Turning Heads

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When Sue and I got to Beirut in 1970, I found it very irritating how people in the street would stop and stare at Sue. Okay, so she was blonde and it was the era of miniskirts. But that still didn’t justify the way pedestrians, cars and even buses would stop when we walked down Hamra Street.

One day I complained about this to the owner of the school where we worked. He laughed.

“They aren’t looking at Sue,” he said. “They’re looking at you.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because they’ve never seen a man with long hair before.”

The next time Sue and I walked down the street, I looked more carefully at people’s reactions. Our employer was right. Everyone was staring at me.

Me in 1970

P.S.

A few weeks after this episode, the Barbers Guild of Lebanon passed a resolution condemning long hair on men. The resolution further stated that any men with long hair who came to their shops would have their heads shaved. I take some pride in thinking that I may have contributed to the barbers' resolution. 

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Eating Disorders

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Eating with Libyans was normally an informal affair. Everyone would sit or lie on the floor around a large communal bowl of food. You would sometimes use a spoon but often you would just pick up pieces of the food using pieces of bread or just your fingers. Unfortunately, this relaxed style of eating didn’t always go down well when translated to other cultures.

My daughter Emma used to run into problems with this. She spent the first five years of her life in Libya, and she spent much of that time with a Libyan family that we knew well. So she learned to eat the way Libyans ate at home. This caused problems whenever she went back to the UK, where she would tuck into a plate of spaghetti or even a bowl of ice cream using only her fingers. I didn’t see anything wrong with this but her grandma was absolutely horrified by it.

I ran into similar problems when I travelled from Libya to visit an International House school in Cairo. I was invited as guest of honour to a party at the home of one of the school’s receptionists.

My first mistake was deciding to sit on the floor when I saw there weren’t enough chairs for everyone. The hostess said “This isn’t Libya” and brought me a chair.

Then came the food. This consisted of tiny (1.5 inches across) pizzas. I was handed a pretty china plate with three mini-pizzas on it. I picked up the first one with my fingers and ate it.

Everyone stopped talking. Somebody started laughing. “Look at him. He’s eating like a Libyan,” she said. Then everyone laughed. After this, all the Egyptians proceeded to eat their pizzas the proper (British) way, with a knife and fork.

Sometimes I could understand why Libyans generally disliked Egyptians so much.

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To Protect and Serve

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Christine, one of our teachers in Libya, was walking down a main street in Tripoli. She noticed that a teenaged Libyan was following her. He kept his distance but he also kept making hissing noises at her. She ignored him. The boy kept following.

Suddenly a car zoomed up and screeched to a halt beside the boy. Christine stopped and turned around to see what was happening. To her surprise, a man got out of the car, grabbed the boy and dragged him over to where she was standing.

It turned out that the man was a plain-clothes policeman. He told Christine that she needed to accompany him and the boy to the police station. When she asked why, he told her that she had to bring charges against the boy for sexual assault, so that he could put the boy in prison.

Christine thought the policeman was overreacting. “He’s only a boy,” she laughed. “And he didn’t really do anything.”

“He was harassing you,” replied the policeman. “In Libya we don’t allow men to harass women. We need to put him in prison.”

Christine had visions of the boy being imprisoned for years and having his whole life ruined. So she kept reasoning with the policeman. It took a while but she eventually persuaded him to let the boy go after giving him a stern talking-to.

“Now I will drive you to where you are going,” the policeman told Christine. She said that wasn’t necessary but he insisted. So she got into his car.

The policeman then drove her to an empty building lot and proceeded to try to assault her.

Christine never could see that by insisting the boy was set free, she had effectively told the policeman she welcomed or at least didn’t mind sexual advances from strangers.

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Friday Night at the Movies

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Even back in 1970 Beirut was a very sophisticated city. However, if you looked hard, you could find parts of the city that were still unspoiled. One such place was Le Baron cinema.

Sue, our friend Dereck and I used to go Le Baron every Friday night. One reason for this was that no other expatriates ever went there and so we were guaranteed an authentic Lebanese experience. Another reason was that they always showed two good, full-length action films, usually a war film and a western. It was there that I first saw such classics as “Sabata: the man with gunsight eyes comes to kill”.

One endearing feature of Le Baron was that most of the seats were broken. Some were missing seat cushions, others were missing armrests. So our first task every week was to find three seats together that were largely intact. We would then reach over to other seats, pull off any pieces we needed and add them to our seats.

All the films were in English but they had Arabic and French subtitles. As the other patrons didn’t speak English, they relied on the subtitles and naturally felt free to talk over the soundtrack. So we three had to fall back on reading the French subtitles. We were usually able to follow the main gist of the films, although we would get confused when the translations were a little off-track: for example, when “God” was translated as “chien” (dog).

One of the great things about Le Baron was there was always lots of audience participation. When a western was showing, the spectators would boo the villains and cheer the heroes, and we would boo and cheer along with them. When it was an American war film, things would turn upside down and everyone would boo the American military and cheer the German or Japanese soldiers. Some of the patrons near us would turn around to check that we, too, were booing and cheering appropriately. We never disappointed them.

The very best thing about the cinema, though, was related to smoking. This was banned in all cinemas in Beirut but more or less everyone who went to Le Baron smoked, and smoked a lot: From our usual seats near the back, we could look towards the screen and see the red tips of scores of cigarettes in front of us. Not surprisingly, the police knew about this and they felt obliged to enforce the smoking ban. So at some point every Friday evening a police officer would enter the cinema and walk down the aisle, shouting at everyone to put their cigarettes out. The red tips blinked out row by row as he passed, and by the time he reached the screen nobody was smoking. Then he would walk back up the aisle. And as soon as he passed each row, everyone in that row would immediately light up again. By the time the officer reached the back of the cinema, everything was back to normal and we were watching the film over a sea of glowing red tips.

