Single in Saudi

By Genia

Bored at work and nursing a broken heart, a thirty something R.N. leaves her prestigious job at a Houston medical center to work at a military hospital in Saudi Arabia in 1978.  She arrives in a land struggling to catch up to the Western world while retaining its strict Muslim morality — at least in public.  “Genia,” a bold, single, blue-eyed blonde, discovers that sex and drugs are very much in demand inside the high-walled compounds of the Western-educated Saudi elite.

During two years in The Kingdom, Genia manages to break every rule short of theft and murder while befriending Arabs of all social standing, including her grateful patients.  A hot-shot Saudi Air Force pilot and a top Saudi official become her lovers, and she parties with princes and princesses at their opulent homes and Bedouin camps.  But she also dons the veil and long, black obaya in order to move freely among the ordinary Saudis who welcome her into their homes.

With plenty of overtime pay and vacation time, Genia travels to more than twenty five countries while based in Saudi Arabia.  She describes these travels, along with her relationships, nursing work, and unleashed feminism in this extraordinary memoir of a time when America wasn’t a dirty word in the Arab world.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 11, 2002
• ISBN: 9781403368355

Genia

“Genia,” a full-time Registered Nurse, has worked in supervisory positions at some of the most prestigious hospitals in Texas and her home state of Michigan.  Her leisure and job-related travels have taken her throughout the United States, to thirty-five other countries, and to every continent except Australia and Antarctica.  She also enjoys reading, gardening and e-mailing friends around the world.  This is her first book.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Cookie Wells, cover artist, and Janet Lively, editor. Cookie, your wonderful cover art made my book come alive. Thank you, my dear talented friend. Janet - you made me expand my rhetoric and explore my feelings. Without both of you, I could never have completed this book. Genia

Prologue

I believe I noticed a Calvin Klein label on the hip pocket of her jeans as she casually tossed her obaya on the seat of the car and slid behind the wheel of a Jaguar, one of the family’s nine luxury cars.

What a contrast to my first encounter with an obaya-clad woman upon my arrival in Saudi Arabia in 1978. This woman of the 80’s had far surpassed her Arab sisters in Saudi Arabia as she openly drove around the tiny nation of Bahrain, an island in the Arabian Gulf just fourteen miles from the oppressive Saudi shores. In Saudi Arabia she would have been arrested for driving a car and then severely reprimanded for appearing in public without an obaya -- a long black cloak -- and a veil to cover her whole face.

I started writing this book while I was working as a private nurse for a very wealthy family in Bahrain in 1983. My patient was the relatively young mother of five grown children who had terminal breast cancer. I was hired for only a month but ended up staying until my patient’s sad demise ten months later.

This undemanding job allowed me the free time to write memoirs of my experiences working as a nurse in The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from 1978 to 1980. The sights and sounds of the Arab world brought back a flood of memories. I wrote more than one hundred pages while I was in Bahrain, then set my manuscript aside for over twenty years. It wasn’t until the attack on our nation on Sept. 11, 2001, when I realized how little most people know about the Middle East, that I sat down to finish.

I have opted to use a pen name because I write of a country that hates any untoward publicity and is also the homeland of fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who were on the planes that attacked our nation. Genia, the Arab word for witch or she-devil, was a name given me by my boyfriend, a Saudi Air Force pilot, whom I dated clandestinely for nearly a year. Arab men weren’t allowed to date Arab or Western women before marriage so I wore an obaya and veil when my pilot and I were together in public, posing as a sister or female relative. But when I went out alone or with other Westerners, I dressed as I pleased and was only occasionally harassed by the religious police.

More recently, Saudi religious leaders have increased restrictions on Western and Arab women alike. Even female American soldiers were required to wear traditional headscarves and were prohibited from driving before the U.S. military was forced out of The Kingdom. The anti-American sentiment now so pervasive in the Arab world is also a new development. In the late 1970s, I was treated well by most of the Arabs I met, whether they be the patients I cared for in the hospital or the wealthy Saudis I partied with in their private compounds. I moved throughout Saudi society with a freedom that few Americans experience now.

Read on and you will see that I certainly found the adventure I was looking for in Saudi Arabia. Everything that was happening in the United States at that time -- namely drugs and sex -- was also happening in Saudi, although there it was more covert and took place behind walled houses. As I was writing, all of my friends kept telling me to put more sex in the book as sex sells. So although this is a memoir, only I, the author, know for sure if I really had all of those sexual encounters. The opportunities were certainly there. You, the reader, will just have to make up your own mind. Did she or didn’t she?

