Saudi America

One great thing about being sent to Dammam is that a friend of mine from the Peace Corps in Albania is living only about a half hour away.  He has been working off and on in Saudi Arabia for about four years, so he is my go to guy when I have questions.  This weekend I got to see him again for the first time since 2009, and met his wife and one year old daughter.  He works for Aramco, the big Saudi oil company, and so he lives in the Aramco camp, which is basically a self contained oasis of America in the middle of the desert.

He picked me up from my apartment in his new black SUV, and we drove along listening to the radio, which is something I hadn't noticed was missing until then.  It is technically illegal to listen to music in public, so I hadn't heard any radio in any of the buses or vans I had been driven around in so far.  Hearing it again was a little strange, especially since it was a cd from his daughters music class for toddlers.  Yes, a music class for toddlers.  His daughter also attends a swim class and has play dates with other kids her age.  Basically, she has a more active social life than any grown woman I know who lives here.  The further we drove away from my neighborhood, the nicer things seemed to get.  The sides of the roads were cleaner and the buildings were newer.  We even passed an Ikea.  Eventually we turned off onto the Aramco property.  There is a main gate with traffic police, then there is a second gate with Aramco security officers, and finally a third gate where I had to register as a visitor.  I handed over the copy of my passport with my companies stamp on it, and they entered me into the system, gave me back my copy, and we were on our way into the inner sanctum.

Damage from the sandstorm at the Aramco Camp

Immediately, upon entering the camp, the scenery changes dramatically.  There are carefully landscaped lawns, and sidewalks and palm trees lining the roads.   This was the day after the big sandstorm, so many of the trees had been blown over, but there were still hundreds of trees and greenery everywhere. There were even flowers in bloom.  We drove passed a golf course, a skate park, and even a bmx racing course.  The streets all had names like Rolling Meadows, Pleasant Lane, and Sudden Valley (I could see marinating a chicken in that).  Except, oddly enough,  the street they lived on, which was called Nomad Place.  We pulled into the driveway, where there was a garage, and went inside.  It was amazing.  The house was big and clean and open and full of light, and not at all depressing the way my tiny room was.  They have a kitchen and a laundry room and an actual bathtub.  It felt like walking into any suburban American home, if it had been the late 80s.  Even the glass of water they gave me was the exact same glass we had in our house growing up.  It seems that the last major renovation to the camp had been sometime in the 80s, so things more or less felt like stepping back in time.  There are even telephone booths scattered around.  I had no idea telephone booths still existed!  They seemed to have everything you could want, including a house boy, and a gardener to manage the strange lumpy grass they have, which he called Korean grass, but which, to me, looks like a bunch of camel humps, so I'm going to call it camel grass.  It was strange to me how something only about 30 minutes away could be so very different from everything I had experienced so far.

Korean Grass

After some catching up and deep exploration of the strange grass, we all piled back into the car to head to lunch at a Thai restaurant, located in the "little Manila" section of town.  We parked in a parking garage where the concrete was coated in some kind of rubber, so the tires made that squeaky noise your shoes make in gym class.  It was strange, but not as strange as walking through a mall where virtually everyone was Filipino and male.  We left the mall and walked through a market area in the street and over to the Thai restaurant.  We walked straight through the restaurant, into a kitchen area and then up a narrow set of stairs to the "family seating" section of the restaurant, which allows men and women to sit together and eat.  Downstairs is for males only.  I'm glad we were upstairs though, otherwise we would have missed out on the six different types of wall coverings in the room to compliment the 4 different kinds of chairs and tables.  There were a series of pictures on the wall that ranged from beach scenes reminiscent of the Outer Banks in North Carolina, to Camels, to African Safaris, and Thai shadow puppet theater.  Perhaps a travel agency had been going out of business and the restaurant decided to buy up all the artwork.  Still, they were all different sizes and in different frames, so even that seems unlikely.  To tie it all together, they used the same lighting fixtures I had in my bedroom as a child.  The eighties prevail here, too.

