Teacher, We Girls!

By Katherine Dolan

A broke English teacher travels to Saudi Arabia intending to teach in Riyadh; she's heard there is a critical mass of English-speaking expats there and that the country's strict rules are relaxed for foreigners in the gated compounds, malls and embassies of the Diplomatic Quarter. Instead, she and her husband are sent to Najran, a little town near the border with Yemen, where they live as the locals do. From wearing the veil to pacifying enthusiastic religious police, Dolan describes adapting to a culture very different to the one she knows--an experience that is funny, frustrating and sometimes frightening. What she finds most fascinating, though, are the stories of her colleagues and students--the girls of Najran.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katherine Dolan
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463100394

Katherine Dolan

Katherine Dolan is a New Zealander who has spent the last couple of decades teaching, writing and traveling with her husband, author and podcaster John Dolan. She has had entertainingly catastrophic misadventures in some of the world’s most fascinating countries including Iraqi Kurdistan, Italy, Kuwait, Russia, Albania, East Timor and (obviously!) Saudi Arabia. You’ll be able to read much more about their adventures in her next book "Ten Thousand Miles to Marathon".

Book preview

Passengers

It’s a Wonderful World

An Arabic Lesson

Abha and Back

Fleur Aurora and the Bat

Love and Marriage

Our Son Sam

Three Teachers

The Indestructible Dr. Hamid

A Ceremony

A Bit of a Stew

The Teachers’ Room

Shambi

Funk

The Driver’s Seat

Going Home

About Katherine Dolan

Connect with Katherine Dolan

Hit and Run

We were sitting in our hotel room when the phone rang. John picked it up and frowned as he listened.

What? What is it? I asked when he hung up.

I don’t know. Mhambi asked if I could meet him in the café downstairs. He sounded weird. This could be very bad.

Bad?

Maybe they’re going to fire us.

We haven’t even started yet!

Or there could be a problem with our visas.

Let’s go and see, I said. Do you think I can go down there without a veil?

Just wear the cloak thing and the headscarf. It’ll be fine.

The café was dark, smoky and cavernous. Big plasma TVs were mounted on the walls. One of them showed a football match, another was playing an episode of World’s Biggest Monster Trucks. A few Saudi men adorned the tables. Dressed in long, white robes and red-and-white checked headgear, they smoked and fingered smartphones with manicured nails.

Our colleagues Mhambi and Fernando were easy to spot; the short Zulu and the huge Peruvian-Brit made an odd couple. Mhambi was staring straight ahead, looking at nothing. Fernando appeared calmer but grim, like a doctor about to give his patients bad news. He nodded a greeting.

Have a seat you two.

What’s the matter?

I’ll break it to you quickly, John, because there’s no nice way of saying it. Philip’s dead.

What? But I just saw him this morning. When did it happen?

About an hour ago.

How?

Hit and run. Some pimply teenager was speeding; knocked him out cold. Mhambi here saw it happen, said the car swerved on purpose to hit him. Didn’t even bother to stop to wipe down the fender.

Mhambi shook his head slowly.

"The limbs were all twisted."

Just now? How? Where?

There was another teacher visiting, a woman who used to teach here. She didn’t want to go to the supermarket alone—you know, the one just across the street. So Philip offered to go get her a box of juice. Then, on his way back, that’s when he got hit, just outside the drycleaner’s next door. Mhambi was dropping off his shirts, so he was first on the scene.

He was all crumpled up, murmured Mhambi.

Fernando continued, Then after the ambulance came, he called me and then you.

All crumpled up...

Fernando patted Mhambi on the shoulder. We all could do with some beer right now, couldn’t we? But fat chance of that. Instead we’ll sip this nice mint tea and drink a toast to my mate Philip. RIP. 

Sitting there in the café imagining Philip’s lifeless body on the road, I wondered if it had been a completely wise decision coming to this country.

The Crossing

As soon as we boarded the plane headed for Saudi, I noticed a grim mood in the cabin. Almost all the other passengers were Asian and looked very poor. Their faces expressed resignation, irritation, depression, uncertainty. Just before take-off, the man next to us made the sign of the cross.

I remembered the conversation I’d had with John the previous week in one of our research sessions.

Guess the percentage of foreign workers in Saudi.

Um, ten per cent?

Nope. Thirty-three per cent.

Wha–? Where do they all come from?

