School visits week

Last week I spent much of my time, in between putting media schedules together, organising brochure copy and creating web content, going on school visits with the recruiters. This is always an interesting experience since the recruiters present in Arabic and, although I know the content of the presentation, I don't actually know what they are saying! For all I know they could be saying 'don't worry about this English idiot, she hasn't got any idea what we're on about'!
I went with Amal to two schools in Shamkha which was quite an experience as Amal hadn't been to the schools or the town before and came equipped with a college car and Sat Nav. Sat Nav is a very different thing in a country with no postcodes and where everything changes on a weekly basis and not to be trusted. It had been pre-loaded with schools, one of which has the same name as one we were visiting but happened to be in Al Ain, about 70 miles from where we were going. It was only when I pointed out that the Sat Nav reckoned we had another 68 km to go when we should have been nearly there that we realised it was taking us to somewhere else altogether! We then tried plugging in the name of the town, but, being a new town it didn't feature on the UAE programme. However, Amal used her local knowledge and we found the town and a school who were able to point us in the right direction. This short detour did mean that I got my first glimpse of the desert - undulating dunes of sand as far as the eye could see, which was amazing and really beautiful. Shamkha is clearly a new dormitory town for Abu Dhabi and felt strangely empty during the day. We agreed it would be a good place to learn to drive as there were no cars on the road so we were able to take all kinds of strange routes. There didn't seem to be much in the way of shops or malls and all the houses looked to have been built to the same design. Even the two schools were identical, giving an uneasy feeling of deja vue at the second one and I wondered if we might be trapped in a school visit version of ground hog day!
In both schools the best place to conduct the presentations was in the Prayer room. I can't say I've ever done a presenation in bare feet before but it was a new experience and also lost one of my main topics of conversations with the girls afterwards where they always admire my shoes! The presentations went well and the project worked on both occasions which was a novelty. We gathered lots of names of interested girls. It always makes me wonder about the life expectations of girls, especially in such a strange town but they all looked like the bright, shiny school girls anywhere, sure that life is going to be good to them.
The next day I went with Salem to the boys schools which was a whole new experience again. We went to three schools and in one of them we were presenting in a science lab so had to present to several groups one after the another. It's tough sitting through the same presenation many times anywhere, but when the presentation is in Arabic its even tougher. Salem is excellent at his job and really engaged the boys before starting on the power point, which was good since it only worked half of the time. He talked to them about their career aspirations and got them thinking about teaching and the bachelor of education degree in general so gathered hundreds of names from the different schools. I hope we can convert at least some of them as we have very few male students. Teaching is not seen as an appropriate career for boys, here or anywhere so its a global problem. The boys we do have call themselves 'pioneers' and are a great bunch. I was the novelty turn and attracted lots of attention. Salem has a great rapport with the schools so there was lots of relationship building going on around the presentations - excellent from a marketing point of view though it was largely lost on me.
I was most impressed when one lad, who was messing about at the back, was called to the front and Salem sent him out of the room. After that everyone else sat in rapt attention till the end of the session! He'd have made a great teacher.