For nearly four months in 2014, I was an English teacher at a private all-girl Emirate high school. The experience was astonishing. This is a lightly fictionalized account of my first month of teaching.

The Abu Dhabi project had begun as a diversion. Years earlier she had applied for a position in the Canadian public school, longing for a change of scenery if not a total transformation of her current life. The agency replied with offers to teach in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Burma but these options seemed too extreme, too challenging, and ambitious not to mention, in the case of Saudi Arabia, demanding she wear an abaya and be willing to remain an occupant of a teacher’s compound within the walls of the international school. She would be forbidden to drive but provided with transportation according to the director’s letter. She had replied negatively but the agency had retained her information and years later she had received an e-mail describing a job that seemed reasonable if it was reasonable to move to the Middle East.

Reasonable decisions were currently lacking in her life. At fifty-seven, witnessing the gradual decline of her parents who were difficult as always but now approaching old age exacerbated and increased their bad behavior. Her mother kept crashing cars into things, lampposts, car doors, walls and denying she was losing her ability to judge distances. Her father was deeply depressed, nearly immobile, staring into space or sighing, reminding her of some minor Dickens character in a book he might have once annotated and discussed with her but now he shook his head at the mention of literature. Her remaining sister kept getting richer and richer, buying houses, and informing their mother she was acting like someone with dementia which made her mother furiously angry and irrational which then made her sister point out that this behavior was very common in older people with dementia. They reminded her of a Möbius strip, a dog chasing its own tail, if this is true than this is true even if both ideas were completely false.

Her decision to interview was spurred by the arrival of her new, blank passport with its vaguely unflattering photograph which made her look old and tired whereas the former picture was taken when she was in her mid-twenties and quite lovely. “Abu Dhabi,” she murmured to herself, as the el train moved above the Loop. A small boy looked at her and she said, “Abu Dhabi,” to him and he seemed to understand the secret code and nodded.

The lobby of the Hilton was filled with vaguely underdressed people who had to be teachers what with their tote bags and their unattractive shoes and slightly startled look like someone had just interrupted their lecture on Of Mice and Men. They were directed to an elevator and then another room where she was handed an application that asked her to define her teaching philosophy and describe how she controlled unruly students.

Twenty minutes later she found herself standing in front of two men, both appearing to be of middle eastern descent. The abaya wearing woman who had taken her application but failed to return her smile and one of the men greeted her “hello” with an expressionless stare. Somehow she knew not to shake hands so she sat down on the chair facing them, feet flat on the floor, knees pressed together although it would be later that she would learn it is an insult to show the soles of your shoes to a Muslim. The other man smiled and looked down at her resume. “When can you come?” he asked her.

“Uh, excuse me?” Lucy said.

“You are extremely qualified,” the man said. The other man continued to stare at her without any expression.

“Yes,” Lucy said. “I can also write curriculum,” she added.

“You are married?”

“No,” Lucy said.

“Why aren’t you married?” the other man said, the effect that of a statue speaking.

Lucy looked at the floor for a moment. This was an illegal question and she knew her answer might determine whether she was hired or not. Being asked this question reminded her that even though Abu Dhabi was the UAE it was still Sharia law and under Sharia law you could be stoned for infidelity. She looked up to catch the man who had initially greeted her shaking his head at the other man.

“It doesn’t matter,” that man said. “You will hear from us very soon.” He stood and extended his hand. The other man remained motionless. Lucy shook it and left the room. The woman in the abaya was standing there and now she smiled.

“Congratulations,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Lucy said.

“You will love Abu Dhabi,” the woman said.

“It’s very hot, isn’t it?” Lucy asked, stupidly.

“Yes,” the woman said. “There is air conditioning.” She pointed at a door and disappeared down the hallway.

Lucy walked outside of the airport terminal and felt heat envelope her of a degree she had only experienced when baking bread and briefly had her face in the oven. The air had the consistency of a hot towel, the heat a few degrees below unbearable. As they circled the Abu Dhabi airport, Lucy’s seatmate, a twenty something kindergarten teacher from Maine looked out the window and let out a squawk. “Fucking hell,” she said, “It’s all sand.” Lucy leaned over and looked down. There was miles and infinite miles of sand interrupted by a geometric city. It resembled Mars if Mars had a colony.

