After my divorce, I had some suitors propose, all of whom wanted to make me a second wife. I was insulted to be approached for that, but men assumed I would say yes. After you are divorced in Saudi Arabia, it is very difficult to get a second chance.
But I didn’t live in Saudi Arabia—I lived in a world more like something from a Hollywood movie set.
When the American company Standard Oil began exploring for oil in Saudi Arabia in 1932, there was nothing but desert and sand. So they built their own compound to live in. Over the years, the compound became a green oasis, sitting up high on a hill, overlooking the Eastern Province; most days, there is a clear view all the way to the Bahrain causeway. There are grassy parks, lakes and ponds, and walking trails. Some fifteen thousand people live behind the compound’s high walls and security gates. Anyone who visits needs special permission to enter.
Behind those walls, women can drive, even if they don’t have a driver’s license—because most Saudi women, even many who have lived abroad, do not have driver’s licenses. Women do not need to wear the abaya; religious police do not patrol the streets. The compound was originally only for Americans, but by 1980, the Saudi government had bought all the shares of Aramco, and the company is now Saudi owned. More than eighty percent of the employees working at Aramco are Saudis, but they are paid less than their American colleagues and receive fewer benefits. Of all the sixty-six nationalities working for Aramco, Americans are treated the best.
In 2006, the former president of Aramco, Abdullah Jum’ah (the man I would be seated next to at lunch on the day of my divorce), changed the policy forbidding all Saudi women from living in the compound. Although I doubt single mothers were what the company had in mind when it specified that only single Saudi women could live there, the compound was one of the best things that happened to me in Saudi Arabia.
The units were small, but I did not mind. The compound had everything, even a hospital, although Aboudi could not use it because he was technically not considered a resident of the compound. He was registered under his father’s Aramco badge number, and my ex-husband still lived in Dammam. I had no birth certificate, no identity card, no passport, no piece of paper to prove that Aboudi was my son. Several years later, I could not register him for school because I had no way to show that he was my child. No Saudi mother can register her child for school if the father is unwilling to provide the necessary documents, so some children go uneducated.
What I did have was a car. I had originally bought it to be used by a driver, but I couldn’t house the driver on the compound. People in family housing could have a room for their drivers, but that wasn’t possible in bachelor housing. But I didn’t want the car to go to waste. Since women could drive inside the compound without a license, I asked my brother to teach me. He gave me an hourlong crash course in starting and stopping and traveling down the road. The longest I would have to drive was only about twenty minutes. Most of the roads were easy to navigate, although sometimes the speed limit did rise to about eighty kilometers (fifty miles) per hour.
Now, I could drive from my home to my office. On the way, I would drop Aboudi at a compound preschool. The first one he attended was just inside someone’s house; they had converted the garage into nursery space and hired Filipino maids to take care of the kids. Each morning, I would wake before dawn and dress Aboudi as he was still sleeping. I would pack my work bag as well as Aboudi’s bag and his snacks, and on cold mornings, I would go down to start my car and turn on the heater, because I didn’t want him riding in the chilly air. A few times, I tried to carry my work bag, my laptop case, Aboudi’s bags, and Aboudi all in one trip, but it was impossible. Instead I would go up and down, through the heavy fire doors, to start the car and then to load it, and then last to get Aboudi. At lunchtime, I would leave my office and drive to the nursery to eat with him. When I left work at four, I would pick him up on my way home.
Unlike most Saudi families, who have so many kids there are not enough seats for all of them in one car, which leaves smaller children sitting on the laps of their siblings, I had only Aboudi. I could always buckle him in a child seat with a seat belt. When Aboudi was old enough, I enrolled him in a more formal preschool that was run by an American, Miss Janet, who was married to an American Aramco employee. All the teachers were Americans and there were American kids enrolled there as well. The classes were mixed, boys and girls. Even in Saudi private schools, there are no mixed classes and female teachers are not allowed to teach boys, except perhaps for one year of preschool.
