The Imperfect Traveler – Part 1

In 1992, I ventured for the first time across the pond onto foreign shores.

I spent 45 days in Europe, returning home two weeks before the school year began with a total of:

nine dollars in my bank account

a maxed out credit card

and a vow to do it again.

But traveling is expensive.

So I began to consider getting a job overseas. At first, I looked into Department of Defense schools, but they weren’t too interested in hiring a teacher with six months’ experience. For a short while, the dream went on the back burner.

Two years later, I shared a beach house with some friends. It was the second greatest summer behind the Backpacking Tour of 1992, and deserves its own screenplay.

But one of the rated-G moments happened when my grandmother called me about Search Associates, a company that specialized in job fairs for international schools. I called, and the gentleman who ran the company lived just 20 minutes from the beach house. I met him for a lunch interview, and it went well. He handed me an application form, with a list of things I’d need to be invited to one of their job fairs held in the winter of 1995.  

By October I’d submitted the application, and was invited to Boston for an extended job fair over the Super Bowl weekend.

While there, I interviewed with 13 schools, and received immediate interest from a boarding school in Switzerland, whose big selling point was the chairlift up a ski slope 100 meters from the entrance to the school.  

The drawbacks included a $17,000 salary (taxed), and it was a boarding school, which meant I would share a hallway with my students…not the best situation.

A week later, I was on hall duty when I called into the office. There was a phone call for me from the director of the Damascus Community School. He was at the job fair in New Orleans, and wanted to hire me as the school’s newest social studies teacher. But there was a second candidate he was interested in as well, whom he had just interviewed. 

He gave me twenty-four hours to say yes, or he was offering the position to the other teacher.

• I had a serious girlfriend. 
• I had just earned tenure at the school, and was making decent money for a teacher in 1995 – $28,800, not including coaching. 
• I might be able to commit to a Backpacking Tour, Part 2 if I played my cards right.

But I never had a doubt.  I accepted the offer.

DCS offered me more in cash (tax-free) than I made. I received an apartment, a car, round-trip tickets to the States twice a year, and money into a retirement account, a package deal that was worth almost 60k. 

It made all the sense in the world.

I received a welcoming package from the school a few weeks later. In it were instructions to make my transition to Syria as easy as possible. 

First, I was to apply for a tourist visa (the residency visa would come after I was in the country) from the Syrian Embassy in Washington DC, and eight weeks before I was scheduled to leave, I filled out the application form, and sent it with my passport via Federal Express. According to the application, the turnaround was about four weeks, so I left myself a few weeks to spare. 

Second instructions? 

Arabic lessons.

I’d love to say I became fluent during these lessons, or even conversational, but that would be a lie. I studied the numbers (not “Arabic” numbers, like we have, but one can see how ours are derived from theirs.)

And I learned from my Lebanese tutor that Syria was a country that depended on IBM.

(Not the company…)

About four weeks after I mailed my passport, I contacted the Syrian Embassy to check in. “Malesh”, the gentleman stated, “it is not ready yet. In’shallah, it will be done bukarrah.”

I called the next day. Then the next. And the next. Each time, the Syrian Embassy offered me an IBM.  

Seven days before my flight left the States, I called and refused to accept their IBM.

I needed answers, and quickly. I was placed on hold, passed from person to person, then given an answer I didn’t want to hear:

“Malesh, thegue, we do not have your passport.”

I called Federal Express. The passport and application were delivered to the embassy at 10:23 AM the day after I’d sent it.

Signed for by an “H. Mahmoud”.

No visa. No passport. 

Seven days before I left the country. 

What next?

…to be continued…

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