I miss Le Baron.

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Driving with Camels

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Driving in Libya was a tricky business. Even Libyans said so. They had two sayings about it. One was, “In England you drive on the left. In America you drive on the right. In Libya we drive in the shade.” The other was, “In Libya you can drive for hundreds of kilometers without seeing another vehicle. But if you see one, you will probably hit it.”

By the way, I can vouch for the truth underlying the latter saying. Once when driving on a road in the middle of nowhere, I saw a truck coming the other way. As the road was absolutely flat and straight and visibility was perfect, I was able to watch the truck for miles as it got closer and closer. It was driving right in the middle of the road. I got nervous and blew my horn. This seemed to wake up the other driver, who swerved back onto his side of the road at the very last moment, just missing my car.   

The problem wasn’t just that Libyans were undisciplined drivers, although that certainly contributed to the chaos. It was also that the roads were not well maintained. So you constantly had to swerve to avoid huge potholes. And potholes weren’t the only dangers. At some point before we got to Libya the military had moved large numbers of tank transporters and other very heavy vehicles east from Tripoli to the Egyptian border. This had left deep ruts in the tarmac on the main coast road. Some of these ruts were so deep that, if you got your wheels into them, you could be stuck in them for miles.

There was another problem with roads and the military. Whenever the latter were in a hurry - which was often - they would drive in the fast lane on the main roads, but going against the traffic. It could be very disconcerting to zoom along in the fast lane and suddenly see a convoy of military vehicles heading straight towards you.

Anyway, thinking about Libyan roads has reminded me that the worst driving experience of my entire life occurred in Libya, and it happened the very first time that I drove in that country. I had just bought a Beetle and had to drive it home from the dealer. (Perhaps I should mention here that I was a very inexperienced driver and had never driven on the right before. Also, I had failed the only driving test I had ever taken, which was in the UK.)

I managed the first couple of miles all right. Then we came to a large roundabout, which was a seething, disorganized mass of cars, trucks, buses, bikes, donkey carts and pedestrians. I stopped and waited for a space to open up so I could enter the roundabout. After several minutes I realized a space was never going to open up. So I said a quick prayer and drove into the chaos. Remarkably, we didn’t crash. I was elated.

But then I couldn’t get off the roundabout. We went around it again and again. Every time I tried to get off, I would have to swerve back onto it to avoid running into another car or a cyclist or a bus. Once, my way was blocked by a donkey pulling a cart filled with toilets. Another time, I almost escaped only to be thwarted at the last second by a line of camels, each with its tongue connected by a piece of wire to the tail of camel in front of it.

I don’t know how many times we went around. I’m guessing at least twenty but it could well have been more. I do know that when I finally broke free, I pulled over to the side of the road, put my head on the steering wheel and wept.

Libya could do that to you.

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Papers, Bloody Papers

As I have mentioned before, the amount of bureaucracy we had to deal with in Libya was horrific. As a result, episodes like the one described below were not uncommon.

I needed to get an exit visa so that I could travel to the UK for a meeting of International House school directors. As usual, it took hours for me to complete all of the necessary forms, because this had to be done in Arabic and I didn’t really read or write Arabic.

Once the forms were done I went down to the Ministry of Immigration with Mansour, the school “fixer,” and handed in the bundle of papers. The counter clerk looked only at the top sheet and handed the bundle back to me. I looked inquiringly at Mansour and he explained that the top form was an old one and that we needed the new version.

We rushed over to one of the kiosks that sold government forms and asked for the new version of the form that had been replaced. The man there told us that the new form wasn’t available yet. God willing, it would be available the next day.

Apparently God wasn’t willing, because the following day the new form still hadn’t arrived.

Three days later we finally got a copy of the new form. I completed it. Mansour and I went back to the Ministry and I handed in the stack of papers again. The clerk shook his head sadly, handed back the papers and said something to Mansour. The latter explained that the form was not valid because it didn’t have the government’s motto of the day stamped on it. 

As neither Mansour nor I had never heard of this motto of the day, we went to the bank where our friend Mustafa worked to see if he knew about it. He did. He explained that the government now issued a new motto every day and this had to be written or stamped on all forms. That day’s motto was the Arabic equivalent of “If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well”.

Since Mansour was illiterate, Mustafa wrote the motto on the immigration forms, and Mansour and I rushed back to the Ministry. Too late! It was an hour from closing time and there was a huge line of people waiting. Okay, we would go back the next morning and would get there really early.

The following morning Mansour and I were first in line when the counter opened. I handed over the papers. The clerk glanced at them, shook his head and handed them back. “What is it this time?” I asked Mansour. “This is yesterday’s motto,” he said.

A quick trip to Mustafa’s bank revealed that the current motto was, “If you help a friend, he will stab you in the back”. (This was no doubt inspired by some recent action by the Egyptian government.) Mustafa crossed out the old motto on each form and replaced it with the new one. 

Back at the Ministry, we waited in line for two hours before we reached the counter. The clerk took the bundle of papers. Mansour and I held our breath. The clerk looked at us, shook his head and said something I didn’t catch. Mansour translated, “The motto is an Islamic motto. So it must be written in green ink. You wrote it in black ink.”

