Saudi: Slice of Life - Served Extra Hot
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| One of the cars I drove as a woman in Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia |
There were a few hitches.
First, Fem had not had the sticker put on the car which allows for entry and facility usage, for a ridiculously small fee. So our man on the spot, Jim, from the Phillipines (they tend to dominate many of the semi-skilled jobs here in Saudi) had first to verify our membership, then find the sticker with much fossicking around in a number of drawers, then put it on, and finally re-gas the car. Much of which was conducted outside in the broiling sun - the workshop itself has big fans and a high-ceiling roof but the bays were all occupied. Once the AC was full, he turned off the gas, took the pipe off the valve, and a fountain of white gas sprayed itself noisily into the moist air. Upon this final pressure the hitherto leaking valve had finally cracked. So now I had, for all practical purposes, an entirely defunct AC on my hands. I was not precisely pleased.
With promises of getting the valve brought in for me that evening ringing in my ears (which like all such Saudi promises proved ultimately futile, the first evening they forgot to load it, then sent the wrong one the next evening and finally in exasperation I demanded that Fem go down-town to purchase it himself), I drove out along a road I never use, because the route to the AAA along the back roads in the ‘semi-industrial’ section of camp is seldom taken by me, and was immediately signalled over by a traffic officer flashing the lights of his big truck behind me. On Aramco they are extremely fierce with traffic violations, in part a response to the execrable driving that happens outside “camp” (it’s the place where oil was literally discovered in Saudi, hence it is called “camp” to this day even though it no longer is one and oil is no longer extracted here either).
To put car issues in perspective, the death rate is twice that of South Africa per 1000 population (and our traffic accident rate is horrific enough), and Saudi roads are considered very possibly the worst in the world; one person an hour dies on the Saudi roads. Or, to put it another way, 81% of deaths in hospital here occur to people who’ve been in car accidents – while world-wide, one hospital bed in ten is occupied by someone whose been in an accident. Or at least, that's what the local English newspaper, the Arab News, reported once, though I lost the link to that particular article. The longer we live here, the less we go outside camp – and we figure the two are clearly correlated.
First, Fem had not had the sticker put on the car which allows for entry and facility usage, for a ridiculously small fee. So our man on the spot, Jim, from the Phillipines (they tend to dominate many of the semi-skilled jobs here in Saudi) had first to verify our membership, then find the sticker with much fossicking around in a number of drawers, then put it on, and finally re-gas the car. Much of which was conducted outside in the broiling sun - the workshop itself has big fans and a high-ceiling roof but the bays were all occupied. Once the AC was full, he turned off the gas, took the pipe off the valve, and a fountain of white gas sprayed itself noisily into the moist air. Upon this final pressure the hitherto leaking valve had finally cracked. So now I had, for all practical purposes, an entirely defunct AC on my hands. I was not precisely pleased.
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| Road on Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, with strangely different speed zone |
To put car issues in perspective, the death rate is twice that of South Africa per 1000 population (and our traffic accident rate is horrific enough), and Saudi roads are considered very possibly the worst in the world; one person an hour dies on the Saudi roads. Or, to put it another way, 81% of deaths in hospital here occur to people who’ve been in car accidents – while world-wide, one hospital bed in ten is occupied by someone whose been in an accident. Or at least, that's what the local English newspaper, the Arab News, reported once, though I lost the link to that particular article. The longer we live here, the less we go outside camp – and we figure the two are clearly correlated.
Of course, the peculiar thing is that, theoretically, women can’t drive in Saudi - at all. However, many years and a couple of Kings ago, apparently a King was visiting Aramco and, very impressed by all the activities the expatriate women were embarking upon for themselves and their families, asked what he could do to help. Promptly the reply came back - "We’d like to drive, Your Highness".
As Kingly decree has it, Drive we women do - Saudis and expatriate women alike, all over camp, all the time (Saudi Gazette). Except that we don’t, you see. Since if I am intent on committing a traffic violation it is my husband who has to go on a Safety Driving Course. Or even in the event of an accident, if I am the one at fault it is he who will be formally charged. It’s tempting, I must admit. But it also means that should I receive a ticket, it goes on my husband’s work record. That’s right, it gets logged against his safety record and he doesn't get the annually given safety award, usually of small monetary worth but important on his personnel file - we are, after all, technically an industrial concern even though Fem has given much thought to scenarios of serious hurt within the IT department and found the results humorous rather than terrifying. But most importantly, the presence of a traffic violation on his record can be used as justification for not giving him a good work review, refusing promotion, and, in the event of three accumulated tickets, can even be used as a motivation for firing him. Which can and has happened, though rarely. Our next-door neighbour was “surplussed” (and we’ve missed them ever since) and when he went to take the case further up he was informed that since his wife had three parking tickets over four years, well, that was that was that was that was that.
