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.