Back at the bank Mustafa found a green pen and rewrote the motto on each form.

Back at the Ministry we waited in line and finally reached the counter again. The clerk took the papers. He looked at the top sheet and he smiled. “Quies (Good),” he said approvingly. Mansour and I grinned at each other. The clerk turned to the next sheet. Another smile and another “Quies”. We worked through the stack of forms, nodding approvingly at each one. Mansour and I were almost hugging each other by now.

 The clerk reached the final page. No smile this time. He pointed to where I had written my name, in block capitals as specified on the form. To my surprise, he explained the problem in English this time.

“This name no good.”

“Why?” I asked.

“All letters same size.”

Obviously they were all the same size, because my name was in block capitals. Trying to stay calm, I asked him to explain.

“You are English teacher. You should know this.”

“Know what?” I asked.

“In English first letter in every name must be big letter.”

I had been in Libya long enough to know how to react to this type of idiocy. So I didn't try to put the clerk right about capitalization in English. And I didn't do what I wanted to do, which was to grab the clerk's head and smash it repeatedly down on the counter. Instead, I meekly apologized, took the form and rewrote the first letter of each of names in even bigger capitals.
  

The clerk nodded approvingly. He stamped the papers and gave me a receipt.

“Come back tomorrow with your passport and you will have your visa”.

“Shukran (Thank you),” Mansour and I said in unison.

“La shukran. Allah wajib,” the clerk responded. “Thanks are not necessary. I’m just doing God’s work”.

No doubt.

Murderers' Home

There was virtually no crime in Libya when we were there. Most people were comfortably off and, besides that, Libyans were basically very honest people. Two quick examples will illustrate this.


1. We sometimes ate in a cheap little workers café on Shara Mizran. A really cheap little café. After eating there one evening, we drove home and went to bed. The next morning I realized I had left the school cashbox in the café. The box had a broken lock and it contained about 3500 dinars ($10, 000 US – a LOT of money in 1975). I drove into town at 90 miles an hour. As I hurtled into the café, the waiter waved at me. “Good morning! You left your money last night. Here it is.” And there it was. All 3500 dinars. In a cashbox that didn’t lock.

2. People didn’t much like leaving their money in banks. (Since last year, I know why.) So they often carried around large amounts of cash. One day I saw an old man come out of our bank with wads of money in his arms. As he walked off down the street, he dropped one of the wads without noticing. Another Libyan picked up the wad of notes and ran after the old man, shouting, “Hey, stop. You’ve dropped some money. Here it is.”

So we were all shocked in 1977 when there was a murder in Tripoli. What happened was an immigrant worker from Tunisia tried to rob a jeweller’s on Shara Istiklal and ended up killing the shopkeeper.

The murderer was caught, put on trial and sentenced to death. Ghadaffi came on TV and praised the court for imposing the death penalty. He suggested that the execution be carried out in public and the man’s body then be hung from a lamppost on Istiklal Street as a warning to other potential murderers. Bloodthirsty stuff worthy of a Texas governor!

But this was Libya. A couple of days later, Ghadaffi came on TV again to announce that he had been thinking about the case and had revised his opinion. After all, the killer was a poor uneducated immigrant worker from a class-ridden neighbouring country. As a fellow Arab and Muslim, he surely deserved compassion.

So the murderer was granted amnesty, given a house and provided with a government job.
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Making Compromises

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A westerner who wants to live in a Middle Eastern country has to be willing to make compromises. Some of these compromises are about fitting in with local customs but others are about fitting in with your fellow expatriates. As I learned on my first stint in the region, in Beirut, it sometimes takes considerable ingenuity to devise a suitable compromise.


When Sue and I arrived in Beirut, we quickly rented a small apartment in the city center.

The next day our employer asked us when he should tell our maid to come to start work. The maid in question had worked for our predecessors at the school and he assured us that she was totally reliable. (I can’t remember the woman’s name now but I’ll call her Khadija.)

Sue and I were both from working-class backgrounds and had political views that did not encompass the hiring of maids! So we told our boss that we weren’t going to have a maid. But all expatriates have a maid, he told us. They don’t cost much and they make life much more pleasant. We repeated that we were not going to employ one and that that was that.

The next day our boss approached us again. He said he had explained the situation to Khadija and that she was very upset. She had a young daughter and she worked as a maid in order to pay for her daughter’s education. If we didn’t employ her, her daughter would have to stop attending school.

As you can imagine, Sue and I felt terrible when we heard this and, after a little soul-searching, we agreed to hire Khadija. However, we weren’t willing to totally abandon our principles. So we decided to hire her for half-a-day a week and to pay her the same hourly rate that we were being paid as teachers.

Khadija started work. As she did a great job and was a very nice person, everything seemed to have worked out well.

No such luck! After a few days the director asked to see us again. The other teachers were unhappy with us, he said, because we were paying Khadija double the going rate. Our colleagues’ maids would soon hear about this and it was bound to cause ill feeling. We had to cut her pay to match what everyone else paid. No way, we replied. You really have to do this, he countered. We were adamant.

In the end we worked out an ingenious solution. We would pay Khadija for a full day’s work every week at the going rate. However, we would always let her go home after working only half-a-day. So her official rate of pay was the same as that of the other maids but in reality she received the same hourly rate as we were paid.

It was the first of many compromises that we had to make in Beirut and, later, in Libya. I think it was one of the better ones, though.
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Driving a Hard Bargain

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Bargaining is an inescapable part of life in the Arab World, where very few shops and no markets have fixed prices. I was never very good at it, as was brought home to me when a group of us teachers from International House Beirut traveled to Cairo for Christmas.


