Fourth and fifth graders at the Chebeague Island School have spent a semester discovering the Middle East. Last week they celebrated their achievements with a Middle East banquet they cooked for themselves, the younger students and their families. The Chebeague Island School cook, Annie Long, helped them prepare Israeli and Arab dishes. Matzohs and hummus proved to be favorites. Each fourth and fifth grader chose a research topic to prepare and present at the celebration. Among them were “Dress in the Middle East” (Tracy Calder), “The Crusades” (Benjamin Hillicoss) “Saladin” (Tyler Campbell). The younger children attending the celebration liked especially, the “Syrian Hamster” (Tim Calder), “Astronomy in Ancient Iraq” (Cassidy Jeffers), “Camels” (Brenna Martin), “The Sahara Desert” (David Hamilton) “Lizards of Arabia” (Anna Hamilton) and “Arabic Music” (Natalie Murphy).
Kristin Rohrbach, their teacher, designed this program with encouragement from the school’s principal, David Galin. She turned for technical support to Barbara Porter, the wife of Chebeague boatbuilder Michael Porter, and the director of The Casco Bay Assyriological Institute. A scholar of the ancient Near East, Porter collaborated with Rohrbach in preparing the curriculum and conducted many of the class sessions herself. She also arranged for an Egyptian musician, Karim Nagi, to come from the New England Conservatory through the Harvard Center for Middle East Studies outreach program.
“Out of the 241 schools where I have performed,” Nagi said, “the Chebeague Island School is one of just 14 where the students had a music program. And it is the only one where the students could greet me in Arabic when I arrived.” He infected everyone with Middle East rhythm and dance. An encore performance at the Chebeague Island Library saw Chebeague’s students bringing their parents along to join in the fun.
Maine’s seagoing communities have always been open to the world. Some members of the community are likely to have had experience in the Middle East. The Chebeague Island School has shown how to reach beyond the current images of violence and involve its students in the rich culture of the region.
Local resources brought the contemporary Middle East into the classroom. Shall Baccarat, the former director of Jordan’s National Gallery and now a year-round resident of Chebeague, not only helped everyone learn Arabic basics but also worked with the school art teacher, Sara Ash, to introduce calligraphy and mosques into the art classes. The program brought children face to face with the shared values of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It put a human face on the tragedies of conflict.
Frontline experiences in understanding current events came from Rich Brewer, Karen Hamilton and Leila Baccarat. Rich Brewer, the Chebeague Island policeman and a history teacher at Cheers High School, served as a marine in Beirut, winning a purple heart, and then returned to the war-torn country to teach Lebanese students. Karen Hamilton served in the National Guard in Kuwait during the Iraq War and has two daughters in the school. Leila Bisharat represented UNICEF in the Middle East and North Africa for many years. Tad Runge, owner of Runge Oriental Rugs, took the art and use of rugs into the classroom. Each spent time sharing their experience on the ground and answering questions about the everyday life of families and children in the region. At the Middle East banquet Roy Jackson, a beloved “grandfather of Chebeague” who offers every child a ride on his tractor, told about the magic of first seeing the pyramids in 1954 while lying atop mail bags in a plane. He also described how he worked with a bedouin guard to protect a cache of explosives against possible saboteurs on a site near Baghdad. He said, “I would go back any day to work with these wonderful people if they would send me at age 78.”
Chebeague’s first and second graders started asking what it would take for them to get out to the Middle East. After this program, most can trace the tanker routes from Portland to the Suez Canal. Other waterfront communities in Maine might draw on their own community experience to create the kind of magic that opens up new worlds of discovery and understanding.