Living in the compound, Aboudi and I tasted an American expatriate life. There were two huge swimming pools nearby, so I signed Aboudi up for swimming lessons and tried to learn myself. Swimming is a sport that has always been forbidden to Saudi women and girls. Even in college, there was no swimming pool, only a court for basketball and volleyball. But Aboudi and I could swim and we could walk on the jogging path. Aboudi would ride his little bicycle or his scooter. Next to my small town house was a park, and I could take my son there to play. With him, I became another child. I rode with him on the swings, went down the slide with him in my lap, and then we would run around, climb up the stairs, and do it all over again. I could sit down on the warm ground and dig with him in the sand. I could watch him play with little girls. None of it was forbidden. Growing up, I had known none of these things. Outside the compound, women, even non-Saudi women, cannot swim, or ride the swings, or go down the slide, or play soccer with their sons.
We celebrated holidays like Halloween, where we dressed up in costumes and went trick-or-treating. We had barbecues and potluck dinners. I was surrounded by people of so many nationalities: American, Scottish, Indian, Filipino, Malaysian. After all my years living amid two volatile families, to see all these people living together in peace was beautiful.
But I never went to the expatriate parties, the ones with drinking and dancing. Saudi men would go and drink a lot, but if a Saudi woman were to attend, everyone would be gossiping about her the next day, “That Saudi girl was there, she mingled with the men, and they were drinking.” It would become a stain that you could not wash off. I would only go to small gatherings held by my close friends, a cookout or something like that. Even if those were mixed, men and women, it was considered okay, because I already knew everyone who was there.
And yet still I lived a very different life from many Saudi women in the compound. Those who were married and lived in family housing would often cover up in their abayas and would not leave the house. There were men whose wives I never saw, men who never spoke about their wives, who never uttered their names. But I knew the wives of my non-Saudi friends. I would be invited to their homes and they would come to my place. We would all cook together. For most Saudis, life was different. They were still following tradition.
Everything about the compound was convenient. We had a supermarket, open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and we had many American-style establishments, like beauty salons and car shops. We had a beautiful eighteen-hole golf course with a nice restaurant, and baseball and soccer fields. Aboudi played both. I would take him to his games and sit there and cheer for him; I just loved it. There was even a theater that would show films and host dance performances, concerts, and musicals. Once I stepped outside the compound, I became aware of how silent the Saudi world is. There’s no music, even at the mall, no other sounds filtering through the background. There were no movies or performances. There was only street noise: tires on the roadway, brakes, engines, the scattered honking of horns. As he grew older, I took Aboudi to many performances, hoping that he would come to love singing and music as I did.
Scattered around the compound were restaurants and cafés, without partitions to separate men and women. Outside the compound, men and women have to sit in different, walled-off sections, and restaurants and cafés have to close at prayer time. But none of those rules applied inside Aramco. Once he had learned to sit in his seat and eat with utensils, I would take
Aboudi many nights to the Dhahran dining hall. For twelve riyals, about $3.00, we could have a five-course meal. Families could sit together, men and women, in the dining halls and at the parks. It was a normal life, which made it truly another world.
But Aboudi would not be able to go to school in the compound. The official reason was that the school didn’t teach Arabic, but I didn’t believe that. The school was an American school, with mixed classes, and mixed education was one taboo the Saudis government would not let its citizens break.
At night, Aboudi and I would return to our home. We would pass through the wooden gate into the tiny yard, and then through the door to the house. The floor was covered in white tile and I had a white, L-shaped sofa in the living room. Our kitchen opened right onto the living room, American-style. Upstairs, off our bedroom, was a small balcony. Sometimes, Aboudi and I would sit out on the balcony, look up, and count the stars. He would give each of them names. He would say this star is Reemah, the name of one of his cousins, and that star is Leenah. Sometimes I would ask him which star is Mommy, and he would say, “Mommy is the yellow star with the laptop and the purse.” We kept looking for the yellow star with the purse, but we could never quite find it. Of all the spaces in my little town house, I loved that balcony the most.