One day, after visiting the Pyramids, Sue and I went into the village that is located next to the Sphinx. We popped into a souvenir shop and we both fell in love with a wall-hanging of an Egyptian scene.

“How much is that hanging?” I asked.
“Six Egyptian pounds.”

Having watched how Beirutis bargain, I knew better than to accept this opening price.
“I’ll give you three pounds for it.”
“No, the price is six pounds.”

Hmm. He was supposed to bring the price down but he hadn’t.
“Okay,” I said. “Four pounds. Agreed?”
He just looked at me and repeated, “Six pounds.”

He was clearly a tough bargainer.
“All right, five pounds. And that’s my final offer.”
“The price is six pounds,” he said.

Refusing to give in and pay such an outrageous price, we left the shop and went back into Cairo.

When we got to our hotel room, we realized that we were being ridiculous. The hanging was one of the best we’d ever seen and even at six pounds it was a real bargain. Luckily, one of our friends was going to the Pyramids and Sphinx the following day and so we asked her to buy the hanging for us. I carefully explained where the shop was and exactly where the hanging was inside the shop.

“He’ll ask for six pounds,” I told her. “That’s fine. Just pay what he asks.”

That evening she came to our room with the hanging.

“I suppose he asked for six pounds,” I said.
“Oh, no,” she told us. “He started by asking for four pounds but I quickly bargained him down to three.”

Go figure!
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Father and Son ( or Morning Has Broken)

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Yahya was the brother of one of our Lebanese friends. He told us a rather touching story about him and his father.


When Yahya was a teenager, he liked to sleep late but his father was an early riser. So in the mornings his father would burst noisily into Yahya’s bedroom. “Get up, you lazy boy,” he would shout, and he would drag Yahya out of bed. This went on day after day for years. And Yahya hated it.

Then one day, when he was a young adult, Yahya decided that he’d had enough of this treatment.

“Oh, my father,” he said. “Why is that that every morning you come into my room like the Israeli army? You shout and scream and you drag me out of bed. By Allah, it is a very cruel way to wake me. Couldn’t you wake me in a more gentle way?”

The next morning his father opened the bedroom door quietly and walked softly over to the bed. He put his hand on Yahya’s shoulder and gave him the gentlest of shakes.

“Oh, my son,” he crooned. “The night has ended and a new day is beginning. The silver moon has gone to rest and the golden orb of the sun has begun its journey across the azure sky. It is time for you to open your beautiful eyes.”

Yahya sat up.

“Oh, thank you, my father,” he said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, my son.”

They embraced, and they cried tears of happiness and love.

The following morning his father burst into the bedroom like the Israeli army again and dragged Yahya out of bed.
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God's Will

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A British friend, Fred, was visiting Sue and me in Beirut. He was thinking of buying a rug during his visit and so we gave him directions to a local store that sold carpets and rugs.

When the entered the store, he was surprised to see the owner was lying on the floor next to a pile of rolled up rugs. The owner explained that he was trying to reach a kitten that was hiding among the rugs. He’d been trying to coax it out for hours, he said, but with no success.

“Let me try,” said Fred. He got down on his hands and knees, made a couple of “pss” noises and out came a lovely little gray and white kitten.

The store owner grabbed the kitten, put it into a shoebox and tied up the box with string.

“Are you going to take it home?” asked Fred.

“Oh, no,” said the owner. “I don’t like cats.”

“You aren’t going to kill it, I hope, “ said Fred.

The owner looked shocked. “Oh, no, that would be haram (a sin).”

“So what are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to put the box in the middle of the road”.

Fred didn’t like the sound of this. “But it will get run over. You will have killed the kitten.”

“Not at all,” the owner responded. “If it gets run over, it'll be nothing to do with me. It will be Allah's will. We are all in Allah's hands.”

Like most Brits, Fred had a less fatalistic view of life. So that evening Sue and I came home to find we had become the adoptive parents of a little white and gray kitten. We named her Habibi.

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Getting Worse

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We hear so much about Islamic extremism these days that I suspect most westerners think the Arabs have always been intolerant and fanatical. This isn’t at all the case, except perhaps in Saudi Arabia.

Take Libya. It was an Islamic country when I lived there and most Libyans were pretty devout Muslims. However, they were generally very tolerant when it came to other religions. For example, every Libyan fasted during Ramadan but nobody ever tried to impose fasting on westerners. In fact, people in villages would offer us Pepsis while they themselves were abstaining from drinking anything from 4:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. every day for a month.

Libyans would ask me and the other teachers at our school what our religion was. When we told them we were Christians, they would smile and say something like, “Christian, Muslim, Jew, same-same.” From what I see on the news, I very much doubt that the same attitude prevails today.

Even in Egypt, the most sophisticated Arab country, religion has gradually become more oppressive. When I first visited Cairo, in 1970, I don’t think I saw a single woman wearing a hijab or headscarf. By the mid 1980s the situation had changed and most women covered their heads when outside. From what I've been seeing on the news recently, it seems that that any Egyptian woman venturing onto the streets bareheaded nowadays risks being sexually assaulted or having acid thrown in her face.

I find it all terribly sad.
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The Perfect Teacher

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Almost all of the students in our school in Libya were happy with their teachers and their classes, but I did occasionally have to deal with complaints from Libyan and other Arab students. When these complaints were justified, I tried to find a solution to them. However, many of the complaints were ridiculous and I eventually hit on a good way to handle these by drawing on my (very limited) knowledge of Islam. My approach went like this.