“Holy shit,” her seatmate said. “Where’s the pool?”

The man who was pushing her luggage cart paused as he saw her knees buckle.

“It’s so hot,” she said, barely able to get the words out. It had been freezing inside the terminal, the air conditioning set so low she had shivered as they picked up her luggage and now it felt like it would never feel safe to walk outside again.

“Mafrac?” the driver asked her as if she knew anything, as if she hadn’t just flown for fourteen hours to a country where she knew no one, to a job in a school she knew nothing about. The name sounded like the name quacked by an annoying duck in an insurance commercial. She looked down at the letter from her new employer.

“Dear Lucille,” it said, a name no one had ever called her except her grandmother in the final days before she succumbed to Alzheimer’s and this because she thought Lucy was her long dead sister. “Please be informed that you will immediately proceed to the Mafrac Hotel where you are welcome for five days at which time you will be expected to locate your own living situation.”

“Yes,” she told the driver, sinking into the back seat of the car, which was just a few degrees above freezing. They pulled onto a highway that appeared to be cutting through a landscape devoid of buildings or civilization. She tried to see through the windows but nothing broke through the darkness to provide any guidance. They sped in silence for a few minutes and then she saw a camel and some children.

“Is this Abu Dhabi?” she asked the driver who kept looking at her in his rear-view mirror. She had read in one of the information packets that you shouldn’t engage taxi drivers in the UAE in intimate conversations or they might kidnap you or propose. It stressed the importance of avoiding eye contact.

“Mafrac,” he responded, smiling widely.

Lucy wondered whether she had made a mistake. How easy would it be to go back, to confess to the people who had greeted her decision to teach in Abu Dhabi with dismay that they had been right?

They pulled off the highway and went under the overpass and onto another road that led to the Mafrac Hotel. It was mainly sand and construction cranes and roads that ended in bridges to nowhere. One house was enormous and marble with a turret and balconies and minarets and another camel.

“Mafrac,” her driver said.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

Standing at the reception desk was a woman cloaked from head to foot in black with her face covered reminding her of the 3 rd ghost in the Christmas Carol, the truly terrifying one who kept pointing at the grave while Scrooge writhed and begged for mercy. She faced Lucy but there was no face, her burka concealed everything with just a mesh screen to reveal her eyes.

A man, presumably her husband, dressed in the dishdashi, engaged the clerk in rapid Arabic, an exchange that sounded heated except for the parts where one drew breath and said, “En’Shallah,” and the other paused and they sort of nodded. It reminded Lucy of how southerners said “bless her heart” when they meant, “fuck her sideways” but she kept this idea to herself. As she approached the elevator she saw the man push the button that closed the door although there was room. Inside her mask she saw the woman’s eyes flash. Another elevator arrived and Lucy wheeled her suitcase inside. She was joined by a sweating man who stood too closely to her. She smelled alcohol and wondered whether he understood he was in a Muslim country where reeking of gin might be frowned upon.

“It’s fuckin’ ‘blistering,” he said to her in an accent that was either Australian or Scottish. Lucy wasn’t sure which and didn’t want to find out.

Down in the restaurant she ordered something that sounded like something she’d had in a Mexican restaurant but it turned out to be something completely different. She wasn’t hungry, anyway. During the fourteen-hour flight, Etihad had served dish after dish, snack after snack marking the hours they were flying. People had warned her about developing embolisms and dying of a stroke from the effect of such a long time in the air but no one told her to refuse any meals. No one had claimed a wish to come with her but rather expressed a complete lack of enthusiasm for the Middle East, long plane rides, living in foreign countries, trying new things and camels. Apparently, many people disliked camels. Her own mother had offered her a year’s salary not to go. She had been sent numerous e-mails with articles attached about women trying to escape from abusive marriages, losing custody of their children, American women with Muslim-American husbands who were suddenly informed they had no rights.

“They can’t drive,” her mother said towards the end of one of these discussions.

“That’s just in Saudi,” Lucy said. “Anyway, I hate driving.”

Most of these cases involved willfully stupid women called Mindy or Cricket or Tiffany, not college educated without a family and the man was invariably some kind of zealot, a breath away from being a terrorist also poorly educated and lacking common sense.

