Mommy, what's ham?

Tartiflette - a famous dish in the French region of Upper Savoy, consisting of potatoes, reblochon cheese, and chunks of ham.  I ordered it for lunch during our ski vacation in the Alps, with a plate of ham and sausage varieties on the side. Kids would not touch any of it.

When we moved to Madagascar, we had to be careful about what we ate. Strawberries were a no-no (pig manure possibly containing worms could have been used as fertilizer - the worms can get inside the permeable skin of the strawberries and then you eat them and you could get a worm in your brain). I also stopped buying pork and ham for the family because of sanitation conditions in the local pork industry. This was a radical change from Italy, where prosciutto crudo (cured ham) was a family staple.

Fast forward two years later, and we had move to Kuwait. In Kuwait, just like back in Madagascar, we eat no pork products, not because of sanitation issues, but because we're in an Islamic state where the raising or importation of any and all pork products has been banned.

Last night, I read the Bambino the book Green Eggs Ham just before bedtime. At the end of the book, I asked the Bambino, in a teasing kind of way because he is such an incredibly picky eater, "Do YOU like green eggs and ham?"

"What's ham?", he replied.

This is what I get for not serving my children pork products for a period of five years straight.

To be honest, I did try to serve pork back in France last summer, but the kids didn't take to it. They weren't used to it. They picked the lardons out of the penne pasta with parmesan cheese that I had served them. They wouldn't have any of the organic pork sausage that I had bought at the farmer's market. They've never fancied sandwiches of any kind, so I don't bother preparing them. The Bambino was offered ham sandwiches at his day camp and while he did apparently eat the bread, he wouldn't touch the ham. Didn't know what it was. Didn't want to know.

I tell myself that in the long run, this is better. Pork and ham contain nitrates that have been added as a preservative. That stuff can't be good. And my vegetarian friends never cease to tell me that pigs are smarter than dogs, so we definitely should not be eating them. Still, it makes ordering food at the restaurant in the French countryside or the Alps all the more difficult. They don't eat much of any other meat there and vegetarian main courses are almost non-existent, unless you're in the Alps and you order cheese fondue.

Here's one thing you can do on the weekend in Kuwait...

In Madagascar, there was nothing to do on the weekends. There weren't even any malls (can't say that about Kuwait!). However, we could always hop into our car and leave the city to explore the countryside. The roads were not great and sometimes there were no roads but we got to see some incredible wildlife and quaint Malagasy villages.

Antsirabe, Madagascar

One of the many lemurs at Vakona Lodge, just north of Antanarivo, Madgascar

Getting to know the tortoises on one of our weekend trips outside the city

Kuwait on the other hand? When you live in a tiny country encased by Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the ocean, you can't go very far by car. There is desert for two hours and there there's more desert but you can't go there because it's the border.

The border at Iraq

The result of this hemmed-in environment is that the kids are bored for much of the weekend. There's the mall. But the mall just means buying stuff and spending money. There's the beach club. We go there every Friday during the warm months, but cooler weather has arrived. I won't call it winter, but it's not beach weather.

There's no park near where we live (and Kuwait parks are not in great shape, anyway), there are no outdoor cafés, no outdoor art exhibits like at the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, no children's workshops at a local museum (that I know of...), but we have found one thing that we can do one weekend at month. We can visit and even volunteer at the animal shelter in Wafra.

Wafra is a town near the Saudi border. It takes over an hour to get there. The Kuwait Society for the Protection of Animals and their Habitat (aka K'S PATH) houses its animals there.

The advantages of visiting this shelter are numerous:

• The shelter is in the country, surrounded like farms, so going there is like taking a day-trip to the country. That's a refreshing change from visiting shopping malls.

• You get to see all kinds of animals - dogs, cats, baboons, falcons, horses, donkeys, goats, are the ones that come to mind. It's almost like visiting a zoo. There is a real zoo in Kuwait but it's depressing to visit. This place is not depressing. The animals are well taken care of.

