EXPAT: CHRONICLES OF AN EXPATRIATE IN SAUDI ARABIA

By LYN C. STAFFORD

In the 1980s, Lyn Johns arrives in Saudi Arabia on a mission that may cost her her family, but it is her family's future that has brought her to the Middle East. Her decision may be fraught with unintended consequences, and she knows it, but she leaves a low-paying job in Alabama to take a two-year contract in Saudi Arabia where she will help launch a new medical journal for the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh.

It seems her fears of not being able to be mother to her three children and daughter to her parents from so many thousands of miles away may all be coming true, but she has more immediate problems. She has arrived at a moment in history, the third Saudi Arabian Five-Year Plan, when expatriates and their jobs are at risk. She also finds how vulnerable she and all her friends who work in that hospital to corruption, surveillance, and even violence by the Hospital's own Security Forces. With the help of letters from home and especially from the expatriate underground, which consisted mostly of ham radio operators and returning expats smuggling in news, she begins to see how what she cannot see is affecting everything she can.

This curious narrative is about the remarkable, sometimes foolhardy, men and women who navigate an exotic but treacherous landscape. Lyn's carefully researched memoir explores the lives of expatriates in a crazy, politically mixed-up, often dangerous, but beautiful world that seems to have lost its compass.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667895772

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© Copyright 2023 Lyn C. Stafford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for

Soft cover ISBN: 979-8-21815-384-7

Hard cover ISBN: 979-8-218-19075-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66789-577-2

Printed in the United States of America--1st Printing 2023

Cover art by Book Cover Whisperer, Christine Horner, OpenBookDesign.biz

all rights reserved

This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.

Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

1. Home Fires

2. 1983

3. No Time

4. Class of 5 Safar

5. On Our Way

6. Complexities

7. Ethics and Confusion

8. The Prisoner

9. More Important Things

10. The Dunhill Trio

11. The First Day of Christmas

12. The Twelfth Day of Christmas

13. Triumph

14. War and Peace

15. Worlds Apart

16. The Sphinx Rises

17. Redemption

18. The Soul of Riyadh

19. Reunion

20. 1 Muharram 1405

21. A New Journal

22. Alabama Bound

23. The Christmas Massacre

24. A Dark and Lonely Road

25. Peggy and the Harriers

26. Looking West

27. The Mahr

28. Stateside

EPILOGUE: Bitter Water

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

END NOTES

Also by Lyn C. Stafford

The Road to Margaret:

A Story of Hope and Survival in the Industrial South

AUTHOR’S NOTE

For on the ringing plains of windy Troy, I am a part of all that I have met.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Memoir by its definition is a tale set in a certain time and place in history, and by its nature is told by the people who lived it. I could never have written my memoir without the people who lived it with me, even those I left behind. Leaving my Alabama family, my children and parents and lifetime friends in 1983 was the most difficult decision I ever had to make, but once I committed to Saudi Arabia for two years, my fellow expatriates became my family. That multicultural, multinational group depended on each other for everything, even the news.

The royal family in the Kingdom, perhaps the most powerful ruling family in the world, controlled everything in print and on television, guarding Shari’a law and its emphasis on strict rules and sometimes drastic censorship. Expatriates were often not privy to much needed information, but they had a lifeline: a network of ham radios, shared copies of imported and probably outdated British and American newspapers, and the latest gossip.

Being a woman in Riyadh introduced yet another filter between the Saudi version of the world and what was really happening. It took me some time to figure this out, but when I did, I began looking beyond the tidbits of news for the rest of the story, a habit I share with Paul Harvey even today.

In 1984, when King Fahd announced to the world he was opening a publishing company in Medina, where no non-Muslim was allowed to set foot, I could only wonder what would happen to me should he decide to publish his King Faisal Specialist Hospital Medical Journal there rather than in England and in Arabic rather than English. A visit from a pair of Saudi pressmen seemed to confirm my fears.

When the new press, the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qu’ran, was built, I soon realized our Journal was safe. The King built that Complex for only one purpose: to print and distribute the Qu’ran, beginning with the new, conservative Wahhabi version called the Noble Qu’ran, named for its translators and annotators, Hilali-Khan.