Since the company is so intent on Saudization (I do think it should be spelled Saudiization to be more phonetically correct) then a traffic fine received by an expatriate is something to be feared. Though, then again, my one friend received three traffic fines in one afternoon, and her high-ranking husband was merely asked to try to keep the total down. However, since my husband is the only non-Saudi working in his entire group and the IT department is under observation by the company for having too many traffic violations, and the company has recently decreed that IT systems being down do not constitute sufficient of an emergency that exceeding the speed limit is justified, he feels under more pressure than most in this regard.
Only once before in these five years did I receive a speeding ticket - one of those poorly indicated 40km zones (I think a big-wig lives in the street since there’s no other apparent reason why that particular road out of all the roads in that entire residential area spanning half of the camp should be 40 compared to all the others that are 50).
Of course it would have been in week three of Ramadam, just before sunset, and my husband just would be overseas, literally flying somewhere between Leyden and London at the time. The man who “violated” me (yes, they have been known to make that particular noun-to-verb enallage, I had a friend who was threatened by an officer, shrieking, “If you don’t move your car now I will violate you!” and wondered if she should report him for making untoward threats) was obviously grumpy and hungry and just plain kick-the-dog, fine-the-expatriate-wife mad. I was also pregnant with Bethany, during which pregnancy the old back injury flared up and I was dealing with such chronic pain that everything else kind of blurred, so I ended up stoically accepting my fate, not kicking up the scream and fuss that you need kick to up if you want to be treated differently than you deserve but which everyone kicks up all the time since that is the way it seems to work, particularly amongst the women who have been here 15 or more years - but I don’t think my husband has entirely forgiven me yet for receiving one.
Certainly for months afterwards, my husband was admonishing me for not coming to a complete and absolute dead stop at a stop street and so on – a peculiarly trying series of moments which were extremely conducive to marital discord. He said, reasonably enough, that it’s hard enough working hard for an entire year than have one traffic violation – which you didn’t even commit - be used against you come assessment time. I started out by feeling guilty about it but after a while just became hardened and callous as happens when there’s nothing you can do to mitigate your crime and you’re not being forgiven for it and what was done was done and my seemingly debonair attitude delighted him deeply.
Nonetheless it has marked me with an abiding dread of traffic violations, and I discover I am highly motivated to undertake anything, legal or illegal, to avert them. Though generally speaking it’s the truth that always works best.
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| After the fact, I took photos to show how it was difficult to see the traffic sign - even with the trees topiaried, which they were not at the time of the violation |
Of course it would have been in week three of Ramadam, just before sunset, and my husband just would be overseas, literally flying somewhere between Leyden and London at the time. The man who “violated” me (yes, they have been known to make that particular noun-to-verb enallage, I had a friend who was threatened by an officer, shrieking, “If you don’t move your car now I will violate you!” and wondered if she should report him for making untoward threats) was obviously grumpy and hungry and just plain kick-the-dog, fine-the-expatriate-wife mad. I was also pregnant with Bethany, during which pregnancy the old back injury flared up and I was dealing with such chronic pain that everything else kind of blurred, so I ended up stoically accepting my fate, not kicking up the scream and fuss that you need kick to up if you want to be treated differently than you deserve but which everyone kicks up all the time since that is the way it seems to work, particularly amongst the women who have been here 15 or more years - but I don’t think my husband has entirely forgiven me yet for receiving one.
Certainly for months afterwards, my husband was admonishing me for not coming to a complete and absolute dead stop at a stop street and so on – a peculiarly trying series of moments which were extremely conducive to marital discord. He said, reasonably enough, that it’s hard enough working hard for an entire year than have one traffic violation – which you didn’t even commit - be used against you come assessment time. I started out by feeling guilty about it but after a while just became hardened and callous as happens when there’s nothing you can do to mitigate your crime and you’re not being forgiven for it and what was done was done and my seemingly debonair attitude delighted him deeply.
