Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  “How are you, Uncle?” I asked. In Saudi culture, it’s customary to refer to older people as uncle and aunt as a mark of respect, hence Uncle Ali—we don’t call anyone by their first names unless they’re the same age as we are or younger.

  This uncle wore dark glasses. “I prefer that you use my name,” he responded.

  I told him I was looking for a furnished apartment, but instead of looking for a place, he started driving me around Khobar City. “Here’s Al-Rashid Mall, here is Khobar Corniche, and the corniche restaurants.” We spent hours going around in his car, but I felt as if I could say nothing.

  As we waited for a traffic light to turn, he asked, “Do you intend to cover your face the whole way?”

  I ignored his question and asked, “Can we please go and look for an apartment now?” But we didn’t visit a single place. I was trapped in that car. My hands trembled. I pretended to call my parents on my cell phone. Eventually, the uncle pulled into the parking lot for a grocery store and asked if I wanted a drink. My heart was pounding and I couldn’t speak, I simply shook my head no. I wanted to open the door and run, but I wasn’t even sure where we were. I knew no one.

  When he got back in, he was carrying a drink I’d never seen before. “This is called Power Horse. It lets you run like a horse all night long.”

  Suddenly I was terrified. “I’m calling your niece now,” I said, feeling my body shake beneath my abaya. “Please take me back to the hotel.”

  That apparently was enough. “Okay, okay,” he replied. “But do me a favor, and don’t tell her that we didn’t look.”

  This time, I did dial my classmate for real. I told her, “Yes, I’m with your uncle now. We’re on our way back to the hotel.”

  I spent my second night in the Eastern Province in tears, just as I’d spent my first. The uncle called and messaged me relentlessly afterward, but I ignored every call and text.

  On Saturday, our next work day, I asked Abdulhadi to help me. He promised to find me somewhere to live in the next few days. The week passed very slowly. When I paid attention to the work, I was interested, but my mind was constantly preoccupied with a very different question: where was I going to live? Finally, Abdulhadi called me. “I’ve found you a residential compound in Khobar,” he told me. “They have a collection of prefabricated buildings and they’ve agreed to lease one to you.”

  Residential compounds are like islands, completely cut off from Saudi society. They permit their residents to do all the things that are forbidden in Saudi culture; for this reason, Saudi citizens are usually not allowed to live in them. The compounds’ residents are normally Europeans and Americans; their companies cover their rent, which is typically around four or five times the cost of a regular apartment. I told him that I didn’t have any money to pay up front. “Can I pay for this month when I receive my salary?” I asked. Abdulhadi promised to lend me the full amount, with the understanding that I’d pay him back once I got my housing allowance.

  He gave me the address of the compound and I took a taxi there. My future home was part of a collection of temporary units still in need of the most basic things like windows, doors, and furniture. “We’re in the process of finishing them,” the compound manager promised me. “They’ll be open by the end of the week.” When the end of the week arrived and I could leave work for the day, I gathered up my things from the hotel room and headed to the compound. The temporary houses were still not ready; in fact, nothing had changed since my first visit. No furniture, no windows, and not a door in sight.

  My knees grew weak and the world started to spin before me. I dialed the division planner’s number and prayed to God that he would answer—he didn’t have to, since it was after official working hours. Relief surged through me when he picked up. “I’m here on the street with my bag,” I told him. “My housing was supposed to be ready today, but it didn’t happen. Can you call the hotel again? I’m forever grateful . . . I promise I’ll find somewhere to live within a few days.”

  I called Abdulhadi every day the following week, but he no longer answered his phone. I’d either become a nuisance, or he’d changed his mind about lending me rent money. The division planner had no advice; he just told me emphatically that I had to leave the hotel at the end of the week. I talked to the division head, the man who oversaw our division, but he had nothing to say. I was lonely, desperate, and angry. At that moment, I truly understood what it meant to be a Saudi woman. It meant being confronted with every possible kind of obstacle and discrimination. It meant being told that if you want to race with men, you’d have to do it with your hands and legs cut off. I started to wish I had been born somewhere—anywhere—else.

  There seemed to be no other option except to back down, admit defeat, call my father, and request to return to the gloomy apartment in Mecca. That night, I slept without crying. My tears had dried up.

  Something made me remember meeting another full-time Aramco employee named Lamia earlier during my summer internship. She was also Saudi, a little older, from Jeddah, and she had complained to me that she’d been living in a room in Steineke Hall, a hotel-like residence in the Aramco compound, for six months. Several times, the staff had notified her that she had to vacate her room and find a place to live, but she had never been able to find anywhere else in the city. I went to Steineke Hall and talked to the receptionist. Lamia was still living there. I sat down to wait for her in the lobby. When Lamia arrived, she recognized me immediately. She told me she’d received a warning from her department and had to move out at the end of the week. “My father’s coming from Jeddah to find me a home,” she said. “You’re welcome to share with me, if you like. We can split the rent and bills.”