"Mainly the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and Southeast Asia. They’re hired according to a sponsorship system, kafala, which means they need their employers’ permission to enter the country, change jobs or leave the country."

Um, that sounds like, uh, slavery?

Yeah, it gives employers immense power, and there is nothing to stop an abusive employer from using his servants in any way he chooses. Women who work in private Saudi homes are vulnerable to some of the worst abuses.

Like rape?

Exactly. It’s commonly seen as an employer’s right. There are horrific stories about maids being tortured or murdered too. Like a Sri Lankan maid, her employers made her work until she was exhausted, then hammered hot nails and needles into her body to punish her for being tired. Or there’s the Indonesian maid Nour Miyati, who was subjected to daily beatings by one couple. Finally, they tied her up and left her in their bathroom for a month without food. She got gangrene and had to have her fingers and toes amputated.

Ugh, but what about Saudi law? How can employers get away with that?

These women have no rights. They’re slaves as far as the Saudis are concerned. I mean, the country only officially outlawed slavery in 1962. As for Miyati’s case, the police only looked into when it was publicized in the papers. You want to know the results of the investigation?

That she’d brought it on herself?

They decided that gangrene came from ‘an existing but unspecified disease’ and that the other injuries had been caused by cleaning fluids used in the course of her work and the bruising was either self-inflicted or caused by a falling wardrobe.

Oh my god. That’s just…

A Riyadh court accused her of making it all up and sentenced her to 79 lashes of the whip.

What?

But after some pretty serious foreign intervention the charges were overturned and she got compensation.

I hope it was in the millions-of-dollars range?

Two thousand, five hundred riyals; that’s about six-hundred-and-seventy US dollars.

What about the sick couple who did that to her?

All charges against the man were dropped. The women got 35 lashes.

Is the money that much better in Saudi than in their home countries?

It depends if they get paid or not. Sometimes they don’t.

A Chinese flight attendant interrupted our conversation to hand us the immigration card. Her smile was not the usual cheery variety. It was a queasy gesture of sympathy and concern, the muted simper of a nurse in the cancer ward. I read the card and saw, even by the standards of a bureaucratic document, it was not in the friendliest vein:

KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA

MINISTRY OF INTERIOR

PASSPORT AGENCY

WARNING

DEATH FOR DRUG TRAFFICKER

I fidgeted, tried watching a few inflight movies without success, took out the airline magazine then immediately tucked it carefully back in its pocket.

A line of women had formed by the bathrooms, waiting to change out of their saris and into abayas and hijabs. One of the younger women broke into a fit of sobbing. She looked as if she were in her early twenties, with a cascade of soft black hair falling down her back. Another older, more world-weary woman was mechanically patting her on the shoulder. It was the older woman’s reaction that scared me. She had the grim, impatient look of a battle-hardened veteran.

My fists were clenching but I told myself to calm down. News is always tilted towards sensational, extreme cases. Some workers were probably perfectly happy and definitely earning more than they could in the Philippines or Indonesia. These women in front of me were probably just homesick, that’s normal, I thought. Once more, I took the magazine out of the sleeve in front of me and flicked through advertisements for gold watches and photos of high-cheeked teen models with glitter on their faces. It was hard to keep my focus, though. My eyes kept straying to the line of sad, gentle women.

Half an hour before landing, the queues around the bathrooms had finally cleared. With shaking hands, I picked up my bag and went to change into the things that I would have to wear in Saudi.

In the plane’s toilet, I wriggled into the brown abaya I’d bought in Seattle and tried wrapping the scarf around my head so my hair wouldn’t show. The scarf was too silky and flimsy to stay in place. Luckily I’d brought along some safety pins, and I fixed them in the scarf where it would hold its shape. Attired in my brown robe and head-wrap, I emerged feeling as if I were now girded for battle.

When the plane landed, the man beside me crossed himself again and breathed out a prayer of deep gratitude. The passengers rose as one body. There was no talking or laughing. A thoughtful hush settled on the passengers.

The first thing we saw after emerging from the confusing, dingy rabbit warren at King Khalid airport was a fountain. We stood in front of it for a couple of minutes, taken off guard by its charm. It was nothing like the golden pillars of Dubai airport or the gleaming tiles and tinted glass of other transport hubs. The pillar of water was clear, brilliant—the sight was refreshing and hopeful. I’d read that Bedouin heroes in old Arabian poems often named their horses things like rushing waters, flood, rain or river; the fountain reminded me that we were in a desert nation, whose people recognized the value and beauty of water.

