Cultural Origins

I had an interesting time the other day with one of our new Saudi pilots. This is the same guy I talked about previously who grew up in Kuwait and experienced the Gulf War first hand. He called me up and offered to take me into town to get something to eat. We had talked earlier about my desire to experience authentic Arabic food, so he took me to a restaurant called Al-Macbus. We tried to get there before prayer time, but we were a bit late so the doors were closed. (Apparently if you get in and are served before prayer time, you can stay there and finish eating until prayer is over. All doors are closed and all work stops during prayer time, which happens 5 times a day.) Anyway, since we got there too late he decided to show me the construction of this house he plans on renting with his brother. It wasn’t that far away, so we soon found it, and he gave me the tour. The walls were all cinder block smoothed over with cement. Wood was sparse, but used for a few things like door frames and molding. Otherwise all the decorative aspects of the walls and floor etc, was done with tile and ornate stone. It was two stories, the bottom floor having two “living rooms” and two “dining rooms” (one set being for “outside guests” and one set for family). The second floor had four bedrooms, and a few bathrooms. The flat rooftop also had plenty of room and could easily be also used for social gathering as it was very spacious and had an 8 foot wall all around it giving it privacy. The only covered area on the roof was a maid’s (or servant’s) quarters at one end. It was almost exactly like I had envisioned houses looking like in biblical times. It seemed all the houses in the neighborhood had this sort of layout. None of them were very colorful, mostly variations of beige. The classiness of each was mostly demonstrated in the ornate texture of the walls. One house we passed had some bright yellow trim. Bander said that even though it was eye catching, the owner would probably have to repaint it every year. The constant sand-storms make anything colorful quickly look grungy around here so most people settle with beige or grey.

We then went back to the restaurant and had quite the cultural experience. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at when I first walked in. There were no tables, only cubicles about 6 feet squared with three foot walls surrounding each, topped by another foot and a half of frosted glass. The aisles in between each cubicle had sandals on the floor, and inside were men sitting barefoot on carpeted floors with cushions lining the walls to lean against, and a few other cushions to lean on. People ate with their hands out of large metal wok-like dishes that sat on disposable pieces of plastic. Everyone sat in relative privacy (unless someone intentionally looked over their cubical walls at them). I was a little more awkward than everyone else as I had to remove my shoes with my hands – since I had shoes with shoelaces, then borrow Bander’s sandals to go wash my hands before and after our meal. Everyone else just slipped on and off their sandals without using their hands every time they went in and out of their cubicles. After a very spicy soup (that was eaten with a plastic spoon) our dishes were mostly rice with about a half a chicken in the middle. Besides a few chilies and some onion, there really wasn’t much in the way of vegetables. The rice was pretty greasy and there was a white sauce to put on the rice to help make it more pasty and add flavor. At the bottom of one of the dishes was a sort of flat bread that was soaking wet with the sauce the rice had been cooked with. We shared each dish “community-style” only eating with our right hands. I had learned how to eat with my hands a few months ago with my Filipino friends, but Bander helped me refine my skills a bit, laughing at my exclusive use of fingers and resistance to get my whole hand “dirty”. He said, “You’ll never get it right until you use your whole hand”. Eventually I figured out that I had to grab the food I wanted and squeeze it in the palm of my hand until it all stuck together. Then, without leaning forward, or tipping my head back, I was to scoop my newly formed ball of food in my mouth with the back of my thumb. It wasn’t long and Bander was calling me a pro.

Bander told me that despite the Western influence in Kuwait, he had grown up almost exclusively eating on the floor with his hands. He really didn’t learn how to use silverware until after he graduated from high school and went to the U.S. for college. He said that even though he loved the American culture, there were times he would get very homesick, and long for his family, especially their tradition of eating together on the floor. He said that he would more than likely eat on the floor when he had a family of his own, no matter where he ended up. He said that more and more people in Kuwait and Saudi are using tables and have adopted many other Western practices, but you will still find a large percentage that prefer the “old ways”. Even among the members of his family that have now grown up there is a 50-50 split. I asked him if he was close to his family, and he said “very”. He said there isn’t a week that goes by that he doesn’t talk to his parents and all of his nine brothers and sisters. He seemed very proud of this. He said, that was partly why he and his brother were planning on renting such a large house. He envisioned constantly having some, if not sometimes all his extended family over to visit, and it was very important to him to be able to house them and make them feel comfortable.

