Brownies and Kalashnikovs: A Saudi Woman's Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut

By Basrawi Fadia

Fadia, a Saudi Arab, grew up in the strictly circumscribed and tailor-made 'desert Disneyland' of Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company). This slice of modern, suburban, middle America was located in Dhahran, Aramco's administrative headquarters in Saudi Arabia, a theocratic Muslim kingdom run according to strict Wahabbi Shari'a law.

Eventually, after only brief holidays abroad visiting relatives in colorful Arab cities like Medina, Damascus and Alexandria, Fadia moved to Beirut, the glitzy 'Paris of the Middle East', to attend high school. In Beirut she fell in love with a passionate and idealistic Lebanese journalist with whom she eloped against her parents' wishes, subsequently getting caught up in Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war while raising a family of five children.

Providing a fascinating account of a Saudi woman's painful journey from naïve Aramcon girl to life as a resident of a war-torn capital city, this book provides new insight into two very different Middle Eastern worlds about which so little is known by those living outside the region.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Garnet Publishing
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781902932354

Book preview

Brownies and Kalashnikovs

A Saudi Woman’s Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut

Fadia Basrawi

SOUTH STREET PRESS

Brownies and Kalashnikovs

Published by

South Street Press

8 Southern Court

South Street

Reading

RG1 4QS UK

www.garnetpublishing.co.uk

Copyright © Fadia Basrawi, 2009

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

First Edition

ISBN: 9781902932354

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Samantha Barden

Jacket design by David Rose

Cover illustrations used with permission of Fadia Basrawi, istockphoto.com/ Stephen Mulcahey (gun), istockphoto.com/Felix Moeckel (bullets), istockphoto.com/Royden Juriansz (flags), istockphoto.com/Sandra Nicol (brownies), Nicholas Holroyd (passport stamp) and George Baramki Azar/Saudi Aramco World/PADIA (Beirut street scene).

Printed in Lebanon

In memory of my parents-in-law Im Bashar and Abu Bashar and my mother Zeina

Acknowledgements

A large part of the raison d’être for this book has come from my life as the daughter of Fahmi Basrawi and Muzayyan Kotob as they faced life in the brave new world of an all-American Aramco in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia without losing their identities; and as the daughter-in-law of Salaheddine Khayyat and Munira Fawaz as they faced civil war in Lebanon without compromising their integrity or love for their country.

One day in 2003, I casually mentioned that I was thinking of writing a memoir to my husband Adnan and five children: Munira, Amer, Ghassan, Yasmine and Rola (ages ranging from 31 to 25). No sooner were the words out of my mouth than this manuscript was dug up from my bottom drawer and my nose stuck firmly to the grindstone.

With the willing enlistment of Munira’s husband Heiko, they all took precious time away from their various jobs and studies to edit my book very, very candidly. Despite our ‘frank’ editing sessions that usually ended with me in time-outs and my toddler grandson Nessim as the only common focus of affection, I am indebted to them for insisting on ‘getting it right.’ Thank you my family for your unwavering faith in the potential of my story.

I am equally grateful to my dear friend, Vonnie Nasr, for doing what she does best: ‘saying it like it is’ as she reviewed and re-reviewed my book in its various stages over the past three years.

My publishers South Street Press were notable in their patience with my slow progress as one failed deadline followed another while war, peace and war once more in Lebanon took their toll on my concentration. To them and to all who have touched my life indirectly or directly in large and small ways, I thank them.

PART I

ARAMCOLAND

1

Desert Suburbia – Desert Kingdom

Home

The Saudi Airlines Boeing 707 banked to the left and began its descent to Dhahran International Airport. I peered out of the airplane’s window to catch the flickering orange-yellow flares that dotted the sea of red sand below. They said home to me, these flares that defined the skyscape of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. From above they winked and glowed so prettily in the oncoming dusk … on the ground they filled the air around us with a nauseating stench of rotten eggs … pungent testimony of Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth that kept the industrialized world so well-oiled and so well-heeled.

