Only in Kuwait: The Original
Sigh. These are, sadly, true. I have seen them myself. I used to make people mad; I always carried a camera, and when I would see able bodied young men park in the handicapped spots, I would take their photos. They would get really mad. I knew I might be risking my life, so I tried to be careful, but I was also hoping they would feel shame, and stop doing it.
Talal Al-Ghannam is a very brave Kuwaiti for printing these “Only in Kuwait . . . ” columns.
Only In Kuwait
These are the things you won’t find in other modern countries or even ones that are poorer, but only in Kuwait.
1. Only in Kuwait people APPEAL to the government to apply the law.
2. Only in Kuwait handicapped parking places are seized by ordinary people.
3. Only in Kuwait many people like to park on the pavement and on green landscapes.
4. Only in Kuwait you could get killed for a parking space.
5. Only in Kuwait you could get beaten if you did not let a maniac driving behind you to pass.
6. Only in Kuwait policemen are beaten by mobs.
7. Only in Kuwait many policemen play with their smart phones rather than monitor the roads.
8 .Only in Kuwait many police stations have only one policeman.
9. Only in Kuwait you need a fancy car on the road to be respected.
10. Only in Kuwait you need three months to get an appointment in a hospital unless you are really sick.
11. Only in Kuwait the majority of Kuwaitis travel out of town when there is a two-day holiday.
12. Only in Kuwait the majority of employees get sick suddenly when there is a holiday coming up.
13. Only in Kuwait we see people spitting or urinating in the streets.
14. Only in Kuwait we see maniacs driving on the shoulder of the road, throwing up gravel to break your car’s windshield.
15. Only in Kuwait some Kuwaitis say ‘kaifi ana Kuwaiti’, meaning I am a Kuwait, I can do whatever I want.
16. Only in Kuwait you see many Kuwaitis able to deport expatriates. I will rest my pen for now until the next article.
By Talal Al-Ghannam
local@kuwaittimes.net
500,000 in Kuwait Banned from Travel
From the Kuwait Times:
Mostly for people who have not paid interest on their loans? The banks have that much power, that they can put a travel ban on their customers?
“Why Do Americans Do This?”
AdventureMan and I were with a group of delegates from Iraq yesterday, taking them on a visit to a variety of Pensacola sites. They are here visiting through the GCCDC, on the IVLP program, studying elections and campaign strategies in the USA.
One stop we make with many delegates is the First Methodist program Serving the Hungry. Two days a week, led by Jerry Vititow and supported by many happy, willing volunteers, they serve a hot lunch to the hungry, varying in numbers but never less than fifty or so.
The delegates learn about the program, then don aprons and serve up the trays. It is often one of the highlights of the trip.
One delegate raises his hand to ask a question.
“We see this everywhere,” he starts, “Americans who are working for nothing and smiling. Why do they do this?” He was genuinely perplexed.
Jerry explained that it wells up from many sources, a yearning to give back some of the blessings we have received, an eagerness to serve those who have less, maybe just an eagerness to serve. “It’s part of what we believe in,” he sums it up.
The delegates had a wonderful time.
Jesus Heals Lepers
My friend Renee sent this one, along with several Christian cartoons, but this one really made me laugh. Yes, as Christians, it is OK to show the image of Jesus.
In our book, the Bible, there are even small jokes. In one verse, a man is told that Jesus, the Messiah, had come from Nazareth, and the man says “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” People are people, yes, it was meant to be humorous.
Happy National Day Kuwait
Happy Liberation Day and Happy National Day to all my friends in Kuwait. Party hearty 🙂
Almost twenty-five years since the Invasion of Kuwait. Imagine. There are young Kuwaitis graduating from college who weren’t even alive when Iraq invaded.
Stellenbosch on A-Word-A-Day
A-Word-A-Day was the very first website I ever bookmarked. I was getting my certification to teach English as a Foreign Language and my students loved words. I’m pretty good with words, even so A-Word-a-Day teaches me a new one, or a new meaning for an old one, more often than not. You can subscribe and receive a new word five days a week and a discussion at the end of the week.
This is a great word, and one I had never heard used before:
stellenbosch
PRONUNCIATION:
(STE-len-bosh)
MEANING:
verb tr.: To relegate someone incompetent to a position of minimal responsibility.
ETYMOLOGY:
After Stellenbosch, a town in South Africa. Earliest documented use: 1900.
