Just to be clear

I would like to stress that I am and have been safe throughout this. My last post was a bit hasty, and probably came off cavalier. But I am safe, mostly because of geographic reasons. The protests have been centered in the south and west, and now, in the capital. Sousse is the birthplace of the current president, and because of that he has a higher level of support (or tolerance) here than in other areas. That said, I wouldn’t characterize what’s happening as regional by any means: this is a national movement, and increasingly, an international one.

Still, Sousse is, for the time being, a good place to be, and I am safe.

While Tunisia burns…

…we don’t work. Classes have been canceled as unrest continues.

Shit has definently hit the fan here in Tunisia. Protest, riots, demonstrations, and clashes with the police have become common in the last few months. While media reports aren’t sure, we have heard at least 60 people have been killed. We even heard today that a teacher in Amideast-Tunis (where martial law has been declared) was shot.

From the New York Times: People walked past a burned building after riots in the Ettadhamoun district of Tunis on Thursday.

Things in Sousse seem to be relatively calm, although we have heard that three people were killed in protests near the university (not close to where we work or live). In fact today my roommate and I went downtown, and things seemed normal.

Things started several weeks ago after a unemployed man lit himself on fire after police had confiscated his fruit selling set up out of a truck.

Foreign Policy has good coverage, explaining how this started and the current leader of the country, to whom much of the anger is directed; and about the how the protests in Tunisia have spread throughout the Arab word. Similar things have begun in Algeria and Jordan, and Egypt is worried too.

Here is a view from a local perspective (professor and lawyers have joined the movement, and some have been killed.) Here is The Guardian‘s take, and The New York Times front page story, some photos of the unrest,

More no work

So, yes, I’m working only 10 hours a week, and I was sick yesterday, and today—well, today was the Islamic New Year (don’t ask, it’s complicated, but I can report that it is the now the year (lunar) 1432 AH, and I don’t really know what A.H. stands for. After Hajj? Well, I looked it up, and it’s Anno Hegirae, Latin for “Year of the Hegira,” which can also be spelled Hijrah, and other sites put A.H. as “After Hijrah,” which kind of makes since, being as Hijrah means (I had to look this up too) is the Prophet’s migration from Medina to Mecca, scratch that: from Mecca to Medina.).

Anyways, being this semi-observed holiday in Tunisia (one co-worker described it as a holiday you can take off, but don’t get paid for; or a banking holiday: shit was open today, but no banks, schools, gov’t offices, etc.) Amideast’s offices weren’t open, but most teachers held classes (even if they be poorly attended) to avoid having to make them up. Well, my one-on-one guy decided not to come, so I—again—went to work to find no client, no class.

Nonetheless, I am feeling much better after taking my medicine, and I played a nice game of chess with my roommate.

 

Basketball and amoebas

On Saturday I played my first game of basketball here. The Tunisian that we went on our trip down South had a friend who plays basketball, and he got me in contact with him. I called him on Friday, and we met Saturday at 4. We pumped up his ball, and we walked to an outdoor court. There were about 12-15 players there, and the first thing I noticed was that most of the players weren’t Tunisian. Most were Africas, from Benin, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire (I’m guessing), and there were some white foreigners too: maybe Italians or French.

They were good. For once in my international career, I was not considered tall. I may have been the shortest person at the court. They were big, and fast and good at basketball. I could hang, and I made some easy shots, but because I was new, rusty and can’t really talk to anyone (language barriers: although having played in Madagascar, my French basketball vocab isn’t terrible. I know how to say foul, travelling, play (as in “no foul, play on,” or “game on”), shoot, defence, and keep the score), I mostly hung back and played D.

We played 4-on-4 half-court for an hour and 45, until it was too dark to see the goal. It was fun, and I’ll play again there next Saturday, but man did it take it out of me. I’ve been sore for two days now.

In fact, I didn’t work today for health reasons. An amoeba I picked up in Bangladesh is surely flairing up again. I got some medicine from the pharmacy, and I’m sure it’ll work, but I felt quite shitty today.

The good news is that the medicine works, at least it always has in the past.

What to do…

With all the free time I have, I have started washing my laundry by hand. Well, actually I never wanted to, but there is no washing machine in our apartment. There is a dry cleaning place below us, but they charge an arm and a leg to clean stuff. (For the price of washing all my clothes twice, I could by a washing machine.) So I am now doing it myself, the hard way.

I have some experience hand washing. In Madagascar I did my own laundry, and hung my clothes on my bamboo fence, until I got my neighbor to do it for 5 dollars a month. It’s not that hard, it’s just tedious and hard on your hands. Today I washed all my socks. Socks are pretty easy because they’re easy to ring out. Rinsing is the hard part because of, well, all the “rinsing and repeating.”

As with anything, the main thing is to stay up on it. It’s no big deal (when you’re not working) to do a couple items a day. However, hand-washing and line-drying require an iron (not for socks, but for other items), and while we have an iron, we don’t have an ironing board. I’ll have to jury-rig something up.

Wind, and other non-events

Well, I’m back. I don’t have much to report, except that I’m a little upset. I have been assigned a measly 10 hours/week teaching. Not only will this not pay much, but I have nothing to do. I’ve said it before, but I need to be busy to be happy. I ain’t been busy yet. I came from a job where I was regularly teaching 25 hours a week, and working from 8 to 6 most days teaching and doing other teaching tasks. Not to mention running a basketball team and a newspaper.

Here, not so much. I sleep in, I cook a lot, I shop everyday for food, I stay up late and I play poker. Sure, in some ways it’s every working man’s dream. (Not to mention that the grass is always greener.) For the most part, though, I feel like this isn’t what I signed up for.