A flurry of traffic suddenly crowded the airplane’s aisle as the Saudi women on the flight, clad in the season’s light summer attire, disappeared into the bathroom and reappeared incognito enshrouded from head to toe in voluminous black abayas. Glancing briefly at the mounds of black that now occupied the seats around me, I turned quickly back to the window to hide my anger at this enforced double standard of veiling.

We touched ground. I was home for the summer of 1970 from my sophomore year of university in Beirut. At the exit from the airplane’s cool interior, I paused to inhale a fortifying deep gulp of oxygen before plunging into the airless furnace of Saudi Arabia’s summer. I’d lived here most of my life but had yet to become inured to that first initial blast of roasting heat and humidity. Clutching my green Saudi passport tightly, uncovered by abaya or veil, I headed towards the Saudi Arab ‘nationals’ passport sector, bypassing a long winding line of ‘non-nationals,’ largely from the third world. I felt a wave of empathy with them as they waited with resignation for the airport official to ask them the most inane questions just because he could. My being a Saudi Arabian female traveling alone did not make my entrance into Saudi Arabia, or exit for that matter, much easier.

The passports officer, dark and scrawny with a pointed scraggly beard, stared dourly at my uncovered head. His censorious eyes darted over the giant square buckle in my short hair, psychedelic orange tunic, low slung leather belt, white bell bottoms, and leaned forward to continue on down to my red cork platform sandals. Lifting his frizzy eyebrows, he asked derisively, You are a Saudi?

I rolled my eyes and with an exaggerated sigh, pointedly nudged my passport closer in his direction. He scrutinized my photo-less passport closely to check if I was from the ‘first tier’ of Saudis, i.e. those born from a Saudi Arabian father, or second tier, i.e. those who had been naturalized.

Really? he said, answering my silence sarcastically. And from Medina al Munawara? You don’t look Saudi Arab! he spat, throwing the holiness of the city at my uncovered face. I rose to the bait.

Yes I do … I am a Hijazi.

Why don’t you speak the dialect? Eh? Eh? You sound Syrian. Answer me. What kind of a Hijazi are you?

I lost my struggle to contain my temper and pounded the counter defiantly, IT IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. YOUR JOB IS TO STAMP MY PASSPORT.

His voice rose into an enraged squeal, Woman, SHUT UP!

Well, I’d come this far and I wasn’t about to back down: No, YOU shut up!

In the split second that the officer’s face froze in confusion between shock and fury, my father grasped the situation from where he was standing behind the barrier. He spoke briefly to the police officer next to him and materialized between us, smiling his famous smile. He was a television celebrity in the Eastern province due in large part to his good looks and that smile.

How are you? I’m Fahmi Basrawi, he greeted the passports officer in lilting Hijazi Arabic, shaking his hand. Caught mid-sneer, the passports officer hastily passed his hand over his face in embarrassment.

Fahmi Basrawi? he croaked as he gaped at my father, the perfect image of modern Saudi elegance with his clipped moustache, immaculate white thobe and gold cufflinks, his white ghutra flipped neatly over the agal, falling in picture-perfect alignment down the other side of his face. Delicately clearing his throat, the flustered officer continued in what he hoped was a more mellifluous tone of voice.

This is your daughter? he asked, then added with an ingratiating grin, I would never have guessed … actually, yes, now that you mention it … I do see the resemblance. I simply was doing my job but your daughter misunderstood me.

Hah! I threw in with all the indignant fury I could muster. My father, continuing to smile, firmly took me by the arm and walked us away from the passports division. As we rounded the corner, the smile disappeared.

Do we have to go through this every time? he exploded in exasperation, shelving his charm for people other than me.

We drove away from the airport in an uncomfortable silence. My relationship with my father was a strained one. We had never been able to reach a middle point where we could see eye to eye on life matters and my education abroad was not making it any easier.