The food was amazing. Especially since I've been surviving here on spaghetti, oatmeal, and bananas, which are my foods of choice because they are both cheap, and hard to screw up.  But the best part was the company.  Mostly, we teachers tend to complain, as our frustrations are what unite us.  All week, I hear complaining about the company, the students, the accommodations, and life in Saudi in general.  It was so nice to be around people who weren't miserable, and to talk about things unrelated to work.  I wondered if part of it is having a baby.  It's hard to be miserable when you are around kids, especially at this age. What is more exciting than watching someone discover something new every five minutes?  Or watching her get pleasure out of the smallest things, like getting rocked back and forth on a chair.  Every smile, or laugh, or strange expression makes you want to smile and laugh and make faces back.  You become so wrapped up in her tiny world, in all the little things she does, and wants, and needs, that you kind of forget to focus on yourself.  All the things you were frustrated or worried about, the things that seemed so important just two or three hours ago, seem minor and insignificant.

After lunch we drove around for the grand tour of downtown Khobar and the corniche.  I expected to be able to see the Persian Gulf, but instead, I saw McDonalds, KFC, Taco Bell, Chili's, and TGIFridays, and that was just on one block.  The area is full of American restaurants, department stores, shops and malls.  There are also a dozen constructions sites with large buildings in various stages of completion.  My friend tells me it is common for projects to be started, and then abandoned part way through construction.  There is one particularly tall building built right out into the water, that was supposed to have a rotating restaurant on the top for views of the Gulf and downtown.  Apparently, the building is complete, and has been for several years, but has never opened.  What a shame.  We drove along through several roundabouts, each one having an increasingly strange sculpture in the middle.  One had rainbow colored triangular bars arranged by increasing height in a semi-circle, and we joked about it being a Saudi tribute to gay rights.  There are rumors that because of the extreme segregation of the sexes, there is higher prevalence of homosexuality here.  This rumor is probably confounded by the common but non-sexual practice of men holding hands in public.

The Aramco walking path

When the baby had fallen asleep, we returned to the camp and decided to go for a walk, now that is was evening and it wasn't so hot.  Here on the camp, you don't have to wear an abaya, it is somehow exempt from the reaches of the dreaded religious police.  So we set off, sans abayas, for the paved walking path Aramco built that takes you around the golf course, and is carefully lit with streetlamps and lined with various beautiful plants.  We made our way a quarter of the way around and then cut back across the road to a park, where on the weekends, an ice cream truck parks outside the gate.  Ice cream in hand, we strolled through the park, where a few men were finishing up their evening prayers, and women in abayas, hijabs, and niqabs (the full ninja mask that reveals only your eyes), watched their children climb on the playground.

Aramco park in the evening

Unlike many compounds that house westerners only, this camp includes all employees of Aramco, including Saudi's.  I hadn't minded not having my abaya while we were walking and passing only others who were not wearing abayas, but here, where most of the women were covered, I felt strangely exposed.  The park included a small pond, and you could feel the air cool down as you approached the edge.  Even here there were trees down from the sandstorm, and we had to do some off-road strollering to get by and make our way back to their house.

It was a nice break from the reality I had been getting used to, but I was also strangely ready to return home to my tiny room. No matter how welcome you are, you still always feel like a guest, and sometimes you need to feel at home, even if that home is little better than a closet.  It's amazing how quickly you learn to settle in, and how soon you begin to think of a space as your own, even if you know it won't be permanent.

As he drove me back, he asked if I thought I would stay, if I could stick it out.  I thought about it, and realized, I'm really not unhappy here.  There are things that could be better.  But I have running water and electricity, and internet even!  If I leave, I know it won't be because of the accommodations, or even the strict rules or the Saudi people.  If I leave, I think it will be because of the company I work for, because of the changes and deceptions in the contract.  Or to be with the family and friends I left behind.  Right now, I don't feel so far away from them.  The internet keeps them close.  But I know that as time goes on, the novelty of being here will wear off, and we will all begin to get caught up in our own busy lives, and forget to stay in touch, and then, that will be the real test.