Student: Director, you must give me a new class. My teacher is not good.
Me: Oh, really. What’s the problem?
Student: Today she was spelled a word wrong on the board.
Me: Well, you know, spelling in English is much more difficult than spelling in Arabic. Even teachers sometimes make mistakes.
Student: No, this is not good. Teachers cannot make mistakes. I want a teacher who does not make mistakes.
Me: So you want a perfect teacher?
Student: Yes.
Me: Are you not a Muslim, then?
Student: Of course I am a Muslim.
Me: I don’t think so.
Student: Why do you say this? I am a good Muslim.
Me: I don’t think so. Good Muslims respect the Holy Koran and you don’t.
Student: Of course I respect the Holy Koran.
Me: But the Holy Koran says that people are never perfect. Only Allah is perfect. So if you want a teacher who is perfect, you can’t be a good Muslim.

At this point the student would always decide to stay in the class. And I would go and remind the teacher concerned that she/he should be more careful when writing on the board.
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Honesty Isn't Always the Best Policy

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One of the things I struggled with during my early days in Libya was the relationship between honesty and politeness. In common with many other people in the less developed world, Libyans really disliked saying "No" to any requests from friends and to foreigners visiting their country. (The concept of  hospitality is very important throughout the Mid East and Africa.) As they saw it, saying "No" implied that you didn't want to help the person concerned. So if you asked a Libyan for help or information that he couldn't supply, he would always say "Yes" - but then wouldn't deliver.

I experienced a typical example of this when Sue and I invited a Libyan friend, Mohamed, to our house for dinner. The agreed day and time arrived but Mohamed didn't. Time was a flexible concept and so we waited patiently. One hour went by. Then two. Finally, I called our friend's house. 
"Hello. Can I speak to Mohamed."
"Sorry but he isn't here. He's in England."
"In England? Oh, did he have to make an unexpected trip there?"
"No. He arranged the trip months ago."
Clearly at the time that Mohamed accepted our invitation, he already knew he wouldn't be able to come to dinner with us. However, it would have been rude for him to turn down our invitation. So he did the polite thing and accepted it, knowing full well that he couldn't come to dinner!

A potentially more serious situation occurred when a group of teachers from our school ran into the politeness/honesty problem in a village outside Tripoli. The first I heard of the incident was when the teachers returned to work the following day. This is what had happened.

While driving around, they stopped in a village and noticed an interesting, small mosque. An old man, presumably the imam, was sitting outside. They greeted him and he returned their greetings. As he seemed to be very friendly, they asked him if they could take a quick look inside the mosque. "Please," he said and motioned for them to enter. They removed their shoes and went in.

The man immediately and went reported the teachers to the local police. The latter came and arrested the teachers for having gone into the mosque. Luckily, when the police called the Ministry of the Interior in Tripoli for instructions, they got through to one of our students, who told the police to let the teachers go.

I tried to explain to the teachers why the imam had done what he did. They didn't get it. As far as they were concerned, he was just a crazy old man who said they could do something but then had them arrested for doing it. I suppose that's one way of looking at it!
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Have Some Respect for Your Elders

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As someone who grew up in an English family that included a Pakistani father, I’ve always been fascinated by cross-cultural differences: the way “we” think compared to the way “they” think. My time in Libya provided me with lots of examples of British-Arab cultural differences but I’ve also run into examples in other places.

In the early 1980s I was teaching ESOL in International House London. One of my classes was a Business English course with a group made up of six members of the Abu Dhabi government auditing department. They were wonderful students.

One day we were discussing how to resolve financial problems uncovered during government audits of contracts made with foreign-owned companies.

“So what happens if you find something that you think is not correct but which the company argues is acceptable?” I asked. “How do you resolve the disagreement?”

“That’s easy,” said Abdullah. “We go to the Principal of Accounting to decide the matter.”

“No, Abdullah,” I said. “A principal is a person. You mean you go to the Principles of Accounting. That’s a list of rules and guidelines.”

“No, Mr. Jeff. We have a man who is the Principal of Accounting in our country. He listens to us and to the company representatives. Then he decides who is right.”

I found this interesting. “So the Principal of Accounting is a very experienced accountant?”

“Oh, no, Mr. Jeff. He isn’t an accountant.”

“So how can he decide accounting issues?” I asked.

“Because he is an old man.”

I thought about this for a moment. “But what happens if you or the company accountants see that he is wrong?”

“You don’t understand, Mr. Jeff. He is never wrong. He is a very old man.”
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Enjoying a National Holiday

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September 1st was a national holiday marking the Libyan Revolution of 1969.

Most westerners stayed home on the holiday. In fact, the American and British embassies always warned their citizens to do exactly that, presumably in case they would be attacked by Libyans swept up in a wave of revolutionary and nationalistic fervor. The embassies took special care to warn us all not to go anywhere near the main square, the focus of Independence Day activities.

Being less paranoid than most westerners in Libya, we always made a point of going to the square to see the festivities. We particularly enjoyed watching the national folk-dancing troupe, in those days recognized as one of the best folk-dancing troupes in the world. We invariably got a warm welcome from the other spectators, who would make sure that we had a good view of the stage.

