My Last Chapel Talk

Chapel talks are an integral part of community life at Groton, since we meet to listen to one four days a week. Over my seven years here I have only given three (mostly because I am pretty nervous speaking in front of large crowds, which is an odd fear for a teacher). Today, Thursday, May 31st, I gave my last talk, wearing a Bedouin bridal dress I bought in Syria three years ago. Here is the text of the talk below, and I warn you it is quite long. Here goes:

When I interviewed for this job at Groton seven years ago, it was a typically brutal Massachusetts winter. Every second outdoors was torture. Yet even though my husband and I were total strangers to almost everyone on campus, as we walked towards the doors of the dining hall, a student fifteen paces ahead of us stopped and waited a really long time to hold the door. This thoughtful act should have won me over immediately, but my initial reaction was one of suspicion: Who are these “Stepford Children” and what have they done with the real students?

You have to understand where I was coming from. At the time of the interview, I was working abroad at the American Community School in Beirut, Lebanon, where it was not unheard of for kids to actually answer their cellphones during class, and once one of my students pulled out her nail polish and began a very thorough manicure in the middle of my lecture on World War I. I don't know who was more astounded—me that she would do such a thing, or her that I actually took offense at it. I mean, she was listening. By the end of my two years in Beirut, I was finally able to come to a point where my conversations with these students were laced with good-humor, sarcasm, and (dare I say it) a grudging respect on both our parts. But they didn't wait in the cold, driving wind to open doors for me. And they certainly did not throw super-secret Filipino-themed going-away parties at Dory's for me...thanks Diana, the rest of Twych's, advisees, and everyone else!

The teaching of good manners was not the only way in which ACS was ostensibly inferior to Groton. For example, the entire school—1200 students, kindergarten through 12^th grade, 60 classrooms, two libraries, two separate wings of administrative offices—the entire campus was all connected to the internet through a grand total of five dial-up connections—dial-up...can you imagine? I had a few computers in my classroom, and believe me it was a good thing our class periods were 90 minutes long so we could wait for our Google searches to finish.

After hearing about this experience, you're probably thinking, “Ninety minute classes? What could possibly make you want to return to a place like that, Mrs. Wallace? Why are you moving to the Philippines to work at another international school?”

Well, first, I should say that ACS is not representative of every international school out there. Because of a very long and painful civil war that Lebanon was just starting to recover from, it was a pretty poor school in terms of resources. They provided my husband and I with a one-bedroom apartment that was smaller than my classroom here at Groton, and about as private. We actually lived next door to the nurse's office (and she didn't even sell Easy Mac or Diet Coke, so it really was a bummer). Never fear, though, the school in Manila is a definite step up from that.

And, despite the awful spin I've put on it here, those two years in Lebanon were the best of my life. Not that I always realized it then—living abroad is full of stress, frustration, and an annoying lack of control over some of the simplest things in life. I did not get my hair cut for a full year after I arrived because I was too intimidated to find a decent stylist. It, ah, wasn't my best look.

But being abroad was also constantly exciting. I coached the varsity volleyball team and when we had away games, we boarded planes (not buses), passports in hand, and flew to another country altogether for a few days. I especially loved going to Cairo, with its cluttered market, the Khan al-Khalili, where around every corner and alleyway I found a new, even more beautiful rug or copper platter. My team and I toured the pyramids and the Tutankhamen exhibit at the National Museum, and in between sightseeing trips we even squeezed in a few volleyball games.

During school vacations, moreover, I traveled extensively, almost obsessively. My favorite destination was Syria, even though I had to go there without my husband. I literally left him at the border. He worked as a photojournalist at the time, and the Syrian government does not exactly appreciate the merits of a free press. Without an approved visa from the Ministry of Information, Stephen was not welcome. Sure, I tried to play into the stereotype of Middle Eastern countries as bastions of patriarchy that couldn't possibly let a woman travel alone: “But he's my husband,” I emphasized, implying that no good self-respecting family man would leave an honorable woman unprotected like this. However, I had not realized I was up against the unyielding machine of Syrian bureaucracy, which—it may surprise you—was gender-blind. Nothing worked, so I left Stephen there. He caught the next bus out of no-man's land and back into Lebanon, and I disappeared beyond the forbidden frontier.