But in January 2009, I found myself sitting under a different constellation of stars, a very long way from Aboudi and from my home.
Aramco has an extensive professional exchange program. If you are accepted, you go to work for another company in another country for a year or more in order to gain experience and technical expertise that you could not learn at Aramco. The company pays the employee’s salary and more or less all expenses, so he or she is working for the foreign company for free. But it isn’t a traditional exchange program, because no one from the foreign company arrives to work at Aramco in return. I applied for the program and interviewed in 2008 to work at IBM in data management and cybersecurity. Then the global financial crisis hit. IBM had no openings. But EMC2, a data storage company based in New England, did. In January 2009, I boarded a plane to Logan International Airport, bound ultimately for Nashua, New Hampshire. And I was alone. My ex-husband had forbidden me from taking Aboudi with me. We would be apart for twelve months, communicating only over Skype. Professionally, it was an incredible experience. Personally, it was a disaster to be separated from my son.
I arrived on January 17 to snowflakes falling. I had never seen real snow, only the man-made frozen water at Ski Dubai. I was met by two Aramco colleagues, a husband and wife, who were already working at EMC2. They helped me with everything, including finding an apartment, buying and assembling furniture, and getting directions for where to go. Apart from missing Aboudi desperately, it was the easiest move I had ever made. I did not need a man to sign my lease agreement. I did not need a man to accompany me to the Social Security office. I could do everything completely on my own. It was so “normal.”
Right away I wanted to get a driver’s license, but my one hour of instruction with my brother was not enough for the state of New Hampshire. The motor vehicle office insisted that I spend two months in a driver’s education program, studying in the classroom and then training on the road. For seven weeks, I left work in the afternoon at 4:00 and went to driving school from five to seven. I studied with a bunch of kids: our teacher was a Muslim, an American who had married a Malaysian woman and had converted. It was funny to think of a Muslim man teaching a Saudi woman to drive in the cold of New Hampshire. I failed the first written test because I didn’t know miles and feet (as in how many miles per hour you could drive or how many feet to park away from the curb or stop from a school bus): I only knew kilometers and meters. But when I retook the same test ten days later, I passed.
I was not scared of the road test when the time came, except for one question: Where are you from? I had been told that if anyone knew I was from Saudi Arabia, I would be given a hard time. Of course, when I got in the car with a large, bald American man, the first question he asked me was, “Where are you from?”
I felt panicked, terrified even. My palms started to sweat and I kept wiping them on my pants. I couldn’t hold the steering wheel.
Finally, the examiner said, “You’ve wiped your hands on your pants five times already. What is going on?”
I glanced over and blurted out, “People told me that if I had to say where I was from, I would have a really hard time. I’m really terrified that I’ll fail.” The examiner made no reply.
I failed the reverse parking section at the end, but he passed me anyway. (I passed what many consider the harder part, parallel parking. My friends often give me the wheel if they need to parallel park their cars.) I waited two weeks and my first driver’s license came in the mail, granted by the state of New Hampshire. It was set to expire on the day my visa ended. I felt like I had been cheated for all my hard work. It was like in the children’s story “Cinderella,” where at midnight the beautiful golden coach turns back into a pumpkin. Later, I learned that I could apply for a driver’s license in Massachusetts and that license would be issued for five years, so before I left the States, I got a Massachusetts license, and that was the license I carried with me back home in Saudi Arabia.
My first few months in the United States were very lonely. I found people in New Hampshire to be careful and conservative, reserved, and not that interested in making new friends. Most of the people I met assumed that with my dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin, I was Hispanic; a few immediately started speaking to me in Spanish. At first I told people I was from “SA,” but I quickly learned most thought that meant I was South African. Even if I said that I was from Saudi Arabia, I usually received a blank stare. If I explained that it was in the Middle East, people would respond by saying, “Israel?” If I said it was a country in the Arabian Peninsula or said that we have the world’s largest oil reserves or even started talking about camels, they still wouldn’t comprehend. But then if I said one name, Osama bin Laden, I got an “oh” of recognition. Some would add, “That’s a horrible country. You should not go back.”
