On the morning of Wednesday, October 9, 2002, my parents saw me off at the Jeddah airport, and I promised them that I would live up to their expectations. In my head were a thousand questions—not least of which was where I would spend the night when I arrived; in my wallet, I had just 500 riyals. When I worked in Aramco’s Expatriate Recruitment Unit, we had a very specific protocol for how we welcomed our new foreign employees. We would meet them at the airport, show them where they would be working, and then give them a complete tour of the compound, so they would be oriented and feel at home. “Here’s the bank,” we would say, “here are the supermarket and laundry facilities; here are the post office and the barber, and here are the cinema and the restaurant.” Finally we’d stop at the housing office, where they would receive a key to their house, equipped with everything they could possibly need: new towels, shampoo, toothbrushes, dish and laundry soap, and enough food for a week. I was looking forward to receiving the same kind of treatment when I arrived; after twenty-three years as a woman in Saudi Arabia, I should have known better.
I landed at Dammam airport and collected my small bag. Everything I owned—clothes, shoes, all my possessions except for a few books—fit into one small suitcase. There was no one there to meet me, not Uncle Ali or anyone else. I took one of the airport taxis and asked for a receipt to give to the employment office in Dhahran. There was nobody to greet me there, either. I felt lost. The only thing I could think of was to head to Abdulhadi’s office. He’d been so helpful to me during the summer; perhaps he could be again.
He greeted me warmly. “I don’t know where to go from here,” I explained. “I don’t even know where I’m supposed to work.”
“Don’t worry, Manal,” he reassured me. He asked Uncle Ali to drive me to my department and told me to call if I needed anything.
“Actually, I don’t even know where I’ll be staying tonight,” I confessed. “Aramco won’t provide me with housing.”
He told me that my department was obligated to provide a hotel room if I needed one, but he wasn’t sure how it would be done, since women weren’t permitted to rent a room without a mahram or guardian. Thanking him for his advice, I headed to my new office with the driver.
When I reached the area belonging to my department, it looked deserted. It was isolated from the rest of the Aramco complex, and the collection of single-story, prefabricated buildings was not very inviting. Their cheerless sandy color did nothing to help. But at least I had arrived. Gathering myself, I entered building 3133 and asked for the Information Protection Division. I already knew two men in the division. The division planner, a man in his forties, was the head of the Planning Group. He escorted me to the office belonging to the head of the Compliance Assessment Group. This man was to be my new boss. My boss was probably in his early thirties. He wore a light beard and Western-style pants and a shirt; something about his mouth reminded me of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. The division planner, on the other hand, wore traditional men’s robes and a shemagh. Both of them had been part of the team that interviewed me. As he welcomed me, my new boss said, “I had to persuade the rest of the group heads to let you work with us.” I felt very happy that more than one group had wanted to hire me, and a little of my uncertainty faded away.
The division planner gave me a tour. “Here’s your office,” he said, pointing to a cubicle. It contained a beige aluminum table with a laminate wooden surface and an office chair with wheels.
Where was everything else? I wondered to myself. How could I protect any information from here? Only later I was given a desktop computer with an Internet connection and a phone.
We passed by the workshop, a small room with a number of servers. Inside sat two men, close to my age, both engrossed in the screen of a laptop. “Amro is your colleague from the Compliance Assessment group,” the division planner told me, “and Khalid is an information security consultant, visiting from America.”
My ears pricked up when I heard his title. “What are you doing?” I asked, the first in a torrent of questions.
“We’re carrying out a penetration test,” the men told me. The new terminology was like hieroglyphics to me.
The tour continued; here a male colleague, here another male colleague, and in the next room yet another. When we’d finished, I asked the division planner if he had left out anyone in the division. “No, Manal,” he told me. “I’m quite sure we haven’t missed anyone.”
“So there are no girls here apart from me?”
“No, there aren’t.”
That was how things were and how things remained for the ten years I worked at Aramco. Not a single woman other than me was appointed to the Information Protection Division as a professional technical employee, except for one female contract employee who worked with us for one year. We had another full-time female employee who joined us in 2008, but she had a degree in English literature and did not work on any technical projects.
I mentioned to the division planner that I didn’t have a place to stay that night. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. He made a number of phone calls before informing me that he had booked me a room at the Dhahran International Hotel, ten minutes from the office.
“I’ve booked a room in my name and at the division’s expense,” he told me. “As an unaccompanied female, they won’t let you book a room there yourself. Try not to draw anyone’s attention when you’re going in and out. If anyone realizes you’re there alone, you’ll have big problems with the religious police.”
I thanked him profusely; but now, I had a second dilemma: “How will I get to work tomorrow?”
He gave me the number of a taxi firm and told me that the division would pay my fare for the first week. “You have a week to find your own accommodation and vacate the room,” he added.
Although there was a five-star sign over the hotel’s entrance, my room was dirty and the furniture worn. But I was too relieved to care. I called Mama to reassure her. “Don’t worry, Mama,” I told her, when she asked about where I was staying. “They gave me a house inside the Aramco compound, and I’ll use the Aramco bus to get to work. I’m just fine, and tell Abouya the same.”