Her room was nice, slightly small but the bed was made with high thread count linens and the bathroom was large. She fell asleep after trying any number of television stations, two showing violent American movies, one featuring Arabic women screaming into cell phones and then fainting, another that seemed to be all about camels and one, a French station, that had small children cooking complicated dishes involving chopping and flambéing, things that were completely unsuitable for underage chefs.

One group of girls, her senior students, were like angels, black abaya wearing, constantly talking angels. They had been there the day she cried, angry rather than sad but in tears none-the-less and they had surrounded her like an Arabic speaking posse, saying things in English like, “Teacher, we hate this school, also.” And “All our teachers cry,” and “Don’t be upset, teacher.” They were gentle, concerned but also calm and amused as teenagers could be, finding their tender hearts, which had been hardened and bruised by the abuse of the school administrators.

And they were such bullies! Each day started with an E-mail that made a sad gesture towards civility (Good morning, we hope you enjoyed your weekend) but then announced a new policy that required teachers to work extra hours or to take on duties or pay for parking. Despite the fact they had no lunch or planning periods the school would keep reducing their time between classes until it was questionable whether anyone ever went to the bathroom or took a full breath.

One day there was screaming in the corridor of the Z building, which remained unfinished with dangerous looking wires sticking out of holes in the unpainted walls. When Lucy stuck her head out of her classroom the PE teacher who had no gym was standing with a group of cowering, now quiet girls. The gym was not yet built.

“That bloody AC box just shot out flames and smoke,” the teacher said. “I think it might explode.”

“What should we do?” Lucy said. “Should I call security?”

“God, no,” the PE teacher said. “They’ll never come. None of them speaks English anyway, so what’s the point.” She turned to her students. “Girls, we’ll have gym in the courtyard,” she announced. “This place is a deathtrap,” the teacher added, marching her girls down the hall, their screams now turned to giggles.

It had taken a full fifteen minutes for Lucy to threaten and cajole her ninth grade English class into doing their work in silence. Her room was cool and quiet, while she was exhausted and discouraged. If she attempted to report this incident to the administration she would either be ignored or forced to deal with piles of paperwork. She went back into her room and shut the door.

The girls looked at her. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a false alarm.”

A half hour later she watched heads bob down the hallway, one security guard after another. “Put your shalas on, girls,” she said and opened her door. Around the now soot covered AC unit stood a semi-circle of Indian men staring at the box on the wall.

“It burst into flames,” she said, knowing most of them couldn’t understand her. As one, they turned and nodded, returning to gaze at the filthy AC unit.

“I think it could be dangerous,” she said, weakly.

They nodded in unison.

“Should we leave? “The men shrugged. Lucy glanced back into the classroom. Half the girls were now sleeping. Two of them were braiding the hair of the girls sitting in front of them. A few more were looking at something forbidden on their I-Pads but they were silent. They stayed. No fire was reported.

The first few weeks of school were marked by a confusion so deep Lucy wondered if the administration actually existed or whether there was a group of domestic animals, cats and sheep, chickens and an occasional duck pressing buttons randomly which determined their schedules, dictating confusing and mean e-mails. The time she had gone downstairs bent on complaining there had been an alarming calm, alarming because it was in such sharp contrast to the English department where the teachers were constantly trying to locate classrooms, plugs, connectors for their laptops and scrambling to get to their classrooms on time. Downstairs, Arabic music played quietly while the vice-principal and the principal shared dates and drank coffee. The head of HR dressed in an elaborately embroidered abaya was quietly playing “Angry Birds” on her computer, her face calmly indifferent. Her eyebrows were perfectly arched. Lucy went back upstairs deciding there was no point in telling any of them about the problems facing the teachers.

Time seemed mutable in this place a fact Lucy found this lack of firm beginnings and endings difficult to accept given her experience in American schools where bells marked the end of classes and students and teachers knew exactly when Calculus ended and AP Lit began. Here, classes started late, ran late, didn’t start at all or were interrupted by an Arabic member of staff, a woman in an abaya who failed to register Lucy’s presence addressing her girls with a torrent of Arabic, which often inspired a shouting match.

“Excuse me,” Lucy said, the first time this happened. “Please speak English.”

