Mowabites Worldwide

Very few of the men in the room wore wedding rings. It would be naïve to think those who didn’t were all single.

During the introductions which required that we all indicate our marital status, many of the ladies said they were open to new relationships.

I sat in a corner, grinning. I know a single lady when I see one. These certainly were not. Like the men, they too were casting their baits, unsure exactly what they wish to catch in the sea of pretenses glistening all around them.

It was our first physical meeting, and everyone seemed to have put a lot into their looks. First impressions.

There wasn’t much talk, since we didn’t really know much about one another.

Then came in the lecturer.

“Hello!“ said our new lecturer.

And while we responded, he sent a student downstairs for a marker.

“You’re too large for a masters’ class.” he whinned, sighing heavily. Going on to talk about how unfairly the university treated lecturers, and how that in turn affected the kind of impact made on students’ academics.

We did not know when his line of thoughts suddenly diverted into Budhism in what was supposed to be a linguistics class. Soon, we were hearing verses and names in Budhist sacred texts.

In trying to take out a pamphlet from his bag, he remembered that he had a marker. And that was how he recovered from the digression, moving to the whiteboard to write the topic for the day, apologizing to the student who had now returned from the general office with a marker.

I was thinking. Not of the class we had that late Thursday afternoon. But how commendable we often thought of Christian lecturers sharing their faith with students in their classrooms, and whether the department would find it ok if a Muslim lecturer shared his religion with his students in the course of a lecture.

There were reports that a lecturer was summoned by the Dean of the School of Languages to explain why half his Spanish Grammar class hours were always spent talking about Hinduism with students. We didn’t know who blew the whistle. Must have been some courageous fellow during the lecturer and course evaluation sessions.

The lecturers always encouraged us to participate in those evaluations. But anytime something offensive was said about them, they came to class fuming. And we knew our end of semester papers were going to be marked with iron hands.

The lecturer finally began the class, invoking terms we never heard of in our wildest dreams, everything sounding so philosophical and far-fetched, and we wondered how such knowledge was going to be applicable on the job market. We had chosen programs we thought will teach us practical skills. Here we were, confronted with our inadequate investigations into the right programs of study to select.

But in this country, to secure a future for yourself , you needed a school certificate, and it didn’t matter what you studied or what means you used to acquire it.

And so after many years of being out of school, wandering and hoping to make it to prove that we didn’t need education to be successful, many of us were suddenly faced with the daunting truth that in these parts of the world, education and political connections were two sides of the same coin that paid for our way into happiness in life.

And so here we were, back to school, with a new god to lead us on this solemn journey: Artificial Intelligence …