Genia

Chapter One

It was the late 1970s, the pre-AIDS era, a freewheeling time ruled by drugs, sex, and rock and roll. If you were single during that time, you know what I mean. Those who missed that crazy era may be shocked at the rampant promiscuity. I was in my early thirties, a swinging single gal. I was also a woman with a broken heart. A few years earlier, I had loved and lost a man, a plastic surgeon whom I worked with when I was an operating room nurse in Michigan. When our two-year romance ended, I took my broken heart back to Houston where I had received my nursing education. I landed an excellent job as a head nurse in the Texas Medical Center and prepared to start over. But I soon realized that I just wasn’t satisfied. Houston wasn’t yielding any meaningful relationships, and I longed for an adventure. Going overseas became my goal.

My intrigue with foreign travel had been ignited the year before by a short, well-organized, guided tour of Singapore and Bali. Afterwards, I vowed that never again would I be shuttled in and out of air-conditioned buses to various points of interest with ladies in polyester pant suits and their long-suffering spouses. Yes, I wanted to see more of this great, wide world but on my own terms. So I applied for employment in Saudi Arabia as a staff nurse in a hospital for Saudi military and dependents that was managed by an American company. I flew to Los Angeles for an interview and was signed to a two-year contract.

When I told my friends and family of my plans, they were both horrified and fascinated. From the little they knew of it, Saudi Arabia seemed an exotic but potentially dangerous place. I didn’t have much time to worry about it, with only four chaotic weeks to get my life in order -- sell my car, draw up a will, give away all my plants and sort out which of my belongings would go to storage and which would be shipped to The Kingdom. I shopped for long skirts and dresses and carefully checked my shipments against the dreaded black list, the Saudi government’s long list of items that could not be brought into the country. Most of the banned items were sold or manufactured by companies associated with Jews, who were presumed to have ties to Israel, the enemy of all Arab countries.

Finally, the day of my departure arrived, and I lugged my two bags to the airport where they were carefully weighed to make sure each was no more than 22 pounds. Then I checked into the airport hotel with my lover, an unhappily married man. For all I knew, I would have no sex for the next two years since I was headed to the land of the four Ds: No driving, no dating, no drinking and no dope. The night was one of maniacal lovemaking, so frantic that I arrived in New York City with a raging case of honeymoon cystitis, a common term for a bladder infection. A doctor I met later liked to describe a bladder infection as the screwing you get for the screwing you got! But that description would not have amused me while I was enduring this most painful affliction.

In New York, I stayed with a long-time male friend who accompanied me to the opening night of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, a Broadway musical based on the true story of a brothel that had operated in La Grange, Texas, for over a century. The brothel was finally closed down by a whistle-blowing reporter in Houston, and its demise was a sad day for the horny students of Texas A&M, a predominately male school at the time, and their horny counterparts at The University of Texas. La Grange was located halfway between the two schools and was the site of many a young Texas man’s initiation into the carnal world. After the play, we had dinner at Sardi’s, the famous restaurant where Broadway performers and critics alike gathered after the shows. My understanding but disappointed old friend spent the night with me, dutifully filling the tub with warm water as I tried to soak away the searing pain from my bladder.

The next morning we went in search of a doctor and a delicatessen in that order. Disregarding doctor’s orders, I enjoyed two cold beers with a corned beef sandwich, coleslaw and kosher pickles. I ate with relish, knowing I wouldn’t be able to enjoy real deli food for the next two years.

When I boarded the plane for London, the first stop on my journey, I was filled with fear and anticipation of what the next two years would bring. I was looking forward to meeting the other nurse from Houston who had been hired by the same company and was coming in on a different plane. But when I arrived at the hotel, Meg had not yet checked into the room we were to share. I had heard about her from our mutual dentist the week before we left, and we had one hurried conversation in Houston. Her shipment to The Kingdom, she told me on the phone, was mostly high-heeled shoes. Later, when we were finally settled in Khamis Mushayt, the most remote and rugged province in the whole Kingdom, we laughed about Meg’s shoes. Hiking boots would have been the more appropriate footwear, as high heels were almost lethal in that terrain.

By dinnertime, Meg still hadn’t arrived so I went off to the bar in search of someone to join me for a meal. Meg never did show up, having met a more desirable companion for the evening. But her ostensible presence gave me a good excuse to put off the charming German gentleman who bought me dinner.

I finally met Meg the next morning on the Saudia Airlines flight to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a large seaport city on the Red Sea. Although very hung-over, she had the glow of a freshly fucked woman. We hit it off immediately, more out of fear than commonality. On the flight, we met a plain English girl named Irene, who was also going to Khamis Mushayt to work as a medical secretary. Irene had brought a bottle of Scotch whiskey for the trip, a practice allowed by the airline as long as you left the bottle on board. However, this policy was later changed because too many expatriates and nationals alike had arrived in Jeddah totally smashed.