Continuing to passport control, we joined one of twenty long queues. It was a good place to watch people. There were Saudi men dressed in thobs, (long, white robes) many of which had been tailored to include special cellphone pockets. On their heads they wore red-and-white checkered headdresses secured with circlets of black cord, on their feet they wore sandals. South Asian men wore salwar kameez, long, loose linen shirts over loose pants of the same material. Other men wore the same long linen shirt over jeans; others wore wrap-around skirts in bright colors. Confusingly, somewhere near the front of one queue was a very tall guy in a black T-shirt with a huge multi-colored Mohawk.

Women were dressed in abayas, burqas, saris, and there were even a few who were still uncovered, wearing jeans. There were very old women carrying big parcels on their backs as if the burdens had incorporated themselves into their bodies. I wondered how many of these people were on their way to Mecca and how many years it had taken them to save enough money to make the hajj.

After an hour of queuing, we got to the security gate and put our suitcases on the conveyor belt. As our luggage was carried along the slow-moving strip, I noticed that the screen being monitored by the customs official was blank; the X-ray machine was turned off. No one searched our luggage and the customs official waved us through as he chatted with a colleague.

When we stepped outside the airport, the first thing we noticed was the heat, which fell on us like a heavy blanket. It was only now we were outdoors that we realized the air conditioning had been on inside the airport.

All the time we’d been queuing, I worried that no one would be there to meet us. We had no phone and I didn’t know how we would contact our employer. I was very relieved to see two young guys holding up a sign saying Jonh and Kateirn. Giggling and joking in Arabic, they led us to a car and we crawled into the vehicle filled with the glorious feeling of knowing we were soon going to sleep in a real bed.

The next half hour was a blur of lights and exhaustion vying with terror. The boys were eager to show us a good time, which meant driving as quickly and dangerously as possible. The whole city seemed to be in on this plot to amuse and impress us with displays of maniacal driving. There were no seatbelts in the back—they’d been cut off—so John and I just held hands and hoped for the best.

You like Saudi driving? You like? They grinned at us, screaming around a tight bend.

I nodded, smiling tensely.

John was braver and said, Too fast!

The driver had a brainstorm.

You, he turned around, smiling, and pointed at me, You want drive?

I didn’t know much Arabic but I knew ‘la’ meant no.

La! La lala la la la! I protested, hoping that he would turn back around immediately, watch the winding road and not let us crash.

The other guy, next to the driver, said to me,

You drive good?

Aha, a trap! I thought.

I remembered joking about the driving ban with John. I’d seen a news item about women protesting against the ban on the news and had decided to do some internet searching.

You know, thank goodness I don’t like driving, I’d said to John, who was across the table reading the newspaper and drinking coffee. Sheikh Saleh al-Lohaidan has really opened my eyes on the long-term health effects.

How so?

Well according to him, ‘physiological medical studies show that driving automatically pushes the ovaries up’.

John splurted out his coffee in disbelief. He recovered quickly and steepled his hands in a professorial manner.

Ah yes, I’ve seen a lot of cases of elevated ovaries. A tragic predicament.

I wonder if they go higher and higher up the more you drive? I mused. Like eventually would they just pop out of your ears and float over your head?

It would make sense.

I scrolled down the page. This time it was my turn to splurt coffee.

Woah!

What? Say it don’t spray it!

Academics at Saudi’s highest religious council said a relaxation of the ban would inevitably lead to a society where there were no more virgins, ‘provoking a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce.’

Sounds apocalyptic.

"Save the endangered virgins! But seriously, what is wrong with these guys? They can’t seriously believe this crap."

John put down the paper and considered.

"Well, who knows what they really believe? But Wahhabi are committed to the idea that women have a ‘lack of capacity’, which means men need to supervise and control their movements. I imagine it’d a bit hard to oversee their every move if they’re zooming around in their own pink Ferraris."

"OK, but how can a woman get anywhere? What if she needs to go to the doctor or take her kids to school? I mean, don’t their husbands have jobs? They can’t be driving their women about 24-hours a day."

Most families have drivers I think.

