IN RETROSPECT

I would never trade the years I spent in Saudi Arabia for anything else (at least not yet). Those years were truly significant and they have left deep impressions on my life that will continue to affect me. Some are quite positive, but some are quite negative as well.

Childhood was relatively peachy until the unfairness of life in Saudi Arabia, especially for foreigners like my father, became quite clear to me. My father worked for one of the largest companies in Saudi Arabia for a majority of the time I had lived there. In the past 15 or more years of his career, he has not been elevated to a better position that what he had been in at the beginning of the 15 years. Maybe it was not the policy of the company, but the rules were relaxed and not protective enough for my father's employer to promote others who were related to people of influence.

One of the most depressing things about working in Saudi Arabia is how one has to tolerate the racist systems of many of the employers, which were legal and even government sanctioned. In my father's corporation, there was a payscale based on citizenship. Saudis being the natives would have the highest salary, then US citizens (see the suckup politics?), then Canadians and Europeans, and lastly citizens of the so-called "Third World". "Third World", a relatively abandoned word in actual policies in UN and most world organizations was a perfectly ok term used to distinguish who deserved a higher compensation for his work. What was unfair was that this system of salary did not pay attention to the actual education level of the person being hired. A US citizen with a meager High School degree would actually get higher pay than a person with an Engineering Degree from Bangladesh. Did they think the US high school education system was truly that superior? If they did, they must have been extremely stupid. I have been through the American education system, and no way can an American High School be superior to University Education anywhere in the world. It seems like these measures were clearly made for being nice to Americans.

Excluding employment policies, other governmental policies were so clearly set up not for the benefit of the Expatriates (foreigners working there). The policies seem to be filled with senseless logic that I never quite understand, even when I try to understand it from a cultural standpoint.

Another subtler attitude that seemed prevalent in the Saudi post-oil-discovered culture was the increasing view that people from poor countries like Bangladesh, India, Philippines, and others were inferior. Islam makes a point of not making an affair of out class distinction, but Saudi culture where I lived did not reflect that. People from the Indian sub-continent were often called "Miskin", meaning "poor". This can be a painful derogatory term, but most of us took it as a joke. I made some conclusion that such a thing as major oil discoveries and money through oil can easily blur someone's image of himself and give him an enormous ego boost, and maybe that is what happened to some Saudis.

All this is not to say that life was a permanent hell there. It is "modern" Saudi Arabia that I am complaining about. Time has changed the people, or so the older Bangladeshi relatives I know have said. They remember a time when they would visit Saudi Arabia for Umrah or Hajj, and there would be Saudi's begging to sell goods to these pilgrims. Now, they just blame foreigners for being illiterate and irresponsible enough to start fires and stampedes during pilgrimages (makes me wonder why there were hardly any Saudi casualties in the Hajj fire last year).

I would never consider going back to Saudi Arabia to live there. They have done a wonderful job of making me unwelcome (unless they need our help to develop more). ©