Only In America

Only in America can you find these things:

1. ATM fees
2. Cell phone companies that will both charge the sender and receiver for every phone call
3. Dates written with the month first instead of the day
4. Temperatures in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius
5. Measurements in feet and miles instead of meters and kilometers
6. Weight in pounds instead of kilograms
7. Coffee makers in hotel rooms
8. Monolingual people

Feel free to add some.

Finding Our Way Together

We have been in Saudi Arabia for a month now, as a family, and are far from a comfortable routine. I've been busy with work and endless other appointments for permits, licenses, I.D.'s, etc. that only I can do as I'm the only legal driver here in our family (women are not allowed to drive). Nikki, on the other hand, has been a bit stir crazy, unable to do much or go anywhere as Maddy comes home every day from school for lunch, and there really isn't time to get anywhere and back on the bus to go shopping etc., during the 2-3 hours Maddy is at school. So, often we join each other at opposite emotional levels - me wanting some peace and quiet, and Nikki longing for an exciting trip somewhere.

Speaking of exciting trips, the driving here is incredible! Since our new location doesn't come with a crew car service, I've been driving myself to work. My rental car shows about 4000 kilometers in the "trip meter" now in the last 4 weeks, while I've been waiting to get the proper documentation to drive our newly purchased '91 Honda Accord. During that time I've had to learn a completely different way of driving. Now, half of my attention is in the mirror, as I struggle to stay alive. Typically I'm on a highway with about 2 or 3 lanes and it seems like no one goes the speed limit. They are either 20-40 kph slower or 50-100 kph faster. So if you are cruising along in the middle lane at the speed limit (120 kph - or about 75 mph) you will invariably come across a slow service truck or guy on his cell phone going 80 kph. You will slip into the outside lane to get around him, and maybe two or three others he's following. Before you can get back into the middle lane, you will suddenly realize someone has come out of nowhere, and is tailgating so close that their windshield fills up most of your back window. Either that or you are being passed on the left shoulder by someone going literally twice as fast as you, and your car rocks from side to side as they whiz by within inches of your side mirror. This is an every day occurrence.

Exit lanes are also used very ...efficiently. Just the other day I took the exit off of one highway and had stopped at the end to yield to traffic on the next road I was going to take. I decided I wouldn't cut anyone off so I politely wait for a comfortable space to merge into. While I was waiting I suddenly realized cars were coming around me on both sides perfectly content to turn my one-lane exit into a three lane mass merging free-for-all. I was a sitting duck. I decided to let go of all courtesy and force my way into the crowd, as I really had no alternative. It's a different world out here. I usually can't wait to get to work so I can strap myself in an airplane, get it in the air, and finally relax.

Routines are starting to develop, however. Nikki has been going to Maddy's school to help out for a few hours a day. She's also been able to do some circuit training and yoga, and even has some Arabic lessons lined up. Thursdays (equivalent to Saturday's in the U.S.) usually are family days when we can go to the swimming pool, or library, and then come home, take a quick snooze in the hammock out back before we settle down to a rigorous game of monopoly. Fridays we go to a small Christian church on the compound, and maybe hit up a delicious brunch at the diner. I think I'm going to try to rejoin my water polo group on Friday afternoons, but I'll have to see how everyone else is feeling about that. Gone are my regular workouts and uninterrupted reading, but the sacrifice is well worth it. Peace and quite are not worth loneliness and separation in my book. It's much better this way.

Ramadan

The moon is almost full, which means that the month of Ramadan is almost half over. The Arabic calendar is based on the moon so each new moon starts a new month. This makes the Muslim year a bit shorter than ours and makes all holidays and special events slowly migrate year after year on our calendar which is solar. This also means that in the next few years, the holy month of Ramadan will slowly migrate closer and closer to the hottest part of the summer, and coincide with the longest days of the year. I mention this because the month of Ramadan is a collective fast of all food, water, tobacco and sexual intercourse from sunrise to sunset. With few exceptions, all Islamic people are expected to participate in this sacrifice. It is incredible to watch such solidarity and devotion of so many people especially when it’s 115 degrees outside with 80% humidity, and the days are 14 hours long. But I’ve come to learn that it is so much more than a collective fast. People really get excited about this time, and it has the meaningfulness that Christmas has to us, without the materialism. Everyone wishes each other “Ramadan Kareem” (which literally means “Have a generous Ramadan”). Work all but stops. People will typically shorten their work day to about 3 – 4 hours and take long naps. As soon as the sun sets, the “break-fast” becomes a huge celebration and everyone gathers together and eats with wild abandon. Then they stay up the rest of the night either in prayer, reading the Qur’an, or just enjoying each other’s company. Finally, a last big meal is consumed before sunrise (about 4 am in these parts) and if possible people go to bed for a few hours before going in for another short day of work.