Why should I keep my mouth shut when he didn’t shut his mouth? I blurted, still smarting from the passports official’s disrespect. Keeping his eyes rigidly on the road ahead, my father did not answer leaving my outburst to dangle awkwardly in the prickly air between us. I settled back resignedly in my seat and turned to stare at the drab desert landscape, rusty billboards and the odd nondescript cement block building slipping by. I had not expected my father to engage in any sort of critical dialogue with me. He was a Saudi senior staff employee of Aramco (formerly Arabian American Oil Company – Saudi Aramco today), the largest oil company in the world, and his long years there had effectively sealed his mouth and any independent form of thought that he may have had as a young Hijazi. Born in Medina in 1922 when it was under the Hashemite Sherif Hussein’s Kingdom of Hijaz, he was ten years old when Saudi Arabia (and everyone in it) was internationally recognized by the world community as the property of King ‘Abdel ‘Aziz Ibn Al Sa’ud. He rarely mentioned that period of politics in his life, or any politics for that matter.

Turning left, we approached Dhahran through an arched gateway emblazoned with Go in Safety, in Arabic and English, Aramco’s ‘Arc de Triomphe.’ We slowed down at the Main Gate, a brick and glass guard post that continuously crackled with disembodied voices over a shortwave radio. Manned by a joint patrol of Saudi police and Aramcon Saudi security guards, it was the only point of entry into Dhahran, and only permitted to Aramco’s ‘Senior Staff.’ Everybody else, particularly Saudis, could not enter this ‘Forbidden City’ except through invitation. The host had to personally meet his guests with Aramco ID in hand, stating name, rank and serial number and introduce them to the guards who wrote their names down on the Aramcon host’s file.

Juma’a, the head security officer, gave my father a smart salute and a wide grin then peered into the car to give me a warm welcome for my safe arrival. He had known me since early childhood and a kindred feeling existed between us. I was five when my father and a few other Saudi employees were singled out by Aramco to live the ‘American Dream’ in Dhahran. My father was given due esteem for his senior staff status by the Arab labor, particularly those Saudis who did the grunt work for Aramco.

Aramco’s three oil towns, Dhahran, Ras Tanura and Abqaiq, were so insular that American employees and other Westerners could work for ‘the Company’ as it was popularly known, for up to thirty years within their barbed wire perimeter fences and not make the acquaintance of a single Saudi Arab or learn a single Arabic word, save for politically correct terminologies such as "sadiqi (my friend), shukran" (thank you), "inshallah (God willing), bukra (tomorrow) and ahlan wa sahlan (welcome) … useful words of greeting for the annual functions held for Saudi Arab and American employees. Such barriers between Saudi and American helped keep a lid on unchecked Saudi voices that might want answers to bothersome questions such as Who owns what in the oil production process? and Where are the profits going?"

We drove into Dhahran past the Oil Exhibit, Aramco’s Public Relations showpiece where my father worked as an assistant manager. Turning right, we continued on down Main Street, a wide asphalt lane with cement sidewalks lined with sheltering banyan trees, mature palm trees and pink flowering oleander bushes. Single story homes with shingled roofs and well-tended gardens stood in square blocks along both sides of the road. Not a muttawa’a (enforcers of Wahhabi Puritanism) in sight. Sounds of laughter and music drifted from the ‘efficiencies’ (single bedroom studios) on Seventh Street where the unmarried Aramco employees resided in U-shaped blocks that shared a common square grass space. The singles’ housing was positioned a safe enough distance away from family housing in Dhahran’s lay-out. Many of Aramco’s American employees harked from the ‘Bible Belt’ of the American Midwest and did not approve of the liberal values of some of the unattached young employees. These Puritan Christian Americans were cut from the same cloth of religious fundamentalism as the Wahhabi Muslims in control of Saudi Arabia. But within Aramco’s oil towns, islands of exception at the heart of the Kingdom’s oil industry, the freedom of ‘to each his own’ was conveniently granted.

At last, to both my silent relief and my father’s, we reached home: 4595-B, a duplex marked by a towering acacia tree that distinguished it from the others in the row of identical houses on Fourth Street. I ran inside to greet my mother. As I hugged Mama and kissed her soft cheeks, now flushed pink from preparing dinner in my honor, my sister and two brothers tumbled out of their rooms to greet me along with our pampered Siamese cat, TC, named after the American cartoon character, Top Cat. It felt good to be home.

