No Matter How Far

No Matter How Far Tony Hays Four-thirty in the morning, and a hint of pink slips into my bedroom window. Back home I'd be hearing the roosters break the silence of the dying night, and the inevitable, gravelly voice of my father telling me it was time to feed the chickens and mend the fence over on Bobby Toolbar's line. I come from the foothills ofthe Appalachians, the rolling hills of middle Tennessee where you can sit on the front porch and hear the peacock's cry against the sunset, a place where possums scavenge summer-ripened red plums and rabbits scurry across snow-covered fields. That was home; that was family. When I pull back these curtains and see hundreds of mosques scattered across a city of square, brown buildings partly obscured by blowing sands, I know I'm a long way from home. This is not home. Home is not Kuwait. It does not have to be. Here, seven thousand miles away from Nashville, Tennessee, the sometimes mellifluous, sometimes harsh and biting prayer call echoes across the Arabian desert, jerking me from sleep. It comes to me in stereo, mullahs in each of the hundreds of mosques across Kuwait City sighting the rising sun within seconds of each other, causing a cascade of calls. "Allah o akbar!" God is great. God is wonderful. The sun casts a pink shadow over the city, an angular landscape where losing your way is a perpetual hazard. I crawl out of bed for another day two blocks from the Persian Gulf. I teach English with the Patriot Missile Project. I have done a little bit of everything; born in Tennessee, spent time in Texas; dabbled in political writing, written some short stories, a couple of novels, taught at a college or two, blowing just wherever the wind had a mind to send me. Leaving the stability of more traditional jobs for the promises of big bucks, imagine my surprise when I realized there was a price for those big bucks: a smiling group of seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen year old men, faces just as blank as the proverbial tabula rasa. We teach at Subhan, home ofthe Kuwait Air Defense Brigade, just like any other military post in the world, except that other posts don't have Bangladeshis whose sole responsibility is to bring tea to the officers and noncommissioned officers. Tony Hays, born in Nashville, was raised on a little farm outside of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He has lived in Bristol, Virginia, and Chattanooga , Tennessee. Currently he resides in Kuwait. 23 Public education is not mandatory in Kuwait past the primary years. Those with high school diplomas immediately become noncommissioned officers. Anybody with college either opts out of the military (a choice for them) or becomes an officer. Military service is compulsory for those without high school diplomas. Teaching, therefore, becomes the challenge that Bel Kaufman's principal in Up the Down Staircase so often reminded his instructors. One of my colleagues advised me that teaching in Kuwait was twenty percent teaching, eighty percent crowd control. So, during the day I teach English (well, maybe that's too strong a word). I throw English at ten or twelve young Kuwaiti airmen who usually have less reason to learn English than we have to teach it. Osmosis as a real concept was abandoned by Appalachian teachers long ago. At least we get paid solid salaries. They're good kids more or less, decent hearts, but when virtually everything they buy is paid for by the government, ambition takes a back seat—move over welfare state, you ain't seen nothing yet. As long as I stay in my apartment, life isn't much different from America, from Tennessee. I have my computer, photos of my mother and father, little knickknacks I've picked up along my travels. Most complexes have been refurbished since the Iraqi occupation. The first thing I do is make coffee (no bacon sizzling in the skillet, of course) and sit down at the computer to write. I plow away at my craft until my watch tells me it's time to go to that other job, just...