Her request was acknowledged with a half-smile but also ignored. After a while she learned to go on with her lesson, speaking slightly louder than the person who had chosen to interrupt her lesson. It was a childish way to respond and never inspired an apology or even a nod from the screaming, mysterious visitor. She knew none of the girls followed her competing monologue but she would not give up. After the person left Lucy would ask the girls what had been said. At first they just lowered their eyes and remained silent but after a few weeks. Noora, a beautiful girl with huge almond-shaped eyes answered. “Miss, she told us we were going to be punished for using our cell phones.”

“Have you been using your cell phones?”

“No, Miss,” Reem, tiny with a huge smile, answered. “They are crazy.”

Normally Lucy would have said something to contradict this statement but instead she nodded weakly.

The school prepared for important visitors like the Sheik by installing new furniture in odd places. A couch suddenly appeared in a previously empty corner while a massive table was installed in the lobby but there were no chairs and the table was awkward and out-of-place. The library which had been closed suddenly opened and was full of books, odd books about things like kayaking and canning vegetables neither of which was relevant to an Emirate girl’s education. Just as quickly, these items disappeared. Small groups of small men would suddenly converge and they would lift the piece of furniture and carry it away never to be seen again. Things were constantly being moved and rearranged including her own desk, which should have bothered her but didn’t. Why should she care about yet another layer of pointless confusion? Sometimes the cleaning crew confiscated her laptop and she would briefly believe it had been stolen but then the security guard would send her to a silent Philippine person who handed it over without any explanation as if it were a game.

Twice a day a female security guard stood outside her door muttering something incomprehensible. Lucy would ask her in and she would speak slightly louder. The girls were rude to the support staff and they would shout, “What do you want?” in voices harsh with contempt and then one of her students would stand and leave her class without an explanation.

“Where is Reem going?” she asked the girls who shrugged and pretended they didn’t know.

Trying to teach without books, papers or pens was challenging because neither the laptop nor the I-Pad worked without the Internet or electricity both of which failed constantly. One afternoon the overhead projector exploded as they were reviewing a lesson on writing about graphs. There was a sudden pop and then sparks leading to a larger fire and then blackness.

“Goddamnit!” Lucy said.

“Miss,” Maha said, “you swore.”

“That’s not swearing,” Lucy said. “Fuck is swearing.”

The girls applauded.

At the end of the day she fingerprinted out and walked slowly home, the pavement ending in a sand pit that filled her sandals. Stopping at the coffee shop around the corner from her hotel apartment, she nodded as the Philippine baristas who trilled, “Good afternoon Miss Lucy!” and picked up the newspaper that detailed the latest casualties among Indian workers falling from scaffoldings built on the shiny shells of a new skyscraper, or a story about how Emirate women were entering the workforce with pictures of these women in abayas, their eyes lowered, their smiles broad.

The newspaper belonged to the Sheik, so anything that made the UAE sound bad was censored. The report on the construction workers focused on how they had neglected to fasten their safety lines not on how inadequately they had been trained to work at such high altitudes, the lack of water to offset dehydration and the length of their work day.

Lucy’s politics tended to be naïve and reactive. Brought up by liberal parents she was against war, for welfare and any other social program that supported the poor. Her ignorance had caused her to take this job, she thought, ignorance and a need to seem interesting, to have something to say to the woman in her kick-boxing class who kept having twins and renovating her house and taking up hobbies like printmaking. The next time this woman leaned over and asked, “What’s new?” Lucy could answer with “Oh, I’m getting my documents attested for my new job in Abu Dhabi,” instead of her normal response which was, “not much.” Once she mistakenly mentioned her job and the woman turned out to be a vice president of a famous ad agency who had just inked a deal to hire Viggo Mortensen as a voiceover. When Lucy said, “Oh my god, I love Viggo!” the woman had looked stern and informed her he was in a serious relationship with a New York ballet dancer as if Lucy had said something like, “OMG, I so want to fuck him,” which she did but she didn’t say it.

It was this woman and her empty passport and her lack of recent knowledge of the human rights violations in the UAE that caused her to say “yes” when the Canadian teaching agency asked if she would accept the job offer to be an English teacher at the Advanced Technology High School.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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