Mama had prepared my favorite food: deep dish macaroni, roast chicken basted in lemon and saffron, samboosak (fried puffs of ground meat and onions basted in pomegranate sauce) and, for dessert, apple pie. Our dinner table sounded like a translation center as my sister Fatin, my brothers Ghassan and Marwan and I chattered in American, switched to Arabic with our mother and spoke a mixture of both languages with our father, whom we addressed as ‘Baba.’ But this evening, Baba was in no mood for conversation. He was still carrying the black cloud that had perched over him since my tiff with the passports official. His unreceptive brooding did not keep Mama from smiling sweetly at me, frequently reaching out to pat my hair as if to make sure that I was truly, physically there. Just twenty years older than I was, we were beginning to be mistaken for sisters as I grew into my adult self. Not that there was any striking resemblance. Where she was petite and plump, I was tall and broad shouldered, where she had the irregular features, full cheeks and round face of the Damascenes, I had the regular features, high cheek bones and almond-shaped eyes of my father who traced his ancestors to the Sa’adoun tribe of Southern Iraq. Out of my siblings, I was the closest in appearance to my father but the farthest in character.

After the dinner table was cleared, Fatin, Ghassan, Marwan and I piled into the compact bedroom my sister and I shared, a pink four-byfour-meter room with white frilly curtains, two standard wooden desks, an American bunk bed and a Persian carpet spread over tan linoleum tiles. I plopped contentedly into an easy chair by the large window that looked out onto our back yard, now awash with light from the corner street lamp. Just beneath our window was the shared bane of us all and of TC, a large cage filled with a dozen parakeets that kept up an unalleviated prattle as long as there was light. Thankfully they were under a canvas for the night, allowing us welcome peace and quiet. Beyond the parakeets’ cage was my mother’s pride and joy, her garden, a profusion of marigolds, petunias and periwinkles that nodded gently in the night air around a plush dark green lawn. The proverbial white picket fence with matching gate enclosed our pastoral patch of nature. Daily at the first streak of dawn, Mama donned a floppy cloth hat and raced with the sun to feed, weed, and water her flowers, happily singing off key to herself while she lovingly nurtured every bloom, "ya wardati, ya wardati …" (my flowers).

TC hopped onto my lap and curled into a furry ball, purring softly. I looked affectionately at my younger siblings crowded on the bottom bunk bed. Fatin, a year my junior, was groaning about her upcoming A-Levels in England in preparation for medical school. Since the age of six, her passion had been to study medicine and nothing was going to stop her. The groaning was a smoke screen. Tiny but muscular, her physique reflected her tough inner self. With her light brown hair pulled back into an efficient pony tail that further pronounced the roundness of her face and the decidedly upward slant of her hazel eyes, Fatin was so unlike me in size, looks and character that no one ever guessed our relationship. The Chinese in England repeatedly mistook her for a compatriot and berated her indignantly for not speaking her native tongue. Ghassan on the other hand was obviously my brother. He was in the UK as well, attending Lord Mayor Treloar College for the handicapped as he suffered from cerebral palsy. But that had not kept him from returning with a full-fledged Beatles haircut, his glossy pitch black hair flopping fashionably over his smooth olive-skinned forehead. He was triumphantly relating a successfully weathered storm with my father over his hairstyle which brought about a worried expression on Marwan’s face, a Beatles fan as well but far less confrontational. Marwan, the youngest, at fourteen, was due to graduate from ninth grade at Dhahran Senior Staff School in another week. He was joining Fatin and Ghassan in England to study for his GCEs at summer’s end at Bryanston School for Boys. Marwan’s copper-colored hair, freckled button nose and white skin had almost resulted in my father being carted off for kidnapping at Cairo Airport in 1960.

