Raising Readers

 

Have you been to the Book Fair?

No. But I want to go.

Yes, you should. Take the kids too. It’s great for them to select their own books.

Oh I encourage them to read. I buy them story books and have the nanny read to them when they come from school.

But why don’t you read to them? It’s a wonderful bonding tool. Right before bed time. They will always remember those special moments.

Oh hahaha I do tell them stories in Arabic. I make things up mostly as I go along. But it’s mostly out of my head.

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She realizes that reading is good for them. But she delegates the task to someone else. In the end, does it matter who reads to your young child?

 

Lorna

I’ve been in Kuwait now for five years. I used to work in a salon under the sponsorship of a divorced Kuwaiti woman. Her husband divorced her because she couldn’t have children. Anyway, she wasn’t a good sponsor. She made us pay for our health insurance and our other expenses. She only paid our salary and I had to be at her salon all day, sometimes working up to 12 hours, depending on the whims of the clients. So when I left her, I told her why are you so “Bakheel?” So stingy? What are you going to do with all that money from the salon? You have no children. No one you need to look after. Why don’t you pay us more?”

It’s better now at this salon. I work 8 hours a day only and then I am free to do anything else. That is if I want to do free-lance work I can to get extra money in.

I left my previous sponsor and now I am direct local-hire. I can ask for a higher salary and I can manage where I work.  Yes, I like living here. I have family also working here direct-hire. I helped get them jobs.

One of my aunties I got to work here as a domestic helper in a Kuwaiti home. Haha, but now she is married to an Egyptian so she left her employer. He was the English language tutor to her employer’s children. He is a 23-year-old Egyptian and she is 40. But they fell in love and now they are married. She has a very beautiful one year old daughter now. I told Alma, that’s my auntie’s name, that she has to take care of her beauty because her husband is very young. She must take care.

Hahaha, why do Filipinas like Egyptians? Maybe because Egyptian men have beautiful big straight noses! Our noses are very small. Egyptian men like Filipinas because they are caring and gentle and they don’t make too much fuss. But sometimes there are problems. Some men are jealous and too controlling.

I know one Filipina who hasn’t been back to our country in years. She married her Egyptian husband and took Egyptian nationality and forgot her whole family back in the Philippines.

Some women forget their lives back home, even if they have family. But mostly we support our family back home. Like me, I support my parents, my son, and my divorced sister whose good for nothing husband left her one day after the birth of her second baby. He just couldn’t afford a family anymore and left. My sister was heartbroken but we support her financially till she is able to get a job. I’m hoping to find her a job here in Kuwait. She’s a college graduate.

The best husband material is if a Filipina finds an American. This is their best chance to get to the USA and to start a new life. But I don’t want to go to the USA. Why? My family is in the Philippines. My boyfriend is Filipino too. It’s the best to have someone from my background. I had some proposals before from some Egyptians. One man asked me to marry him on the first date. The other, he proposed through my friend after one meeting. But I don’t want to get married that way. I have to really know the man and want to get married. Not just temporary. It is my decision in the end and my life.

Shahla

Shahla sat on a low stool and whipped out her white spool of thread. She proceeded to do the bird dip with her head as she threaded the little hairs on my toes. Now I see the gasps of incredulity: “Waih! Hairs on her toes! Disgusting! Laser, laser!”

Well, it happens that Middle Easterners are downright hairy. I’m lucky that the hairs on my toes are the worst of the unlikely hair growth and to Shahla, it was just another job.

She bobbed her head, up, down, and with every yank, there was that sense of relief and cleanliness. Innumerable sessions of laser had not managed to tame the mane on my Arabian toes. But still, I had never had anyone do threading on my feet before. I felt mortified that her lips and face were so close to my feet and feared offending her.

Shahla, or Sheila, as the English called her, didn’t seem to care. So I continued to babble on some sensational bits – like the infestation of bed bugs in American hotels – posh or not. And the Eastern European lady on my right shuddered visibly as she imagined the horrible things.

“But they cause no harm,” I reassured. “Only mental trauma and distress!”

Shahla had raised her sons in the U.K. but she cannot forget Iran, the country she immigrated from  in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution. There were reasons she had to leave but her soul is still there in her city, with her parents, and the rest of her aunts and uncles and cousins. She goes back to visit family any time she can but after etching a life for herself in the U.K. for close to 30 years, she feels she cannot go back permanently. She seems lost in that fragment of time, where parts of her are particles in the afternoon sun.

After she finishes the last toe, she sits upright and I comment about her feeling tired. It’s only then that she tells me she’s fasting for Ramadan.