• You get to walk the dogs outside around the surrounding farmland.

• You get to play with and brush all the gorgeous kitty cats . 

Can you tell that I'm a cat person? :-)

• You get to meet other families living in Kuwait.

• The kids get to experience the joy of animals and of volunteer work.

Be careful, though. Your kids may convince you to adopt one of the animals.

Meet Pumpkin, our new cat

Spending the night in the desert of Kuwait

Every November since we have been living in Kuwait, we join the Amicale des Français au Koweït (that's the local association for French-speaking expats) for a night in the desert. We meet up at 1 in the afternoon at an agreed-upon place, someone hands us a map and GPS coordinates, and we head out in a convoy to a corner of Kuwait where there is nothing but sand and the odd herd of camels.

Some observations about the desert in Kuwait. First of all, it's almost completely flat.

It's nothing like the beautiful vast rolling dunes that you see in the United Arab Emirates, for example.

The flatness makes finding a campsite all the harder, because you really do need dunes to camp out. Dunes make camping a better experience, more beautiful, less windy, easier to find a private spot when you want to go pee! There are a couple of places where you can find a sand dune or two, fortunately, but they're rare.

Seconlyly, the sand of the Kuwait desert isn't consistently smooth and fine. In many parts, its more like gravel. There are plenty of stones and even large rocks to be found in it.

And then there is the garbage. It's a sad fact that there is trash everywhere you look in the desert of Kuwait. It litters almost every square meter of sand. We are guessing that there is no or limited trash collection for the bedouins who live in the desert. That might be one part of the problem. However, I also sense that people in Kuwait have not developed the common value of caring for their communal environment. The desert doesn't belong to any one person individually but to the whole country, so it's not up to any one person to keep it clean. It's sad because, even without the dunes, it could be a beautiful desert. As it stands, it can be truly ugly just because of all the trash.

The camp is only an hour and 15 minutes away (Kuwait is a tiny country!).  Once we arrive, we have to set up our tent right away, before it gets dark. Pitching a tent can be an arduous task in normal conditions. It's really hard when you have a strong wind, and sand blowing in your face while you're doing it. We end up getting help from a few people to set up our tent, plus several bags of sand and rocks to prevent the tent from blowing away when we aren't in it.

Once the tents are pitched, it's time for the aperatif. Everyone gets beverages out of their coolers (I'm not going to mention what kind of beverages people brought with them. I'll leave that up to your imagination).  We drink to good health and the expat life.  The Crown Plaza Hotal has already arrived with the catering truck, and an hour later, there are tables and chairs set up and a buffet dinner is served. We have a lively dinner filled with banter, jokes, and camraderie. The kids hardly eat anything. They're too busy rolling down the sand dunes and exploring dark places for snakes and lizards.

After dinner, it's time for singing around a big bonfire.

Somewhere around 11PM, we make it to our tents and fall asleep. This may seem early to you, but it's been dark since 5PM and we're exhausted.

In the morning, we wake up with the sun and the sound of wind. Sand covers every crevice of our tent and every orifice of our body. After a communal breakfast of coffee and packaged croissants, we take down our tents and pick up any garbage on the ground.  We think it's important to clean up after ourselves. 

We can't wait to get home, take a shower, and appreciate the new-found luxury of our homes. The desert is fun for a night but not longer than that.

That moment when you realize that you really are in another part of the world...

Kuwait has so many street cats, maybe as many cats as people. Most of the cats you see hiding under parked cars or meowing from rooftops are feral and it's impossible to pet them, let alone pick them up. Even if you wanted to adopt one of these cats, you couldn't. They're not meant to be domesticated.

And then you happen upon some poor wretched cat that is not feral, just living in the street, very friendly and (dare I say) cuddly, begging you for some food. Here is a beautiful Persian cat that lives just outside our house. She's one of these cats.

Something happened to her tail. I don't want to know what it was. It's too painful to think about and I can't stand to look at it. It has puss coming out of it sometimes, and today I finally couldn't take it anymore and I took her to the vet to get her treated with antibiotics.