At Cairo Airport, a guard had noted Marwan’s coloring and his American prattle and had asked him if he was Irish. Marwan was four years old at the time, spoke very little Arabic and did not understand the guard’s Egyptian dialect. But he had nodded politely in response and that was apparently enough proof that Marwan was Irish. Anyway, the guard had not found it credible that this American speaking, foreignlooking child could be the biological son of this Saudi Arabian man with black hair and moustache. But perhaps more to the point, Egypt was not happy with the politics of Saudi Arabia that year. As my father was getting our passports stamped, he suddenly found himself surrounded by security guards accusing him loudly of child kidnapping and pandemonium broke out. We began to cry, my mother yelled and everyone in Cairo Airport came rushing to catch the action. My mother’s blond brother, Khalo Adnan, who was studying Agriculture at ‘Ain Shams University in Cairo, was trotted out from the reception sector to show where Marwan got his fair looks from, but all to no avail. The security guards were not going to be budged from their accusation. We suffered several noisy and exhausting hours in the airport until Amti (Aunt) Bahija, my father’s sister who lived in Cairo in palatial style, contacted friends in the right places, and only then was the confusion finally sorted out.

Now Marwan was regaling us with impersonations of Mama during yet another clash with Aramco’s long-suffering personnel department over her accusations of shoddy workmanship in the maintenance of our bungalow (Marwan was the shanghaied interpreter with the Filipino clerks). I knew I could count on shared feelings of outrage at the insolence of the Dhahran Airport passports officer towards me away from Baba’s unsympathetic ears. Our father wanted us educated but unaltered, an impossible task. Politics and demands for civil reforms in Lebanon where I had been studying for the past five years were influencing my perception of Saudi Arabia and Aramco. I was eager to discuss my changing views of the world with my siblings and tell them about my new Lebanese boyfriend, Adnan, a young journalist for the influential Lebanese newspaper, An Nahar.

I smiled inwardly as Fatin and Ghassan interrupted one another amidst loud laughter at the confusion they’d cause after disclosing their real nationality to new English acquaintances and then watch them politely and discreetly attempt to adjust to the Saudi Arab rather than the American they had thought they were talking to. I was having the same responses in Lebanon but with a lot less hilarity. Neither the United States nor Saudi Arabia was particularly popular in Beirut against the ever-present turmoil of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that defined everyone’s identity and politics.

My siblings and I were Saudi by virtue of having been born to a Saudi father and that’s where Saudi Arabia stopped in defining us. Without ever stepping foot in the United States of America, we had developed into a new breed of the American colonized while living on Saudi Arabian soil: Saudi in name and as American as the Americans in everything else, we called ourselves ‘Aramcons.’ Circumstance alone would pull only me into an Arab awakening while my siblings would remain firmly as American as the apple pie we had just eaten for dessert. Eventually we would inhabit two separate worlds at extreme odds with one another…

Desert Dust to Desert Gold

Dhahran began as a dusty collection of makeshift tents and palm tree frond huts in 1933 to house American oil men of the California Arabian Standard Oil Company, Aramco’s forerunner. Even then the oil camp was, as it remains today, the largest American enclave in the Middle East, despite a homesick American’s plaintive song:

‘Home no more in Dhahran

Where the Arabs and Bedouins play

Where a shamal always blows

And God only knows

What causes a White man to stay?’¹

The answer to his question is ‘oil’ of course. The Americans had begun searching for oil in Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s in spite of Great Britain’s firm conviction that the Eastern Province did not have enough oil to be worth the trouble. Doggedly, the first American geologists followed old camel trails and crisscrossed the desert many times over in Ford V8 touring cars and a Fairchild monoplane, certain that they would strike oil. Expectedly, these trips created quite a stir amongst the locals as Nassir Al-Ajmi, a Saudi who rose to become an Aramco CEO, wrote in his autobiographical book, Legacy of a Lifetime. Describing his first contact with cars and foreigners as a child in a nomadic camp on the edge of the Ghawar field, the world’s largest oil field, he wrote:

The first time that I saw a vehicle was a frightening experience. I was playing with other children next to our encampment when we heard a strange noise. We saw an odd-looking thing rushing towards us with a cloud of dust behind it. We ran as fast as our legs could carry us and hid inside the tents. As we peeked through the holes to observe the noisy, strange-looking creature, we noticed two or three, unfamiliar looking people wearing funny clothes and deep plates or funneled pots over their heads! It was an exploration party asking for water and seeking directions.²

The American geologists finally struck oil in the Eastern Province on March 3, 1938 in Dammam Well No.7. When the well spurted its first 1,585 barrels of oil, Saudi Arabia formally became an oil-producing country and when profits from Saudi oil shot up from $2.8 million in 1944 to $114 million in 1949, the United States slid into dependency on foreign oil in its quest for global supremacy. Aramco’s three tented oil camps were rapidly upgraded to eventually become America’s largest settlements across the globe, outsizing those in Manila, Shanghai and Panama.