Slowly I made some friends. Marcus, an American originally from Argentina, taught me about cross-country skiing, gave me a Red Sox sweatshirt, took me to coed soccer games, and showed me Boston; Kenta, whose parents were Japanese, would eat lunch with me at work; and a big guy from Alabama, David, taught me photography and took me for a ride on his Harley. My friend Randy would send me back my emails with all kinds of marks to correct my English, and taught me everything I know about baseball. And I found that once I got to know people, they became real friends, friends you would have for life.
Driving helped. Once I had my license, I could drive to Boston. Aramco paid for my rental car for my entire stay in New Hampshire. It was no small irony to think that Saudi Arabia’s largest company was openly paying for a Saudi woman to drive abroad. I signed up for a couple of social Meetups and there I met an African American Muslim girl, Muslimah, who had moved to Boston from Chicago. She no longer practiced Islam, but she had been raised as a Muslim. She introduced me to theater, musicals, orchestras, jazz performances, swing dance, and stand-up comedy. We saw productions of the musical Cats for $15 a ticket in Manchester, New Hampshire. We went skiing, and when I turned thirty, she and I went skydiving together. I used every long weekend to travel to places like Niagara Falls with my friend from Alabama and my neighbor from Honduras and her two children.
I enjoyed the weather. I had not seen rain for three years before I arrived in New Hampshire, and the first time it rained, I was so excited. When Saudis see rain, our first impulse is to run outside. I jumped up and down in the office, yelling, “It’s raining, let’s go outside.” My coworkers looked at me as if I were crazy. In Saudi Arabia, we pray for God to send us the rain as a great mercy. In New Hampshire, people wished for the rain to go away. I never stopped loving each rainy day.
But I had so many things to learn. One of the first Meetup events I went to was at a res
taurant. There were hooks for jackets by the front door and Muslimah left her coat on one. I did the same, but in the pockets I left my phone, my wallet, my money, and my keys. I came back to find my phone and my money gone—thankfully, the thief had left my keys and my driver’s license.
The first play Muslimah and I went to was Spring Awakening, in which two men kiss. I could not believe what I was seeing. I almost fainted watching it onstage in front of me, because in Islam, of course, homosexuality is forbidden, and even punishable by death. Muslimah turned to me, laughing, and said, “I enjoy watching your face more than watching the actors.”
For the first time, I saw people reading in public. They would sit with a book under the trees, in subways, in cafés, in waiting rooms, on the bus. I was mesmerized. I started carrying a book with me everywhere I went. I found the public library in Nashua and signed up for a library card, which I still have. I borrowed many books; it was the first time I had ever been in a public library.
Slowly, I became Americanized. I dressed up for St. Patrick’s Day, shocked to discover that even though the Saudi flag is green, I had nothing green in my closet. I learned that when I took out my credit card after a meal, I should say “Let’s split it,” or else I would end up paying the whole check. I quickly learned that ordering one meal in a restaurant would provide enough leftovers for a whole week. As a Saudi flying in the US, I also learned what a “random check” means at the airport. I learned that men kiss women on one cheek in greeting, but women do not kiss each other like that, basically the extreme opposite of home.
I also learned many things that I never expected. All my young friends in Boston, in their late twenties and early thirties, were overwhelmed with college debt. They were very educated, but at what price? Even those who had what could be considered good jobs often worked second jobs as waiters and waitresses to try to pay off their enormous student loans. I had friends who waited for free microwaves to be posted on Craigslist because they couldn’t afford to buy new ones. That shocked me. They lived with roommates and would circle around the city for an hour looking for a parking space on the street, rather than pay to park in a garage. I never thought about paying for parking. If we went to a restaurant, they looked at all the prices on the menu before they ordered. I realized that this debt would rule their lives for years, while in Saudi Arabia, I had been paid $300 a month just to study at my university.
Daring to Drive Page 21