  I threw my arms around her, on the verge of tears. “Oh, God, thank you,” I cried. “I swear, He has sent you from heaven. I didn’t know where to go or what I was going to do.” That night, for the first time since I had arrived, I truly slept.

  We found an apartment, and Lamia’s father signed a pledge permitting his “daughters” to live by themselves and guaranteeing their proper behavior—although each night we left a pair of men’s shoes along with our own outside the apartment door (it is Saudi custom to remove one’s shoes) so that our neighbors would think we had a proper male chaperone living with us. The lease agreement was in Lamia’s father’s name, though we were the ones who paid the rent.

  But while the apartment solved our most serious problem, it created a new one: how would we get to work? We couldn’t drive, and Saudi Arabia had no public transportation. We discovered that the Aramco bus, which transported employees from Khobar City to the company’s offices each day, passed our building at 6:15 every morning. Seeing that it picked up a fellow employee on the same street, we went down at 6:00 a.m. to wait for it. We should have known that as Saudi women, it could never be that simple.

  As we climbed up the steps of the bus, the Filipino driver gestured for us to stop. “Madam, where are you going?” he asked.

  Lamia and I exchanged looks. “Apparently we’re getting on the bus!” we replied.

  “Sorry, you can’t,” came his answer.

  “Why? We’re both Aramco employees.”

  “Women aren’t allowed to take the employees’ bus, it’s only for men.”

  “Well, are there any buses for women?” we asked.

  “No, madam, sorry!” he replied. “You must get off.”

  I hadn’t known it when I applied to the company, but Aramco had a long history of discrimination, starting with Saudi nationals. In the 1950s, there were repeated strikes and demonstrations. Saudi employees both demanded better working conditions, including a forty-hour workweek, and protested against having so many Americans and so much American control at Aramco. The Saudi authorities were by turns conciliatory and repressive; they ultimately sought to identify the workers behind the protests and remove them. While they did grant labor reforms, they also undertook a campaign of arrests and torture to crush the strikes.


  By the time I arrived, Aramco had been entirely Saudi-owned for more than two decades, but it still had discriminatory practices in place. Women were the ones most affected, Saudi and non-Saudi females alike. A non-Saudi woman had to be unmarried to be hired by Aramco, regardless of her age. After I was allowed to live in Aramco housing, I had an Indian neighbor in her fifties. She had been married for thirty years, but although she lived with her husband, she was forced to conceal her marriage and state that she was single in order to keep her job. Female employees of any nationality were prohibited from using the Aramco employees’ bus that transported workers between the cities and the compound—they could only use the recreational buses that traveled to the mall or to another Aramco residential compound. And although women were permitted to drive inside the residential compounds, they weren’t allowed to use Aramco cars, or to register for driving lessons offered by the company, or even to be present as observers at the company’s safe driving and defensive driving training sessions.

  The restrictions on Saudi-born women were even greater. Before being hired, a Saudi woman had to submit to a blood test to ensure that she was not pregnant. Pregnant women could not start work. A classmate of mine from university was about to be hired to work in the Information Protection Division as a full-time employee, but she failed the medical exam when her blood test revealed that she was expecting. For years, Saudi women employed at Aramco could not apply for the homeownership loan offered to male Saudi employees, they could not receive a housing allowance, nor could they apply for a scholarship program for foreign study abroad. When I worked there, Aramco offered women only six weeks’ maternity leave, and it still does not provide day-care facilities for employees’ children, though Saudi labor codes require a company nursery if there are more than fifty female employees in one city or more than ten children. Women are also not permitted to take jobs in the oil fields or refineries; they are restricted to office work.

  At the end of October, 2002, the month Lamia and I moved into our new apartment, Lamia, our colleague Afaf, and I wrote a letter of protest to Aramco’s management demanding our right to live in the compound. Though I didn’t recognize it at the time, this was my first taste of activism. Eight and a half years later, I would be driving a car through the streets of Khobar.

  9

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  Love and the Falafel Man

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  As Lamia and I were starting our new lives in our Khobar apartment, my sister was graduating from medical school and beginning a job at the university hospital. Muna moved my parents and our brother from Mecca to a nicer neighborhood in Jeddah, paying the rent for the first six months. The two of us agreed to share the payments after that. My parents insisted on transferring their secondhand furniture from the old apartment to the new one, but I was determined that nothing from our old life would move with us; I wanted to cast off those miserable memories. I bought everything for their new home, from the furniture and appliances to the spoons and dishes in the kitchen. I bought mobile phones for my parents and my brother so we could keep in touch easily, and began giving small allowances to Mama and Muhammad.

  After all this was done, I had no money left to buy furniture for my own room. Night after night, I slept on the floor; for the first six months, I lived out of the suitcase I had traveled with. The happiness that my family’s new, comfortable life had brought them—with water that flowed from the taps all month long and a clean and tidy neighborhood—was more than enough to keep me going.