“Credits” is the term my Arabic first officer used to explain why people spend so much more time in the mosque during Ramadan praying and reading the Qur’an. The closer to the end of Ramadan it is, the more credits one gets for religious activities (reading, praying, giving to the poor etc.) At first I was reluctant to ask, but I had to know, so I asked him what these “credits” were good for. I said, “Do you mean that people are able to get closer to God than they would otherwise at other times of the year?” He said, “no”. God is close to everyone no matter what they do. What these credits are good for is hierarchy in heaven. He said that there is heaven and hell, and if one goes to heaven, the religious activities they do on earth will determine their status in heaven in the afterlife. He said that some people spend incredible amounts of time in the mosque during Ramadan and are able to get lots of credits. Credits are also achieved throughout the rest of the year as people diligently comply with what is called “The Five Pillars of Islam”. They consist of a profession of faith, five daily prayers at specific times, giving to the poor, fasting during Ramadan, and at least one pilgrimage to Mecca.

Although most people gain a few pounds during Ramadan because of all the eating that happens at night, the fasting during the day has the purpose of not only helping people focus on God, but also helping them identify with the poor. Fasting is obligatory for all but the sick and those who are traveling. If a day of fasting is broken due to one of these reasons (which most of the Muslim pilots do if they are assigned a long day of flying) they are to make up the fast during the following month for the equivalent amount of days they broke fast during Ramadan. An exception is made for diabetics (of which there are many here). Safety is stressed by the company and little things are done to help people avoid making foolish mistakes when they are hungry. The most notable one is that free little boxes of food (dates, juice and yogurt) are passed out by volunteers at the compound entrance right at sundown so people won’t drive unsafely in their eagerness to get home or to any other feasting ground.

What amazes me about all this in how willing everyone is to fast. It seems to be more than an obligation. It is something they are proud of, something that helps define them and give them a sense of identity and purpose. It gives structure to their lives and a sense of moral superiority. All this is worth a little hunger and a little thirst.

What also is intriguing and a little puzzling is that I have been asked a few times if I am fasting, by people that are well aware that I’m not a Muslim. No one has asked me if I pray five times a day, or if I go to the mosque or on pilgrimages, but they have asked me if I fast. I am always honest in my answer, and say “no”, but I wonder how they feel about that. Why is this the only sacred pillar of Islam that I am being invited to participate in? Does it say something about my lack of respect toward their religion not to fast? I mean, I don’t eat or drink purposefully in front of them. Expats have been asked by the company to be discreet in their consumption. But why am I being asked if I fast? I wonder if I should? What would that say to them? There is so much more to learn here and I’m so eager to do it. I’ve been here now more than nine months, and my fascination with this place and it’s people, culture and religion continues to grow in intensity. The more I know, the more I want to know.

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.

Respect

Three memories come to mind that I think relate. One was quite a while ago. We were boarding a flight that was to take people from Dammam (our home airport) to Riyadh (the capital city of Saudi Arabia). The rest of the flights we do in my airplane only have men as passengers. This is due to the fact that all the oil wells and pump stations we serve are only staffed by men, and transporting these men is primarily what we use the Dash-8 for. Riyadh is a different kind of flight. I’m not sure what department pays for it, but we usually carry a mixture of men and women on these flights. The women are often going to Riyadh to shop and the younger ones are going to college there and coming back home every weekend. I’m not sure why the men go. Maybe it’s for similar reasons. None of it seems to be actual company business, but I could be wrong on that. What is interesting is that the men and women are segregated in the terminal waiting room. Then they come out to the plane in separate buses and all end up intermingling in the plane. I don’t think they actually sit next to each other in adjoining seats, but there isn’t much more than an aisle separating them much of the time and I’m sure this intermingling is viewed as a sort of necessary evil.

