Fall Festival

Yesterday was the big Fall Festival here at Schutz, it’s an annual tradition where we put on a Festival around Halloween and every class has two booths with games they created to raise money for their class. The eight grade and seniors do a big class trip at the end of each year. A lot of us dressed up, making costumes out of what we could think of. Friends and parents are also invited to come.

Overall everyone one had a great night, except perhaps Seth and I. Seth’s advisory class came up with the idea of doing a booth where you can put money in a jar with a teachers name on it and the top two money raising teachers would have to kiss a donkey. Well, Seth and I where the top two teachers. Although I’d like to point out that Seth had well over two hundred more pounds in his jar than me. The donkey is thought of to be a very dirty and bad animal in Egypt and these rich kids have never had any contact with a farm or any animals really so they thought this was a huge deal. Of course, Seth and I being the teachers from Kansas and around farms and animal lovers kind of spoiled their fun when we didn’t over react about having to kiss a donkey and actually liked the donkey and enjoyed petting it. We had also volunteered to get a pie in the face at the end of the night with a bunch of other teachers, although we will never do that again. Instead of using whipped cream they used shaving cream and that really stings your eyes.

Volleyball Tournament

I just got back from taking my volleyball girls team to Amman, Jordan for our EMAC (Eastern Mediterranean Athletic Conference) volleyball tournament for four days. How sports work in international school is that we practice for four to six weeks and then you go to a tournament hosted by another country to compete against other international schools from all over the Middle East. (We’ll be hosting the soccer tournament next month, and Seth will travel to Oman next semester for Basketball) The school pays for everything for the coaches and the students have to pay half of their expenses. At this tournament there were two schools from Amman, Doha, Kuwait, Cairo, and us.

Coach Malak, the boys coach, and I had 19 kids to travel with, ten boys and nine girls. One of my players got hurt the day before we left. I was worried about traveling internationally with high school kids but it turned out to be nothing to worry about. These kids travel so much and all over the world they are pros at it. In fact, I think they can tell you exactly where the Starbucks is at every major international airport in the world.

The players and the coaches are hosted by the local team. We lucked out and six of my girls all got to stay at the same HUGE house out in the country and the other three were all together too. I stayed with the high school chemistry/physics teacher named Stephanie; it was her first year in Amman but her third international school to work at. The best part was she had a cat named Chloe and a German Shepard puppy named Jai. So I was very happy to have animals around and she was happy that I liked animals so much, in fact they even slept with me while I was there. Stephanie was very nice and we hit it off pretty well. The school provides them with furnished apartments around the city and also provides them with cars to rent. Her apartment was so nice a new and much bigger than ours, I was jealous.
I was really impressed with Amman and would love to go back and see more of it. It’s in the mountains so has nicer weather than Alexandria and even better it has grass and trees! Although the ground is extremely rocky, I have never seen such rocky ground before. They also have a lot more shopping and almost every American and European brand you would want, unlike Egypt. It felt a little bit more like home. It was also a lot cleaner and nicer, and the city was a lot better organized with nicer architecture. Over all my opinion of Amman was that it is better than Egypt in everyway. Not that I don’t love living in Egypt, but it was nice to be there for awhile. I would have loved to see more, especially the Dead Sea but all our time was consumed with the tournament, it was an exhausting weekend. We did have social events at night for the kids, but unfortunately that meant we just went to another large mall. The kids LOVED it, I hated it. Although, they did have tons of American and European stores, they were designer stores that I couldn’t afford in the States much less when they were marked up prices for Jordan. I couldn’t believe how much our student bought though and how much money they spent. I was surprised that our guys even bought a ton of designer cloths. It’s funny, because at school most of them don’t wear this stuff, they dress like any American high schooler would dress, but when they go out, it’s all designer clothes. I also had to laugh because my girls would get so dressed up in the evenings and do their hair so nice, which they don’t do at school. These international conferences are their way of meeting boys. Of course they don’t like any of the boys at our school since it’s such a small school and they’ve all been together since they were three years old. Plus so many of them are related in some way.
I really enjoyed meeting all the other teachers and coaches and learning about and comparing our schools and countries. It was interesting to see how different they all are. Schutz has a great reputation for being a very good school, but it is also a very small school compared to most others. We also have a good reputation for having very well behaved players and almost always win the Good Sportsmanship aware at every event. However, with such a small school and having a little less than hundred high school students we aren’t always the best in sports since we don’t have a huge population to choose from. In comparison, Doha is almost 98% American students due to the oil company there and they have almost 3,000 students. This year alone they hired 90 new teachers; we only have 36 total teachers. They are so big and rich they can hire professional coaches, rather than have any old teacher coach like the rest of the international schools. Their coach told me she had over 60 girls come try out for the volleyball team. We don’t even have 60 girls in our high school! So needless to say Doha is a little out of everyone else league to compete against.

We played games for three days, the first two we played every team and then got out seed placement for the round robin tournament. Over all I was proud of my girls and could tell that all the hard work we had done had paid off and they had improved a lot this season. However, we did have a few bad games…and I mean bad. We forgot how to play as a team a few times and once they were fighting with each other I got so mad at them I couldn’t even yell at them, I had to have Coach Malak do it. But after a good talking to, and a few pep talks, they pulled it together and played the best game of their life the last set of the tournament. They were very proud of themselves and knew they had done well, we also know which areas to work hardest on next year. We ended up getting fifth place out of six. Which, hey is very good for them! This is the first time these girls having come in last place in volleyball for the last four years. That was my one goal, I didn’t want to get last place again. So I was pretty happy. I think they were even happier than the team that got first place! Our boy’s team got second place. Go Schutz!

