Midnight Runners, Parties, and all that stuff!!

Yes, I do get to the beach every Saturday!! Check out the blue water of the Arabian Sea (don't call it the Persian Gulf here) behind me!!

When we sign our contracts, they are for 2 years. We get our salary, our housing, and a $5400 furniture allowance. The furniture allowance has to be paid back at a prorated amount if you don’t stay for the full 2 years. For this reason, many teachers who are unhappy chose to do the “Midnight Run” where they wait until payday (or text out sick while elsewhere), transfer the money to the states, lock up, and fly out. We have had several of these, one of whom I actually did know personally.  There are others who do things the right way and give notice and pay back the furniture allowance. Females who are placed in boy’s elementary schools and don’t have experience in anything but upper income schools are the least likely to last here. It’s not that the kids are from low income families; quite the opposite is true. The problem is the behavior and the lack of consequences. My high school girls can be a major pain in the butt at times and there is no discipline there. I have been told to threaten with a nonexistent loss of points and to make them write “I will not be late for class” or whatever the infraction is 100 times IN CLASS. So I am supposed to make the girl miss more instructional time. NOT. So basically I do nothing. Lucky for me, that year I spent in Trenton prepared me for this. Unfortunately it did not prepare me for the other teachers. 

The 7 Native-English speaking teachers (called LTs here) in my school share an office. We have our own desks, computers, printers, and internet. This is more than many of the schools have given their LTs so I am happy. BUT we have only this space to use for our preps, our 30 minute break, and our 20 minute break. We do not have our own classrooms as I explained in a previous post. This would be rough even if we all got along….which we don’t. We have one teacher who has been at the school for a year who is originally from Buffalo, one who taught in Al Gharbia for 2 years and has lived in 32 different countries, one from Australia where she taught in the Bush, one from the UK, one from Texas, one from Arizona, and me the Jersey Girl. I had a rough time dealing with the one from Australia for a while but she and I have come to a truce. Two of the others are absolute PITAs: “There is too much noise in here, you have to stop talking”, “This is the way this should be done”, “I don’t want to be friends with any of you, I don’t like you”, “I am not going to insult your intelligence by explaining what I mean”. OMG can we get a man in here so we could stop the back biting? 

On the home front: Last Friday I was rudely awakened at 3:37am by a man ringing my doorbell wanting to see Erica. When I told him there was no Erica, that he had the wrong apartment, and to go away his response was “What are you going to do” Call security?”  At that point another man appeared and attempted to get the door open. My cell phone and whistle were already in my hands so I called the police, 999 here by the way. As soon as my visitors realized I was on the phone with the police, they got out of Dodge. The police were great and even transferred me to an officer who spoke fluent English. In the end, I went right back to sleep after dealing with the police. In the afternoon, after I got up (!), I contacted the contact people for the complex, the Housing Coordinators at ADEC, and posted on the FB site for the 4 “Teacher Towers” here. I was more concerned that a single female who had not been married to a midnight-shift-working-member-of law-enforcement might actually have opened the door while half asleep. Yeah, I do have to thank Karl for all of the security measure he pounded into my head during the years I was home alone all night with the kids. I later was told that it was all a mistake and that several teachers had gotten drunk at a bar and the 2 males had just been trying to check on a drunken female LT. Seriously, was this supposed to make us all feel better? We have drunken morons living among us.

Let’s get to the “What happens when trailer trash skanks move to a foreign country” part of the blog. We have had problems with cigarettes being thrown out of windows onto other people’s balconies, people just sticking their trash into the trash room and not taking the extra 30 seconds to put it in the Rubbish Hopper”, and now evening-hour-liquor-fuel ed-pool-parties. Seriously…in a Muslim country where you can get arrested for public drinking. Several friends and I had dinner out on Friday night and decided to take a dip in the pool after dinner. We all went to our respective apartments to get changed and head up. Since I am on the 19^th floor and the roof is technically the 21^st floor, I was there first. I heard the music from the elevator but was not prepared to walk into empty beer, vodka, and wine bottles all over! There were 4 LTs there, who very quickly got dressed when they realized we had an 11 year old right behind us. There was a broken beer bottle in the corner that was not near anything it could have fallen off, so it had to have been thrown there. The bucket and ladle from the sauna were floating in the pool and had obviously been used to throw water all over since there was water dripping from the window and puddles all over. It reminded me of Animal House. Seriously….minus the togas!

In previous years, the LTs had been scattered all over the city wherever they could find apartments available. This year they pretty much took over a complex of 4 newly built towers in downtown Abu Dhabi City. This unfortunately gives some the feeling that “Big Brother” is not watching and that they are free to break all rules of decency. Yes I have turned into The Church Lady!