Every year the highlight of the folk dancing came with their final dance. This would start with a scene in which Libyan men and women danced joyfully around the stage in a scene of pastoral bliss. Then two dancers dressed as soldiers and carrying bayoneted rifles would appear; one had a Union Jack on his helmet, the other the Stars and Stripes. The crowd erupted in loud booing. The soldier dancers proceeded to stab the other male dancers to death and to do unspeakable things to the women. Meanwhile the booing got louder and louder. Suddenly the music would change as several dancers dressed as armed Libyan insurgents burst onto the stage. The cheering was deafening. There would be a brief struggle, the foreign invaders would fall to the floor, and the insurgents would dance over them, stabbing their twitching bodies with bayonets. The stabbing would go on for quite a while. The applause was deafening.

At the end of the dance the spectators nearest us would look at us a little sheepishly, obviously worried that we might have been offended. They would reassure us that the dance was about the US and UK governments, not the American and British peoples. We would smile at them. They would smile at us. I would shake hands with the men around us. Happy days!
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We Take Checks Here

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Mustafa and I were window-shopping in Tripoli when I saw that one shop was offering really good prices on Olympus OM-1 cameras. As I had just broken my own camera, I decided that an OM-1 would be an excellent investment.

Inside the shop I checked out one of the cameras and was very impressed. So I decided to buy it.  

I didn't have enough cash on me but I did have a checkbook. Knowing that some Libyan storekeepers were reluctant to accept checks, I asked Mustafa to make sure that this storekeeper would take a check.

The storekeeper said he would be happy for me to pay with a check.

I wrote out the check and handed it over.

The storekeeper examined it very carefully.  He nodded approvingly. 

Then he handed the check back to me and said something I didn't understand to Mustafa.

"What did he say?" I asked.

Mustafa smiled. "He says that the check is good. So can you please take it to the bank and cash it in, and then bring him the cash. He'll look after the camera until you get back."  
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Strange Bedfellows

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Elsewhere in this blog I have mentioned that one of my favorite places in Libya was the oasis town of Ghadames, some 300 miles southwest of Tripoli. Sue and I visited Ghadames several times but one of the visits sticks in my mind more than the others.

It was just before the beginning of a school year and a group of new teachers had arrived. Wanting to start them off with a positive impression of Libya, Sue and I decided to take them down to Ghadames for a brief vacation before school started.

We drove down in several cars and arrived at the hotel – there was only one hotel. The manager was pleased to see us but said there was a problem. He had only two rooms available rather than the five we had reserved.

After some discussion I suggested that the only solution was to put me and the three male teachers in one room and Sue and the six female teachers in the other.

The manager was horrified. He explained that he daren’t let so many unmarried women guests sleep in a room without supervision. 

I pointed out that my wife was going to be in the room and that she would supervise the other women.

“Mush mumkin (Not possible),” the manager said. “Because she is a woman, too.”

His solution was that I should sleep in the room with Sue and the women. I was, after all, the school director and therefore presumably in loco parentis. 

It didn’t seem like a very good solution to me but the manager was insistent. So I spent the next two nights sleeping in a room with seven women. That’s something I’ve never done before or since.
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Dealing with Censorship

According to the law, every book that we intended to use in our school had to be inspected and approved by a committee of our students. The students had to go through a book and use a black marker to cover up any inappropriate words, such as “girlfriend” or “whisky” or “beer”. They also had to check the illustrations to make sure that any women shown were fully covered from the neck to their wrists and ankles. So, for example, if a picture showed a woman wearing a short sleeved top, the students had to black out her arms down to the wrist.

If the book was then approved by the committee, every single copy had to be censored in the same way.

This whole process was clearly unworkable and so I streamlined it as far as our school’s books were concerned. I created a student committee that had only one member, Ali, our office assistant. He would go through and mark up one copy of every new book that we bought. I kept the marked-up books in my office to show any inspector who might turn up at the school – and I just hoped that no inspector would ever be bothered to check the copies of the books actually being used in our classes. Luckily, I never saw an inspector during the 4 years I was there.

No Whisky

Censorship also applied to any visual aids that teachers used in class. One teacher, David, got around this in a way that amused all of us.

“White Horse Whisky” ran a series of glossy ads in the color supplements of the UK Sunday papers. Each double-page ad showed a group of people – and a white horse - at a party. Each ad also included a large photo of a bottle of “White Horse Whisky”.

David would carefully cut out the picture of the bottle and then take the rest of the ad to class and stick it on the whiteboard. The students would see the white horse and the bottle-shaped hole in the picture, and they would shout, “Whisky. Whisky.”

David would look shocked and, pointing to the hole, he would say, “No whisky.”

The students loved it!   

At the Movies

The same censorship laws that applied to school books applied to movies. So before any movie could be shown in a theater, it had to be cleaned up - frame by frame. Can you imagine how much work it must have taken to go through every frame of a movie such as "Bikini Beach Party" and to ink out the offending flesh? The mind boggles.
 

A Short Visit

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Getting into Libya was always a hassle. It wasn’t unusual to spend 2 or 3 hours in lines at the Customs and the Immigration desks in Tripoli International Airport. The key to getting through reasonably smoothly was to be polite to all the officials and never to show any sign of impatience. Not everyone arriving realized this.


On one occasion I flew into Tripoli and got into the Immigration line. A few places ahead of me, I noticed a tall American man, who was wearing cowboy boots and a large Stetson hat. No doubt an employee of one of the oil companies.

As we waited, the oil company man kept looking at his watch and making sarcastic comments to the rest of us in the line. The comments gradually became louder and more disparaging, and they attracted the attention of the young Immigration official at the desk. He motioned for the next person in line to wait and, smiling, beckoned for the oilman to go to the desk.

