Recently, the school held its second anniversary to “celebrate the good luck, as I see it, of having so many nationalities where everyone can learn form the other, even in a school of this small size,” said Herr Volkmar Gueni-Baxmeier, the school’s headmaster for the last 18 months.

Farmers from Persia, a Saudi who erected a tent and served qahwa (green cardamom coffee), and a clutch of exhibits and presentations from many other cultures are among the attractions there.

Baxmeier is a busy man. A genial and affable figure, he juggles the needs of the children, the German national curriculum and more often than not a mug of coffee from his office. He also has a full class-teaching program.

He has the endearing characteristic of embarking on slightly eccentric journeys — twice across Australia (in different directions) in his Ford Falcon and the length of New Zealand’s islands by motorcycle. His enthusiasm and ready laugh give the impression that there is not much that would faze Herr Baxmeier.

While his office has more the character of a front room than administrative hub, appearances are deceptive and while it is the center of the school operations, its door is open to the pupils who occasionally tap gently on it for attention.

Baxmeier, a career teacher, is however used to the pressures of school. He came to Jeddah for his second sojourn in Saudi Arabia after a spell at a 650-pupil secondary school in Frankfurt. He intends to retire in a few years and explained that he returned to Jeddah to “finish my work in the place where I first started.”

A year after qualifying as a teacher, he found that there were no jobs for teachers in his home state. Thus he came to Saudi Arabia with a large German construction company on Aug. 23 1983, as he notes with characteristic precision.

A year later, he began teaching at the Deutsche Schule in Jeddah and nearly 30 years on is completing the circle. That circle has taken him through teaching posts in Western Sumatra, Singapore and the German Swiss International School in Hong Kong among other places. Ironically, he found returning to Germany to take up a short posting in Duisburg as foreign to him “because I had become increasingly Asian.”

His travels have exposed him to the young people of many, mainly Eastern, cultures and he feels this has given him an empathy that helps greatly in delivering the German curriculum to the scores of nationalities currently in the Deutsche Schule.

As a German national school, not an international school, the distance from Germany gives him the flexibility to solve local problems locally in concert with the Saudi Ministry of Education.

“As the director of a school in Germany, you have to stay in line with the main office; they give orders, you fulfill.”

It also allows working closely with the teaching staff to explore new ways of delivering the curriculum to the culturally diverse 146 pupils that on Baxmeier’s arrival stood at about 90.

The increase in the roll, he said, was due to his combining the kindergarten group and mixing different age pupils together. “Now the younger can learn from the older in the same group and every day they learn German as a foreign language.”

The language of instruction is German, but the school also teaches English and French from grade 1 (six years old) and Arabic from pre-school level. “It is vital that learners are competent in their mother tongue before starting the next language,” said Baxmeier. “So, when the pupils have completed class 10, they are able to speak four languages.”

His ambition is to offer secondary education and teach grades 11 and 12.

“Because many parents wish to remain in Saudi Arabia, I am working now on getting finance from Germany to make this happen,” he said. “Parents get jobs outside Germany, become more open minded and find it very hard to go back and settle.”

Parents formed a vital element of the school’s work, said Baxmeier. “It is always easier to get the focus of the students if you know that the parents are fully behind them and are willing to help,” he said.

Meticulously structured and operated, the Deutsche Schule in Jeddah is not only quietly providing a haven of German education to the expatriate community of Germans and others in the city, but also developing a generation that will succeed as solid foundations of cross-cultural understanding that is sorely needed in today’s world.