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| One times husband and two kids; I was shortly thereafter pregnant with the third |
So there I was, one hot crost bunny (my friend Hadeel always pronounces cross crost, not as in crossed, but rhyming with crust which I find delightful), feeling pretty low and miserable, and trying to explain that I had just flown in, from a winter, that we drive on the other side of the road in South Africa, that my AC doesn’t work, it’s just blowing extremely hot air all over me, and yet again it’s a stupid 50km road in the middle of 65km ones (it was marked at the turn, but if you are turning, it’s the other side of the road and you don’t see it and yes, I am remarkably stereotypic in terms of the roads I drive, normally taking exactly the same basic route regardless, at which Fem then laughs but that’s all I can do to ensure I obey the signals since three kids squirming and fighting in the back is not conducive to concentration, and neither I have found is being very hot and bothered).
And underlying it all of course is this dread that my husband will be mad with me even though there is always a chance that a contact of a contact of a contact may be able to make it disappear, stranger things have happened … but the important thing is never to let it be logged into the SAP system because then it’s there for life, and the Saudi traffic officer said, “But you’re in Saudi now,” at which I burst into miserable tears and said, yes, yes, that was precisely the problem, he had hit the nail on the head, I didn’t right then and there feel like being in Saudi Arabia at all and more in this vein and I absolutely insisted that he feel the car’s AC, or lack thereof, which he duly did, either out of fear or in verification of my story.
Motivated partly I believe by fellow feeling for another male who was clearly in deep trouble with his wife though some people here like to impute sympathy to him on a day of 100% humidity and extreme heat, but I don’t know, sympathy to women I have not found at all high on the Saudi male agenda (but then again, to put it in perspective, it's culturally verboten, really, to be on too close speaking terms with any female not already or about to be a relative, and certainly not a very blonde, clearly expatriate wife), though you never know. But mainly, I think, because female emotion they find extremely problematic to handle (particularly if erupting from aforesaid blonde female), and hence he wanted to get away from this particular erupting epicentre intact, he gave me back my ID (you have to carry it about you at all times and if you lose it once, you are docked about 10% of that month’s salary or three working days, escalating upwards, and if you lose three cards - yup, you got it, it’s a fireable offense - funny that). My ID was held out to me at the end of his outstretched arm, and I’m sure that while his chest faced me his feet were already turning in the other direction. But at least he didn’t violate me.
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| No, butter wouldn't melt in their mouths |
Motivated partly I believe by fellow feeling for another male who was clearly in deep trouble with his wife though some people here like to impute sympathy to him on a day of 100% humidity and extreme heat, but I don’t know, sympathy to women I have not found at all high on the Saudi male agenda (but then again, to put it in perspective, it's culturally verboten, really, to be on too close speaking terms with any female not already or about to be a relative, and certainly not a very blonde, clearly expatriate wife), though you never know. But mainly, I think, because female emotion they find extremely problematic to handle (particularly if erupting from aforesaid blonde female), and hence he wanted to get away from this particular erupting epicentre intact, he gave me back my ID (you have to carry it about you at all times and if you lose it once, you are docked about 10% of that month’s salary or three working days, escalating upwards, and if you lose three cards - yup, you got it, it’s a fireable offense - funny that). My ID was held out to me at the end of his outstretched arm, and I’m sure that while his chest faced me his feet were already turning in the other direction. But at least he didn’t violate me.
Ah! The joys of being a company wife in a company town. My friends at the supermarket literally cried with laughter when I told them the story, since I still had to pick up a by now late lunch for the five hungry children at home. Lucy from Australia but originally from China was wiping her eyes as they streamed with tears, and saying, “It’s funny, you know, I was just feeling a little depressed, you know? The last two weeks since we’ve been back? But it’s always like this in the beginning, isn’t it? You know?” she said and then begged me to stop talking as she was losing control. I don’t think I was that funny, actually, it was more the identification with my saying things that we all think sometimes but don’t often say to each other, at least not openly to a nodding acquaintance in a public place like a supermarket. Which reminds me also that I was asked recently if I knew many Australians here and I initially said no, since all the Australians we had known worked in armaments for BAE off-camp and then I realised I actually do know masses of Australians but since they all speak Mandarin as their first language and belonged to the Chinese Cultural Community of the Women’s Group I had not thought of them as such. The world is on the move, it always has been, but in our particular microcosm thereof, the rapidity is well mapped given that Aramco employs people deriving from 64 different countries and so this shifting of citizenships and identities is very apparent.