That’s certainly not any of my readers’ problem, but it doesn’t give me much to write about.

One thing I would like to mention though is the wind-tunnel our apartment has become. It’s been windy here, and the doors on our apartment don’t shut. My roommate had his room window open, and the ensuing breeze was blowing the balcony doors open enough to blow the chair holding them closed over. Door routinely slam around here. (Another problem is the opening to the roof upstairs has no door at all.) There’s the roaring of the wind outside, constant door rattling that comes with inside breezes and the occasional slamming of the door or window somewhere, either in this apartment or another. It’s enough to drive someone who isn’t working much crazy.

So, for all you people working full time out there and living in homes whose doors shut, be thankful.

I know it’s been a while, but…

I haven’t had much to report. I got back from our lovely holiday in the desert, but since then it’s been more slow news days. I did some subbing, giving reviews and tests to two of another teacher’s classes, picking up five easy hours last weekend. Other than that, I’ve watched a lot of The Wire with my roommate, eaten and slept. We go to cafes, do a little shopping, cook, etc. I read a lot. I got a call from a friend who knows someone that hopefully can hook me up with a basketball game. Teaching wise, I don’t think I’ll be able to teach on the military school contract. It doesn’t look like I’ll get clearance in time. Otherwise, the next session of Amideast courses should be starting this week, but we haven’t gotten any confirmation. That’s the latest.

Pictures of southern Tunisia

Here's the people I went with on our little trip at an old Berber cave house. From left to right, there's Jake, another teacher here; me; Odd, a Norwegian who works in Tunisia; Raulof, an English professor at a university in Gfaza; and the other Jake, my roommate. Rauloff had a friend (not pictured) from this area that took us to his relatives' old house for an authentic Berber troglodyte house where his family had lived.

This is the foyer of the old Berber cave house.

This is Jake in Matmata, a toursity-trap Berber village with dug-out houses. Jake was pumped because this is Luke Skywalker's house in the first Star Wars. Tataouine, the Skywalkers' planet, was actually Tunisia, and the town of Tataouine (from which the planet takes its name) is just west of where this is.

We had a beer at the Skywalkers' with some American tourists we met.

We climbed one of the hills in Matmata to get a better glimpse of the land around.

Jake got his Yassar Arafat on with the help of our guide, Habeb, a friend of our Tunisian friend. Habeb and his family pulled out all the stops for us, showing us their ancestral homes, letting us stay in their current one and cooking us a hell of a Tunisian meal.

After Matmata, we headed south for an oasis called Ksar Ghilane. On the road through the Sahara we came up often upon camels. We stopped once and talked to a Tunisian who was herding them south for sale.

The Sahara.

After the barren Sahara, we hit the oasis, and promptly rented some horses, because really, there's nothing better than being on a horse in an oasis/the desert.

My steed was Tuner, the owner's of the horse-renting outfit personal ride. Apparently, Tuner had won a 100 km race. The horse was both the finest dressed and the most responsive to riders like us—with no experience. I really wanted just to head out into the sunset, but our guide wouldn't let us. Probably for the best.

Vacation

Good news for me; bad news for you…at least for a while. Tonight I found out that I am going on a little trip tomorrow. I am heading south with two teachers, a Norwegian and a Tunisian. We are visiting Matmata, and an oasis further south. I’ll take some photos and give a full report when I get back. I would have written more, but I had to stay up late to grade some tests I won’t be able to do tomorrow.

It happens everywhere, but you’re never ready for it

I had my first run-in with Tunisian bureaucracy today.

(Well, actually my second. When I got here I had to fill out various pieces of paperwork. One of them was a special kind of CV (Curriculum vitae: what everywhere else in the world calls a résumé) that my organization uses for outside contracted work. In Tunisia, your CV has to be stamped by someone. I went to a DMV-style kiosk in a mall with an Amideast staffer and waited in line for about 20 minutes to get mine stamped. The CV is just a form (in French) that one fills out with standard information: education, work experience, training, etc. With a little help from the people here, I got mine filled out. When I finally got to the lady (who, in a touch of familiarity, looked like a DMV attendant from Anywhere, America), she questioned what I was doing. As I was able to make out from the ensuing conversation between my friend and this woman, she doubted my ability to understand the form, as I don’t really speak French or any Arabic. He explained that I was an English teacher, for crying out loud, and the school does this kind of thing all the time. She, while everyone looked at us annoyingly, finally caved in and gave me the required signatures. I really couldn’t see the whole point of the exercise; she certainly didn’t do a background check. Nonetheless, I got my stamps.)

I was picked to help team-teach a rather large contract Amideast does with the military school in Sousse. We prepare a small number of cadets for the TOEFL and SAT so they can study in the U.S. The other teacher taught this course last year, and I was brought in to help take some of the load off. It’s an intensive course; the cadets study 4-5 hours a day for two months, five days a week. I was called in this morning to sign some sort of documents for the contract.

However, when I arrived my boss told me that I would need clearance of some sort to do the course, and the military school told her that it might take up to two months. The course, on the other hand, starts at the beginning of December. She hopes the school can get it sped up, but who knows. The school has to ask me my grandfather’s name, and all sorts of other random information for some form to sit somewhere to make sure it’s safe that I am working at this government institution. (Tunisia’s government is a little touchy. For example, the Wikipedia page for the country is blocked on the internet. So is YouTube. So are hundred of other sites.)

Anyways, someone from the military academy was supposed to show up (between 9-10) for some paperwork for me. At around 10:30, a man from the school gets there, but—of course—he didn’t even have the necessary documents. I didn’t even get started.

Otherwise, it was a pretty good day.