Yes, I know I’ve been a bad boy. This is my first real letter home since arriving in Tunisia over a month ago. I can’t believe it’s only been a month. It feels like a year has already passed by!
The flight over was uneventful aside from my wristwatch dyeing. Three years of flawless performance and then battery death! Since landing in Tunisia, I haven’t had a clock. I haven’t needed a clock. Things here run on their own time. If you tell someone you’ll meet them at 2 o’clock in a cafe, that means you could show up anywhere between 1 and 3pm. Saying “Insha Allah” after agreeing to do something is basically the same as saying “I’ll do it, but in fact, no, I won’t do it”. It’s used as an easy escape, invoking the name of Allah absolves you of any blame or problems down the road for not performing the task.
The first few weeks of my time in Tunisia were filled to the gills with field trips around the north and west of Tunisia. We went to such sites as the ancient Roman and Phoenician cities of Dougga, Carthage, and Utica. One day we drove for about 20 kilometers along the old Roman aqueduct running to Tunis from a spring more than 40 kilometers from town. It’s a truly impressive structure rivaling any other roman monument I’ve seen to date.
On one of our field trips, we stopped off at an old Berber hilltop fortified settlement. It bore a striking resemblance to the Hopi dwellings on the mesas of the desert southwest of America. The construction, the colors, and the people all were the same. The only difference was the language.
The last couple of weeks have fallen in the Islamic month of Ramadan. We’re near the half-way point of the lunar month. Every night I have a big dinner, starting exactly at sunset, with either the family who I rent a room from, or one of the many Tunisian students I’ve met. It’s very interesting to observe who fasts and who doesn’t in Tunisia. I would have expected most of the population to fast as they do in most other Islamic countries. Instead maybe only 50% fast, and of those, most don’t strictly fast. Up until maybe ten or fifteen years ago, the government banned fasting to increase productivity and keep the country strong. Since the overthrow of the old president, Habib Bourgiba, in 1987 by his one-time prime minister, Ben Ali, Tunisia has become more Islamic. It’s still a far cry from even Egypt or Morocco though.
Classes have been going well. I’m taking a women’s study class, an environmental case study class, a Mediterranean cultures class, and an Arabic language class. I’m registered for a total of 17 credits. Between class, Ramadan, and other responsibilities, I’m kept very busy! Unfortunately, the majority of my time is spent trying to get from point A to point B and back again.
Transportation in Tunis is actually very easy but it takes a long time to get anywhere. To go from my apartment to school, we get a ride with the family in the back of their little delivery van to where they work. That takes anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour, depending on traffic. Rather than stick to the big highways which are always bumper to bumper and most of the time complete gridlock, we drive through neighborhoods at reckless speeds. Traffic here isn’t as bad as in Egypt or Morocco, but it’s quite different than Oregon! Lanes are disregarded as well as most stop signs and stop lights. Instead, whoever is the boldest goes first. Sometimes, two way roads are turned into one way streets when enough traffic decides to go down the wrong lane. Pedestrians are completely disregarded unless there’s a real danger of hitting one. No one wants to get a dent in their car, especially from a pedestrian. When there is traffic control, it’s provided by the many police officers. Instead of having a welfare system like the USA has, Tunisia hires unemployed people into the police force. As you can imagine, almost every street corner has two or three uniformed officers. Watching some of these people try to direct traffic is really funny. A perfectly fine intersection can be changed into a traffic nightmare within minutes of a police officer arriving on the scene. People joke that since there’s no crime to speak of in Tunisia, the police have to create traffic jams just so they have something to do. The police also make a habit of pulling over cars at random for searches and, at times, arrests. Whenever I’ve been pulled over in a car, as soon as they see that I’m a “tourist”, they wave us on our way. Otherwise, we could expect a 20 or 30 minute search of all of our possessions and the possible forfeiture of our documents.
Anyway, once we get dropped off, it’s anywhere between a 20 minute and 40 minute walk. The majority of our time seems to be spent trying to cross one very large and busy intersection. A major highway to the north and another major highway to the west intersect in a stoplight. We have to cross from one corner to the exact opposite corner. Sometimes we end up stuck in between two lanes with cars whizzing by going opposite directions. It’s a real adrenaline rush in the morning.