And here was my Kuwait moment - my moment when I thought to myself, "This part of the world really is very different from the place where I grew up". I arrived at the veterinary clinic, I took a number, I sat down with the cat in her cage (yes, I know, poor kitty) and here is what I saw:

Yes, that's a bunch of Arab men holding falcons. They traditionally use falcons for hunting, although I'm not sure that these men do. They might just keep a falcon as a pet. It was a bizarre scene - me with my stray cat and eight men that look like they're wearing pyjamas holding a falcon on their finger.

I think I'll send the photos to National Geographic.

Raising Freethinking Globetrotter Kids

When we arrived in Kuwait, the Bambina had already been around nominally Muslim families in Madagascar, but none of them practised their faith in a visible way. So Kuwait was the first place my kids saw men in dishdashas and women in abayas and headscarves. 

Some women even had their faces and hands covered, something neither of our children had ever seen a lot of in Madagascar, Italy, or France. In France, it is against the law for any person to go with her or his face covered in public. And in public schools in France, teachers and students are prohibited from wearing any "ostentatious" religious signs. 

Our new cultural and religious environment came as a shock to our kids. I can remember the Bambino - age two - seeing for the first time in his life a woman fully decked from head to toe in a black abaya that also covered her face. We were in the restaurant of the Marina Hotel in Kuwait, serving ourselves at the buffet. The Bambino looked up at this woman with a black sheet over her head, pointed his little index finger at her and said "Fantôme!" (Fantôme is the French word for "ghost"). We were ready to burst out laughing because, yes, she did look like a ghost. A black ghost.

If I had to put a label on the Frenchman and me, I would say that we were secular humanists.  We want our children to question all beliefs - their origin, their rationale, and the historical accuracy of any "sacred" book that expounds a belief. When our children are confronted with a rule or moral code, whether found in a religious book or elsewhere, we want them to ask themselves whether that rule or moral code seems fair - whether it makes ethical sense. We want our kids to be skeptics. We want them to be as skeptical about the veracity of any major religion as they would be about the existence of, say, Zeus or Odin, until someone can show them evidence that requires a different conclusion.

On the other hand, we also want our kids to be open-minded to new points of view. And we want them to respect and love people for who they are, not for their beliefs.  We want them to be good to people of all beliefs, persuasions, and backgrounds, for the sake of being good.

So how do we do this? First, I try to expose my kids to all kinds of myths, from Greek, Norse, and Egyptian myths, to the stories in the Bible, to the myth of Santa Claus. And I ask them what they think of these stories.  Does the story make sense? Do they think the story is true? Do we have any evidence that it's true? When the Bambina asked how the earth and people came to be, I told her about how evolution works but I also told her that some people don't believe evolution is true, despite what scientific findings tell us. They believe that some kind of a god or gods created the world. In addition to finding some information for kids on the internet about evolution, I read to her the Genesis creation myth as well as the creation story in our Greek mythology book.  

Just as important as the preceding questions about what evidence we have to back up the story, I encourage them to think about the nature and character of the god in the story. When the Bambina saw a toy Noah's arc, I read the story of Noah's Arc to her ("God drowned everyone? Even the babies?"). During the annual Eid celebrations when the kids see sheep in the backs of trucks everywhere in Kuwait, waiting to be slaughtered, we talk about the story that the Eid celebration is based on - the story of how God asked Abraham to kill his son Isaac. The Bambina also learned very early on about the Christian Easter story - Jesus was killed on a cross as a human sacrifice for sins, and then rose from the dead. Conclusion: the god of the bible apparently thinks human sacrifice is a good thing?

Santa Claus has been of great assistance in creating young skeptical minds. When the Bambina was almost six years old, we had the following conversation: 
Bambina: "Mommy, is Santa real?" 
Me: "Well, what do you think? Have you ever seen reindeer fly?" 
Bambina: "No. And how does he deliver all the presents around the world in one night?" 
Me: "That's a good question. Do you think it would be possible for someone to deliver presents to all the children in the world in one night?" 