The oilman approached the desk.

“Passport, please,” said the official.

“Here you are, boy,” said the oilman.

The official took the passport and thumbed through it until he found the page with the entry visa. Still smiling, he ripped the page out of the passport and called over two police officers.

The last I saw of the oilman he was being led to the departure lounge by the two policemen, preparatory to being put back on a plane out of the country.
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Creative Carpentry

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One day I noticed that the lock on the front door of the school was coming loose. I asked, Mansour, our fixer, if he knew a good locksmith and he said he did.

A little later that day Mansour appeared upstairs at my office with a man who bore a remarkable resemblance to him. He introduced him as his cousin the carpenter. 

"Why do we need a carpenter, Mansour?" I asked. He took me downstairs and showed me that the wood around the lock was rotten and would not hold a new lock. So we needed a carpenter to cut out the section of rotten wood and replace it with a new piece. As this seemed logical, I told them to go ahead with the repairs.

A couple of hours went by and then Mansour appeared and took me down to inspect the front door. His cousin the carpenter had done a very neat job. He had cut away a 2" by 6" section from the edge of the door and replaced it with new wood. He had then stained the new wood to match the rest of the door. It all looked very good to me and so I paid the carpenter and asked Mansour to find a locksmith. I wanted the lock fixed before we closed for the night.

Just before our closing time Mansour again appeared at my office, this time with a man he introduced as the locksmith. After exchanging the usual greetings, I asked the locksmith if he had replaced the lock. He looked rather uncomfortable. "There's a problem," Mansour said, looking down and shuffling his feet. 

They led me downstairs and showed me the problem. The locksmith had tried to attach the new lock to the section of new wood with screws. This hadn't worked. In fact, all that had happened was that the new wood had disintegrated. How strange! I looked more closely. No wonder the new wood had disintegrated. It wasn't wood at all. Rather it was a chunk of stale bread that had been cut to shape, sanded and varnished. 

I looked at Mansour. Mansour looked nervously at me and then at the locksmith. The locksmith looked at me. I couldn't help it: I started giggling. And it ended up with all three of us laughing and laughing and laughing.

That's how Libya was sometimes. You just had to laugh. 
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Waiting for the Moon

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We had quite a few religious holidays in Libya and their dates depended on the moon. I always wanted to post the dates in advance but this would upset the school’s assistant, Ali. So we used to have the following conversation a week or two before every holiday.

ME: Okay, Ali. I want you to put up a notice saying that the school is closed for the XXX holiday on Thursday next week.”

ALI: We can’t do that, Mr. Jeff.

ME: Why not?

ALI: Because the holiday doesn’t start until the day after the new moon appears.

ME: Right. And the new moon will appear on Wednesday.

ALI:  We don’t know that.

ME: We do know, Ali. I have an almanac here which shows me the date of every new moon for the next 50 years. And there will be a new moon next Wednesday.

I thought my argument was a winning one. Of course, I should have known better.

ALI: But what if there is no new moon this month? 

ME: There will be.

ALI:  We don’t know that. It depends on Allah. He might decide not to have a moon at all this month. So we have to wait until next Wednesday to see if the moon appears.

ME: Okay, Ali. Let’s wait until Wednesday.

This is the type of thing that made it difficult to run a school efficiently in Libya!  
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Driven to Despair

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A couple of weeks before leaving Libya, I bumped into a British friend, Les, who worked for an oil company. He looked terrible. I asked what was wrong and he told me the following story.

One morning he noticed a stray kitten near his house. Being British, he immediately tried to rescue the animal. It bit him on the hand, drawing blood. He washed the wound, stuck a band-aid on it, and went to work. Later in the day he mentioned to a colleague what had happened. His colleague was horrified and told Les that he should check right away that he hadn't got rabies from the bite. Some other colleagues overheard the conversation and all agreed that Les was at risk from rabies.

After work Les went to see his (Egyptian) doctor. The latter pointed out that the only way to tell if the kitten had rabies was to kill it and them do tests on its brain. Les set off immediately to look for the kitten - but, of course, he couldn't find it. So back he went to his doctor to see what else he could do. The doctor said that Les needed to get a series of fourteen rabies shots spread over two weeks. And this needed to happen before any symptoms appeared. Once any symptoms appear, full onset of the disease is inevitable - and it is usually fatal. The first symptom is a headache.

"Okay, you'd better give me the first shot now, " Les said.
"Sorry," said the doctor, "I don't keep the vaccine. In fact, you can't get it anywhere in Libya. I wouldn't worry too much, though. After all, God willing, you might not get rabies."

Not being a Muslim, Les wasn't willing to leave matters in the hands of fate. He spent the next day reading up on rabies and becoming more and more worried as he learned more about the disease. Cats, he read, often carried rabies. And a bite from a rabid cat was much more likely to result in infection than a bite from a rabid dog.

After two sleepless nights, he asked for leave from his job, booked a flight to England, flew to London and rushed over to a major teaching hospital. There he saw a specialist and immediately started receiving the series of rabies shots. A few days later, he got a cable from his employer telling him that he had to return to work right away or lose his job.  
"That's fine, " said the specialist. "I will give you the ampoules containing the rest of the vaccine and your doctor in Libya can complete the series of shots when you get there. Don't forget, though, that the vaccine needs to be kept cool. If the temperature goes over X degrees, the vaccine won't work"

Les flew back to Tripoli the next day, carrying the ampoules in a vacuum flask. 

