Week Without Walls...Just not how I expected...

What a weird year we’ve had with regards to travel. Mind you, we’re still incredibly lucky to be in the position we are in and to travel as we do. I acknowledge that but I can still complain about the way this year has been a total mess. For our fall break, we had to cancel a long-anticipated trip to Beirut due to political unrest. We made that up with a wonderful trip to Florence, that we were totally under-prepared for, and got caught with some weird weather and some serious baby teething issues. Then, on a delightful trip to Istanbul and Athens, we ran into some other severe baby sickness combined with even more serious baby teething issues. Now we’ve got the CoronaVirus. I don’t mean to make light of this topic as I recognize and acknowledge that as of the writing of this post, there have been over 72,000 cases confirmed, and nearly 2,000 deaths. I empathize for those who are living in areas that are more directly affected and whose lives are being permanently changed by this virus. I also intend to use this space as a way to discuss how the virus has impacted Shannon and my life, at a significantly smaller scale of impact.

Every year, most international schools participate in a “Week Without Walls” experience. For some schools, that includes local camping trips, or local community service oriented trips. Other schools offer international trips to students as a way to experience the cultures of new places and to engage in community service in a host country. On this blog, I have highlighted past Week Without Walls trips that I have had that featured camping at 15,000 feet on the edge of a volcano, getting lost in a jungle, and building houses in the Philippines. The programs are wonderful, fulfilling for students, and usually quite enjoyable for the supervising teachers as well.

When the time came this year for volunteers to offer supervision on specific trips, I was chosen to help chaperone a trip to Thailand. As the weeks passed, our trip itinerary was built up and our tickets booked. Then the Corona Virus hit. As it continued to spread, our school, to their credit, did their due diligence and kept in contact with the local embassy, other international schools, and kept up to date on World Health Organization recommendations. Ultimately, our school decided to cancel all of our trips we had planned to Thailand, Cambodia, and Nepal.

Our students were disappointed, but the inability for the international community to get this virus under control makes it a decision of caution. Our school rightfully, didn’t want to get stuck in a situation where we were exposing students (and teacher chaperones) to any heightened level of risk by traveling through airports and other bustling locations with many travelers. While disappointing to me and to our school as a whole, it was the right call. It was also a nice wake up call. People tend to think of their own perspectives from the scope and context of their own experiences. If they aren’t in a position to face an international crisis, it’s easy to put it from the forefront of their mind. Whether those events are earthquakes in South America, Tsunamis in the Pacific Islands, or a sweeping virus. But being faced with the realities of those situations forces us to confront those problems, or at least acknowledge them, in ways that go beyond simple awareness in a news feed.

Now I am spending my week driving around Riyadh, checking in on students as they intern at various local and international businesses. For many of them, they were forced to forego their trips to various countries, only to be thrust into the workforce for the week. But regardless, I think the learning that they will take with them from this week will benefit them greatly in the long run.

Now here's to hoping that we don't have some other weird obstacles to overcome before our spring break trip we have planned...

Call to Attention

This blog has been a great sounding board for me personally to vent on things I have found frustrating while living abroad. Often, these frustrations belong to me and how living within the parameters of a new culture can be challenging only because of expectations formed by my own previous experiences. There were language barrier issues, and pace of live concerns  in Ecuador. Living in Saudi has been a different set of circumstances, again, defined by my own expectation to living in a new culture. Keeping a running log of the singular moments and details that coalesce into our lives here is something I value greatly. I don’t want to look back in 40 years at the amazing things we’ve been able to experience with no memory of anything beyond the broad strokes of our experiences. Writing my thoughts in this way serves as a reference point to the individual moments that will inevitably slip through my fingers like sand, faster and faster the harder I try to hold on to it. So I hope that writing here will serve as my record of all things wonderful and frustrating that make up my (and our) lives abroad.

One such frustration that I have expressed, yet understood, has been the closing of businesses for prayer time multiple times per day. I won’t go into it at length now, but my frustration has taken on a new tone and context. Recently, a new mosque near our home was built. It was under construction before we got here, but it is now in operation. I think this is a great thing, and having more, and more abundant places of worship for people to pursue their relationship with God is a good thing, especially when the land wasn’t being used for anything constructive previously. My new qualm is that the calls to prayer from our new neighborhood mosque are quite loud. From a cultural standpoint, I can see the rationality to a communal call to do something, especially a collective act. From a personal standpoint, that 4:50-5:05am prayer call that interrupts the dark silence of the night is super inconvenient with a baby. I have obviously learned to live with it and sleep through it, but apparently the toddler cannot. I realize that is my own problem to own, but since this blog is a place to vent my frustrations, and a way to record my experiences after we leave here one day, I really needed to get this written down. Those peaceful mornings fading in and out of sleep as the morning takes me over and prepares me for a new day aren’t really ideal when started with the exclamation point that is a 5:00am mandatory wake-up call. This particular problem may fade away when H learns to sleep through it, or maybe not. But in the meantime, that’s a grain of sand that I anticipate I’ll remember long after we are gone.