Extremism in Saudi Arabia vs. Oman

One of the goals of this blog was to entertain, educate and, most importantly, reassure my friends and family back home that I was safe and happy here and not living in fear of terrorism. I've tried to share my experiences and some of the knowledge I've picked up by reading a lot and just being a nerd in general, but the single best thing I've read to date on why terrorism just won't be an issue in Oman is the recently posted article by Gary Grappo, "Saudi Arabia and Oman Have Different Experiences With Extremism". So follow the link and read an excellent article that's far more compelling than anything I could write.

 

 

To Go Home

A couple of months ago someone posted an article on Facebook about whether one could ever go home again after being an expat and it's something I've been thinking about since, especially as I've been fielding a lot of questions from work lately about whether I want to stay in the region or go back to the US.

 

When you live abroad, whether it's for one year or ten, life moves on without you at home. You miss weddings and birthdays and births and other big life events. You miss the phone call from your best friend that she got engaged because of the time difference. You miss the impromptu calls from friends to chat about life or love or work. And while your friends might think of you fondly and miss you occasionally, they generally fill the gap you left in their social group and move on without you. And as time goes on, the calls and the texts and the emails lessen.

 

And sad as that might sound, my life has also moved on. In 2014 alone I visited 16 countries. Most of my American friends will never visit that many countries in their entire lives and, as the gap between our experiences and lives widen, it becomes harder to find things in common. I learned this at a very young age when I first started traveling - after returning home from a trip, I wanted to tell my friends all about every cool experience, only to find that many of them were immediately bored or were just jealous of my trips (and thought I was bragging). So when people ask about a trip after I return, I generally say something generic like "Oh, it was great!" or "I had a lot of fun but it was so cold!" The people who really want to know more (whether because they care about me or because they're genuinely interested in traveling or just because they're inquisitive people) will generally ask enough follow up questions to get me talking.

 

Most of my funny stories start with phrases like "So, this one time when I was camping in Uganda and surrounded by wildebeests and hippos..." or involve some story about my trials and tribulations of using a squatter toilet (in fact, if I ever wrote a book, I'm pretty sure the title would be something like "Ass Hoses and Squatter Toilets: One Girl's Adventures in Learning to Squat in the World's Shittiest Toilets"). Those stories tend not to be received so well in the US (except by my closest friends). And when I only traveled once or twice a year, it wasn't a big deal to leave those stories out of my dialogue. But now, after traveling this much, how do I go home and be myself and yet leave out such huge pieces of my life and experiences?

 

I imagine it's also hard adjusting back into American culture after living in a foreign culture. I've already talked about how sometimes I get offended on behalf of Arabs when I hear Americans say something ignorant, and I know it's going to be so much worse if I were to return home. Aside from the comments about terrorists and subservient women, there's plenty of people who have said/will say "Ugh, Oman?!?! Where the hell is that and why on earth would you want to go there?!? Did you have to ride a camel to work?"

 

And finally, living abroad makes you miss and appreciate America in ways that I took for granted when I lived there. I miss Target and Wal-Mart and Home Depot and other one-stop shops. I miss craft beer and Cajun food and southern BBQ. I miss real Diet Coke from a fountain. I miss Americans' sense of independence and pride and bullheadedness and belligerence and all the other adjectives that describe our upstart nation, both the positive and the negative. And I know that if I move back I'll just be frustrated by all these things that I miss  (well, not Diet Coke - I'd never be frustrated by Diet Coke) and appalled at how insular and ignorant many Americans are of the outside world.

 

So no, I don't think repatriating back to the US is going to happen anytime soon. And as for going home? Well, I'm already there. Because as any nomad will tell you, home isn't a single place. It's where your friends are, where you put down roots (even for just a year), where your pets are (minus my happily retired dog who has permanently abandoned me for my parents), where the bed is that you long to return to after a few hard weeks on the road, where your local pub is, where the waiter at your favorite restaurant knows your name...

(Oh, and here's a really poignant blog post about this very same topic.)