I’ve said all this to create a bit of a background for my actual story. As the boarding process was nearing its conclusion my Saudi first officer, and I were wrapping up our preflight procedures and checklist and had settled into a very relaxed and amiable “catching up” of each others’ lives. Suddenly our very senior Saudi flight attendant came up to us and rather agitatedly told us he had asked an elderly lady to change seats out of an exit row, and she had refused. The exit row she was sitting at had an exit door that had no stairs and a 4 foot drop, so the flight attendant felt it was necessary to put her closer to the door with the stairs attached to it. My first officer immediately took it upon himself to try to calm our flight attendant down. He suggested that maybe we should just let this lady have her way, as she was old and was obviously not trying to rebel. We could all plan on doing our best to help her out of the plane if we had need for an evacuation, instead of embarrassing her in front of the passengers. This discussion, by the way, was mostly in Arabic, so I was only getting bits and pieces of it and relying largely on body language. Every once in a while I would get a brief synopsis, but what I saw in the body language was that the calming intention of my first officer was ineffective. Our flight attendant remained passionately incensed and demanded a resolution. Apparently he had gotten in trouble for the very same thing on another occasion, and wasn’t going to have it again. We were already about a half hour delayed due to a maintenance issue that required us to change airplanes so I was feeling a bit of a time constraint. I was also struggling internally with my feelings of obligation to both follow the rules, and support my flight attendant. When I noticed nothing was being resolved I felt it was time to step in and blunder my way through some sort of resolution. I asked the flight attendant if he wanted me to go and talk to the lady myself. He said yes, so I did. Since she was in the front row it wasn’t far for me to go. I went up to her and squatted down in front of her so I would be at her eye level and so as to minimize the attention I was creating. All that I could see of her were her hands and her eyes. Everything else was covered in black (as it was for the rest of the women on the flight). When I looked at her eyes, I could tell she was crying and quite shaken. I tried to explain to her why she needed to move, and that it was necessary for her to follow the orders of the flight attendant. As I was saying all this I made probably my worst cultural (and religious) blunder. My hand was open and facing upward as would be natural in the middle of an explanation, but then I instinctively rested the back of my open hand on her knee. I’m not exactly sure why I did it. I think it was partly to comfort her, and partly to get her attention, but looking back I’m surprised I lived to tell about it. Talking to non-relative women here is very taboo and must be strictly business related and in the company of others. Touching a non-relative woman here is downright obscene. Somehow I got away with it. I asked her politely to change seats with another gentleman close to her but she continued to refuse. Her crying, however, seemed to stop. I told her we wouldn’t be able to go until she moved. After a bit of a pause she finally did move, but very slowly and reluctantly. This involved the moving of four people, actually, to avoid anyone sitting next to someone of the opposite sex. When it was finally done, I got back into my seat, and I could tell that my first officer wasn’t completely happy with what I had done. In his view I had disrespected an elder and this was more of a wrong than disobeying our rules or supporting our flight attendant. We sort of agreed to disagree and got back to regrouping ourselves for the flight …but it wasn’t over. It wasn’t a minute later, and the flight attendant came back up to the flight deck even more agitated than before. He declared that he was quitting right then and there, and that we would have to find a replacement for him. The lady had continued disrespecting him and he was not going to have any more of it. My head was swimming. Was I going to have to kick this lady off of the flight? As my mind groped unsuccessfully for a solution, the first officer came to my rescue. Like talking someone out of a suicide attempt at the edge of a bridge or tall building, he smoothly but definitively gathered up all the charm and persuasiveness he could muster, and successfully dismantled the emotional bomb that was just beginning to blow in front of us. I was in awe. Despite the fact that I couldn’t understand a word he said, I watched as in a matter of less than a minute the flight attendant rescinded his intentions to leave and went back to his duties with nothing but a bit of residual muttering.

Not knowing what else to do I asked my first officer if we were now good to go, and he said yes. Without saying a word about what had just happened we started up the engines and took off toward Riyadh. Once we were in the climb I thanked him for what he did and said I was indebted to him. I admitted that I had been at a loss as to what to do and he had done exactly what was necessary. After we had been flying for a while he called the flight attendant on the inter phone to check up on him. Apparently he was okay. There was even some laughter in the conversation as he joked about now having to stare at this lady for the rest of the flight, who was sitting face to face with him. When we got to Riyadh, I helped the lady down the stairs of the plane and into her wheelchair, after the other passengers had gotten off, and she thanked me. The flight attendant was calm now and in good spirits, but was still bothered by what he had endured.

