By Muna Al Gharabaly

This academic year is the fiftieth year since the New English School (NES) first opened as a secondary school. Established by the late Tareq and Jehan Rajab, it was the first private, co-educational day school in Kuwait to offer a British style grammar school curriculum. To mark its fiftieth anniversary, a reunion dinner was held in November, drawing past alumni and faculty members, both foreign and local back to the school to celebrate this half century milestone.

I joined NES as a three-year-old, the first year a kindergarten was offered. The KG was located to the left of the main school gates at the school’s original location in Shamiya/Thahiya Abdulla AlSalam. I spent my first three years of school at this magical location before moving to the ‘new’ location in Jabriya, where it currently still stands and where I remained all the way to the 6th form. Although many things have changed, whenever I visit the school, I vividly remember my school days with fondness.

Whether you were one of the students who loved school, hated school or were just indifferent, all of us who went to NES, were touched by it. The school was a mini United Nations of sorts, with students and staff from all over the globe. It gave both alumni and faculty an opportunity to co-mingle and thrive in a truly multi-cultural environment.

The school provided its students not only an education, but also a spring board to launch us into the world with the necessary building blocks to chase our dreams whatever they were. I completed my A ‘levels in 1986 and that year, 72 flags were represented in our flag parade. I am fairly certain that through my school years, I had classmates from over 50 countries at one time or another. So, from an age before the internet shrunk the world even further, nowhere has ever felt alien in my travels and I am certain my fellow alumni would agree with me. 

Many things have changed in the world since I left school. Primarily, the two biggest influencing factors that have affected our lives is the ease of air travel and the technological revolution that is the internet. In 1969, air travel was a bourgeoning way to traverse the globe (some of the first faculty members who joined the NES teaching staff, came to Kuwait via boat) and the internet would not be part of our daily lives until the mid to late nineties. Also, I am sad to say, acts of terrorism or war were resigned to something you only read about in history books or saw reported on the news.

NES prepared all of us early alumni to be creative, independent thinkers, ready to take on anything and strategically figure out how to complete something we had started. Although I had already graduated by the time of the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the way that the students who were enrolled in school managed to adapt to this violent change in their student life is a true reflection of how well the school prepared its students for whatever situation the world threw at us.

 On a mini level, my own early experience of dealing with the unexpected came in my lower sixth year, which was the academic year 1984/85. As sixth formers we were encouraged to take the initiative to organize our own school trips. These we went on without adult supervision. That year, we decided to go to Failakah.   

The night before our ‘voyage,’ I remember asking my father if I would need my passport. His answer was a short “of course not, Failakah is part of Kuwait.” It may be worth highlighting here that we did not have civil IDs yet – the registration and roll out of those would not come until 1986/7. 

The next morning a small group of us gathered excitedly by the ferry boat that would take us to the island. The only piece of ID I carried was school ID, a little blue book with NES’s crest and Ex Orient Lux emblazoned on it (Latin for “out of the east, light comes”). So, when our mixed group of sixth formers docked at Failakah, we were all instantly detained.

It was the foresight or just good judgement of two male students (a Pakistani and an Indian) who had brought their passports with them, that saved us that day. The island police felt that they could leave them with the girls, while they piled all the other boys on to a van to take them to the police station.

We were crest fallen at the bad turn our solo trip had taken. For what seemed like an eternity, but in reality, was probably 10 to 15 minutes, those of us left behind sat on a curb with our heads forlornly in our hands trying to come up with ideas on how to get our classmates released and return to Kuwait City (what we could have done with a smartphone then).

Before our morbid moods could get any worse, the van returned with our arrested classmates. The next several minutes were spent giving up our names to an officer who was dutifully writing them down. Apparently at the police station the commanding officer had called the school and confirmed that the boys in their custody were indeed NES students and that there was genuinely an unsupervised trip to Failakah scheduled.

In case you were wondering, today and ordinarily you do not need any ID to go to Failakah, we were just unlucky that we chose to go one week before a GCC event was taking place and so all security was on high alert.

Reunited, we had a lovely day on the island. But, our adventures were not over yet. About an hour before the last ferry left, the local police came by us in a golf cart to inform us that the last ferry was leaving early due to tide conditions and that we had five minutes to run across the island to make it. You may never get to witness such an organized mad dash, as we gathered our things and sprinted to the dock, only just making the ferry.

Our final challenge was that our ferry door was broken. The ramp for the cars and people to board would not come all the way up and close, so we chugged back to Kuwait on one of the slowest ferry rides of my life.

Happy times! There are several photographs of our trip memorialized in the 1984/85 Oasis. The most valuable lesson I learned from that trip was to always be prepared, persevere and keep my head while everyone else was losing theirs while also trying to make the best out of bad situations. NES gave me and my fellow alumni both an excellent education as well as the confidence and tools to manage our way through all our future travels and life challenges and like the moto says, Ex Orient Lux, its eastern light has lit up our paths. 

Happy Fiftieth Anniversary New English School (just close your eyes and imagine confetti cannons going off).

For more information visit neskt.com to learn more about NES or nesoasis.com/oasis-year-books to take a look at the yearbooks.