 

And while it feels like I'm channeling my 20-year old self, I'm going to leave you with some appropriate some lyrics from an old favorite band:

 

I met a girl who kept tattoos
For homes that she had loved
If I were her I'd paint my body
'Til all my skin was gone

On Being Female...and Other Musings

The question I get asked most often by people back home is what it's like living and working as a female in an Arab and Muslim country. And frankly, my answer is that it's pretty much the same, with the exception that I wear slightly longer skirts and cover my shoulders. Sure, sometimes I have to work a little harder to get the same respect as a similarly situated male colleague, but that's no different from my experiences in the US. 

 

Most people are shocked by this answer and the next follow up question is usually something like, "But aren't women really second-class citizens over there?" (Not to mention that any time there's violence perpetrated anywhere in the world by an Islamic terrorist that my Facebook feed is rife with commentary on how horribly women are treated in this region.) As I find myself explaining over and over again how American media incorrectly portrays life in the Middle East, or as I try to explain the differences in culture, or describe how many women choose to wear an abaya/hijab, I feel a bit like an Arab apologist.

 

That's the phrase we used for our Middle Eastern History professors in college who were Westerners teaching about the Middle East and yet constantly trying to apologize for the Western misperception of Islam/Arabs. My Arab or Muslim professors tended not to apologize - they just stated facts and, if a debate started about the morality of a topic, the professors just shrugged it off as Americans' inability to understand other cultures. When we called professors Arab apologists, though, it wasn't a compliment. But I understand it now - to study or experience or understand a foreign culture, yet never truly be a part of it, can wind up alienating you from both cultures, as you're always trying to explain or defend one culture to the other.

 

So when I talk to Westerners about life in the Middle East, I wind up saying "Yes, but..." a lot and qualifying my statements.

- "Yes, some women are forced by their husbands to cover their faces, but they are the minority, except maybe in places like Yemen, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan."

- "Yes, some women are still put to death for adultery, but that very rarely happens, except maybe in places like Yemen, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan (and besides, how many women are killed in the US each year through domestic violence?)."

- "Yes, some girls are married off at very young ages to older men, but that really only happens in places like Yemen or Afghanistan."

- "Yes, divorce and child custody over here might favor the man more than the woman, but you have to understand that the culture is different. Divorce rates are much lower, not because women can't divorce, but because people marry for different reasons. Rather than marrying for "true love", people marry for a spouse that can support them, or that can provide them with children, or for companionship. Their expectations for their partner are lower (and clearer), so divorce rates are naturally lower."

 

And so I feel like an apologist, constantly trying to explain and justify my host country's culture. I also find myself getting offended on behalf of Arabs/Muslims when I hear Westerners say ignorant and misguided things about a culture that they have never witnessed or experienced. (Oh, and it goes both ways - my Arab colleagues think I'm constantly trying to defend American culture or politics, or diffuse claims that everything wrong with the world is somehow an American conspiracy). But as much as I might be branded an apologist, I also think that the only way Westerners are likely to change their perception of Arabs is by hearing it from a Western female. If an Arab woman told you that she wore the abayajab out of personal preference and that she did not feel like a second class citizen, would you believe her? Or would you instantly start coming up with counterarguments in your head, like she's only saying that because that's what she's been brainwashed with?

 

So I'll keep apologizing (for both cultures). Because I'm so lucky to get a glimpse into a culture so foreign to Americans and because there's a chance that when an American hears me say that my gender isn't an impediment to my success here, that maybe some of you will start to believe me.

 

Finally, a post! And some updates...

I know, I know, I have been woefully remiss in updating this blog lately. It's a combination of being really busy, crankiness/expat frustrations (and not wanting to use this blog as a forum for whining) and trying to write posts that don't stray into local politics or things that could piss off the people who so nicely sign my checks every month. So I'll just ram the past few months into this one post and then I'll try to promise to be better in the future.

 

1.     I Moved!

 

As you may recall, I had some serious maintenance issues with my former house. It turns out that living in a house with toxic black mold, unending plumbing issues and where your kitchen cabinets are lying on the floor can make you cranky. It also turns out that living in the middle of absolutely nowhere, 20+ minutes away from any conveniences, can make you feel even more isolated and homesick than you already do as a single expat in a foreign country.

