Naqaanaq and Dew

The school environs adapted with the horde of upper-class, money-heavy patrons of our school with numerous small cafes and sandwich shops to siphon off any disposable income the students may have had. They catered to a wide range of the student's needs. First, there was Cafe Ole, famous for packs of fries, admittedly quite tasty, but with distastefully high price tags. Then there was Abu Haniffa Grocery which was established to cater to the needs of the residentials around Choueifat more than the students that went there. They sold more Polo, Jelly Cokes, Bubblegum, than cooked food, and in the way of real food, more okra, sweet pumpkin, cabbages, tomatoes and eggplant, fresh off the field than anything else.

Then came the Naqaanaq Place. I'm not particularly sure what the word Naqaanaq means in Arabic, or if it is an Arabic word at all. I was told it literally means "chicken frank," but I'm not so sure. Whatever it means to humanity, it means nothing more than an incredibly tasty sandwich to me.

As with many sites of importance and significance, this sandwich shop was so good and sold such tasty sandwiches, that the real name eludes me at the time of this writing. It was "Something Refreshments" but I just can't remember it, because it was called the Naqaanaq Place by us. From here, we bought our Naqaanaqs.

What, pray tell, are Naqaanaqs? They're delicious sandwiches made in toasted hotdog buns, with chicken franks, some french fries, ketchup and a horridly unhealthy helping of mayonnaise. Why do they call it a Naqaanaq? I'm not particularly sure, but it's probably the same reason why they called a milkshake "Titanic." I never had myself a Titanic, but I do remember seeing the name under the beverages section of their menu. No doubt, their others sandwiches bore equally fascinating and mind-boggling names, some of them rip-offs, probably not consistently of Oscar-winning movies, but of other well-known, easily recongisable, super-hyped products of mainstream media.

I respected the Naqaanaq place because of their consistent sandwich wrapping technique, which was flawless and remained consistent for the 2 years I remained a customer of their shop. The bottom end would usually be twisted shut like they seal candy, forming a good, solid base, and the top end left open. Peering down the top of the sandwich barrel, the sandwich stared right back at you, the chicken frank usually tantalizing visible, coated with some mayonnaise that continued out of view into the middle of the hotdog bun.

I consistently tried teaching Shahed, the smart kid we all copied make-do homework off of, to unwrap the sandwich according to the style I pioneered, but he insisted on mangling the beautiful thing. I can't go into the details of the technique, because it would be too much work describing it, and besides, it's intellectual property. In any case, as with most things with me, I took unwrapping sandwiches to a whole new level of anal-retentiveness with the Naqaanaqs.

After a long, hard day at school, trying to decipher French Chemistry or assuming the fetal position in fear of Mrs. Faysan's colourful webcast Physics lectures, we sometimes had after-school study sessions to attend as well, which were compulsory for those of us that failed AMS examinations, something I did quite a bit in my first semester of Grade 11. So, we would all trudge along to the Naqaanaq Place, walk in, place our order with a brief "Two Naqaanaq", emphasized insultingly, in retrospect, with two raised fingers, and go buy ourselves a cold, green-bottled, classic, Mountain Dew which was only available from the Abu Haniffa grocery, and sit around, waiting for our Naqaanaqs to come.

Sometimes I would ask my parents to collect me late from exams, so that I could enjoy some Naqaanaq and Dew with my friends.

The year before I left, a new sandwich store opened, no doubt to capitalize on more hungry AMS failures like myself. It was called, interestingly enough, Ghuwaifat, which rhymed ever so coincidentally with Choueifat, no doubt the shop's prime source of customers. Good to know Mrs. Faysan's policies were chucking out so many after-schoolers, it was actually boosting the economy around our school.

The Student Life Organisation

The Student Life Organisation, also known as the SLO, was, in my opinion, the biggest farce on campus, second to none other than French-educated Chemistry teachers. In my opinion, they should cut the crap and rename the SLO "Choueifat Gestapo."

Of decidedly negligible benefit to students, it served as nothing more than a gathering point of the administration's top chronies among the students. They exploited the ambition of otherwise intelligent young boys and girls to sell their souls to the administration's personal obsession with tracking down ridiculously over-burdened students who exhibited the slightest hint of disobedience.

The SLO actively maintained at least one or two students from every class who would report friends of theirs for cheating on the outrageously over-rated AMS exams. No doubt, cheating is a terrible offense, but it's one thing to properly track down miscreants and punish them, and something completely different to acquire names from informants just to track them down and superficially "suspend" them for a day.

Many students were caught through this policy of plain-clothed informants, some of them from among the upper strata of the class. Come university application time, however, nobody's records had any mention of these incidents. Personally, I'm glad they didn't put these incidents into students' records, because I don't really think what they did was so big a crime, but surely the administration knows better than me, someone at the receiving end of their policies.

In Grade 11, we had three weekly exams, every week (thus the name) which were full-fledged written exams with or without a multiple choice component. In addition to three hours of weekly exams, we had no less than five AMSs with their corresponding ridiculously high standards and bad implementation, which amounted to a total of 8 tests every week. Any student faced with these, coupled with the numerous external exams that we take, including SAT I, SAT II, APs and A-Levels, the workload is simply unacceptably high.

Students were driven to cheat, and the administration hunted them down, almost for sport, "suspend" them for periods at a time with no mention of these episodes in their academic records, which they knew were exemplary compared to students in other schools. Fed by a greed for more high-brass university acceptances, the administration would blatantly lie about students who partook in the hideous crime of cheating.