In less than two years, that press was delivering many millions of copies of the Qu’ran annually to pilgrims, mosques, charities, schools, travelers, and embassies all over the world. The obscure article I saw in a Saudi paper that day heralded one of the greatest religious successes in the world.¹

It is so easy to pass over small stories, but pebbles make ripples. For the sake of our children and grandchildren, it is more important than ever to think through the what ifs in a story. I went to Saudi Arabia to make enough money to send my three children to college, but came away with much more. Having a chance to be an expatriate gave me a sense of being part of a larger world and a fascination with that world’s people and their histories. And it gave me a chance to see my hometown and the Deep South from the other side of the world.

People the world over have hopes and dreams, experience successes and failures, and fall in love. My wish would be for everyone to have a chance to live in another country for a little while, to be able to see that larger world and to look back home with new eyes. But that is not realistic. The best I can do is share what I saw and learned while I was away with the hope a reader won’t have to leave home to find it.

Chapter 1

Home Fires

The fireplace struggled to keep us warm, and so did I. The last of the embers turned to gray ash before breakfast, and my kids were cold. With no electricity to turn on the boiler, the furnace was cold. And now, no wood. Not that it mattered much. Even when we had wood, that old fireplace never did its job no matter how much wood we burned. Some architect might be able to figure out why, if heat rises, heat from that fireplace never rose past the first landing and never warmed the children’s bedrooms upstairs. There were no repairmen much less architects in my budget.

The house came with the ghost of a previous owner who left his problems behind, a ghost that sucked the heat out and sent it up the chimney far into the skies above Redmont Park, my neighborhood, now immobilized by ice and its consequent morass of broken limbs, downed trees, and blocked streets on our side of Red Mountain. My side. The city side of the mountain had electricity, but none of us, including my elderly parents a couple of miles away, had power. I knew my Dad built his house well, and his fireplace was a good one, but he and my mother had been isolated by the ice storm for two nights. I had to choose between trying to reach them on foot or staying put downstairs in my own freezing cold house to do what I could to keep my children warm. I always hated making decisions.

The beauty of that ice lay in part in its danger, the way it crystallized trees and shone gloriously in the sun. But when night fell, the trees groaned and broke, killing the early buds on the azaleas, crushing cars and roofs and blocking roads.

So far, our house was sound, and I might be able to knock enough ice off of the azaleas to save them, but the last of our saved logs were gone, and it was miserable inside. My children thought it all grand and adventurous, but none of their coats were warm enough, and we barely had enough food to make it through another, even colder night.

Birmingham, no stranger to February’s ice storms, was usually prepared for power outages, but this time the city had loaned its trucks, the ones it used to salt our roads, to Florida–to move sand. Our neighbors had wine and generators, a gracious plenty to keep even a three-story home comfortable until mobile crews could clear the debris and restore power. But it had been two days now, and not a single power truck had made it across the mountain.

It was so cold. I wrapped my blanket around my oldest child. He’d wrapped his tightly around his little brother and sister until they were no more than two sets of eyes peeking out of a package. In a bit, we took ourselves outside so they could play in the snow. I could see my neighbors opening doors for their extended families, other people without heat. I resigned myself that I could not get to my parents and worried as I tried to knock the killing ice off the budding bushes. My soaked jacket soon froze in the bitter cold, and I went back inside with the idea that I might be able to seal off the useless fireplace and the gaping stairwell to salvage what little heat I could. Sheets of plastic and duct tape might get us through one more night on the floor, where my children and I had been sleeping for the last two nights.

My oldest son, Keith, was home--not for the holiday but because Northwestern University recommended he take an academic leave. Pessimist though I sometimes was, I could never have predicted that from my studious son, but it didn’t matter. I was glad he was home.

Mom, he informed me at the end of his last year, I don’t want to worry you, but my grades are not good. It’s my fault. I’m on academic probation, but my advisor says Northwestern thinks I should take a gap year and get my act together. So I’m coming home.

Wonderful news for a mother, nonetheless.

I know I can do it. I’m so, so sorry. I’m going to get a job, maybe travel a little, but I’m coming home. He told me he’d succumbed to the party scene, which was true, but I knew there was more to it. He parked cars at the Orrington Garage every afternoon just to make enough money to live on, and that meant time lost from studying. He knew how much college meant to me and knew he was lucky that Northwestern would take him back.

Next year I would have a generator. Next year Keith would be back at Northwestern University where he belonged. Next year I would fix the fireplace and caulk the windows and repair the rot in the window sills. Next year I would find yet more part-time work outside the journal at the Alabama School of Medicine, or perhaps the job at the New England Journal of Medicine in Boston would come through. My friend, a specialist in tropical diseases there and one of the reviewers for The Alabama Journal of Medical Science was on the lookout for me. Anything tropical sounded good at the moment.

