A Dry and Thirsty Land

A Dry and Thirsty Land is the account of my nearly eleven years of living in Tripoli, Libya, and teaching English at the Oil Companies School. Mr. Robert R. Waldum of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, founded the school in 1958 in a villa in Giorgimpopoli, a suburb west of Tripoli. He started with a handful of teachers and students, moved to an old school which later became a Libyan school, and finally supervised the construction of the campus which opened in 1964. The school consisted of seven single-story rectangular wings and a two-story elementary building. From the air all the buildings combined looked like a giant "L." On the ground, the campus would have looked right at home in Southern California. Each wing had five classrooms, all opening to the outdoors and connected by covered hallways. Off by itself stood a large gymnasium and beside it, an athletic field of sand. A parking lot completed the complex. The whole campus was enclosed by a concrete block wall. The building exteriors were neat, clean, and freshly painted in pale blue. The grounds sported one of the most impressive crops of precious grass in Tripoli.
OCS followed the administrative guidelines of a typical American public school with a superintendent, elementary and junior high principals, and a school board comprised of representatives from five major oil companies: Oasis, Occidental, Amoseas, Mobil, and Esso. Under Mr. Waldum's direction, the National Junior Honor Society, a Youth Center, and a Little League Program were established. The school was generously funded, so he had few financial worries. In just a few years, Mr. Waldum turned a tiny villa into a highly accredited American overseas school.

The total enrollment at OCS in 1970 was 1,100 students, kindergarten through ninth grade, two or three hundred fewer than the year before. The student body was 90% American, many of the students from Texas and Oklahoma. Students from kindergarten to grade nine were for the most part eager, competitive, and polite. The absence of television maximized the opportunities for learning. The only TV available was the local station on which one could watch the reading of the Holy Koran, unremitting reruns of the Great First of September Celebration, the news, a horse show or a camel race, all in Arabic. Students elected to do their homework.
As years passed, enrollment at the Oil Companies School reflected the relations we had with our host county. At the beginning of the 1972-73 school year we had 750 students, K-9, down from the over one-thousand students we had when we first arrived. The Libyan government had begun the process of nationalization, and many families who worked for the major oil companies and service companies were reassigned to other oil producing countries or packed up and sent back to the United States. That same fall, enrollment was down to 400 students, kindergarten through grade nine.
I arrived in Tripoli the year after the 1969 al-Fateh Revolution, the "Great First of September Revolution" in which Muammer Gaddafi overthrew King Idris, hereditary monarch of Libya, in a nearly bloodless coup.

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