It’s hard to express the way I feel about being out here in the midst of such a rich blending of cultures. In some strange way, learning about others seems to help me understand myself. Where did I get this “work ethic” and is it really a good thing? Why do my relationships with family and friends seem so shallow and so poorly maintained? What is this tension I feel between scientific rationalism and faith? I’ve been reading a book I saved from college called “History Through the Eyes of Faith” by Ronald A. Wells, that I’ve enjoyed very much. It explained how our Western ideology traces its “radical individualism” all the way back to classic Greco-Roman philosophy. Much of what prompted the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution comes from the ancient Hellenistic philosophy that “man is the measure of all things” (p17). At first, we were much like the Middle East is now with a strong sense of community and a sense of obligation to religious authority. The end of the Middle Ages was marked by a rapidly growing distrust in established religious authority culminating in a reawakening of classical thought. Man was his own priest, according to Luther, and he didn’t need another person to understand the bible. Although there were many positive aspects to the Protestant movement, the continued trend of Western thinking evolved from a God centered world-view to a man-centered one, and eventually the “essence of human nature” was believed not to be “that humankind was created, but that humans create” (p170). Another subtle change was from the Christian “expectation for a perfect life in heaven” that was eventually “secularized and promised on earth” (p172). This spawned a ruthless, unchecked form of capitalism that saw plenty of “progress” but at the expense of community. When people saw their own ability to pursue happiness (a concept that made it all the way into the American Declaration of Independence) they began to strive for their own good and not for the good of the community. This caused them to feel great alienation, something Karl Marx tried hard to fix, so far unsuccessfully, with socialism.

So, I think it’s been good for me to understand who I am and what my culture and world view has been influenced by as I compare myself to my friends here in the Middle East. There is a lot to appreciate and learn from out here, and I’m grateful for the time I have to process it all.

The Wake of a Prince

The Saud royal family is fairly extensive and apparently there are hundreds of princes. One of the princes needed a ride from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to Beirut, Lebanon, and I was asked to do it in our little Dash-8. This particular prince is the governor of the eastern province (where I live) and I’m sure would be in a much nicer airplane if he were more important, but the way people acted around him made me realize he was no ordinary guy.

They took out most of the 37 seats in our little Dash 8 and put 12 first class seats in and a nicer looking carpet. I’ve never seen such an ordinary airplane look so comfortable inside. As we got ready for him and his 10 companions we had a little snag that was starting to turn into a pretty big deal. Catering had not provided any cups or coffee and said it would take them an hour to go get; an hour we didn’t have. So after a bit of heated argument we finally chose to buy the stuff ourselves from a coffee shop in the building. We were way overcharged, but there was nothing we could really do about it. The mechanic we had with us was extremely helpful and volunteered to go get the cups and coffee for us while we continued to get ready. Pretty soon a few members of the entourage came and scoped out the scene. Then the prince came out with the rest of his traveling companions and about 10 other people that came to say goodbye to him. They all took turns bowing and kissing him out on the tarmac, while I stood next to the door of the plane with the main ramp coordinator next to me. The prince shook each of our hands and paused long enough to graciously thank each of us with a genuine look of gratitude. I was surprised how genuine he seemed. I guess I was expecting a sort of political showiness, but none of that seemed to emanate from him. He and a few of the older passengers had on a dark robe over their white thobes with shiny gold lining along the edges which added to the regal look. Otherwise everyone had the same white thobe and checkered cloth (“gutra”) on their heads secured with the usual black chord that almost every male wears in Saudi. It wasn’t long and we were starting engines, only 9 minutes late!

We made one fuel stop in north-central Saudi Arabia on our way up. It was interesting to watch the varying topography along our journey. North-central Saudi has about the most amount of agriculture that I’ve seen out here in the desert, with hundreds of crop circles. The mechanic explained that there were lots of underground springs in the northern area that allowed it to produce much of Saudi’s domestic food. Eventually we were flying over bare sand that, from our altitude, seemed to have large ripples in it, all facing the same direction. Once we got into eastern Jordan, the sand was very dark with much more rough and random patterns. I don’t remember seeing any sign of civilization in this area. Next we crossed over southern Syria and the sand got lighter again but quickly turned into a pretty steep mountain range. The highest mountains served as the border between Syria and Lebanon, and, believe it or not, had patches of snow on them. Once we crossed these mountains I couldn’t believe the beauty before us. Like a huge grandstand with the Mediterranean Sea as the stage, the terrain naturally sloped down to the water for more than a hundred miles. There were a lot of buildings on these slopes, each with an unobstructed view of the sea. There were trees everywhere (we don’t see too many trees in Saudi) and the visibility was much clearer than we had had the rest of our trip. The city of Beirut sticks out into the Mediterranean on a sort of peninsula, with the airport just south of it. We made a wide circle over the sea around the western side of the airport from north to south and landed to the northeast.

