This one was perhaps a little too ambitious, and sacrifices had to be made with resolution, so apologies if the text is unreadable or if it is too large to load. Let me know if it fails to load and I'll try to shrink it down some more.
It had taken months of petitioning the school board and a generous grant from the Saudi Cultural Bureau itself, but I’d finally arranged a cross-cultural field trip for my pupils. It was to be a month of cultural and religious exchange, forging links of friendship and mutual understanding that would last a lifetime.
32 eager young men and myself, their teacher, would be exchanging bodies with women from Saudi Arabia. While they would be living in the homes of my pupils here in America, we'd be jetting off to experience the everyday lives of women in their own country. I was confident tit would be an eye-opening experience and, who knows, perhaps they'd learn a thing or two from us too.
The anticipation was huge. The day itself was bedlam. Collecting the ladies from the airport by coach, shuttling them to the gymnasium where the vast apparatus of the mind exchange machine had been temporarily installed, where they were each transferred into an American body, and my pupils into theirs. The girls lined up for their turn. My pupils, I’m sad to say, were not quite so well behaved, joking, arguing and tussling over who would get which body. After, passports had to be exchanged, as well as clothing, underwear, phones and items of personal hygiene, during which time I was the last to go into the machine.
The body felt strange as I bundled the ex-women back onto the coach, readjusting the driver’s seat to fit my shorter stature. Out of respect, I’d yet to remove the niqab, though I suspected beneath it I was younger and far more petite than I’d have ideally liked for my position of authority. The girls had been timid when they got off the plane but, as each was dropped off with the people they’d call family for the next month, I sensed them beginning to come out of their shells.
Then back on the coach to race my pupils to the airport! Getting through security was an eyeopener, exacerbated by the fact none of the boys had even bothered to open their passports to learn their new names, let alone were able to pronounce them. But finally we were in departures, and I could relax.
Until I realised two of my wards had slipped away to the prayer room to compare tongues.
“George! Nathaniel! These bodies were bequeathed by their owners in the spirit of good faith - you will treat them with the respect and dignity with which they are treating yours!”
If I’d known how intimately acquainted some of the saudi women were getting with their new bodies, I might not have been so prudish.
Reads like a fun start to a wild exchange program. For readability, I find gifs with texts always really hard to read so I appreciate you putting it in pure text as well. I get distracted easily so it might just be me.
ReplyDeleteHopefully the students have an eye-opening experience :)
DeleteYeah, I'm experimenting a bit with how to make gifs usable while keeping their size down. It's tricky. The pure text seems to cause issues with the formatting but thankfully not this time.