Characters Welcome

I don't know if Saudi Arabia attracts crazy people, or if people become crazy as a result of living here, but either way, there seems to be an above average amount of crazy people living here.  Luckily, the people I have met so far are all the charmingly eccentric kind of crazy, not the scary kind.  So  I would like to share with you some of the characters I've met so far.  Disclaimer:  on the off chance any of them might stumble upon this blog, and because I happen to like making up names, I will use pseudonyms.  I have also changed some details and made small adjustments to preserve anonymity, and there might be the odd artistic embellishment here or there as well.

The first person I met in the company apartments in Dammam was an Egyptian guy.  Actually, I have never learned his name so I won’t bother making one up for him since I simply call him “the Egyptian guy.”  Anyway, the Egyptian guy technically manages the apartment building, but seems to have at least 4 Saudi men working for him, so I’m not entirely sure what he actually does other than tell the men to do things.  He always wears a knee brace, but not on his knee.   He keeps it on the thickest part of his calf, and sideways.  Officially, there is no smoking inside the apartments, but I have never seen him without a cigarette no matter where he is.  For the longest time, I lived right across the hall from him, and there were always at least three pairs of flip flops outside his door.  Oddly, I never saw him wear any shoes or flip flops at all, but he seemed to like having them decorate his doorway.   Luckily, he is good at changing light bulbs.

The very next day, I met Rosemary, who at first seemed like a friendly Texan, but as time went on became stranger and stranger.  She is an orphan, and the youngest of nine children.  Whenever she does something MacGyver like, for instance, making toothpaste from salt and baking soda, she likes to remind people that she knows how to do these things because she was an orphan.  Whenever Rosemary didn't have food, which happened more and more often as the end of the month came and went and we still hadn't been paid, she refused our offers of food and money and assured us all that she knew how to handle hunger because she was an orphan.  When we were grading papers, she told us she learned how to spell by copying the school books from her friends because they couldn't afford to buy books because she was an orphan.  The more I talked with Rosemary, the more frequent and tangential were her reminders of having been an orphan.  She has a bad back because she was an orphan.  She doesn’t like TV because she was an orphan.  Her favorite color is brown because she was an orphan.  She buys tuna fish because she was an orphan.  She can’t fall asleep before 10pm because she was an orphan.  After several days of this, she asked me quite sincerely over lunch one day, if I knew that she had been an orphan, and to please not mention it to anyone else because she didn’t like to talk about personal matters.  I assured her the secret was safe with me, but thought to myself that it clearly wasn’t safe with her, and anyone who didn’t know she was an orphan by now must be hard of hearing, or comatose. 

That evening on the shopping bus, Rosemary - who doesn’t like to talk about personal matters - told us the story of how she came to be in Saudi Arabia.  She had been living a normal life, apartment, job, happy, when one day her 18 year old daughter showed up at her door with a two year old.  Rosemary had not seen this daughter, Mercy, whom, like her five other children she had named after virtues, since she had run away at 15. Rosemary had no idea her daughter had been  pregnant and had a child, but was excited to be reunited with her.  So Mercy and granddaughter moved in, and Mercy promptly began going out all night with various men and arriving home at 5, 6, 7 in the morning, too tired to take care of her child, leaving Rosemary to get the child up and breakfasted before she left for work.  After several months of this, Rosemary was obviously fed up, despite being an orphan who could handle everything, and told her daughter to take care of her own “brat” or get out.  The daughter, Mercy, still drunk and agitated, attacked Rosemary, who took the grandchild into the bedroom away from the violent daughter and called the police.  Somehow, when the police arrived, Mercy claimed that she was the one who had been assaulted, and that Rosemary was trying to take her child, and so the police arrested Rosemary, and she spent 6 months in jail.  Meanwhile, Mercy stole her car and left, the apartment was re-rented to a new tenant, and Rosemary lost her job.  When she finally got out, she went to live with her mother (yes, I know, how does an orphan have a mother – I didn’t think it appropriate to ask for clarification on the bus with everyone listening, seeing as how I was told she was an orphan in the strictest of confidence), who suggested she take a job overseas so that her children would stop taking advantage of her.  So now here she is.  Despite this turbulent often unbelievable past, and her propensity to talk about it, I liked Rosemary.  She was eternally optimistic and seemingly indifferent to her frequent bad luck, preferring instead to focus on helping those around her. Thanks to her, I now own a bowl, plate, fork, cup, spoon, and knife, and have expanded my movie collection by quite a bit.  In addition to all the orphan stories, she also gave me a lot of good information about teaching, the company, and life in Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for her, she is being transferred to a different University, the one she had wanted to go to in the first place. I will miss her, and I hope she is happy in her new position.

Most of the other women teachers are only mildly odd, and don’t have pasts nearly as interesting as Rosemary’s.  One woman from New Orleans is especially protective of “her seat” on the bus and has been known to take a taxi rather than sit in a different spot if hers is taken.  Another girl wears copper necklaces and bracelets and swears that they help her arthritis even though she can’t be more than 25.  Another teacher enjoys telling you random facts about everything from the origins of make-up to the mating habits of seahorses, only none of them are remotely true.  When you catch on, she throws her head back and laughs so hard the only thing you can do is join in.  A few of the younger girls disappear each day after work to visit “compounds” which are walled and gated communities for expats, often with a pool in the center, where abayas are not required and who knows what else goes on.  They appear again in the morning, often taking a taxi to work instead of the bus, and whisper conspiratorially about their adventures in a back corner.