  I finally told my parents the truth about Aramco’s terrible housing rules and introduced them to Lamia and to her family, so they would feel reassured about how the situation had been resolved. Happily, my parents accepted the idea of my living in the city. “So long as you’re living with your older colleague, and so long as we know her family in Jeddah, you have our blessing,” they said. When, finally, I had some money left over for me, I bought something very special for our Khobar apartment, one of the things I had loved most about the house in the Aramco compound: a fully automatic washing machine. I bought it alone. When I first started living in the Eastern Province, I returned to asking my father’s permission for everything, and he would get very angry if I failed to do so. But gradually I stopped asking and made my life mine.

  Getting around was our biggest challenge. Lamia and I were using private drivers, taxis—anything that was available to us—and it was draining a good deal of our salaries. Eventually, Lamia suggested that we buy a cheap car and look for a private driver. The cheapest make available at that time was a KIA. We started asking the taxi drivers who ferried us around if they knew anyone who would work for a monthly salary, although, as women, we couldn’t employ a driver under our own names. (Happily, the state code was changed in 2014, enabling female employees to now recruit their own drivers. And the rise of Uber and other app-based vendors has completely changed the transportation landscape, although Saudis still lack public transport and pedestrian walkways.)

  One of these taxi drivers helped us find Mumtaz, a young Pakistani man in his early twenties, but there was a problem—he didn’t know how to drive. We promised Mumtaz that we would get him driving lessons and pay for a driver’s license, along with a monthly salary of 1,200 riyals and 200 riyals more for his food and living costs. Mumtaz didn’t speak Arabic or English, so to communicate with him, I dusted off the little Urdu I remembered from my extremist days going to the Grand Mosque.

  Mumtaz didn’t much care for hygiene, and we were always complaining about his smell. Lamia decided to buy him toiletries—soap, shampoo, and deodorant—and request that he use them every day. Once we’d solved the problems of the language barrier and the smell, the next issue was that Mumtaz knew nothing about the layout of Khobar, nor its traffic rules. Lamia and I studied a map of the city streets so we could direct him from the backseat, which resulted in more than a few close calls. I asked Aftab, a Pakistani colleague in my department, to explain the traffic rules to Mumtaz. We had enough burdens without his traffic violations as well.

  But there was still the problem of how Mumtaz behaved if he drove either of us anywhere alone. He would adjust the rearview mirror, look up, and observe our every move. Once he made a comment about my eyes and how I looked. I couldn’t muster a response, but I knew Lamia would take care of it; she was older than me and far more willing to tick him off. Sure enough, she reprimanded him harshly, and he never dared to comment on my appearance again.

  My work was challenging, especially after our group leader selected me to manage my first project. I was terrified I’d fail. I had never managed anything before, and the fact that I was both a graduate of a public university and the only woman in our division put even more pressure on me to prove myself. Until then, I had always thought that my English was good, so I was shocked to find myself struggling with reports and emails. Neither my university nor Aramco had trained me in the technical terms I needed to know for work. Even more challenging, English was the official language spoken at Aramco, so I needed it for every meeting as well as for reports and emails. Then Lamia told me about the Aramco English Learning Center. I could study in the morning, she said, and return to my office after the lunch break. After taking the placement exam, I was put in the advanced section, which required students to attend half-day classes for six months. But my boss flatly refused to let me leave the office, telling me that I had to improve my English myself.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to do everything on my own.

  One of my colleagues, Amro, gave me considerable support and encouragement. Whenever I had questions, he would answer them willingly, no matter how silly they were. I often sat in the group meetings with no idea what was being said. I wrote down scores of new words so that I could look them up later, rather than asking for their meanings and appearing stupid. I mentioned to Amro how frustrated I felt after having been a top student. He smiled. “Work is different than study,” he said. “W
e all started from scratch; we had to be patient and persistent to acquire the knowledge we have today. Don’t be in too much of a rush; one day you’ll be the specialist in your field. You’ll be the one we all turn to with questions.”

  Every bit as challenging as the actual work were the personal relationships around the office. I was still uneasy about—even fearful of—mixing with Saudi men. The only two male colleagues I didn’t deliberately avoid during break times were Albert, from South Africa, and John, from New Zealand, and even then, one of my male Saudi colleagues would ask me, “What do you hope to gain by associating with these infidels?” after he watched us drinking coffee together. Outside of working hours, I had no friends and socialized with no one, apart from Lamia and another colleague, Alia, whom I had met during the summer internship. There was a very sensible reason for this. Everything I was doing—living and working far away from my family, without a male relative to monitor me—was socially unacceptable for a Saudi girl.

  My parents went to great lengths just to keep my job at Aramco a secret from my own family; if anyone found out, Mama and Abouya would face severe disapproval or worse. Whenever anyone asked Mama about my work, she told them that I was a teacher in one of the Aramco schools in the Eastern Province and that I was living in the company accommodation for female employees. But even then, there was constant questioning: “How can you permit her to live there alone, even if it’s in the company housing?” My parents found themselves under so much pressure that they eventually resorted to additional lies: “We’re taking turns traveling to the Eastern Province, to stay with her and supervise her,” they said.