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At midnight, I telephone home one last time today (it was mid
afternoon there) and spill the beans about the trip, the taxi, the
confusion about the hotel name, the beautiful moon beams reflecting
in the surf and the shining mosque domes. We say good-night and agree
to call me back in the morning. I am a little homesick, but more
nervous about the client, the class, and the unknown of my first
"foreign teach".
 In
the morning I learn that there are actually 4 members on 'our team'
this week. I meet our driver, "Alleel", the woman from
London, and learn that she is actually Israeli (very Israeli,
whatever that means) and that she can read Hebrew, was acclimated to
local driving customs, had actually lived in the area and serviced
this very client while living there prior to recently relocating to
London. I also meet Derek, a handsome young man from South Africa,
recently engaged to marry a woman back in his home country, and
working on a one-month engagement with the client. I learn that he
has extensive experience with the Human Resources module, and that he
has committed to stay with the client for an entire month to complete
that portion of the client's project. I later heard the story of how
he had appeared at Hof Hatmarim, similarly disoriented, just 3 days
prior to myself and that he would stay through the first week of
January. "Aren't you going home for Christmas?", I had to
ask. No, he said, he wanted to bank some money for his upcoming
marriage and take some time off then. It had never dawned on me that
a company in Israel would not have a Christmas holiday vacation week,
even though I had already been taught that the work-week was Sunday
thru Thursday with the week-end on Friday and Saturday. How exotic!
At 8am, we four pile into our little car (clearly labled
"Hertz" on the door) and drive to the plant, retracing back
the route of my taxi last night. The campus buildings are nondescript
to the point of being somewhat depressing. I truly wanted to take
some pictures of the facilities, but the security procedures very
effectively spelled out that any behavior of that type would be
strictly forbidden. I will simply describe the buildings as old and
neglected. After awhile, I came to the thought that they resembled
some kind of abandoned 'school for boys' built during the 1960's. The
buildings were yellow brick, or patched stucco. Some window were
dirty, others were broken and patched with duct tape, still others
were simply painted over. Stairwells were outside (California style)
and the railing on one was missing (watch that first step...).
Since the client is a defense contractor of some kind (I feel good
about the fact that I do not, to this very day, know exactly what
product they manufacture), we are not allowed to ever walk about the
compound 'unescorted'. Since I am teaching a class, this is not a
very big deal, there are always dozens of people available to stay at
my elbow. Each morning, our ritual requires that we furnish our
passports (one American, one British, one Indian, one South African)
while dozens of employees pass thru the electronic turnstiles in the
tiny crowded guard shack. We are given visitor badges in exchange. We
then wait for our group escort (the department secretary), a young
woman with the standard issue striking dark eyes and olive complexion
wearing, each day, the pseudo military outfit of a rough-hewn olive
sweater over olive slacks and black shoes. I learned that some
company employees were working there as part of (in lieu of?) the
mandatory 3 year military service required of all Israelis (2-years
for women). This was a part of the culture that I chose to not make
effort to learn about.
Each morning she makes small talk with us in English, but eventually
gives in and chatters in Hebrew with Alleel. You can't imagine how
exotic to see each sign, each notice, written in totally
unintelligible Hebrew letters. The 'enter' sign on the door (or was
it 'pull', or 'push' or 'keep out'), the sign over the elevator, the
signs identifying the floors, signs hanging over office doors
(people's names? Department titles?), the department bulletin board
with the mixture of stapled up computer printouts and notifications
(quality reports? due dates? vacation notices? requests for car
pools?). Being totally illiterate to signage was first exotic, then
frustrating, then a challenge (to overcome) and finally, simply, an
accepted fact. I would need an escort, not so much to be kept out of
'top secret' areas, but to simply find the men's room.
I am surprised on the first morning when our group stops in the
corridor and faces a broom closet. My surprise is when our escort
reaches for the doorknob and opens the door revealing a tiny elevator
(plainly identified in Hebrew text). There were few sliding doors on
elevators this trip and that was both exotic to me and, frankly, a
little wierd.
The class starts as a disaster. I am exhausted on Monday, from the
confusion and missed flight in Milan, the long late taxi drive,
getting to bed late and up early. My books are a different size
(metric) and some of the chapters are missing. We send off some of
the items I brought with me to the Xerox machine and make extra
copies. I meet up with a new escort and am walked back down the tiny
elevator out the building and over to a different beat up and
neglected yellow building plainly marked with unreadable Hebrew text.
Up another flight of stairs, down another hallway loaded with hanging
signs and into a classroom.