I realized that the tension in this situation was largely a result of a disrespect of status and position, rather than just being ethnically based. Other tensions I’ve observed, however, have been across ethnic lines. We had an Indian flight attendant yesterday as we flew what we call the “pump run”. This is a long day of flying where we cross most of Saudi Arabia along the east-west pipe line, hopping from pump station to pump station to transport workers in and out of each one. We were briefly pausing at Pump Station #6 to pick up a few folks and take on some fuel. The flight attendant stepped off briefly to talk to the ground staff, and when he did so, a passenger sneaked off the plane to have a smoke. He at least went out to a designated smoking area, but when he came back, the flight attendant reprimanded him and asked for his badge number. The man refused, and once again I was brought into the picture. The flight attendant explained everything to me, and I eventually realized I needed to do something about it immediately. I asked if he wanted me to talk to the offender right then, and he said yes. I went to the guy’s seat and explained to him that I needed him to obey the instructions of the flight attendant. He didn’t say much. Then I asked him for his badge number. He mumbled it, and I had to ask him to repeat himself a few times. After I got it, I thanked him and went back to my seat while the flight attendant looked his number up on the manifest and filled out his report. I was a bit nervous at this point as I knew we now had a somewhat agitated and defiant passenger on board, but since he had obeyed me and seemed to somewhat understand a bit more of the gravity of his offence we pressed on. What complicated the matter was that my first officer had taken advantage of the short break as well to do the very same thing, and he and the offending passenger had actually enjoyed the smoke break together. In his defense he had thought that the passenger had been given permission to do this, but he was, however, obviously agitated once he realized our flight attendant had been disrespected. He brought it up multiple times during the course of the next flight, saying that this is a problem with uneducated Arabs. He said that he has observed them disrespecting people of other ethnic groups many times before, and didn’t like it. He claimed that you don’t see this so much among the more affluent and educated Arab population.

My last memory that relates to this theme of respect, but a little more loosely this time, happened this week as well. We arrived at Haradh in the middle of a sand storm. The visibility had dropped from seven miles to half a mile in just the short hour it took to get there, and the wind increased from 10 knots to a 27 knot direct crosswind. This was all within our limitations, so my first officer expertly wrestled the plane to the runway and did a nice job of landing it as well. We pulled up to the pump and were asked how much fuel we wanted. Before answering we asked how many passengers we were to expect, and they said 30. Our next flight was only going to take a half an hour so we calculated how much fuel we would need to be able to land there under our max landing weight and then decided that since we didn’t have a full load of passengers (37) we could add another 600 lbs of fuel to give ourselves an extra safety margin, due to the rapidly changing weather conditions. All was well until the boarding was done and we were told that we in fact now had 37 passengers. Now we were faced with a tough decision. We would have to either off-load 4 passengers, or plan to circle over our destination and burn fuel for about half an hour before we landed. We presented these choices to the dispatcher at Haradh and he mulled it over for a bit. After talking to the dispatch team at our home airport, they elected to let the choice be mine. I talked it over with my first officer, and we decided the best thing would be to remove 4 of the late passengers. Well, the decision wasn’t going to be completely mine as this wasn’t completely satisfactory to the dispatcher and he began to negotiate with me. He said that there were 3 passengers on board who were contractors (which usually means they are South-Asian expats that are notoriously treated pretty poorly here), and he would rather ask them to get off, than the Arab passengers who had been late. It was explained to me that the Arab passengers were returning to their families and the expats were just being relocated to their quarters in Dammam. Not knowing the full situation, I reluctantly agreed, but said that we would still have about 200 extra pounds of fuel to burn before we landed. This was finally the resolution we all agreed on and we took off about half and hour late. While on the way to our destination we creatively came up with all the inefficient ways we could fly there, the final choice being to fly the complete approach with the gear down (which would require more power and therefore higher fuel burn for the same airspeed). This worked, but I kept thinking how absurd this would be to do in the US with the current cost of fuel. On the flight, my very sensitive Saudi Arabian first officer mentioned multiple times how bad he felt for the contractors that got kicked off. We both agreed that it would have been better to kick off the late arriving Arabic passengers.

This issue of respect is obviously not just a Saudi Arabian issue. We deal with it all around the world. We all carry biases whether we realize it or not, and even our attempts to not be biased often serve only to reveal other biases (as was the case with my second story). The statement “those people are usually racist” is itself a biased statement. I have long been aware of the disrespect that goes on here and I’ve tried my best to give all people I interact with all the dignity I feel they deserve just for being fellow members of the human race, but I never imagined that my job as a pilot would require me to intervene in the biased based conflict of others. It’s going to take a while to get used to this. I hope I can keep my social and cultural blunders to a minimum in the process.