She didn't have an answer for that right away but the longer she thought about it the more skeptical she became. She was already a non-believer in Santa well before the following Christmas. I recently asked the Bambina if she was sorry not to have been able to believe in Santa for at least one or two years more. "No," she said. "I'm glad. I like knowing the truth."

Secondly, I try to encourage our kids be open to listening to new ideas and world views. I'm comfortable doing this because I'm also raising them to be skeptical. I've told the Bambina that she is welcome to explore religious beliefs if she wants. I've offered to take her to a church, a mosque, or any other religious place. So far, she's not interested. One of the Bambina's best friends at school is a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints. I've asked the Bambina if she would like to attend there one Friday (with me accompanying her). She said flat out no - she's not interested in three hours of church on her weekend!

Not all people agree with this approach. My good friend F, who is Muslim, thinks that our children will grow up with no moral compass or any notion of good or evil. She thinks that our children need something or someone to believe in in order to know right from wrong. To me, it is very obvious that our children know the difference between right and wrong. Whether we have a religious rule book or not, we know when our acts can hurt other people. And it doesn't take much reasoning to figure out that we don't want to be hurt, so we shouldn't hurt others, either.

My Christian friends think that our kids will still know what is right from wrong (they believe that god did give them a conscience, after all) but that our kids will lack larger meaning in their lives. I think my kids will define their own meaning. 

I love how living in Kuwait exposes our children daily to another major world religion.  There is a mosque right next door and we hear the call to prayer (very loudly!) five times a day (yep, at 4:15 AM, too). Most of our children's friends at school come from Muslim families. In the Bambino's Montessori school last year, during the Eid celebrations, the children learned all about the Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are obligated to do at least once in their life). The teachers put a big black cube in the yard. The children pretended it was the Kabah and learned about the ritual of circling it seven times during Hajj. They also learned to roll and unroll the prayer mats and to recite the Arabic prayer. (We were okay with the Bambino learning the words to the prayer but told the teachers that we were not okay with the Bambino engaging in the actual prayer ritual of bowing prostrate on the prayer mats and praying). 

The Bambino (age 3) came out of his class one day that week and said to me "Mommy, I want to go to Macca and see the Kabah." 

I smiled. "Sure! If you want to do that one day when you're grown up, you can!." I didn't tell him that he would have to convert to Islam first. He'll learn about that later, if he wants. 

"But why do you want to go to Mecca to see the Kabah?" I prodded further.

"Because then we get to sleep in a tent!", he said.

"We're camping in the desert next week. You'll get to sleep in a tent then."

"Yay! I want to sleep in a tent!"

Phew. There's one request put to rest. Now if I could just getting him to stop calling mosques "castles". 

Judging Kuwait by its playgrounds

Since having children, I have learned about the importance of public playgrounds.  Playgrounds give children something to climb on, swing on, slide down, and run around.  But they're not just for children.  Playgrounds are a meeting place.  They are the place where you bump into other mommies and daddies and grandparents in the neighbourhood, where nannies can meet up to chat every day, and where your children get to meet other kids.  In our travels, I have met many people and made many friends in neighbourhood playgrounds and I have failed to meet people and been prevented from making friends in places where they were no playgrounds.

The number of play areas in a country as well as the state of a country's playgrounds says something about that country.  In Italy, for example, there aren't many public play areas at all (although this is changing) because Italians view the family unit as a pre-emptive force.  Children stay at home (or in the restaurant or wherever) with their parents and brothers and sisters (and maybe cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents).  The state has no role in entertaining children.  There is no room for a neighbourhood playground in this scenario.

In Madagascar, there are no public playgrounds, because the country is far too poor to think of spending public money on such luxuries. Children play on the street, in the dirt.  This might sound romantic but in reality it is not.  Their are no parks, so children play on the street where they breathe in noxious car fumes all day long.  Their clothes and bodies get filthy from the red earth, the children rarely bathe and their clothes don't get washed.  Disease spreads.  Asthma is common.