Aramco’s three oil camps were landmarks of social and horticultural engineering in 1950s Saudi Arabia. Their streets and sidewalks were paved; trees, flowers and green grass grew in abundance everywhere. Each of the three communities had its own library, golf course, clay tennis court, bowling alley, yacht club, horseback riding stables and Olympicsized swimming pool. All were Saudi Arabia’s firsts, as were the electricity grid, central air conditioning, and fresh desalinated drinking water. In no other region of Saudi Arabia could anyone (particularly Saudis) go to movies, dance on a moonlit patio to live music played by a popular American band, or listen to celebrated pianists perform the works of Mozart or Chopin. Dhahran even made a mention in the New York Times in 1956, where it was described as an American community transplanted to the Arabian Desert complete with weekend gardeners, women’s clubs, PTAs, television and brightly lit, air-conditioned homes, each with their own yards and hedges. Such mundane details about Dhahran deemed worthy of mentioning by the reporter underlined in bold red the backwardness of the rest of the country. Well-known scholars such as historian Arnold Toynbee, Arabist H. St. John Philby, and anthropologist Margaret Mead accepted Aramco’s invitations to give lectures to members of the community. All three also gave warnings of an eventual backlash against Aramco’s stiff segregation policy from the rest of the country, but their warnings fell on ears that were not ready to listen.

In the Dhahran that we grew up in, women wore shorts and liquor flowed freely. We bought our food from the company’s ‘commissary’ that sold all things American, including pork products. We moved freely from one area of Dhahran to another on bikes and roller skates, hopped on and off the free bus service driven by Shi’a Saudis that the Americans (and we) were taught to call ‘sadiqi’ (my friend). While everyone living outside Aramco’s towns drank brackish water, we drank fresh desalinated water from our taps. Cold water fountains were stationed in all the public places of the camp complete with envelope paper cups and salt tablet dispensers to combat the intense heat. We camped out with our scout troops on Aramco’s private beach, Half Moon Bay. We competed at American football and basketball with Abqaiq and Ras Tanura. Our swimming pool area, ruled by a stern Indian lifeguard named John, had the air of a resort spa with its reclining sun chairs, and piped-in ‘muzak’ that ranged from country and western to classical to rock, never Arabic. My Catholic classmates attended Catechism, went to confession with a residing Catholic priest, and to Sunday school, which was actually on a Friday. That day of the week was the one non-negotiable where the line was drawn between Aramco and Saudi Arabia. Friday, the Muslim holy day, resolutely remained as the only day when everything closed down and all Muslim men attended prayer in the mosque, even in Aramco.

My siblings and I addressed one another by the American mispronunciation of our names. I was ‘Fudgie’ short for ‘Fadjyah,’ Fatin was ‘Faahttn,’ Ghassan was ‘Gussaaaan’ and Marwan was ‘Moe.’ Growing up, we entered Brownies and Cub Scouts and graduated to Boy and Girl Scouts of America. On Halloween we went trick-or-treating with our friends dressed up as ‘G.I. Joe’ and ‘Cinderella.’ I joined the cheerleaders for one of Dhahran School’s American Football teams, the ‘Bears,’ Marwan played catcher for the ‘Orioles,’ Dhahran’s Little League Baseball team and Fatin was the star gymnast of Dhahran School on the rings. We hung out with our friends in the pool hall in the Recreation area in the center of Dhahran. There was a ‘Teen Canteen’ set up especially for young teenage Aramcons replete with a jukebox, soda fountain and a Filipino barman we all called ‘Mike.’ A short walk away was the ‘Snack Bar’ where we ate super-size grilled hamburgers and caramel sundaes prepared and served by Hussein and Ali, Shi’a Saudi Arab personnel, from the neighboring Al Hasa oasis towns of Qatif and Hofuf.

