Jaunting Along

This post is from an email I sent in August 2001 - it describes a young boy to whom I taught Art on a compound in Saudi Arabia. It is written after I had briefly returned home when my dad was dying, upon my return to the 'Kingdom' after his death, where I was teaching art to both adults and children. Action shots from the swing were the order of the day at Al Yamamas, Saudi Arabia

Persian carpet, Saudi Arabia It is always the personalities that are the most interesting in any place, but the most treacherous to write about. Both in terms of getting it wrong, and, in the event that they may one day discover your perhaps less-than-flattering description of them, also in terms of getting it right. Fem often shakes his head in bewilderment when I describe people to him; I ask him why, and he says, “But she is your friend ,” as if that meant I must cut off my sense of discernment at the root. Of course, at this stage I could quote Jane Austen's Mr Bennett, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them in our turn?” except that, of course, I am entirely without foible myself. But, truth to be told, I like my friends most because of their foibles rather than otherwise, they are more interesting, if necessarily more complex and complicated.  But before we can even get to characters, there is the context. The first few times I...

One of the cars I drove as a woman in Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia It’s sweltering here, 47 C the day that I took the car in to be re-gassed as the air-conditioning unit wasn’t working adequately. Fem (my husband) had been asked to undertake that task before my arrival but said he didn’t want it standing around for a few weeks, leaking gas. Leaking? That was the first I heard of it. So, with five kids in the house (two visitors) and a beleaguered Doris  (our South African house-keeper) trying to maintain order and wash all our clothes and clean the house of two months of Fem and abandonment, with the fine Saudi dust having settled over everything thanks in part to a 17 day dust storm in June, and with dust bunnies under the beds which the elder visiting child would point out to Doris leaving her greatly disgruntled (as if she had anything to do with the accumulation of dust in her absence),  I took myself off to the Triple A (Arabian Automobile Association) ...

Just before we left Saudi Arabia in December 2008, I wrote this email since I had never before documented the Khobar massacre  which occurred during our time there, and in which we were all on lock-down over an extended period of time.  Desert camping with boys 2004 Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, December 2008:  It’s been years, literally, since I wrote about our life here in Saudi as opposed to our lives with kids. Today, strangely enough, I came across the beginning of an email I started exactly three years ago to the very day, touching upon what life is like here on Aramco, since it differs greatly from general expatriate life in Saudi. However, I never finished what I begun on the 7th August 2005 and three years later I still haven’t finished it. (And it took me a further six weeks of rumination, internal debate and external research, before I was ready to send this one off).  But somewhere along the line I felt it necessary to sketch in the background, ...

Talk Given at 60th Anniversary of the Dhahran Women’s Group,  May 3rd, 2007, Saudi Aramco Learning to let our light shine out  Welcome.  In particular, to our honoured guest and speaker, Mr Mazen Snobar, Executive Director of Community Services and his wife, Naheel. We welcome too our other special guests, Mr Ahmed Zahid, CCSD Manager and Mr Richard Ksiazek, Administrator, Recreation Services Division, CCSD.  And of course, we welcome all our very special guests, members of the Dhahran Women’s Group, our Board and especially our wonderful volunteers and friends.  We come here from all over the world, a disparate bunch, derived from a variety of cultures, heralding from a multiplicity of lands and speaking a cacophany of tongues.  Like many an expatriate population, we are subject to both unique privileges and peculiar privations. The privileges are well-documented and often future-oriented – to do with establishing a nest egg, ensuring a better...