Something made me remember meeting another full-time Aramco employee named Lamia earlier during my summer internship. She was also Saudi, a little older, from Jeddah, and she had complained to me that she’d been living in a room in Steineke Hall, a hotel-like residence in the Aramco compound, for six months. Several times, the staff had notified her that she had to vacate her room and find a place to live, but she had never been able to find anywhere else in the city. I went to Steineke Hall and talked to the receptionist. Lamia was still living there. I sat down to wait for her in the lobby. When Lamia arrived, she recognized me immediately. She told me she’d received a warning from her department and had to move out at the end of the week. “My father’s coming from Jeddah to find me a home,” she said. “You’re welcome to share with me, if you like. We can split the rent and bills.”
I threw my arms around her, on the verge of tears. “Oh, God, thank you,” I cried. “I swear, He has sent you from heaven. I didn’t know where to go or what I was going to do.” That night, for the first time since I had arrived, I truly slept.
We found an apartment, and Lamia’s father signed a pledge permitting his “daughters” to live by themselves and guaranteeing their proper behavior—although each night we left a pair of men’s shoes along with our own outside the apartment door (it is Saudi custom to remove one’s shoes) so that our neighbors would think we had a proper male chaperone living with us. The lease agreement was in Lamia’s father’s name, though we were the ones who paid the rent.
But while the apartment solved our most serious problem, it created a new one: how would we get to work? We couldn’t drive, and Saudi Arabia had no public transportation. We discovered that the Aramco bus, which transported employees from Khobar City to the company’s offices each day, passed our building at 6:15 every morning. Seeing that it picked up a fellow employee on the same street, we went down at 6:00 a.m. to wait for it. We should have known that as Saudi women, it could never be that simple.
As we climbed up the steps of the bus, the Filipino driver gestured for us to stop. “Madam, where are you going?” he asked.
Lamia and I exchanged looks. “Apparently we’re getting on the bus!” we replied.
“Sorry, you can’t,” came his answer.
“Why? We’re both Aramco employees.”
“Women aren’t allowed to take the employees’ bus, it’s only for men.”
“Well, are there any buses for women?” we asked.
“No, madam, sorry!” he replied. “You must get off.”
I hadn’t known it when I applied to the company, but Aramco had a long history of discrimination, starting with Saudi nationals. In the 1950s, there were repeated strikes and demonstrations. Saudi employees both demanded better working conditions, including a forty-hour workweek, and protested against having so many Americans and so much American control at Aramco. The Saudi authorities were by turns conciliatory and repressive; they ultimately sought to identify the workers behind the protests and remove them. While they did grant labor reforms, they also undertook a campaign of arrests and torture to crush the strikes.
By the time I arrived, Aramco had been entirely Saudi-owned for more than two decades, but it still had discriminatory practices in place. Women were the ones most affected, Saudi and non-Saudi females alike. A non-Saudi woman had to be unmarried to be hired by Aramco, regardless of her age. After I was allowed to live in Aramco housing, I had an Indian neighbor in her fifties. She had been married for thirty years, but although she lived with her husband, she was forced to conceal her marriage and state that she was single in order to keep her job. Female employees of any nationality were prohibited from using the Aramco employees’ bus that transported workers between the cities and the compound—they could only use the recreational buses that traveled to the mall or to another Aramco residential compound. And although women were permitted to drive inside the residential compounds, they weren’t allowed to use Aramco cars, or to register for driving lessons offered by the company, or even to be present as observers at the company’s safe driving and defensive driving training sessions.
The restrictions on Saudi-born women were even greater. Before being hired, a Saudi woman had to submit to a blood test to ensure that she was not pregnant. Pregnant women could not start work. A classmate of mine from university was about to be hired to work in the Information Protection Division as a full-time employee, but she failed the medical exam when her blood test revealed that she was expecting. For years, Saudi women employed at Aramco could not apply for the homeownership loan offered to male Saudi employees, they could not receive a housing allowance, nor could they apply for a scholarship program for foreign study abroad. When I worked there, Aramco offered women only six weeks’ maternity leave, and it still does not provide day-care facilities for employees’ children, though Saudi labor codes require a company nursery if there are more than fifty female employees in one city or more than ten children. Women are also not permitted to take jobs in the oil fields or refineries; they are restricted to office work.
At the end of October, 2002, the month Lamia and I moved into our new apartment, Lamia, our colleague Afaf, and I wrote a letter of protest to Aramco’s management demanding our right to live in the compound. Though I didn’t recognize it at the time, this was my first taste of activism. Eight and a half years later, I would be driving a car through the streets of Khobar.
9
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Love and the Falafel Man
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As Lamia and I were starting our new lives in our Khobar apartment, my sister was graduating from medical school and beginning a job at the university hospital. Muna moved my parents and our brother from Mecca to a nicer neighborhood in Jeddah, paying the rent for the first six months. The two of us agreed to share the payments after that. My parents insisted on transferring their secondhand furniture from the old apartment to the new one, but I was determined that nothing from our old life would move with us; I wanted to cast off those miserable memories. I bought everything for their new home, from the furniture and appliances to the spoons and dishes in the kitchen. I bought mobile phones for my parents and my brother so we could keep in touch easily, and began giving small allowances to Mama and Muhammad.