital), by special order of the Interior Minister Prince Naif. hmmm. The Interior Minister is reputed to be a strict conservative, in charge of domestic security (read riot police). Am I reading too much into this? Maybe Private Hamid Al-Qahtani of the Special Emergency Forces was injured while suppressing a demonstration?
At any rate, let's keep an eye on reporter Neela Banerjee of the LATimes: congratulations for current and insightful reporting.

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Where we are working now

ISG Jubail School is the Anglo-American school for this area: Jubail is one of two planned industrial cities in Saudi Arabia, given a special royal commission for development and planning. Our district, the seven schools of International Schools Group, runs the school in the other industrial city -- Yanbu -- as well. Jubail is on the east coast, between Dhahran and Kuwait. Our nearby "big city" is the tri-city metropolis of Dhahran-Khobar-Dammam, where all the big shopping malls and quaint old markets are, along with the central 3 schools of our district, where Coleman attends high school. ISG Jubail has 410 students -- an average of 2 homerooms for each grade, K-10. Class size varies, up to 22. I have 12 in my required course "Computers & Information Management"; Barb has 12 students in her first-grade class. Most of the teaching staff come from the U.S., some from the Commonwealth. Several teachers are wives of engineers an...

Riding the Bus often

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Reservoir of European Youth, Parliament

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