My venture into the garden left me coated in ice. Back in the house, I hung my jacket over the stair rail; as it melted, it dripped water on the hardwood floor. We were all dripping, but without electricity we would never dry, and without electricity, the antique boiler in the basement wouldn’t work. Surely someone who had been both father and mother for two years could figure out how to turn that boiler on with a screwdriver. All I needed to do was make a spark, but I had to do it before dark. I always hated going down those cold concrete steps in the daylight, and even with a flashlight, it was creepy.

The stairs smelled of ghosts, and the basement still reeked of cigarettes from the days my then husband Burns told me and the children he wasn’t smoking. The gauge on the boiler seemed to dare me, so I took a deep breath and attacked it with my screwdriver. The spark took, but when the furnace coughed itself alive and burst into flame right in my face, I jumped, then turned to run upstairs to tell my kids the good news. We had heat we could bask in until evening, and nothing else mattered. My children were with me, and it was warm.

We grabbed a few things out of the refrigerator for lunch and closed its door to keep the cold in. We’d left it open the night before because it was colder in the house than it was in the now dark frig. As the hours passed and the house warmed up, we threw off our blankets and began shedding sweaters. It wasn’t long before I realized how fast the temperature was rising. Jackets hanging over the rail had long dried, and I began folding them. They were warm to the touch!

Still no sign of the power company. Nothing moved outside; nothing could get through any of the streets until the line crews could bring in buzz saws and move the trees off the roads. I listened, hoping I might hear machinery in the distance, but all I heard was the silence of ice.

Kids, I’m headed back to the basement. Your mom’s a human thermostat, and I promised you I would keep us warm, but this is way too warm! I have to go turn the boiler off. I’ll be back in a minute.

How wonderful it was to be able to joke with my kids again. They gave me a thumbs up.

All I had to do was reverse what I did earlier: turn the ignition the other way. But no matter which way I turned that screwdriver or how many times I turned whatever it was I was turning, nothing happened. The boiler just sat there in defiance, growing hotter. Time passed as I tried everything I knew to do, but nothing would turn that heat off. I thought briefly about calling the children’s father but knew he wouldn’t come. He would patronize me and laugh, say it was my problem—that is, if he answered the phone at all. This was not the first time I had to deal with something with no instructions, and there was no doubt it would not be my last.

I remembered that the fire department had long been known for helping citizens get snakes out of basements and cats out of trees, and they most certainly would know about boilers. I dialed. The firemen reminded me they couldn’t get through, either.

Is this an emergency, ma’am? I assured them it was.

They said they would do their best and were as good as their word; two firemen in full regalia soon appeared at my door, but only one came inside. He took stock of the oppressive heat, then ran downstairs for a quick look at the antique boiler before he let me have it.

Lady, take your children and get out of here. It’s about to blow!

We scrambled out onto the sidewalk to wait until they gave us the all-clear. In the end, we thanked them, ran inside to grab our warm jackets off the stairs and a few blankets, then walked up Red Mountain across Key Circle and back down the other side of the mountain onto a street that still had electricity but no azaleas where my friend Whitman lived. He had called earlier to ask if we had electricity, and I had assured him that although we did not, we were fine. We were welcome there, he said, any time, and that time had come.

His house probably dated to the ‘20s, and cold air seeped through the plank flooring, but between his gloriously functioning radiators and our blankets on the floor, we didn’t care. He watched us spread out all across his downstairs living area.

Look, I can sleep down here with the children. You take my room, Lyn.

No, no. I’m fine. Actually, I’m used to sleeping on the floor.

My son piped up My dad took all the bedroom furniture.

What?

I sheepishly told Whitman that I was as surprised as he was. It was worth it, I said. It was just me and my children now, and we could laugh and talk again.

As night fell, Whitman fed us hot vegetable soup and left the downstairs to us. I watched Keith tuck his little brother and sister in. He looked so grown up, his hazel eyes dark and serious. Handsome like his father, like me he was the incorrigible dreamer, the first-born, the responsible one, the kind of kid who fell over his own feet trying to follow a log downstream or scraped his toes bloody just so he could stop his bike fast enough to check out a lizard.