There are some strange male teachers as well.  Fortunately, I don’t have much interaction with them since the only time we spend together is on the bus where conversations between the sexes are frowned on.  Still, it isn't hard to spot crazy from a distance.  Hermatroid,  the male version of our nearly powerless female boss, is good at spotting crazy.  He is from South Africa, and he always sits in the front seat next to the driver.  He spends the entire trip yelling at crazy drivers, telling our driver to cut certain people off, to speed up, to slow down, to try another route, to not turn her, or to turn there. He is basically the worst  backseat driver I have ever know, with road rage thrown in.  I feel sorry for our driver, I would never put up with the constant screaming, but he never seems to mind.  He always has a kind of half smile on his face, and I secretly hope he’s rolling his eyes on the inside like the rest of us.  If Hermatroid is the entertainment for those who sit near the front, Homer does his best to entertain the group in the middle.  He is the only one who ever tries to engage women in conversation, but he only does that because the men have learned to ignore him.  He talks incessantly, laughs at all his own jokes (which occasionally aren’t bad) and makes speeches about the oppressive life in Saudi Arabia.  You will remember his valiant effort to save the women from having to stay late?  This weeks crusade is to get the bus fixed.  This morning it began to shake more than usual on the way to school and the culprit is probably a loose or nearly flat tire.  He felt we all should send emails complaining about the rough ride and questioning the safety of a bus that wasn't taken to a proper dealership for maintenance.  In the morning, most of us sleep through this, but in the afternoon, one of the younger men tries to drown him out by drawing pictures of obscure 80s movies on his tablet and making the other guys try to guess the titles.  Another of the British male teachers went with us on a recent shopping trip to a local mall.  He stopped at every perfume shop in the mall, each time having them spray a different part of his body.  Then, after 20 minutes or so (so the scent had time to “settle”), he would run up and say, “smell my armpit… do you like it better than my elbow?  I think the left wrist smells the nicest, what do you think…..”  I’m sure he is a lovely man, but I never want to be around that many different perfumes at once ever again.

There is one person, one woman, who takes the cake.  She is by far, the craziest among us. The queen of crazy.  Tara is a bleach blond woman between 30 and 50 who wears heavy electric blue eye shadow with Cleopatra eyeliner and the reddest red lipstick I have ever seen.  The first time I saw her she was limping exaggeratedly down the hallway and whispering to herself, someone else in the hallway inquired if she was alright, and she gave no indication that she had heard.  The second time I saw her, she was in a bus waiting to go on a shopping trip.  At first there were only three of us going, but shortly, two more people arrived and Tara became agitated and shot out of the van like it was on fire and ran-walked back inside the apartments.  She hadn’t said anything and we weren’t sure if she was coming back or not, so we waited 15 minutes and when she didn’t come back, we went ahead and left.  Apparently, it was too crowded for her in the van.  I saw her again at the University one day, though she hadn’t been on the bus that morning.  She was arguing with Chris, our boss who has no authority, about money, and going home, and waving her arms about furiously.  The other teachers filled me in on what was going on.  Tara had resigned about six weeks before hand.  But she couldn’t leave until she had received her passport back from the company in Riyadh.  They took a few weeks to get it back to her, and when it finally arrived, she told them she needed to be paid before she could leave.  Since she had not stayed the whole 90 day trial period, they did not want to pay her for what she had already worked, or, they weren’t going to pay her for the two weeks it had taken them to send the passport, or something.  There was some unclear dispute about money that she felt she was owed and that she decided she wasn't leaving until she got.  As the weeks rolled by, her mental state, which apparently wasn't all that stable before, began to deteriorate.  She frequently walks by herself alone where we live which is such a notoriously bad  part of town that it is hard to convince taxi drivers to come here.  When she crosses the street, she does so without looking and not seeming to see anything but what is directly in front of her.  Now, that is pretty risky business on any street, but here in Saudi Arabia, crossing the street is like being on the hardest level of Frogger.  There is constant traffic and drivers are notorious for speeding and changing lanes whenever they feel like it. When you cross the street, even when you cross carefully, waiting for a long gap, you take your life into your hands. We are frankly all amazed that Tara hasn’t been killed, and everyone leans out into the hallway to check if anyone has seen Tara whenever we hear police sirens outside the apartment. Less terrifying, but perhaps more annoying, the people who live next door to her claim to hear hysterical laughing coming from her room at strange hours in the night, and the occasional chant singing of popular Disney songs.  Teachers who worked with her before she resigned claim she is an absolute genius at grammar, and can write the most engaging emails.  But they also said she was never all there, and that they had overheard comments about her parents having custody and needing to give permission for her to come in the first place.  Perhaps she is somewhere on the autism spectrum, and being in Saudi has exacerbated it.  The good news is Tara finally got paid on Wednesday, only about eight weeks late for her and 13 days late for the rest of us.  She got a flight home that same day, and is now back at home with her father. Hopefully, she is doing much better.

I'm sure if you took a poll of all the teachers, I might rank up there myself on the crazy meter.  For one thing, I'm known for wearing sweaters in 100 degree temperatures (the air conditioning is so cold!).  For another, I don't have a purse or wear make-up.  Since these are really the only things that show over your abaya, accessories are the only way you have of making yourself stand out.  It is exceedingly rare to find a woman who doesn't take full advantage of flashy and exorbitant bracelets, shoes, purses or make-up here.  I also always fall asleep on the bus, and I'm sure I usually drool.  And today, I was so thirsty because I had left my water at home, I went around collecting all the abandoned half empty bottles the students leave behind in the classrooms and drank those. I'm sure if anyone had seen me they would have thought I was very strange. Of course, I haven't been here long enough to expose my stubborn streak, and I'm still too timid and unsure of Saudi culture to be my normal independent self, and I'm sure many would consider those crazy traits as well. I guess we will see by the end of my time here if I have gained a lot of new eccentricities to add to my current ones.  Then we will know for sure if it's Saudi life that makes people crazy, or if crazy people are just drawn to Saudi Arabia.