Once we landed we slowly made our way to the General Aviation ramp and were parked right in front of a private terminal. A bunch of stout Lebanese men dressed in Western suits came up to our plane and greeted us, as our passengers proudly deplaned in their flowing white robes, checkered head cloths and trademark Saudi goatees. Despite the fact everyone was speaking Arabic, there was an obvious contrast in cultures. Everyone seemed happy to see each other, and it was nice to know we had been a large part of making it happen.

After the mechanic and flight attendant had their cigarettes and catering had refilled our plane with enough food to feed a small village we took off for our 4 hour journey back home. We had enough of a tailwind to make it all the way back without a fuel stop, so we reluctantly left the beauty of Lebanon and retraced our flight path over the mountains, across southern Syrian and eastern Jordan avoiding Iraqi airspace sometimes by only about 20 miles. The food was incredible; shrimp, lobster, raw salmon, crab, fruits of every kind etc. What a feast! We had so much food in the plane after we landed that everyone we met, including customs officials, mechanics, ground handlers, etc got trays and trays of food from us. Everyone was happy and eagerly received everything we gave them.

An Inside Perspective on the Gulf War

I’ve been back in Saudi a bit more than a week now. Not much has changed except the heat is greater and we have a few new pilots. The first four or five days averaged a high of around 113. Now it has settled down to around 105 or so. On one particular day I got out of the plane and was walking to the terminal with my crew and there was something I felt that I’ve never felt outside before and it was probably the result of a combination of the heat (about 117 that day) and it’s reflection off of the concrete, and the northerly wind that faced me at the time. It was almost identical to the feeling you get when you open an oven door to pull out something that has just finished cooking. It’s a sort of stinging sensation mostly on your cheeks. The only difference was I couldn’t close the oven door to stop it.

Enough about the heat. I knew it was going to be hot before I came here, so there is no sense in complaining about it. What I did want to capture in this entry was a fascinating conversation I had with one of our new pilots I’ve been helping to train. I was assigned an added new role of “training captain” soon after I came back, which I gratefully accepted. All that this means is that alongside my normal duties as line captain, I will also occasionally train the new guys that come in, and will check the standardization of those already here. I’ve always liked training and am glad to get back into it a bit. I’m pretty sure I will enjoy it.

This new pilot, Bander, is a very nice guy and already showing great aptitude. He’s a Saudi by nationality but grew up in the northern part of Kuwait. His citizenship is Saudi Arabian because his father is Saudi, but his mother is Kuwaiti and he feels more Kuwaiti than anything else. After high school he went to Louisiana and got an accounting degree, and then went to North Dakota to learn how to fly, using an company scholarship. When he told me about his Kuwaiti upbringing, I immediately thought of the Gulf War. I asked him if he was in Kuwait at the time, and he said yes and proceeded to tell me about it. He was 8 years old at the time and remembers his father being captured by the Iraqi forces at the beginning of the 8 month invasion of Kuwait. His father was a pretty important lieutenant in the Kuwaiti army and was posted near the Iraqi border. The frustration of the Kuwaiti forces at the beginning stages was that they were not given any orders to fight back. The Iraqis capitalized on this and seized everyone over 18 years of age that they could find. After about 3 months, Bander’s dad was released (due to his high position, apparently) and he immediately smuggled his wife and 10 kids into Saudi Arabia for their protection. I asked if there were a lot of Kuwaiti refugees in Saudi at that time and he said yes. He also said that he remembers the incredible hospitality of the Saudi Arabian people. Almost without exception every Saudi home was opened up to the refugees to live in, and for the most part their dignity and comfort was preserved. I gather that the family soon returned back to Kuwait and he spent the rest of his childhood there. I’m itching to ask him more about this. He seems open to talk about it…