On every American Independence Day, July 4th, Dhahran held a parade led by baton twirling, mini-skirted majorettes and a spiffily costumed brass band which included my sister on the clarinet at one point. Two Eagle scouts carried the American and Saudi Arabian flags as they led troops of Brownies, Cub Scouts and Boy and Girl Scouts. Floats draped with pretty girls in sun dresses rolled past clapping crowds followed by Americans on spirited Arabian horses and elementary school children dressed as Cowboys and Indians. To the rat-tat-tat of the drums and the blare of the trumpets, the parade moved triumphantly down King’s Road on to the County Fair spread out in Dhahran’s Recreation area. There we wolfed down hot dog buns smothered in relish and ketchup and washed them down with root beer. We bought rides on laconic camels, paying the outstretched hand of their equally laconic Bedouin owners before embarking. Then there were three-legged races and donkey races to join, and bakery contests to nibble from. We placed bets on races of tiny green turtles fished out from the water canals of the Al Hasa oasis that sported numbers on their miniscule backs. By day’s end, with our prize turtles still racing round in circles in a bowl of water, we were more than ready for a sound night’s sleep as we dragged our bulging stomachs and our booty home.

My siblings and I led the rarified life of coddled westerners in one of the harshest of terrains on the face of this earth – except when the deadly shamals struck. Nature is the great equalizer and the shamal winds, deadly northeast sandstorms, forcibly drove this home. One such unannounced shamal struck during English class when I was in sixth grade while we were in the grips of the poem ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allen Poe. As we sat in spellbound silence listening to Miss Mathews’ dramatic repetition of the raven’s Nevermore we became aware of a different kind of silence. An eerie red light had stealthily permeated the air outside the classroom’s windows blotting out the sun amidst a deathly stillness. The playground and sky and distant desert horizon had disappeared without a trace into the opaqueness of the red glow and it was as though we were suddenly drifting alone in space. Miss Mathews dropped her book mid-Nevermore and walked rapidly to the window. As she stared at the unfolding scene outside, she underwent an astonishing transformation from a stodgy school marm into an excited youthful woman,

Drop your books and pick up a pen and paper, she ordered us in breathless anticipation. "This class is going to be dedicated to the shamal. We are about to be amongst the few, other than the Bedouins, to witness a shamal’s birth."

With the somber mood of the raven’s Never more still upon us, and the unexpected change that our English teacher had undergone, we entered a surreal world as the shamal unfolded before us. The red glow deepened to shades of darker red and increased in its opaqueness as the air filled with particles of dust each bringing in its own shade of desert sand, much like the gathering of soldiers before the battle. Stirring swathes of deep yellow began to glide amongst the motionless multihued flecks of red-tinted sand. When the last of the red glow disappeared into the deep yellow, Nature gave the signal for battle. Unearthly screaming howls of the shamal’s angry winds shattered the silence, attacking our window panes in a barrage of wildly swirling grains of sands that had turned into tiny but deadly spears capable of choking the uninitiated. The shamal was not stopped by the physical barriers of our classroom and we began to feel the sand crunching between our teeth and becoming embedded all over our bodies, ears, noses and hair. As we bent over our papers writing feverishly we stole surreptitious glances at our transfixed English teacher who remained standing spellbound at the window until the school bell jangled her back to earth.

The lighter side of living in the desert was the unmitigated joy we felt when it rained. On the rare days that rain fell, the neighborhoods in Dhahran rushed out, adult and child alike, into the streets to revel at this miracle of nature. We hopped onto our bikes pedaling furiously for the pleasure of swooshing through the wet rivulets running down the streets while the adults square danced in the puddles. We twirled in circles like mesmerized dervishes, arms spread out, our faces eagerly turned up to the sky to catch each fat globule of water before it fell to the ground.

The desert rain fell