Our school is in a neighborhood called Hayatt Al Khader (The Green Town). The neighborhood, in fact, is anything but green. It’s a typical dusty borough. Most of the houses and buildings are finished, but many are in various stages of construction. The joke among Tunisians is that the entire country is in a perpetual state of construction. Since independence from France in 1956, Tunisia has had a sustained building boom, trying to catch up for the previous 100 years when Tunisians weren’t allowed to build anything for themselves. I wonder how much longer this housing boom can be sustained. Government statistics say that something like 19 out of 20 people own their own home or flat in Tunisia. I expect that the good times will run out soon. Most likely, the government will try to prop up the housing market for a while before they let it collapse or change its focus to civic projects.
The school itself consists of a couple of different blocks of buildings roughly in a C shape. In the middle of the C, there’s a large chunk of ground taken up by an elementary school. Our school is part of the University of the 7th of November at Carthage system. In the rapid expansion of Tunis, the different departments and colleges of the University were flung far and wide around the city. Our branch is only for languages such as French, English, German, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, and others. Other schools are only for engineering or the humanities or whatever. The buildings are all whitewashed and are multi story. The building that we have all of our classes in is three stories tall with a central open section housing the only staircase between the floors. It’s also the building that everyone is forced to enter through. There are security guards at the only unlocked entrance to the school to make sure rabble rousers aren’t allowed into the school grounds. On several occasions we’ve seen them take potential troublemakers outside. Most likely the kids are just kicked to the curb, but if they’re known radicals, they’ll be arrested and beat up. That said, some protests are allowed. I’ve seen several protests for school reform on the bottom of the staircase. Usually it consists of one or two students yelling for smaller class sizes and more options. Maybe twenty or forty students will stand around in a semi circle listening.
Sometimes I feel like a rock star and other times I feel like the new playtoy of the school. Everyone wants to talk with us and try out their English. It’s hard to get them to talk to us in Arabic or French. Also, it’s hard to speak Arabic so I suppose English is the best answer. Usually, I go directly to the classroom to avoid the many students, mostly women, who try to talk to me and say hello and whatnot. It almost feels like a reality television show! Outside of school, most people try to talk to me in French. They’re shocked when I talk to them in Arabic. My Arabic is still really basic though so communicating is challenging at times. One nice thing for communicating but bad for learning Arabic is that almost everyone in Tunis speaks at least three languages, one of which is English. The problem with this trilingual city is that there isn’t a real distinction between French or English or Arabic. All three are blended together in this funny fusion of languages. Farther south or west in cities such as Bizerte or Kairouan, the people speak Arabic and a little French. The Arabic outside of Tunis is much easier to understand as less dialect has managed to creep into the day-to-day language.
In the next few weeks, I’ll have a five day vacation to celebrate the “change” on November 7, 1987, when the original president since independence, Habib Bourgiba, was “retired” by the current president, Ben Ali. Originally, several of us had planned to go to Libya but that fell through this last weekend when it became apparent we wouldn’t get the visas in time. It takes about 30 days to secure the appropriate papers to travel to Libya. I think once the program ends in December, I’ll head to Libya with my parents for a few days. Since Libya is out, now we’re looking at Malta or Sicily or one of the other nearby islands in the Mediterranean. I think by Thursday we’ll know where we’re going.
Mid November will see me back in the USA for two days to attend a design contest in Anaheim California. I will be gone from Tunisia a total of four days, two of which will be spent in airplanes. It will be very tiring but I hope that it’s rewarding too. Hopefully when I go back to the USA, I’ll be able to give someone a few CD’s worth of pictures that they’ll post online for me. I’ve been getting a bunch of good shots but I don’t have the ability to upload them from Tunisia.
That brings me to a good topic. The internet in Tunisia is painfully slow. Internet Cafes run off of a single shared 56k modem connection. Anywhere between five and 15 computers will be sharing one dialup modem! It’s painful. To check my email it usually takes me two hours and about three dollars. That might not sound like much, but in a country where everything takes a long time, those two hours are a lot! Also, checking the internet every day or two would quickly add up into a large bill. I usually find myself checking my email once or twice a week. Hopefully once I’m on my own starting in December, I’ll be able to get a place with its own phone line and get DSL. I hear DSL is something like 250 dollars a month but it’d be so worth it. You have no idea the pain involved in checking my email!
Well that’s it for now. Email me if you have any specific questions or want to hear more about something and I’ll see about including it in the next update. Maybe next time I’ll send one sooner.