On any ordinary day, to tell the truth, I’m mighty glad I no longer live in Saudi Arabia…or really, anywhere in the Middle East. But these days: holy mackerel!
[oooookayyyy… WordPress won’t let me add a link. So, here it is, for the copy-and-pasting: https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/czrm4k1e7d0o Best described as egad!]
It was a horrible place to live, even for a little kid who didn’t know or understand what was going on around her. You think Americans can hate? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
Where those bombs are blasting away? That’s where we used to stay during my father’s biannual two-week vacations!
The American men (married women couldn’t work for the company) signed on for two-year contracts. Between each contract, you got a month off, and in the middle of the contract, you got a couple weeks off.
During those “short leaves,” as they were called, we would go to Beirut, or to Bahrein, an island off the shore of the Persian Gulf not far from where the American camps stood.
It’s horribly sad to think of a bunch of a$$holes blowing up Beirut. Despite the poverty and the hatred for Americans, it actually was quite a beautiful city. I recall this one beach we used to visit — not far from where we would stay. It wasn’t sand, exactly: it was made of tiny, smoothly eroded glass-like pebbles. Stones of many colors. Small enough and fine enough that you could walk around on them bare-footed. And so very, very pretty.
Yeah. So…let’s drop a bomb in it, right?
I see Aramco has spiffed up the Ras Tanura beach, turned it to a sorta entertainment venue. That’s too bad: it was quite beautiful enough, back in the day, and did not need to be junked up with any man-made accoutrements.
You have to be quite the adventurer — or, as my father was, extraordinarily anxious to max out your earning power — to sign on for two years in that place. We were there for ten endless years. These photos make it look a lot less bare-bones than it was when we lived here. But still:
- It was hotter than the hubs of Hades.
- Humid as a steam-bath
- Women were not allowed to take any decent jobs: you could be a K-8 teacher, a nurse, or a secretary. That was about it.
- You had to soak every piece of produce in Clorox water, lest the stuff give you a roaring case of amoebic dysentery.
- The school went through the eighth grade. After that you were sent to Beirut, to Switzerland, or back to the U.S. for high school. And no, your parents didn’t come with you.
- At the time, the only air-conditioning was what we call “swamp cooling” today. Damp and pretty much ineffectual.
- There were two church meetings: Protestant and Catholic. If you were into religion and one of those would suffice for you, you’d go to one of those. Not very many folks did.
- Americans were roundly hated. That’s OK, I reckon: the feeling was mutual.
- You couldn’t have a dog: rabies.
- Even if you could, jackals came into the camp at night and would rip your dog, if it was caught, from limb to limb.
My mother did catch amoebic dysentery, as a matter of fact. In our LAST WEEK in that garden spot, we were invited to the home of one of my father’s coworkers. He was a guy my father openly disdained as a moron…without a doubt that attitude had become widely known. The guy’s idiot (malign???) wife served us a salad with greens that she hadn’t soaked in Clorox, then the only effective way to sanitize produce. Before we were ready to head to Dhahran and jump on a plan back to the states, my mother came down with the parasite.
She very nearly died from it. Had to be shipped back to the U.S on an emergency flight. There she spent weeks in a hospital, being treated with the fierce and poisonous drugs they had at the time. The stuff made her desperately sick…which must have been gratifying for MacA’s bi*ch wife.
{Seriously: I am quite certain the woman knew what she was doing. She deliberately served us unsanitized produce in an effort to make us sick. And it worked!}
Eventually, my mother recovered. Got on a plane; flew back to Rasty Nasty, picked me up, and took me off to New York.
Never have I ever been so happy to leave a place. Seriously….
“…Leave us all enjoy it,