In France (or at least in Paris), the playgrounds are numerous and of good quality.  Practically every church or public square has some kind of a play area, and sometimes even a sand box.  There are also the major play areas in the Champs de Mars, the Jardin du Luxembourg, and the Jardin des Tuileries (including trampolines), to name a view, not to mention pony rides and merry-go-rounds (but you have to pay for those).  It is a convenience that I will never tire of boasting about.  Where is the first place we go when we hit the ground in Paris, once we check into our apartment-hotel?  The local playground!

In France, if any part of public playground equipment gets damaged, it gets fixed, promptly.  If the play equipment is starting to look worn out, the local city hall takes it all down and builds another play area.  All play equipment has a sticker on it indicating what age the equipment is appropriate for.  What do French playgrounds say about the French?  For the French, children have their own sphere of activity separate from their parents and extended families, and providing activities in that separate "children's sphere" is part of the job of the state.

Kuwait is interesting when it comes to playgrounds.  The country is stinking rich, and the weather is decent for playing outdoors at least six months of the year.  So you would think that this country would be the ideal place for lots of good playgrounds.  Unfortunately, this is not quite the case.  There are many playgrounds, especially on the Gulf Road, and many families frequent these playgrounds. However, all the equipment looks about 20+ years old and is badly in need of repair.  20+ years.  Hmmm.  That would take us back to before the first Gulf war.  So it would seem that before the Gulf war, the Kuwaitis were very keen to have lots of great space for kids and families.  Since then, they have left it all at a standstill.  None of it has been maintained and nothing new has been built.   Amazing how a war can affect the mindset of a people.

It's not only the run-down playgrounds that need a facelift.  The public hospitals are on shoestring budgets.  The beaches have been full of sewage for the past 10 years.  There is litter all over the desert....

What does the state of Kuwait's playgrounds tell me about Kuwait?  It tells me that while Kuwaitis, for whatever reason, no longer think that their country is worth investing in.  The war seems to have made them cynics.  After all, why build a playground when it risks getting bombed?  

The Bambino's nursery in Kuwait

So we decided not to enroll the Bambino in one of the nurseries frequented by expatriate children here in Kuwait.  We figured that while he is still so young and his mind like a sponge, why not put him in a nursery with Arabic speaking children instead?  So he goes to a private, upscale Kuwaiti nursery.  The children wear uniforms (they're only two years old!).  The teacher-child ratio is one teacher for six children.  The materials are from Neinhuis.  The languages of the classroom are English, Arabic and French.

The nursery being the most "authentic" Montessori nursery in Kuwait (other nurseries in Kuwait call themselves Montessori but are more "Montessori-inspired" than actual Montessori), there are very few "toys" in the classroom.  The closest thing you get to toys are stacking blocks, puzzles and an abacus.  This being the toddler class, these toys are acceptable.

There is a practical life section, which real glass pitchers of water and bowls to practice pouring and transferring with a spoon.

There are also the standard Montessori mathematic and sensorial materials, like the pink tower and the cylinders.  These materials are actually meant for age three and up but the school decided to put them in the toddler room as well.

And here is the Bambino during his adaptation period at the school (no uniform yet - that came a week later).

We recently had parent-teacher interviews.  You read it right - a parent-teacher interview regarding our two-year old child.  Never before have we encountered a nursery that gives parent-teacher interviews for toddlers.  Not that I'm complaining.  It's always fun to hear how my two-year old boy acts at his nursery when we're not there.   Oh, and this "interview" didn't take place at the school, in the classroom, as you would expect them to.  No no.  We received a formal invitation to a tea at the very chichi Le Notre Restaurant and had the interview there.

So far, we're happy with our decision to put him in the posh Kuwaiti nursery.  Now if only I could understand the Bambino when he tries to say something in Arabic!