It is here, as the session is about to commence, that I learn about
confusion from misprinted information in the internet descriptions
for the class agenda. Would I cover this other material? No, I have
to say, it was a misprint and I am not qualified to discuss those
subjects, let alone teach them. My class would have to proceed with
its actual agenda, the one I had written about, not the one
misprinted on the internet.
You could feel the mixture of confusion, frustration, and
disappointment. With English being everybody's second language
(except mine), such minor impasses like this (there were several)
seemed to always be a little bigger than they really were and
everybody always seemed a little unsure if it is a miscommunication
(language barrier) or an actual misunderstanding (the issue at hand).
Often, a side conversation in Hebrew, with intermittent pauses to ask
me clarifying questions in slow-English, would take place about
something like this. Don't get me wrong, the class went great, and we
all got to laugh and smile plenty of times. Its just that when an
issue (like the Internet misprint) arose, everybody walked on
double-eggshells to ask then explain then verify what they themselves
and then the other person was saying. Those times felt very foreign,
like a debate at the United Nations or something.
We did some special xeroxing, and I was surprised on Wednesday when
additional, replacement material magically appeared. I learned that
the client (of course!) was also communicating with my Israeli
company contact and making arrangements of their own. In this way I
was always feeling slightly 'out of the loop', like some distant
uncle in town for a visit. I had my class agenda, my 'road-show' if
you will, but it was definitely not 'my class' or 'my client'. That
took some getting used to and frankly, it makes me wonder if all
international assignments would not have a similar confused feeling,
making it less desirable to me to volunteer for more of them.
I spent several minutes in one-on-one social conversation with
individual students. They were each delightful, interesting, and
posessing a good sense of humor. Whenever possible, I asked questions
about the details of daily life in northern Israel, but not enough in
any way to be considered, even in passing, as an expert. I had a
horrible time with everybody's name, and this made me feel both sad
and lonely. In the USA, I quickly learn people's names and believe in
the adage that no song sounds as sweet to a person than to be
addressed by their own name. In Israel, each name had a foreign sound
or letter combination in it. Nobody was named "Joe" or
"Mary". I could handle "Ruben" (sorry, but due to
the sandwich) but could not handle "Galeed" or
"Diora" or "Alleel" (or even poor Shrikant, my
new Indian friend). My writing here does not do justice to that fact
that these name are pronounced with a famous Hebrew "ch"
sound (the one where you clear your throat) in their middle. Also,
everybody spoke English with a heavy Hebrew accent so their own names
were particularly pronounced with foreign emphasis and sounds. On my
second day, the dear Diora taught me a trick, "when I lived in
the US as a child, everybody just called me 'Dora'", she
explained. Of course! I was the foreigner here, not them. All I had
to do was approximate their names and they would smile and help me
out. Once I got over the fear and trepidation, once I learned to
relax and enjoy what I did not know instead of fearing it, then I
started to enjoy the trip and the delightful people I was visiting.
At the end of the first day, we four joined up for the ride in the
car back to the hotel, but Alleel had a 'dinner date' and we 3 men
would be on our own to eat. At the end of the second day, Alleel was
to meet somebody somewhere else for dinner and drove off alone in the
car. The 3 of us were to share a cab back to the hotel, and we talked
of walking into Acco for dinner at an Arab cafe. We stayed on site
too late that night, as Derek was off working elsewhere with a
client. When we 3 finally caught up to leave, we hastily needed an
escort to return us to the guard shack for our passports and taxi.
Shrikant nosed into lit offices and pressed a man into this service
who was sitting alone working late (it was dark and near 7pm). This
man seemed congenial and pleasant enough, especially considering that
he would have 3 floors and 200 yards down and reverse and repeat to
get back to his desk. On the way to the guard office, we made small
talk and I was surprised to learn that this man (who I had taken to
be a staff programmer of some sort) knew of me and my class. How is
your class going, he asked to make small talk. O.K., I replied, then
talked about how my scheduling and sleepiness, and people's bus and
car pool schedules had caused our day to be less than optimal.
"Well", he said in reply, "I will take care of that
tomorrow". I nearly stopped in my footsteps, raised my one
eyebrow and, without words, asked the nighttime air "Who the
hell is this?".