All was well until he reached the customs desk at Tripoli airport. The customs officer opened the flask and saw the ampoules. 
"What's this?" he asked. 
Les explained. 
"Where is your permit?"
"What permit?" Les asked.
"Your permit to import medicines."
"I don't have one."
"Then I have to confiscate the medicines."

Les argued for an hour but to no avail. He rushed down to town and returned to the airport with a Libyan colleague. The Libyan colleague argued with the customs officer, and then with the officer's superior, and then with the superior's superior. They refused to budge. Worse yet, they were so offended by Les that they had an immigration officer seize his passport.

The following morning Les managed to put a call through to the specialist in London and explained what had happened. The specialist pointed out that Les had already missed one rabies shot and therefore would need to have a whole new series of shots right away. However, as Lee explained, this was not going to be possible because he was now unable to leave Libya. 

To cut a long story short, by the time I saw Les he had spent two weeks trying to get his passport back but hadn't succeeded. Now convinced that he was doomed to die from rabies, he had borrowed a gun from a Libyan friend and had decided to shoot himself at the first sign of a headache. 

I never saw Les again and I often wonder what happened to him.
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I never saw or heard from Les again, and I often wonder what happened to him.    

My Driving Test: Part 1

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As I didn't have a UK driver's license, I spent my first few months in Libya driving on a fraudulently-obtained international license. (How I obtained it is another story!) However, Libyan law only allowed the use of an international license for three months, after which time you had to pass a driving test at the local Dept. of Transportation office. So after three months I had to set about getting a Libyan license.

Luckily, one of the students in our school happened to be the Deputy Minister of Transportation. I went down to visit him in his office to see if I could get a license without bothering with a test. He was very sympathetic but insisted that I absolutely had to take the test. Even he couldn't make an exception. But, he said, he could arrange for me to take the test that very day - and he was sure (wink, nudge) that I would pass it.

Leading me by the hand, he took me around the various offices and had clerks complete the necessary forms for me. Then he talked for a while with a police officer, who then took me out to the testing area. This was a stretch of road behind the D. of T. building.

The scene that greeted us outside was astounding. Several hundred people were standing or sitting in the roadway, waiting to take their tests. Every couple of minutes they had to rush to one side or the other as someone taking their test drove down the road in a car or a truck or rode down on a motorcycle. Every time someone completed their test, he would get out of (or off) his vehicle and shout out the result. "I passed." Loud cheers from the crowd. Or "I failed." Equally loud cheers from the crowd.

The system for driving tests was ... interesting. The cars used were Volkswagen Beetles with dual-controls. The examiner sat in the passenger side front seat. A policeman sat in the back seat, to make sure that there was no funny business. Then three applicants squeezed in - two in the back and one in the driver's seat. As soon as the driver passed or failed his test, he got out and one of the applicants on the back seat moved to the driver's seat.

When my car arrived, "my" policeman got in the back and motioned for me and another applicant to join him. 

The third applicant was put into the driver's seat. He peered at the dash. "Let's go," the examiner said sharply. The driver turned the key in the ignition. There was a horrific grinding sound. The motor was already running. The examiner didn't hesitate: "Fail." The unlucky driver got out and did a little jig in the roadway: "I failed again. Nine times I've failed." The cheers for him were deafening.

My other companion moved to the front seat. He confidently threw the car into gear, released the handbrake, stepped on the accelerator and released the clutch. Wrong gear. People screamed and threw themselves out of the way as our car hurtled backwards through the crowd. "Fail." The driver got out to what I thought were rather less enthusiastic cheers than he deserved.

Now it was my turn.

(Contd.)

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My Driving Test: Part 2

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I don't mind admitting that I was nervous as I moved into the driver's seat to begin my test.

I adjusted the rear mirror. 

My policeman leaned over towards the examiner and gestured to the mirror. "Quies!" (Good!) he exclaimed admiringly. He was clearly determined to follow his boss' orders to make sure I passed. The examiner clearly knew the fix was in and didn't like it. He looked cross.  

I stepped on the clutch and pushed the gear lever into first. "Quies jedan!" (Very good!) from my policeman. The examiner looked cross. 

I drove along the road at maybe 5 m.p.h. This elicited a cry of "Masbut!" (Excellent!) from my policeman. The examiner looked cross. "Stop," he shouted. I stopped. Another admiring cry of "Masbut!" from the back seat.

Having apparently aced the practical section of the test, now it was time for the theory section. I wasn't looking forward to this because I had no idea what it would involve.

The examiner produced a sheet showing various road signs. He pointed to one and asked, "Shu haida?" (What's this?) I hadn't a clue. "Sorry, I don't know that one," I said in English. The examiner looked puzzled and I realized he didn't speak English. My policeman didn't speak any English either but he was much more supportive. "Quies jedan!" he said approvingly.

The examiner pointed to another sign that I had never seen before. Knowing he couldn't understand me, I answered more confidently this time: "That means the road is a motorway, or maybe it means that you can't park there, or maybe it means something else." My policeman was ecstatic. "Masbut! Masbut!" he cried, slapping the examiner on the back. 

Three more questions were asked and answered in similar fashion.

Then, looking very cross indeed, the examiner passed me a slip of paper and gestured for me to get out. 

My policeman got out also and shook hands with me. "Mobruk!" (Congratulations!) he said.

I leaned into the car and held out my hand to the examiner. He scowled at me. "Imshi!" (Go!) was all he said.

And that's how I passed my driving test and obtained a legal Libyan license.
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