"Yes, but the drivers are men, and their passengers are unrelated women! How can they rationalize that? I tapped the keyboard furiously, wanting to know. Ah…OK, it seems Saudi’s greatest minds are aware of this problem of male chaffeurs mingling with Saudi women and they have been hard at work trying to solve it. The solution is breastmilk."

Excuse me?

"Breastmilk. One sheikh said that women should feed foreign drivers their breast milk. According to Sharia, any male who drinks the breast milk of a woman becomes as good as her biological son. This would allow them all to mingle as family members. Voila!"

John shook his head.

You know when this driving ban started?

When God invented Saudi Arabia?

"No! Only back in 1990. Apparently in the Gulf War Saudi women saw female American GI’s driving and demanded the same right. That’s when the Grand Mufti made a fatwa against women driving, saying it would lead to social chaos. And since then lots of women have been arrested behind the wheel. A couple of activists were even sent to terrorism court for Tweeting selfies of themselves driving."

So now that we were actually here in Saudi and this young hoon was asking me if I wanted to take the wheel, I was ready with an answer.

La, I said, No. Illegal.

The guys laughed, the car flew over a judder bar and I squeezed John’s hand.

Suddenly, the driver swerved off the road completely, onto the sidewalk and it seemed clear we were all going to be killed. The car kept going, ploughing into an area full of people, who scrambled to get out of the way, before stopping just short of some gas pumps, barely grazing the legs of a wiry Asian man in overalls. It dawned on me that this was the way the driver had intended to pull into the gas station. The driver yelled his order at the attendant, who calmly, with just the slightest contemptuous curl of his lip, proceeded to carry out the command.

I remembered Saudi boys I’d taught at a private school back in Vancouver (our school had had a deal with the Saudi government, which paid for the students to fly to Canada and attend school for three months). They all had stories about crashing expensive cars, about fatal accidents and near-misses. During the break they loved to watch YouTube videos of drifting, a kind of stunt-driving popular in the Gulf, with cars travelling at high speeds and strange angles on public roads. Some were tilted to one side so far that only two wheels touch the ground. Passengers and even drivers sometimes climbed out and performed tricks, for example unscrewing and then replacing the hubcaps, performing handstands or elaborate dances.

Our two current drivers seemed to have the same fascination for risky driving. After getting gas, they treated us to a high-speed tour of the neighborhood. After an 18-hour plane journey, the experience was like a lurid, neon-lit nightmare.

A huge drive-in Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet sat at the top of a hill, lit up with the seemingly nuclear strength of five white spotlights.

You like Kentucky?

A crowd of wand-thin teen boys, all in white, happy and excited emerged from a building with pretty stained-glass windows.

"Masjid. You like masjid?"

A monstrous octagonal building, a sports stadium appeared in the middle distance, surrounded by flat wasteland.

You like ballfoot?

After a while we stopped responding and our guides grew moody and sullen. They gave up the joyride and drove us to the saddest hotel in the world, a dead-eyed mansion perched across the road from a massive pile of gravel beyond which was a featureless tract of desert. They hurriedly hauled our suitcases to the lobby, and zoomed away, tearing up the superfine dirt into a thick cloud.

Aching from fatigue and tension, we climbed the steps and entered the front door to find a dark lobby. The small reception area featured a shabby brown sofa and a painting of giant wobbly seagulls suspended over a gluey-gray ocean. On the reception counter was an open log-in book but there was no one behind the desk, so we sat down on the hard couch and waited. A small fan rotated slowly on the desk, rustling the pages of the log-in book.

After ten minutes, the receptionist materialized. He was a young Asian man with big chipmunk cheeks and a bored pout. He was dressed in a burgundy shirt, dark pants and oversized sandals that flapped loudly when he walked. The lower buttons of his shirt were undone, allowing his ample belly to peek out.

Yes?

We stood up and John said, We’re with English Experts. We need a room tonight.

Name please.

Dolan. John and Katherine.

He squeezed in behind the counter and looked at the register.

Not here. He kept gazing at the page and moving his mouth as if he were sucking his teeth or chewing on some imaginary tidbit. So tired that we could barely stand up, we held our breaths until we were dizzy, hoping that we wouldn’t have to go anywhere else. He scratched his stomach lovingly, thinking things over. Then he looked at our suitcases and shrugged.

OK, and he started shuffling down the unlit corridor towards an ancient elevator.