Walking in the old city of Damascus—which claims to be the world's oldest continually inhabited city—is like living history. Some of the streets are so old that they are actually referenced in the Bible. The alleyways are framed with wooden balconies and heavy iron doors that open up to spacious foyers with inlaid marble floors in striking geometric patterns. Damascus was the capital of the Umayyad Empire during the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., and in making this city their political center, the caliphs built one of the most impressive mosques in all the world. It is decorated with colorful tiles depicting the garden of Eden, resplendent with vines and wild animals dancing across its surface. I spent many afternoons there, wearing the large brown wool robe given to all non-Muslim foreigners who are not properly dressed for such a sacred space. I took pictures, wrote in my journal, and often just watched the children race across the courtyard, sending clusters of pigeons swarming up into the air. I meandered down the road to the glass factory where skilled artisans still made cobalt blue stemware by twisting a molten blob of liquid glass with their iron poles, shaping it with a swing of their wrists and a skillful breath. All of the cups in our Beirut apartment were green or blue glass bought from this factory, and I still wish we had not left them there.

The Syrians are a proud people, and they are not afraid to tell an American how wrong they think our government is, but they will do so after buying you tea, inviting you to their home for dinner, and giving you the nicest item in their house as a souvenir. Sometimes they could be too nice, too protective. I traveled out through the eastern desert to Palmyra, the remains of an ancient Arab empire carved out of Rome's domains by the warrior-queen Zenobia. I checked into my hotel after a sweaty four-hour ride on an open air mini-bus, and promptly stripped down to my birthday suit for a quick shower in my luxurious private bathroom, upon which I had splurged a hefty $20 a night. That's a pretty expensive room in Syria. As I entered the bathroom, I reflexively glanced up at the small window near the air vent and was startled to see two eyes looking back at me. I yelped, backed out of the bathroom, and threw on my towel. By the time I looked again, the eyes were gone. I put my clothes on and rushed down to the front desk, where the manager was equally concerned. She promised to find the owner and get the situation sorted out; though I was reassured, I was not yet ready to return to my room, so I decided to wander around the ruins in the bright sunshine, where I felt safer.

A few hours later I returned to the hotel, where the owner rushed up to me with three 10-year-old boys in tow. He shoved them in front of me, a Sesame Street line-up, and insisted that I choose the guilty party. I now understand why police let victims stand behind one-way glass in such situations. Here I was nose-to-nose with these boys, at least one of whom had had the rather unfortunate distinction of seeing me naked. For some reason I felt even more exposed right then, despite being fully clothed.

I recognized the culprit's eyes immediately, but didn't want to say. Apparently, my identification wasn't totally necessary, though. The owner pushed the guilty boy forward—we'll call him Samir—and said that Samir had confessed and would now be punished.

“No! He's just a boy. It's really okay,” I said.

“I have already called his mother and she is very, very angry.” He looked at me reassuringly, wanting to make sure I understood his meaning. “She will have his older brother beat him.”

“No! I don't want anyone to beat anyone else.” I wasn't sure he understood me, so I waved my hands frantically, aware that the rest of the people in the hotel lobby were watching. Those crazy Americans.

“I can fire him,” he offered.

“Nooo.” How had I gotten myself into this mess? I knew this boy probably brought in half of his family's entire income.

After the owner phoned the family one more time, he made yet another conciliatory gesture. “His brother works at the Hotel Zenobia, the nicest hotel in town. He wants you to come eat dinner there tonight, his treat.”

Now, I did not relish the thought of dining in a place where the entire wait staff would know that the only reason I could afford to eat there was because someone saw me naked. It just seemed, well, cheap. I tried to decline, but the owner insisted that I had to take the family up on this offer or else they would be honor-bound to punish Samir more severely. I negotiated them down to lunch on the patio of the hotel—a place a bit more secluded than the dining room, and rather beautifully laid out with glass table-tops balanced across the capitals of ancient Roman columns that littered the desert. The owner also invited me along to a traditional Bedouin dance with a local tribe, which again I knew I had to accept, both to help him save face and to show that I really wasn't holding a grudge. In reality I wanted nothing more than to turn around and go back home to our tiny, but familiar apartment in Beirut. I wanted my husband to take me out to the T.G.I. Friday's that overlooked Beirut's coastline for burgers and mudslides so I could forget all about the trouble I was causing.

But these are the moments in international travel when you just have to take a deep breath, relax, and give a place a second chance. And the truth was I couldn't sulk for long. At the Bedouin tent, I was treated to a feast of lamb kibbeh, rice, hummus, and fresh almonds, and eventually I unwound enough to join the rest of the tourists in clumsily dancing to the live music. One of the Bedouin hosts, a sergeant in the tourist police by day, made quite an impression on me, swirling around in his long white tunic and red and white checkered kaffiyeh headdress. There I was in the middle of the Syrian desert, dancing, eating, and laughing until the wee hours of the morning, on a side-trip I would have never taken by myself. I never stayed in that hotel again on my return trips—mostly because I just got too cheap to splurge on $20 a night when I could sleep in the Hotel Zenobia's outdoor Bedouin tent for $3—but I owe my appreciation for Bedouin culture and cuisine to little Samir and his hi-jinks.