Two years before, his father and I drove him to Illinois to enroll him in his first year at Northwestern. It was possibly the saddest journey I ever took–not just because I was about to lose him to adulthood, but more because he and I spent a terrible eight hours on the road trying to make conversation with his father, to break his silence, his inexplicable silence that I suffered through for a year at least if not more. It was an impossible task. My husband refused to laugh at Keith’s jokes or even join in the hunt for a place to eat. After a miserable lunch at some restaurant finally chosen because of a billboard, we continued on under the cloud of silence, still trying. Burns drove and didn’t stop but once, at a Seven-Eleven where he told me to pay the attendant while he made a call from a phone booth. Twice in eight hours he broke his silence. I laughed to myself: at least he was talking to someone. I tried to ignore the obvious fact that it was no business call–he was no longer with the company–but any conversation probably meant I could rule out a brain tumor.

We stayed in Evanston long enough to settle Keith in his dorm. When Burns and I turned to leave, Keith thanked his father for the ride and took me aside to tell me not to worry, that he would be fine. I gave him a hug and pulled the two sides of his herringbone jacket together as though I could protect him from the cold. That coat was our main purchase for his college wardrobe, bought at the Nearly New Shop. It felt flimsy in my hand.

He waved goodbye that day, and I waved back before I turned my attention to climbing into the Volkswagen bus for the long ride home. Whatever would happen next rested on my shoulders. Anything that affected me I could handle, but when it hurt my children I drew the line. Burns and I drove the eight hours back to Birmingham in silence, or rather he drove back in silence. I remember trying to chat about small things like the weather and the passing scenery.

Now I watched all my kids sleeping, huddled together there on the warm blankets in a stranger’s house. Whitman and I waited up for news that the roads were clear, but no news came.

The next morning, after hot oatmeal all around, I watched our kind host sit on the floor with the children to play a game—one that began Did you know that…? Apparently, he was a walking encyclopedia of scientific curiosities, and the children loved it. We hoped we wouldn’t have to stay the next evening. After the children settled down with their books, he and I had all the time in the world to talk about his embarking on a new career at the newly opened Red Mountain Museum and I my declaration that I was determined to do whatever it took to make enough money to launch my kids into the world with a good college education behind them.

Late in the afternoon of that third day, we heard utility trucks making their way south from downtown Birmingham, their engines chugging over the crest of the hill toward our house on the other side. We thanked our wonderful friend for his hospitality, bundled up, and made our way up that mountain behind the trucks and down again from there. With plenty of raucous slipping and sliding, we made our way home amid the ruckus made by the trucks and the workmen as they ground away at fallen timber or waved at us from a high perch near the power lines they were trying to restore.

Neighbors stood out on the sidewalk watching the linemen work. I joined my friends across the street, other matrons in the neighborhood who, as they always did, puzzled over why I or anyone who appeared to have it all like me, worked every day. They never hesitated to tell me that I should stay home where I belonged and that if I didn’t, bad things would happen. Had they known how many nights and weekends I took on freelance work they might have judged me even more harshly. In their defense, they never knew that all of us, including my now ex-husband Burns Johns toward the end of our marriage, were living only on my part-time salary, a steady income but one greatly reduced from when I held down positions in three different departments, two of which had dissolved. I had cobbled those positions together years before, as a part-timer with three jobs. My responsibilities as associate editor of the medical journal began as only one of those three, but the work load exploded until it not only required my presence each day but meant taking paperwork home almost every night. So far I had been unable to convince the University that this job was, and had been for some years, full time. Now I had neither the energy nor the time and money to stand up for myself. The Women’s Movement might mean hope for my daughter Susan one day, but so far not for me.

In a few days, the city returned to life. Keith left for work, and it was time to take the others to school. Keys in hand, I headed for the car where Susan and Walter sat waiting. After I dropped them off, I would double back to the University. Just before I closed the car door, I turned to check the back seat to be sure they had books in their laps. They did and were waiting for me to crank up the car.

Mom, we’re going to be late, Susan said.

Yes, I said to myself. But being late is the least of my worries. Lyn Johns, I said to myself, even though you are an associate editor of the University’s medical journal with a master’s degree, you can’t fix things that need fixing and you are having trouble even paying utilities, much less thinking about sending them all to college. You’ve got to do something. They deserve more.

I could almost hear my father saying the difficult can always be done with enough time; the impossible just takes a little longer. He never ran out of old adages, and I hung my hat on that one, cranked up the 1973 Volkswagen bus, and picked up two more kids.

They went in different directions to different schools, but were on time, and I—Volkswagen bus empty—made it back to town in time to find a parking space in the deck off 20th Street and climb the concrete stairs to my office on time.