But if the administration didn't mention these incidents in their records, then surely the administration didn't think very highly of the offense. If they didn't think very highly of an offense they basically drove their students to, why install such oppressive policies to start with and initiate a fruitless game of cat and mouse?

The SLO played the cat in this story. Apart from that, it was also the central headquarters of the school's money-saving scheme, also known as the extracurricular point system, AMS-repeats and Thursday classes (so maybe in addition to "Choueifat Gestapo" it could also have been called "Choueifat SS"), and the ever-interesting SLOGA, the Student Life Organisation General Assembly, the yearly meeting that I once wasted a weekend on.

The Necessary Vice

Mornings in Abu Dhabi were really beautiful. The morning dew would render windshields literally unusable without a strong wipe, the humidity would make little patches of condensation on the car windows where the air vents were directed, and late winter sunrises meant the sky would usually be a dull grey by the time I got to school.

As beautiful as the mornings were in Abu Dhabi, between 7.30am when most of us arrived at the Table Tennis area, and 7.55am when the first bell rang, we ignored and defiled the morning air by shamelessly copying homework.

I can positively say that I had personally never copied a letter of homework before I hit Grade 11. By the end of Grade 12, though, my class and I had homework-copying down to an art form.

By the end of Grade 12, homework copying was an every-morning occurrence. Over-burdened with largely needlessly advanced schoolwork, it was no longer the aberration and abomination it was during our earlier, more naive years when we took schoolwork seriously. It was stream-lined to a point where it didn't take much to pull off a successful copying session in the morning, and no matter what the assignment was, it never took more than 5 minutes. All you needed was a diligent student and willing friend.

"Hey, did you do the Physics homework?"
"Yeah, sure..."

Without having to ask further, the fellow would pull out his notebook, and like a swarm of flies descending upon a fetid slab of meat, we got about our business. The primary source material would usually be put in the centre of a table tennis table so that others could crowd around it in a semi-circle, their notebooks laid on the edge of the table. Hunched over and setting the supplier of the material on watch against one of the wandering "supervisors" set loose on us to weed out the copiers, we got about our business in the most professional manner such business could ever be attended to.

If a supervisor swooped in on us, and they did from time to time, the fellow who supplied us the homework and didn't have to be bent over an uncomfortable table under visual cover of other people's bags, would notify us.

"Hey, guys. Someone's coming."

Immediately, 7 or 8 guys, hunched over at the side of a table tennis table rise up and look around casually, one of them takes his copybook and walks off in a carefully plotted tangent that brings him back to the table in exactly eight steps, frowning deeply as if he were revising something, one of them flips pages and shifts his weight casually as if looking for a piece of information at the tip of his tongue he just can't find, another one with the skill of a master magician, tucks the source notebook under his own as he bites his pencil and ponders deeply over what may, in five more steps, be the Grand Unified Theory.

The problem, however, inevitably came down to sheer crunch of time. Time waited for no man, even if he was copying homework to avert the wrath of Mrs. Faysan, the terror of our school, the prime source of undoable homework, oppressive policies of weekend study sessions, and general unpleasantry. Choueifat, however, had tremendous selection pressures, and in the true spirit of Darwin, by the end of Grade 12, most of us could copy down 5 pages worth of arabic numerals, mathematical notation and greek letters in under 3 minutes. That's more than a page a minute.

Toward the end of Grade 12, with numerous external exams on the horizon that had little to do with the super-advanced rocket science we were doing in class, when the going got really rough and the crunch seemed inhuman, even the diligent smart kids stopped doing their homework. Rest assured, though, the homework was religiously allotted day after day, and we dispassionately brushed it aside night after night.

The following mornings were among the most memorable and fondly remembered copying sessions of my academic career.

We would place Shahed, a brilliantly intelligent young man on the far left end of the bench. He was the key, the only guy who could both solve to any appreciable extent the problems assigned in under 10 minutes, and have the sense of humor to not bother doing it at home. He began by drawing the diagram and writing out the basic equations with which to solve the problem.

To his right would be the rest of us. A would copy off Shahed, B would copy off A, C would copy off B, D would copy off C, and so on and so forth.

Copying homework is a lossy process. It's not as simple as one may think. Students and teachers in Choueifat underwent a sort of co-evolution, not dissimilar to the Darwinian concept of a physiological arms race between predator and prey. As students devised new ways of circumventing the outrageously oppressive system, teachers, likewise (namely Mrs. Faysan) developed keener skills on homing in on miscreants. Having an identical copy of a person's work risked detection under Mrs. Faysan's hawk-eyes.

As such, students used creativity to alter the work as they went along. A range of methods were employed: an extra equation here, scribble marks on the diagram at certain points showing we put our pen on a point several times while we were thinking hard the night before, rearranging the equations, not copying intermediate steps, using different variables and conventions.

After five guys of "skipping intermediate steps," little is left in the way of recognizable science by the end of it. By the time the information was transmitted to the poor sap sitting at the far end, the work was understandably unintelligible, a hodgepodge of greek letters, arabic numerals and mathematical notation.

We didn't mind, though. That hodgepodge was good hodgepodge, because we engineered it to look good; that was our job. The equations didn't have to work (the problems were usually impossibly difficult), they had to make the sell. In large part it wasn't dissimilar to cooking in a ship in the 15th century: it never mattered what was in the food, as long as it tasted good, and it's not like the crew had any taste left after 9 months of hard tack and gruel.