To this very day, I recall how my own last name “Stoda” got smeared in Kansas in 1991.
It was immediately after the Gulf War (or Desert Storm) and I had been against U.S. participation in it. I had had trouble with my principle in Western Kansas at the high school where I had taught because he and some parents or family members (movers and shakers possibly) didn’t like my vocal stand against blindly following the USA government into war in 1990-1991.
Subsequently, by the time I moved to Eastern Kansas the following school year, the blackballing of the “Stoda” name in Kansas had already begun.
On my first day at my new school, in a small town near Lawrence, the superintendent of schools refused to shake my hand. I wondered why. “Could it have been because of something spread about me from one superintendent to another 200 miles away? What had been said or lied about me? By whom?”
Meanwhile, my own brother had completed his teaching block and certification in Kansas, too, in mid-1991.
He was a math teacher and certainly thought that he had a job sewn up in Wichita at a high school for autumn or winter 1991-1992.
Alas, it soon appeared that although my poor brother didn’t share my politics (and had actually served in the Gulf), my family’s last name was being blacklisted in and around the state of Kansas in the world of education.
NOTE: My poor brother eventually moved in Spring 1992 to teach first in California—and then in Oklahoma and in Colorado over the subsequent decade. Finally, he has returned to Kansas to teach over the past 5 years.
In short, even (or especially) in a right-to-work state, it is hard to get a teaching job in America if someone is spreading bad rumors or innuendos about you.
The problem is that Kuwait and the other Gulf countries are far away from the USA and Europe and legal familiarity. This means injustice and innuendos can hurt you a lot easier when you come here to work. There is less shame here publicly in terms of spreading such falsehoods about foreigners who are not connected well enough generally to protect themselves.
In the long-term perhaps Kuwait and the Gulf Arabs will open their systems to reform. Sadly, in the meantime, get ready for unfair rumors and innuendo affecting your career if you come to work or teach in the Gulf!
When and if you arrive, seek out support from Kuwaitis who don’t like the system of wasta and kinship leading to individual and national underdevelopment.
If you click on this link, you will find one such Kuwaiti, who is trying to support improving the system:
http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=OTMyMDA2NzAz
It is an article called “Thriving Dishonesty” by a Kuwaiti, Shamael Al-Sharikh, who is one of many natives concerned about Kuwaiti education--and in improving the status quo for all.
Shamael Al-Sharikh discusses in her piece on “Dishonesty” the bad educational habits I sought valiantly to get taken out of the bad educational practices at Gulf University from 2004 to 2006—and which I continue to try and see erased elsewhere by improving primary and secondary educational practices as well.
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