When the pilot announced our descent into the Jeddah airport, all of the Arab women on the plane, most of them dressed in expensive Western outfits, started scrambling into their veils and obayas, the long, hooded, black robes that Saudi women were required to wear in public. This was my first encounter with obaya-clad women, and it hit me like a punch in the gut. My feminism boiled as I watched these fashionable women lose their identities and became non-entities, black gnomes, lumps of coal. Little did I know that I would soon be hiding behind the veil and welcoming its anonymity!

In the airport, I was socked with the most oppressive heat and humidity I had ever encountered. Houston is often hot and muggy, but Jeddah was much worse. The three of us were shuttled onto a bus where we were absorbed into a mass of passengers, all jockeying to grab the straps attached to the ceiling. Then we set off for a hair-raising ride to the terminal. Drivers have one speed in Saudi Arabia -- fast!

In the terminal, my bladder raged again so I hurried off to the bathroom. But when I pushed open the door to the stall, I found a little Filipino janitor asleep in a squatting position on top of the commode. Obviously bored with his job, he had picked the little-used ladies room for his napping place. I backed out and went over to the only other facility in the bathroom, an open hole covered with a grate. I had seen these in Mexico but had never been forced to use one. Mustering my courage, I pulled down my panty hose, but there was no toilet paper. After that, I carried Kleenex on my person at all times.

When I rejoined my little group, they were talking to a young Saudi man who introduced himself as a representative of our new employer. He had picked out Meg and Irene as the new recruits, not a hard task as we were the only Western women in the terminal. After helping us through the dreaded customs, he explained, he would take us to the hotel.

We welcomed him warmly as he maneuvered us into line for the customs inspection. Our bags were opened and rifled through, our visas were carefully inspected then finally stamped, our bags were marked with huge chalk Xs, and we were through customs. During my two years in Saudi Arabia, I made more than a dozen trips in and out of The Kingdom and was always relieved to be through with this ordeal. Luckily, I was never body-searched as I became increasingly bold with the contraband I carried in or on my person.

Soon we were off to the car park where we encountered all forms of human beings sleeping on mats or the bare concrete. Who are these people? I asked our new friend. They’re just left over Hajjis, he answered blithely. Hajjis is the common name for the Muslims who make the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the holiest city in the Muslim world. Every year, more than two million Muslims from all over the world travel to Mecca, obeying the command of the Koran, the Bible of the Islamic faith. All Muslims with the physical and economic means must make the pilgrimage once in their lifetime. Every year many arrive on one-way tickets. Every year the Saudi government buys hundreds of tickets to send them home.

We all piled into a small Toyota for another perilous trip to the hotel. Our driver wove in and out of traffic, blasting his horn, braking quickly, yelling and gesticulating at other drivers and then accelerating again. When I asked him if 60 kilometers per hour was really necessary, he just laughed and went faster. It was on this ride that I started composing the little prayer of safe deliverance that I would recite every time I got into a vehicle in The Kingdom. Later, I decided that all the abandoned cars on the side of the road probably worked fine except for broken horns, as horns were absolutely essential for this Grand Prix of drivers-education dropouts.

Frazzled but intact, we arrived at the hotel, which was staffed by flirtatious and solicitous Lebanese clerks. We quickly dubbed all the clerks Louis de Lebanon as they were quite polished and sophisticated due to the French influence in their country before the bloody civil war that was currently plaguing Lebanon. The hotel lobby was fairly presentable, but that was only a façade. Only in a third-world country could our room be called a suite. But hell, I was in a third world country, a country that had been catapulted into modernity within the past fifty years. For centuries before, it had been the domain of Bedouins roaming the desert and merchants living behind the walls of their cities, people with little knowledge of the outside world. The discovery of oil in the early 1930s had started a slow but steady change in the country. I arrived in a Saudi Arabia striving to catch up with the Western world yet retain the strict edicts of the Muslim religion.

In 1978 the government was in the midst of an ambitious five-year plan to improve the roads, communications, education, agriculture, and industry and also to build desalinization plants to supply more potable water to the burgeoning population. I later heard of one harebrained scheme to bring a huge iceberg into the port of Jeddah to be used in a desalinization plant. That plan melted as fast as the iceberg when it hit the warm waters of the Red Sea. But the government was desperate for Saudi Arabia to become a global competitor as quickly as possible, and countless multimillion-dollar contracts were signed for all sorts of buildings and commerce. Many Saudis became extremely wealthy practically overnight, and they were spending their profits at an unprecedented pace.

However, no one had spent any money on our hotel. The chairs and couch in our sitting room were covered with hard plastic and the dinette set was Formica. And the bedroom had three army cots! I hadn’t slept on one of those since I had finished basic training as a member of the Woman’s Army Corps in 1964. I longed for a hot shower, but that desire was soon dashed when I discovered the water from the bidet was more forceful than the shower. Water from the desalination plants was obviously not being pumped into our hotel.