NOTES:
Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, was a British military base during the Second Boer War. Officers who had not proven themselves were sent to Stellenbosch, to take care of something relatively insignificant, such as to look after horses. Even if they kept their rank, this assignment was considered a demotion. Eventually the term came to be applied when someone was reassigned to a position where he could do little harm.
A similar term is coventry.
Babayaga by Toby Barlow
You know how books come your way in coincidental ways? Amazon.com had told me I needed to read Babayaga, so I ordered it. I’ve always loved mythologies, I devoured them like candy when I was young, always looking for more. Babayagas are very old, and exist under many names in most cultures – elderly women who usually deal with concoctions, often medicinal, who live alone. In the west, they were often called witches, in the Slavic countries, babayaga, and it seems to me there is an old woman used to scare children in the Gulf, too. It seems to be a cross-cultural phenomenon.
Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Babayaga:
Baba Yaga is a witch (or one of a trio of sisters of the same name) in Slavic folklore, who appears as a deformed and/or ferocious-looking elderly woman. She flies around in a mortar and wields a pestle. She dwells deep in the forest, in a hut usually described as standing on chicken legs, with a fence decorated with human skulls. Baba Yaga may help or hinder those that encounter or seek her out, and may play a maternal role. She has associations with forest wildlife. Sometimes she frightens a hero (e.g. by promising to eat him), but helps him if he is courageous. According to Vladimir Propp’s folktale morphology, Baba Yaga commonly appears as a donor, a villain, or something altogether ambiguous. In many fairy tales she kidnaps and eats children, usually after roasting them in her oven).
Andreas Johns identifies Baba Yaga as “one of the most memorable and distinctive figures in eastern European folklore,” and observes that she is “enigmatic” and often exhibits “striking ambiguity.”[1] Johns summarizes her as “a many-faceted figure, capable of inspiring researchers to see her as a cloud, moon, Death, Winter, snake, bird, pelican or earth goddess, totemic matriarchal ancestress, female initiator, phallic mother, or archetypal image”.[2]
Barlow’s BabaYaga includes all the backstory, inserted here and there, the Russian purges, revolts, revolutions, the wars, the mud, the snows, following the troops, and several different Babayaga, while focusing one one, the beautiful and mesmerizing Zoya, who lives in a magical post World War II Paris. She in unforgettable – unless, of course, she has woven a spell to muddy your mind and make you forget.
What I love about this book is that if it were true, you would still think it is fiction. If every single thing happened just as Barlow wrote it, you would never believe it. LOL! A wicked sour old babayaga turns a police detective investigating a murder into a flea; he finds it a novel experience and manages to make things come right even as a flea.
A young American man, Will, loving living in Paris, works for an ad agency and also for THE Agency in the heady days of post war Paris, where the rules are not yet in place and lines are fuzzy. Falls for a witch with a long history of loving and killing men, but that’s life. Is it better to love and lose than never to have loved? What if your love is a gorgeous babayaga who helps you live life with a vibrance and intensity you have never experienced?
There is a long, intricate, time-appropriate adventure/spy/industrial-scientific plot which I am not sure I entirely followed, with murders and shootouts and the Paris jazz and club scene, and it didn’t matter one whit whether I could follow the plot line or not, it was a wild ride of a novel and a lot of fun. 🙂
Study Shows Muslim Nations Differ on How Women Should Dress
Digg started sending me articles, I don’t know why, but every now and then something turns up truly interesting. This is a Pew Research Center Study found in Slate Online Magazine:
Charted: How People in Seven Muslim Countries Believe Women Should Dress
By Joshua Keating
As the chart above, created by the Pew Research Center, goes, there’s quite a bit of variation over what constitutes proper dress for women in the Islamic world. The data for the chart come from the Middle Eastern Values Survey conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. (Several hundred people comprising what the researchers describe as a nationally representative sample in terms of education, religion, and social class were polled in each country. The gender breakdown was close to 50–50 in each of them.)
As you’ll see, the majority overall said that a woman should completely cover her hair but not her face. The majority in conservative Saudi Arabia favored the face-covering niqab, while relatively liberal Lebanon and Turkey had the highest support for no covering at all. (Hijabs are still prohibited for women in a number of jobs in Turkey.)
Overall, Tunisia had the highest number of respondents (56 percent) saying it is “up to a woman to dress whichever way she wants.” Only 14 percent of Egyptians agreed. Interestingly, given that it has the most stringent legal dress codes of any country sampled, 47 percent of Saudis said women should be able to dress how they wish.
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