After all this was done, I had no money left to buy furniture for my own room. Night after night, I slept on the floor; for the first six months, I lived out of the suitcase I had traveled with. The happiness that my family’s new, comfortable life had brought them—with water that flowed from the taps all month long and a clean and tidy neighborhood—was more than enough to keep me going.
I finally told my parents the truth about Aramco’s terrible housing rules and introduced them to Lamia and to her family, so they would feel reassured about how the situation had been resolved. Happily, my parents accepted the idea of my living in the city. “So long as you’re living with your older colleague, and so long as we know her family in Jeddah, you have our blessing,” they said. When, finally, I had some money left over for me, I bought something very special for our Khobar apartment, one of the things I had loved most about the house in the Aramco compound: a fully automatic washing machine. I bought it alone. When I first started living in the Eastern Province, I returned to asking my father’s permission for everything, and he would get very angry if I failed to do so. But gradually I stopped asking and made my life mine.
Getting around was our biggest challenge. Lamia and I were using private drivers, taxis—anything that was available to us—and it was draining a good deal of our salaries. Eventually, Lamia suggested that we buy a cheap car and look for a private driver. The cheapest make available at that time was a KIA. We started asking the taxi drivers who ferried us around if they knew anyone who would work for a monthly salary, although, as women, we couldn’t employ a driver under our own names. (Happily, the state code was changed in 2014, enabling female employees to now recruit their own drivers. And the rise of Uber and other app-based vendors has completely changed the transportation landscape, although Saudis still lack public transport and pedestrian walkways.)
One of these taxi drivers helped us find Mumtaz, a young Pakistani man in his early twenties, but there was a problem—he didn’t know how to drive. We promised Mumtaz that we would get him driving lessons and pay for a driver’s license, along with a monthly salary of 1,200 riyals and 200 riyals more for his food and living costs. Mumtaz didn’t speak Arabic or English, so to communicate with him, I dusted off the little Urdu I remembered from my extremist days going to the Grand Mosque.
Mumtaz didn’t much care for hygiene, and we were always complaining about his smell. Lamia decided to buy him toiletries—soap, shampoo, and deodorant—and request that he use them every day. Once we’d solved the problems of the language barrier and the smell, the next issue was that Mumtaz knew nothing about the layout of Khobar, nor its traffic rules. Lamia and I studied a map of the city streets so we could direct him from the backseat, which resulted in more than a few close calls. I asked Aftab, a Pakistani colleague in my department, to explain the traffic rules to Mumtaz. We had enough burdens without his traffic violations as well.
But there was still the problem of how Mumtaz behaved if he drove either of us anywhere alone. He would adjust the rearview mirror, look up, and observe our every move. Once he made a comment about my eyes and how I looked. I couldn’t muster a response, but I knew Lamia would take care of it; she was older than me and far more willing to tick him off. Sure enough, she reprimanded him harshly, and he never dared to comment on my appearance again.
My work was challenging, especially after our group leader selected me to manage my first project. I was terrified I’d fail. I had never managed anything before, and the fact that I was both a graduate of a public university and the only woman in our division put even more pressure on me to prove myself. Until then, I had always thought that my English was good, so I was shocked to find myself struggling with reports and emails. Neither my university nor Aramco had trained me in the technical terms I needed to know for work. Even more challenging, English was the official language spoken at Aramco, so I needed it for every meeting as well as for reports and emails. Then Lamia told me about the Aramco English Learning Center. I could study in the morning, she said, and return to my office after the lunch break. After taking the placement exam, I was put in the advanced section, which required students to attend half-day classes for six months. But my boss flatly refused to let me leave the office, telling me that I had to improve my English myself.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to do everything on my own.
One of my colleagues, Amro, gave me considerable support and encouragement. Whenever I had questions, he would answer them willingly, no matter how silly they were. I often sat in the group meetings with no idea what was being said. I wrote down scores of new words so that I could look them up later, rather than asking for their meanings and appearing stupid. I mentioned to Amro how frustrated I felt after having been a top student. He smiled. “Work is different than study,” he said. “We all started from scratch; we had to be patient and persistent to acquire the knowledge we have today. Don’t be in too much of a rush; one day you’ll be the specialist in your field. You’ll be the one we all turn to with questions.”
Every bit as challenging as the actual work were the personal relationships around the office. I was still uneasy about—even fearful of—mixing with Saudi men. The only two male colleagues I didn’t deliberately avoid during break times were Albert, from South Africa, and John, from New Zealand, and even then, one of my male Saudi colleagues would ask me, “What do you hope to gain by associating with these infidels?” after he watched us drinking coffee together. Outside of working hours, I had no friends and socialized with no one, apart from Lamia and another colleague, Alia, whom I had met during the summer internship. There was a very sensible reason for this. Everything I was doing—living and working far away from my family, without a male relative to monitor me—was socially unacceptable for a Saudi girl.