When we first arrived on Aramco I met one lady who was particularly daft, even in comparison to the rest of us who all acknowledge that we are here because we are not all there. One of her particular obsessions was collecting passports and citizenships. Originally Australian, she was on four and working on acquiring a fifth. Made no sense to me. At all. Particularly since she liked being Australian. She was leaving Aramco in part because she took extreme umbrage at the fact that they refused admission to her father’s live-in girlfriend. She didn’t seem to understand that the birthplace of Wahhabism and Osama bin Laden might not easily be persuaded by her arguments as to the morality of their particular situation, given that her argument was precisely that; that her father and his girlfriend had a more moral arrangement than many married couples. True or false, the reality was: it's not the Saudi way, and well - when in Rome, as the saying goes, do as the Romans do.
It was my friend Nick Holdsworth, who delights in collecting stories of people living over-regulated lives in companies such as Unilever in the 1950s, who gave me a hook whereby to decode our particular and peculiar set of living circumstances. Or rather, made apparent the saying that the more we are different the more we are the same in that the parallels with those stories and our lives here, despite the changing out of characters, nationalities and countries, became most apparent. We attempt to live within a bubble manufactured by a quintessentially American sense of sensibilities which have passed their sell-by date by at least 50 years, and which is both isolated from and therefore insulated within a fundamentalist Saudi Arabia of the 1400s (Islamic calendar). Though of course there are a variety of generally speaking one-sided interchanges with that world, but it’s pretty much parallel lives you live. With a extraordinary population growth of 3.5% - which translates to doubling the population in twenty years - the pressure is on, however, to give as many Saudis jobs as possible, so the outside is becoming more and more inside (and that is fundamentally important too).
Nonetheless, for those who persist in thinking of themselves almost entirely as being of the inside, their focus is on all the minutiae of housing type and size which in turn indicate hierarchy and they imitate military wives in their obsessions.
When first I arrived I would wonder at all these women who’d move house and spend thousands on re-renovating the new one and then realised it was part boredom but mostly about status; since if you live in x house it signifies your husband is on y salary scale. It's "Mevrou die Doktor" (Mrs the Doctor's wife) on a massive scale. Which side of 'camp' (people persist in talking of it as a camp, though that dates back to 1947 when it really was a camp) you are on alone denotes seniority and status. There was even a hairdresser once, who ran her salon on camp, who would only accept women whose husbands were on the right salary scale, so women would be able to say to others, "Oh we are off to have our hair cut at so-and-so's" and this would denote to others your husband's status (and hence, by association, yours).
Nick’s absolutely favourite story of a company town was of the wife who refused to give up her new toilet seat even though her husband’s latest and large promotion did not allow him to possess such a particularly fine example of a toilet seat and the workmen had installed it in the company house by mistake. The long and the short of that story is that they finally awarded him the teeny extra promotion to get rid of the stand-off situation that had arisen, with her refusing entry to the company maintenance brigade and it all developing along farcical lines as these things are wont to do.
Nonetheless, for those who persist in thinking of themselves almost entirely as being of the inside, their focus is on all the minutiae of housing type and size which in turn indicate hierarchy and they imitate military wives in their obsessions.
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| Outside our house in the non-executive side of 'camp' |
Nick’s absolutely favourite story of a company town was of the wife who refused to give up her new toilet seat even though her husband’s latest and large promotion did not allow him to possess such a particularly fine example of a toilet seat and the workmen had installed it in the company house by mistake. The long and the short of that story is that they finally awarded him the teeny extra promotion to get rid of the stand-off situation that had arisen, with her refusing entry to the company maintenance brigade and it all developing along farcical lines as these things are wont to do.
I suppose it would be more funny if people all didn’t take it so seriously. But humour, you see, is generally verboten. That’s the one thing I always miss whenever I go shopping in Malls here, hearing people talk and laugh. It’s like living in a really bad silent movie in black and white - the women all in black, the men all in white and no-one talking to each other, while, not in public anyway. While back on Aramco all the multi-colours of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-lingual series of cultures and nations are on display. And still ready, easy laughter is not much heard. Humour is, after all, a very subversive force, exposing hypocrisies, asking of you that you take yourselves lightly, easily misunderstood and prone to cultural error, but, most importantly from a company and Saudi perspective, not easily managed. Which is all the more reason to laugh when you find yourself nearly getting a traffic fine.
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| No, my children didn't find it funny either |
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