When living abroad you never know what the next day will have in store for you. At the end of our two-year stint in Beirut, something truly historic happened. For 22 years, part of Lebanon had been occupied by its southern neighbor, Israel. The explanation for this is exhaustive, but suffice it to say that for most of my stay in Beirut I had gotten used to a certain political reality, and this reality affected my everyday life and even my job. The Israelis liked to exert their military prowess by regularly violating Lebanese air space; the Lebanese could do nothing about this because their “air force” had a smaller fleet than the country's commercial airline. The Israelis flew their American-made F-15 jets over the city at random times during the day or night, breaking the sound barrier right above us. These “noise bombs” would shake the very earth underneath you, sometimes shatter your windows, and generally make it feel like the building next door had just exploded. The first time this happened, I was sure the Lebanese civil war had been reignited right on ACS's campus. But by the tenth or twentieth time, it became rather routine. In fact, a common scene in my classroom went like this: I would be droning on about some key point of European history—many of you can imagine this scene quite well—when “Boom!”...one jet broke the barrier. But see they always flew their sorties in pairs, and I knew another would be coming and so I would not even bother finishing my sentence. We'd all just wait, staring around the room in total silence. (Pause.) “Boom!” ...and I'd just continue my sentence right where I left off. Two booms. That was the rule. The Israeli occupation was just a way of life.

Until May of 2000. Frustrated with their war of attrition and prompted by the protests of Israeli mothers sick of losing sons in their version of Vietnam, the Israeli prime minister promised a withdrawal from the Lebanese territory still occupied. We knew it would happen, but how fast it happened took most political commentators by surprise—everyone, I should mention, expect my husband Stephen who basically nailed it to the day of the withdrawal. As their proxy army melted away, the Israeli soldiers found themselves alone and unprotected, and vanished across the border with all of their heavy equipment. Some men broke camp so fast, they left food cooking on the stove in one of the prisons they ran.

The next day was declared “Liberation Day,” a national holiday by the Lebanese government. At a day school, see, a government holiday means you actually get the day off. A few of my fellow teachers—another American, a Lebanese of Iraqi citizenship, and a Brit—and I rented a car and set off that morning at 4 a.m. to beat the crowds and see the countryside that had been off-limits for so many years. As the sun began to rise an hour later, our car was climbing the mountain to Beaufort Castle, a crusader fortress that had been occupied by every invading army in Lebanon, most recently by the Israelis and before that by a Palestinian militia. On the radio Aretha Franklin sang “Amazing Grace,” and we all fell silent to listen to the words of the song—one Christian, one Muslim, and two atheists, together sharing a very spiritual moment. The pink light of the morning made the yellow sandstone of the surrounding houses glow with a beautiful warmth that infected us with an optimism that we could not explain in words, but was most notably manifested in the large Lebanese flag that flew out our car window. This flag hangs in my classroom today.

We were only the second group to reach the castle. The first was a local family, still wearing their pajamas, that had climbed up to the fort from their house at the foot of the hill. I am sure they had lived beneath Beaufort for most of their lives and never actually stepped foot in it.

My friend the Brit had an unhealthy fascination with ordinance, and he kept asking our other friend, a former U.S. marine, to identify the various shell casings that littered the ground. I think he stuffed a few into his pockets as souvenirs; I was less daring but still took an Israeli training uniform left behind. It, too, hangs in my classroom. We walked among the sandbags and machine gun platforms, looking with awe at the places where men younger than us had sat just two nights before, fearing for their lives.

From Beaufort we moved south to the border where we witnessed a truly unusual sight in the Middle East—a lightly-guarded border crossing. Without a nine-mile buffer zone, the Israeli soldiers on the other side of the simple chain link fence looked scared, even behind their Oakleys and sharpshooter rifles. Away from the guard post, though, Israeli and Lebanese civilians were talking through the thin fence—not shouting or cursing, just talking. This scene made me optimistic about the prospects of peace, which given the events of this past year—including another Israeli invasion; a sustained bombing campaign of the cities of Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre; and now a deadly siege of a Palestinian refugee camp—reveals how naïve I was at the time. Back then, though, it was easy to be hopeful about the future of the region, and I just don't regret that at all.

These are just a few of my stories from living in Lebanon—good ones that have hopefully entertained you, but old ones that are getting worn from time. I'm ready to make some new stories, and as wonderful as Groton is, I have not been able to really do that here. It's not all going to be Bedouin tent parties and there won't always be castles to storm—I know that. There are going to be some dark days, but these are the contrast without which the rest of the image would never become visible. I yearn for new adventures, and for this Ohio girl that means going to the Philippines. For you, it might mean auditioning for the lead in the play or trying an outdoor leadership course next summer. Whatever it is, I urge you to go for it, not to wait. And while I can, I'll even hold the door open for you.