Well, heh heh, it turns out he was the 'technical project leader'
(duly unannounced), the man underwriting the chargeback for my class
and (of course) the direct boss of everybody sitting in the chairs in
my classroom. Of course I learned this at 9 o'clock the next morning
when he met us in the classroom. He chatted amiably with me in
accented English and in Hebrew with the students (his direct
reports). He called MY class to order and said that he would need to
'take a few minutes and address the class in Hebrew'. So while I
shuffled papers, erased the board, and sharpened my pencils (teacher
busy work) he talked amiably while everybody sat in rapt attention to
his every word. I listened and was impressed with the music of the
Hebrew language, in the sense that listening to a foreign voice is
like listening to a cello or a trumpet, it is trying to tell you
something and you are free to hear whatever suits your fancy. At the
end of his speech he turned to me and, in accented English, said that
I "should take as long as necessary to teach whatever subjects I
felt the students should need to know", stressing that my trip
was a costly investment in time, money, and effort and that we should
all benefit as much as possible from my presence.
So class kicked off that day, and at the first break it was discussed
how I had wanted class to be until "six and a half". Those
darn pronouns! It took several passes back and forth (like a tennis
match) to figure out that it was expected that I should 'want to
teach' until half-past-six that night! Oh, I get it! And, indeed,
class did go until 6:30, and everybody stayed in rapt attention until
the very end and the extra time did make a big difference in both the
quality and quantity of material that was covered in the class. I
just simply cannot explain how many words were required during that
first break for them to explain to me what had occurred, until I
could understand the information and the correct nuance of it. It was
fun, and frustrating, to encounter this kind of language difficulty
for a simple event, and it made me appreciate how difficult the
students must have had it listening to me lecture for hours and hours
(and hours) in English. I truly appreciated their difficulty thanks
to having some of my own. I must also note that several times each
day a student would stop me to ask follow up questions (this happens,
of course, in the US, too). But here, if the student had difficulty
getting their nuance communicated to me they would look pleadingly to
their friends and chatter quickly in Hebrew. It was like a game-show
as somebody else would shout out the missing English word and the
original questioner would take that word and finish their question. I
did my best to always repeat their question, using the 'discovered'
English word in context, and answer slowly with extra gestures or
diagrams. Again, an often exotic, sometimes frustrating, but always
delightful experience for me, a man that deeply loves people,
education, and the spoken word.
Lunch was incredible! I was escorted (of course) from the classroom
to a different building. There somebody 'signed' for me while
everybody else swiped their badges thru some kind of electronic
sensor. We would be standing in front of huge steaming units like
those from the lunchroom at school or my old college dorm. The server
would ask what I wanted, and all of it looked so good. There would be honest-to-goodness
home cooked entrees, of a size and complexity appropriate only for
dinner back home. Stuffed cabbages, chicken cordon-blue(ish), fish,
beef stews, or other dinner size portions of dinner entrees. Of
course this was just the first stop. I asked my escort to explain the
foods, and I pointed and smiled like a child in the window at a
bakery. The food was always delicious. At a second counter area were
deep serving trays with soup and hot vegetables (as my guide
encouraged me to 'have this' or 'try that'). A third area had cold
vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers with the delicious sauce that
always tastes so 'Mediterranean' and hummous. The next counter had
the tap of water and soda water, clearly labeled with small Hebrew
signs. On the second day, I figured out (by watching) that the orange
soda syrup was for you to add to the 'water' or 'soda water' to make
flat or fizzy orange soda. Starting to live like a native. Finally a
table laden with bread, flowing out from large wicker baskets laid on
their sides and wrapped with maroon tablecloths to look like a
cornucopia. By now we would be signaled by the rest of the students
and walk across the room to joint them for lunch. What a delightful
and memorable scene.
Everybody would be eating a hearty meal, laughing and telling stories
equally in accented English (as a courtesy) and in fluent and melodic
Hebrew. Everybody made fun of my describing the sounds of Hebrew
language as 'melodic' with so many guttural and 'throat-clearing'
sounds, but I tell you that I found it to be so. So people talked and
laughed and told stories. By Wednesday I had told my story about 'Hof
Hatmarim (NOT Hotel Palm Beach) and everybody was delighted and
listened attentively. I asked about simple things, tried to get a few
lessons in Hebrew, in geography, in culture. I asked about the gulf
war and the scud missiles and, while being told the story, decided to
spare everybody my curiosity on that subject. Likewise, I never
brought up (except with Shrikant) the ongoing random killings of
Israeli soldiers in the southern Lebanese broader area or the unrest
in the recently released areas near Hebron and Bethlehem. When
speaking on these subjects, everybody exuded a brash confidence that
nothing was the matter. My wonder and worry did not compute and had
no place penetrating their lives. I spared them my story of how I
almost turned down the trip during the umpteenth exit from Baghdad by
UN observers (the one that resulted in Christmas bombings after the
umpteenth plus one withdrawal).
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