Despite the uncomfortable cot, I slept deeply until I was awakened at daybreak by blaring horns. Warily, I stepped out on the small balcony for my first daytime look at the country that was to be my home for the next two years. Jeddah looked like one huge, haphazard construction site. Cranes dotted the skyline in every direction, cement mixers were on the sidewalk, cinder blocks and equipment were flung all over, and there were no security fences to be seen. Walking close to a building under construction could definitely be hazardous to your health. Later I heard that one apartment building constructed as public housing for Saudi nationals had gone up so quickly that it had no bathrooms and only one elevator. The building was unlivable, not just due of the lack of bathrooms but because Saudi law dictated that there be separate elevators for men and women. Women were not allowed to ride elevators with members of the opposite sex except for their husbands or members of their immediate family.

My roommates had also awakened, and Irene, who had spent some time in the Sudan in northern Africa, was having fun practicing her Arabic with the waiters as she ordered room-service coffee. We got quick service and an anxious and curious waiter who hovered outside the door, checking every five minutes to see if we were finished. We did manage to get meager showers and packed for the final leg of our trip to Khamis Mushayt, some six hundred kilometers south of Jeddah.

Our young Saudi came to collect us for another trip to the airport. But I didn’t see much of the city, as I was too busy reciting my little prayer and clutching the back of the seat for dear life. Upon arrival, we checked our bags and went into the lounge to await our flight. My feminism was once again assaulted when I saw a room where all the non-entities in their black obayas were sequestered. What a life these Arab women had to endure.

Irene proceeded to educate us on all the various forms of dress affected by the men of the Arab world. There were Pakistanis in striped pajamas that could have been purchased at J.C. Penney, Egyptians in flowing robes and scruffy, turban-style headcovers, and skinny little Yemeni in plaid, wrap-around skirts that hit below their knobby knees. The latter completed their outfits with striped or plaid shirts and garish polyester sport jackets, rubber thongs, and, of course, the red and white ghutra, a head scarf worn by all the men in the Arab world. The Yemeni carried huge bundles wrapped in rags that probably held all their worldly possessions.

The Saudis were dressed in thobes -- long thin dresses that revealed long white undergarments, no briefs or bikinis here -- that ranged from immaculate white to so scruffy and gray they looked like they had never seen water. Their heads were covered with either red and white checked ghutras or pure white headdresses, both held in place with the kabal, also called an igal, a black, round rope. Many of the younger men wore the ghutra at a rakish angle as they strove for individuality in their monotonous national dress. Fascinated, we watched as one old man hiked his thobe over his knees and fumbled under it for a long time. Guessing that he was masturbating, we giggled and started betting on how long it would take. But we saw that we’d been fooled when he pulled out a pouch on a string and started counting his money. Apparently, a groin-level money pouch would thwart any pickpockets who weren’t otherwise deterred by the threat of losing their right hands for a third-time offense of theft.

As the time approached for our flight, we started listening for the call. A little bell sounded as each flight was announced, and we soon realized that all flights were announced in Arabic only. We listened in vain for the words Khamis Mushayt and Abha, where the airport was located. Finally, about ten minutes before our scheduled flight, we shyly approached the ticket counter to inquire if our plane had been delayed. The clerk looked at our tickets, checked his roster and told us we had missed our flight. Our company representative had booked us on a flight that had left the day before! The next flight was not for another six hours. So much for efficiency in Inshallah (God-willing) land. I later learned that almost every sentence spoken in Saudi Arabia ends with the Arabic word Inshallah. Some smart-ass Westerners called Saudi Arabia the IBM land because the Saudis were fairly laid-back and everything was Inshallah (God-willing), Bukrah (tomorrow) or Malesh (it doesn’t matter). This IBM attitude drove the hard-driving Western businessmen absolutely crazy, as they were out to make a fast buck in this newly rich country.

The Jeddah airport was definitely not a happening place. The only foods available were sickly sweet yellow cakes, cheese sandwiches of indeterminate age, Pepsi and warm orange juice. I settled into a book, already having seen enough thobes, ghutras and black gnomes to last me a lifetime. By the time we finally boarded our flight for Khamis Mushayt, we were hungry, dejected and definitely in need of hot showers.

We arrived at the small airport in Abha just as it was closing and were met by a young, handsome Lebanese. Definitely the man to know in Khamis, he was the procurer for foodstuffs and all things forbidden. As he drove us towards Khamis, we saw only a few lights dotting the landscape. The city was a virtual ghost town; all the storefronts were dark with heavy, louvered metal doors, pulled down and locked. The military base, where our hospital was located, was not much more welcoming. After our driver had a rapid conversation in Arabic with the guards, we were forced to undergo a slow, lurid inspection. At