Texas tea

I had an interesting conversation with our headmaster's wife a few weeks ago, while we were sitting on the beach enjoying a nice bonfire. She was telling me about a friend of theirs who was in charge of a school in Saudi Arabia. The school is owned by some Saudi-American oil company and is inside this big complex set up to be like an American city.

"We can definitely get you a good word in if you'd want to work there!" she said, ticking off the school and complex's merits. Apparently the school pays its teachers a ridiculous sum of money, and also picks up the tab for trips home-along with a hefty "travel allowance." The benefits are unreal, and if you work there for 10 years, she said, you can basically go home and retire.

Nice, but...I'm pretty sure signing a contract to work for a Saudi-American owned oil company would be equivalent to me signing over my soul, or at least most of my core beliefs and ideals. Besides, living in some Amercatownville U.S.A. complex would be really nice for the culture shock at first, but after a while I'd feel like I was cheating. I'd kind of feel like a fraud, saying I lived somewhere with a fascinating, undeniably different culture like Saudi Arabia when in reality I lived in someplace that, aside from desert temperatures, could just as well be some town in Iowa.

(Kind of like some of our bigwigs over here who let people back at Concordia think they're missionaries, which conjures images of grass huts and worn clothing from church charity drives, when in reality they live in a huge house and have a car and driver and a maid and cook...but that's another story.)

I guess this is probably one reason I feel like I have to explain our living situation over here when people at home assume we're living in hovels and working as poor missionaries to the starving children. Uh, hardly. I live closer to a Starbucks here than I did in Nebraska. Plus, we have Krispy Kreme now! Anyway, enough digression.

Travis made the point that we didn't have to sell our souls to take such high salaries from an oil company. We could take it to sort of damn the man, he said.

"You could donate some to helping the environment, or alternate fuel research or...the Democratic Party..."

I pointed out that there'd probably be something in the contract, which I'm sure we'd have to sign in blood, that said we couldn't do such things, that our charity money would have to go toward throwing Rush another party the next time he came out of rehab or something.

Then Travis came up with the plan to just go earn the money himself.

"You can move home and live a life of leisure on the salary I'd get! You could buy a lot of shoes."

Then he added as an afterthought, "Or spend it to buy posterboard and markers to make some hippie, peacenik protest posters, or send it off to save the starving pandas in Africa."

Or, I suppose, as Kristin and I had discussed-shop all day and hang out at the piano bar all night. Hmm...I suppose we all have our prices...

Still, even if the compound did have a New York & Company next door, a piano bar that served hot Krispy Kreme donuts all day long, and trees that grew Manolos, I think I'll stick to coming home. My soul's in trouble enough as it is, what with my computer wallpaper and all!