 

I'll admit, I was willing to live with too many issues for too long because it seemed like living with the House from Hell was easier/less stressful than dealing with moving, so it's partially my fault for waiting until I was totally miserable. My final straw(s) was when my shower stopped working for like the 6th time and when my house completely flooded when we got 30 minutes of light rain. That was back in October and thus began a nearly two month endeavor to get HR to move me. (I actually wrote a blog article back in December on that whole seemingly unending clusterfuck, but then decided I sounded too whiny and angry. But if you ever ask me about it in person, be prepared for me to launch into an angry tirade since I still have some anger issues about the whole topic).

 

To make a loooooooong story short, on Christmas Eve I moved into my fabulous new apartment (which also happens to be the apartment I was originally supposed to move into, except HR accidentally gave it away to someone else), which happens to be in the heart of the expat area and is a 3 minute walk from an area with my favorite restaurant, a bar, liquor store, 2 coffee shops and a Western grocery store. Let me tell you what a huge sigh of relief this has been for me - I'm much happier here, much more willing to consider staying beyond my contract term of 15 months and much more social now that I can walk to meet up with friends.

 

[Side note: After moving out of the House from Hell I heard a lot of other stories from people who had also moved out of the same development. Turns out one of my neighbors had three huge, poisonous viper snakes in their laundry room and other people have reported poisonous vipers coming up through toilets. Turns out that as part of their botched plumbing construction, they've managed to let poisonous snakes into the pipes. Can you only imagine how I would have reacted if I'd had a poisonous snake come up through my toilet?!?!]

 

2. Christmas

 

Christmas in the Middle East is pretty strange. It's a normal work day, all the restaurants and shops are open, there's no Christmas trees or decorations and it feels like any normal summer day. I had offered to work on Christmas so my coworker could spend it with her family and it was so strange to be at work and to go out for lunch at a normal restaurant. Also, you know how in the US you're not supposed to say "Merry Christmas" anymore but instead have to say "Happy Holidays" to be politically correct and inclusive of all the non-Christians? Well, here there are no other recognized holidays in December other than Christmas and every Omani assumes that all white people are Christian. So pretty much every time an Omani saw me on Christmas, they exuberantly shouted "Merry Christmas!!!" and seemed pretty happy with themselves for remembering the white-people holiday. I found it charming and funny.

 

[Side note: I could give two shits about the whole "Merry Christmas"/"Happy Holidays" political correctness debate in the US, so please don't think that previous paragraph was meant to indicate an opinion on the political correctness of either statement.]

 

3. New Year's Eve

 

I traded working Christmas for getting off for NYE. My sole requirements for NYE were that I wanted to be somewhere cold and I wanted to not be in Oman. So I met up with a few friends from my Romania trip in Edinburgh, Scotland for the annual NYE street festival called Hogmanay. Two comments: I am too old for drunken street festivals and my body is too broken to handle a cold, wet Scottish winter. Everything ached for like a week even after I returned to the desert.

 

4. Naughty Nala

 

I got suckered into taking home a stray kitten that we'd been feeding outside of our favorite restaurant for a while. She's sweet and adorable and I think Zim is happy for the company, but she's in the naughty kitten stage where she races around the house and then knocks everything off every surface. She also has an obsession with smashing fruit all over the house (so far I've had an avocado, tomato and apple smeared everywhere)...hence the title Naughty Nala.

 

Zim and his mini-me, Naughty Nala. Yeah, I know, one day I should get a pet that isn't black.

5. Winter Wonderland

 

All summer people kept telling me how awesome Oman is in the winter when it's not hot and gorgeous. I heard tales of rooftop bars and restaurants, nightlife only available in the summer and desert excursions that wouldn't kill you from heatstroke. I can finally say that while I would hardly call 75-85 degree weather winter, it is definitely a nice change from the scorching summer. And this is definitely a more interesting place to live from December-March.

 

 

Ok, I think that's it's for the major "catch up" and I'll try to get out some more substantive posts on my recent adventures soon!