The minute I opened the door to the Journal office, I was revived as always by a shot of happy chatter and welcome chaos among the all-but-hippy staff. I was home. Ad managers and copy editors hung around my desk looking at my empty chair, waiting with questions in their eyes. None stood on ceremony, and none thought twice before barging in on me. Familiar chaos could be comforting, but not so much this morning.

Two full-page ads! exclaimed my suddenly successful new ad manager, a newly divorced gal who had never worked a day in her life. She laid the copy uncertainly on my desk, looking for my approval.

Hallelujah for you! I said. She beamed. Here. Take a look at the layout. You’ve already sold the back cover, so you’ll just have to find a spot for it.

That same day, I went again to see the Dean to ask him to raise my salary. I wasn’t surprised when he said he would try, but he was an old-fashioned man, a good man who knew my ex-husband and thought all ex-husbands supported their wives. I wasn’t about to tell him that mine left me not only with no support but with huge debts that I hadn’t even known about and couldn’t possibly pay.

Then, just as I was beginning to let myself succumb to the desperation I was feeling, my Boston friend called to tell me the New England Journal of Medicine did need another medical editor after all, and they had tentatively offered me the job pending an interview. A letter would follow. Foolishly, I was just beginning an acceptance letter in my head when I heard my editor cough from across the room. That cough meant wake up and take over, I have a grant to write.

I made my way to the lay-out table where the next issue was roughly displayed, and two copy editors followed. The older one, a woman in her late thirties, watched over my shoulders and fidgeted with her curls until she could stand it no longer.

Lyn, what am I going to do with these slides? The author says they have to go with the article because they’re from the foundation that gave him the research money. But we can’t use slides: it’s right there in Directions for Authors. There’s no time to make black and white glossies. Plus the layout’s done.

Not quite. Looks like we’ve got to add another signature anyway.

But we haven’t got time to return them to the author, she protested. Fortune smiled for once, a good omen. Our best photographer ducked in just in time to see if we needed him.

You bet, I said and waved him over.

I loved working for that Journal. I loved anything remotely linked to the ongoing drama of science, but with one exception--I was in the middle of my own medical drama, one that added fire to my sleepless nights. I picked up the mail and thumbed through memos and submissions hoping to find something, anything, on the subject of a recent pathogen, a virus traced back to a visitor from another country, a killer of gay men that as yet had no name. This was personal, or at least I was afraid it might be. Surely there must be something in the in basket that reported some kind of progress. But no, the world still only knew that this pathogen was carried in the blood, was some form of a human herpesvirus, and was deadly, all of which left me uncomfortable because only three months earlier my urologist gave me two pints of fresh blood, not plasma, while I was under his knife for some collapsed female something. He told me proudly as I was coming out from under the anesthetic:

We fixed everything. And we gave you two pints of blood!

All I could do as a groggy patient lying on a gurney in the recovery room was look at him horrified and mumble Holy Mackerel. He tried to assure me that the blood I received was perfectly safe, that he never used blood from out-of-state, and I shouldn’t worry because said virus had not been found in anyone in Alabama. The problem as I saw it was that although I never doubted the blood supply came from someone in Alabama, plenty of transients gave blood in Alabama. I found nothing in any of the material other than that scientists were still grappling for a name and were having no success finding a test for it.²

Still, everything medical fascinated me. Theories sent me scurrying for answers. If an author of a paper failed to do the proper research, he or she could conceivably be held responsible for killing someone. Searching for the whole story must have been built into my DNA because when I was a small child, when my mother gave me my first doll—a baby doll made of rubber with eyes that opened and shut—I really wanted to know what made those eyelids go up and down. Curiosity won, and I performed surgery on Rubber Baby. My parents never gave me another doll, but I did discover the rubber bands in her brain and understood how the weights on those rubber bands obeyed gravity.

Years earlier, when my husband and I moved to Birmingham as newlyweds, I took it for granted that I would try for an M.D. degree at Birmingham’s brand new medical school, the one promising to be one of the finest in the world—the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. I hadn’t done my homework. Too late I found out that the School of Medicine still didn’t take women. I say still because when I was twelve years old, I knew Alabama medical schools did not accept women. I knew that because I asked my aunt by marriage how I could become a doctor, and she told me her story.

Louise Branscomb, MD, had finally returned to Birmingham to practice medicine after many years. She had graduated from Women’s College of Alabama in the 1920s, when Alabama’s medical schools did not admit female students. She left Alabama to earn her M.D. degree at Johns Hopkins and