He led us upstairs and flapped along a corridor, opened a door and ushered us into a windowless apartment lit by a dim orange lamp in one corner. Everything in the apartment was a shade of brown: dirty beige, wet sand, clay, tarnished copper, gold. It was bare and tidy enough, but the walls, floors and baroque furniture seemed covered with a film of grime evocative of cooking smoke, old smells and the tiny footprints of generations of flies.

When the receptionist left, we made a quick inspection.

In the bathroom, the toilet was a hole in the floor flanked by two corrugated porcelain footgrips. Next to the toilet was a hose with a trigger nozzle. Is that what you’re supposed to use instead of toilet paper? I wondered idly. But how did anyone use it without getting their clothes wet and messy? Could aim be perfected to that extent? And there was no toilet paper. How did one dry oneself?

There was no separate shower stall, just a curtain ring that went around a little corner of the bathroom. The atmosphere was so dry and warm that any water would quickly evaporate. There was also a drainage hole with a plastic grate in the center of the floor, which gave off the odor of sewage thinly disguised by the fumes of some strong-smelling petrochemical.

The kitchen was a tiny, narrow space that looked as if it would require extensive cleaning before use.

The bedroom was a massive, crypt-like room filled with an almost equally massive bed. The coverlet seemed dusty and the sheets didn’t seem particularly clean, but it didn’t matter. It was a bed. We crawled inside and slept for fifteen hours.

English Experts

A telephone woke me, the old shrill kind that rattles your brain like a fire alarm. I leapt out of bed with no idea where I was and stumbled around in the dark banging my toes and knees on the sharp edges of furniture looking for the source of the terrible noise. A faint strip of light on the floor guided me to the door; I groped for a doorknob, finally found it and rushed out into the living room. The phone was still ringing so I picked up the receiver.

Uh hello?

’Ello. Van school. Five minutes, a male voice boomed.

Uh…wha–? But line was dead. I raced into the bedroom and shook John.

The van’s leaving in five minutes! We have to get dressed!

Van, whadda van? he mumbled.

Come on! Get up! Here’s your shirt!

I wrestled myself into my clothes and abaya in about two minutes but then I had to fasten my scarf over my hair. It was flimsy polyester and kept slipping down, so I ended up using hairpins to attach it to my hair then got a safety pin to cinch it underneath my chin. By the time I’d finished all that, John was completely washed, shaved, dressed and ready. We went down the stairs and into the lobby without having a clue what was going to happen next.

A white van was waiting outside the hotel. A member of the hotel staff waved us toward it and we bustled in. There was one other occupant there, a tall slim young man with dark skin and a shock of curly hair.

Hi, we said cautiously.

Hiya, said the person warily.

Are you with English Experts?

Yeah.

Your first year?

No man, been here four years.

Four years! By the way, my name’s John, and this is my wife Katherine.

He nodded. Omar.

Are you from London? I asked.

"Manchester. There are three of us guys from there: we’re all good mates.

So were you teaching in Riyadh, at King Saud University?

Nah, don’t like Riyadh. Too expensive. We were in Najran.

Najran? Where’s that?

Down South, near the border with Yemen. Small town.

Oh, isn’t that bad though? Is there anything there?

It’s buzzin’ man! Me and my mates have a mint time there. Not so much work as here, and the weather’s better. Hope I go there again this year.

I thought about this.

Can’t you choose where you go? I asked.

Nah man. You go where you’re told. That said, I’ll probably be going back to Najran. They know me there. Doctor Fratley—he’s the boss—wants me to go there.

We lapsed into silence. I began to wonder where the van’s driver was. There was movement within the hotel and a short, dark chubby-cheeked man appeared blinking and scowling in the cuttingly bright sun. He wore a bright orange polo shirt and basketball shorts. A man in Saudi dress, who turned out to be the driver, herded him towards the van. The hotel receptionist lingered behind them both, led by his beautiful stomach, an unlit cigarette lodged between his lips.

The stranger got into the van and heaved a big sigh.

Did you sleep in man? asked Omar. It’s nearly ten o’clock!

The man blinked and shook his head as if it was full of dust. He started talking softly, as if to himself, in a South African accent.

"I arrived at the airport at four a.m.—four a.m! No one was there to meet me. I called the phone number for the driver, but there was no answer. They didn’t pick me up till six o’clock. Then