Seth enjoyed the time without me it sounds like, he was very social. A lot of the staff when over to Debbie’s (grade 4 teacher) for Canadian Thanksgiving. He said it was fantastic. I guess he did miss me though, because everyone told me he did.

All School Sports Day

Today was All School Sports Day, it's been a tradition at Schutz for years. All the students from pre-kindergarten 3 year olds to the seniors are divided into teams with one student from each grade level. The morning they compete in games, like relay races, sack races, egg on a spoon race, and hole in the bucket water carry. Then in the afternoon they play soccer, basketball, and volleyball with their teams. It's a full day of fun games and sports and bonding between all grade levels. It was a lot of fun to watch and great to see the older kids helping the little kids. At the end of the day the winning team got to run a relay race against the teachers and then we had ice cream. After school, my girls volleyball team scrimmaged the teachers. It was a lot of fun for students and teachers all day.

Rain

It rained this morning! I was extremely happy to see the rain, I was just happy to see any change in the weather. Today was the first day in the two months that we’ve been here that we’ve had any change other than the sand storm we had a few weeks ago.

Big Man On Campus

Last Friday, October 3, 2008 we added a new addition to our Schutz Family. Malcolm Lake Collins was born to our elementary school principal Nada, and our high school Social Studies teacher, Mike.

Eid Vacation to Dahab

Last week (Oct 1st-6th) was the Eid El Fitr holiday which is the holiday at the end of Ramadan. Eleven staff members, including us, went to Dahab for the vacation. Tamer, who is also a new teacher this year, was born and raised in Egypt but has lived in the US for the last 12 years where he met his wife, Jean, and had their son Noah who is now 4 years old. Anyways, Tamer’s brother is a travel agent here in Egypt and has recently moved to Dahab to manage a restaurant/ bar there. His brother, Iman, set up our whole vacation for us including the bus that took us from Alexandria to Dahab which is on the Sinai peninsula on the Red Sea.


The bus ride down took about 9 hours and was pretty uneventful except for some sites we got to see from the windows we got to see our first bit of Cairo as we drove past and saw the pyramids from afar. We drove over the Nile river and under the Suez canal. After the canal the scenery turned to a very dramatic desertscape. We went hours without seeing anything, plant, animal and especially not a town; just sand and rocks. Occasionally we’d see a little big a plant life, some wild camels, including one stubborn one that didn’t want to get off the road, some wild donkeys, and a Bedouin trip moving their goats. After we crossed the desert we reached the Sinai Mountain range; I was absolutely astonished by these mountains, I’ve never seen a mountain like them before. They looked like there had just been an earthquake on the fault and the mountain just sprang out of the earth yesterday. They are so shear and rocky, they haven’t been eroded by the wind or water for thousand of years like our mountains in the U.S.A. What surprised me most was the total lack of any vegetation. From what I could see there wasn’t even any moss growing on the rocks. It’s amazing what a mountain range looks like when there is not wind, weather, water, or vegetation to erode it. I kept on wondering how over two thousand years ago Moses and his people managed to cross these mountains and how have so many holy wars been fought in them.



Dahab is a very nice little town on the Red Sea. It is mostly a tourist town and visited mostly by Europeans and backpackers. It has a lot more laid back atmosphere than the rest of Egypt and kind of a hippy vibe to it from the backpackers. Not many Egyptians vacation there because its’ local culture is different from other Egyptian cities. Our hotel was beautiful and brand new, had just opened up that month. It was right on the ocean and it was great to either sit by the pool or on the beach and look out onto the Red Sea and across the sea we could see Saudi Arabia.



View around Dahab:
















Our Hotel:



(our 5th grade teacher, librarian, and principal reading by the pool)

We spent most days just relaxing by the pool or on the beach reading a book or walking around the town doing some shopping. One day we spend the whole day snorkeling, we went to one coral reef right off the shore from the town, and then that afternoon took an interesting Jeep ride (which took 3 different Jeeps b/c they keep breaking down) to the Blue Hole. We had underwater cameras and hopefully got some great pictures of the Red Sea Reef and the Blue Hole with all its’ coral and sea life but we haven’t gotten it developed yet and will post it when we do. Another day, Seth and I got a relaxing Egyptian massage in a little hut on the beach. It was very relaxing with the sound of the waves and a nice cool breeze. Later that same day the other girls and I went and got a pedicure...although not a good one.



The food was very good there, although they lived up to the relaxed hippy by the beach atmosphere and took about two hours for the whole “out to eat” process. However, it was very relaxing, all the restaurants are literlly on the beach and are open air reutrans with carpets and pillows to sit on the ground and eat at a low table. Dinner is suppose to be a relaxing process where you sit and smoke sheesha for hours after you eat.




(soft bodied starfish)




(the Blue Hole is behind this camel)

All in all it was a relaxing vacation and great to see another side of Egypt. However, the bus ride back ended up taking 15 ½ hours after our bus broke down and we were stuck on the side of the highway for hours. Luckily, we were just outside of Cairo but this time and not in the middle of the mountains or desert. Within minutes we had four police cars with us for road side assistance…although I’m not sure how much assistance they where. After three hours the company finally sent another bus to pick us up, the driver was in such a rush to finally finish this trip by that time that we ending up getting stopped for speeding and had to sit on the side of the road again while the police processed the speeding ticket…a lengthy process with bribing of the police officer involved.