It says north on the masthead, but in 2010 I decided to go, ah…south. All the way to Saudi Arabia. Jizan, to be exact. Way down near the border of Yemen. Not because I was tired of Japan, you understand. It had more to do with money, and the feeling that I had exhausted my teaching opportunities in Imabari.
I still had considerable student debt to pay, and when GEOS went under in April I was exactly 30 days away from finishing my contract. I continued to work for GEdu, the company that immediately bought GEOS, until the end of June to try to make up some of my four years of bonuses which went, more or less, down the tubes. Then I took three weeks and cycled the Shikoku no michi. After a short break visiting in Canada, I headed to Saudia.
Jizan is an ancient fishing village on the shores of the Red Sea. It was around when the pyramids were being built, and was a port of departure for boats carrying frankencense from Oman via Yemen up the Red Sea to Egypt. None of that money seems to have been left behind: when I first saw it, I felt I had never seen such a mean looking, dirty place.
Jizan has a small regional airport, which is just, I think, now being developed for international flights. The area is also currently being developed by the Saudis as an ‘economic zone’ (heavy and light manufacturing, oil processing etc), and port, and, as part of this, there is a need for vocational training for the numbers of unemployed, not well educated local youth swanning about. It is required that these future technicians be basically functional in English; that’s what I taught. My students were young men only – sharia law and custom demand segregated schooling.
Jizan has been historically neglected. It’s situated on the coastal plain between the Asir mountains and the Red Sea, a region of farmers, fishermen and camel herders. The climate is consistently hot and somewhat humid.
It rains extremely rarely, though when it does, it usually seems to do so during violent sandstorms. The roads are built without drainage, and are only perhaps 2 meters above sea level, so when it rains, they flood.
One of the rare times it rained without a violent windstorm.
Building lots are walled with stone, then filled with rubble to the level of the roads. The buildings themselves are built of cement block and stucco, often painted startling shades of green, orange, red or yellow.
As a result of the large sums of money currently being poured into Jizan, it has become the wild, wild middle-east. Development is constant, uneven, and often seemingly unplanned. I lived here for 2.5 years.
I call it topsy-turvy-ville. Life here is…different. It is said that if one goes to the beach in the summer at 2am, one will find it packed. It’s quite reasonable, really, as midnight to 6 am is the only relatively comfortable temperature to be outside in. Temperatures in the daytime close onto 40 degrees and the humidity is usually above 60 percent as well…it’s still 30 degrees at midnight, but at least the sun isn’t shining. Consequently many of my students had a great deal of difficulty arriving for class at 8am – they often told me they had had only 2 or 3 hours of sleep…favorite activities were playing football, eating and hanging out with their friends in coffee shops, going to the beach…playing wii and video games or watching movies at home…oh yes, and going out and driving their cars at 200+ kph on the highways, occasionally splattering themselves and a friend or two across the landscape.
Saudi Arabia is the home of Islam, and proudly claims Wahabism, its bedouin-based, strict form. As a result, in Jizan women are not allowed to drive without a male relative in the car. Even the presence of her 7 year old son is legally more enabling than her own status, whatever her age. Interestingly, I have also seen, numerous times, what looked like 8 and 9 year old boys driving SUVs on the streets of town.
Women of any age over, say, 8, are required to wear full hijab, or abaya and niqab, – a head to toe black covering with a rectangle removed for her to see out of. I, as a middle aged man, am expected to avoid in any way interacting with her. We sometimes called them Saudi Ninjas. On one occasion recently, a fellow teacher (Muslim, as it happens) and I were having dinner in the food court at one of the local malls. Ten feet away a mum and her 3 kids were eating as well, happily. The evening prayer time was just ending. Suddenly a late middle-aged Saudi man in a thobe appeared and started gesticulating and yelling at us. Rixat, more fluent in Arabic than I, said “He wants us to move”. I just looked at the worked up man, thinking “What a jerk”. “We will move” Rixat told the Saudi, who then, his displeasure having been expressed and acknowledged, roused up his whole family and moved them away from us bad seeds. Good riddance, I thought. We had been sitting too close to his family, while he, pious prick, was off relieving himself of the days’ immorality.
In restaurants families customarily dine in a closed off, entirely separate area from men not accompanied by their families. It is worth noting that 2 years previously, we had been turned away from this entire section of seating (about 20 x 40 metres) as it was considered (though not marked) as the ‘family section’.
When visiting a Saudi household, as I did a few times, visiting men are invariably kept away from the women folk. They will disappear into the depths of the house. The architectural metaphor for house is ‘fort’. Every house except the very poorest hovel is surrounded by a wall with a gate. Windows are barred and usually covered in curtains, as they are not to be looked into (or out of?). Often however houses sport colors like lime green or tangerine, or rose.
This is a coffee shop.
In general, there being no cinemas, no bars, no parks to speak of, no book stores with English books (in Jisan, discounting textbooks, at least) and so on, there’s not so much to do beyond hitting the mall for some good, clean shopping, and/or going out for lunch, dinner or coffee.
Everything closes down 5 times per day for about 45 minutes during prayer times. Just to keep things interesting, prayer times are based on the Islamic lunar calendar, hence changing by a few minutes every day.
Not being Muslim, I ultimately found Saudia to be the most closed off of cultures: eventually I got quite sick of spending my social time, 100 percent of it, amongst men. It became a bit depressing.
