Well, it’s official. After waiting and waiting and then back and forth, I finally signed a contract for a teaching position in Jubail, Saudi Arabia.
The job is through McGill University, a university based in Montreal, Canada. The university partnered with the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning in Saudi to create a program that would teach young, high school grads to speak English for their petrol jobs. Yep, it all comes back to oil.
Jubail is on the east side of Saudi Arabia, on the Persian Gult. It’s the largest industrial city in the Middle East and supposedly the largest civil engineering project in the world. As you can imagine then, it’s kind of a robot of a city.
The population is about 380,000 people, but only 33% of them are Saudis. The rest are Indians (30%), Filipinos (14%), Pakistanis (12%), and a bunch of others. I guess technically, I will be the 1%.
I’ll be sharing a two-bedroom apartment in a teachers’ compound just outside the city and commuting in each day. Along with all the housing costs, the program provides transportation as well. They even make weekly runs to the grocery store too.
So yeah, it’s going to be different, maybe even crazy, but I’m excited about it. The contract only lasts nine and half months. We’ll see where I go from there. For now, I’m just going to immerse myself in this place. If nothing else, I can pretty much guarantee we’ll get some stories out of it.
