King Khalid University, Abha. October 2013
[from FB post: December 7, 2013]
Yesterday I went to the "new KKU" campus. First of all, it is HUGE! When they call it a "city" they are not joking. I think when it's finished it's going to be very nice, especially if they put some nice landscaping. The setting amongst the big rocks in that area is very dramatic. People have told me "two years"... I am not so sure about that though. It sure seems like a LOT needs to be finished before we all move from Gregor to the new campus....
[from FB post: May 27, 2014]
Submitted grades... there will be students who are happy, there will be students who hate me too. This is all part of being a teacher.
[from FB post: May 29, 2014]
Last exam today. One more time, grading, grading, grading....
[from FB post: May 25, 2016] My third contract ends at KKU. Tomorrow I will be off for an extremely long break with a lot of travel and visiting family. I wish everyone a happy summer and I will see you all on FB or in person after the Hajj vacation. As I have done in the past, I will close down my FB temporarily. Summer is a lot more fun and "real" if I am not worried about checking my FB status all the time....
[from FB post: April 19, 2017]
Today was graduation. The prince came and was greeted with a uniformed, motley band of foreign laborers playing the Saudi national anthem for him. Of course, no Saudi can play the national anthem because music lessons are illegal here. Just another weird little window into my world....
[from FB post: May 25, 2017]
done!!!!! (but still not permitted to leave the Kingdom).
[from FB post: June 4, 2018] Today ends my time at King Khalid University, Abha, and Saudi Arabia. As per usual, I will be shutting down my facebook for the summer. When I come online again in August it will be in a new place with a new job.
I want to thank all my friends for their support over these five years. What is my takeaway from this experience? Maybe that you are never too old to learn new things as long as you keep your spirit of adventure.
See you all in August.
Signing out. — feeling strong.
What a chunk of my life! Five years is some of the longest I lived anywhere and I never would have expected that Saudi Arabia would be among those places. After the total crash and burn end to one part of my life, I needed a restart fast. I was thankful for my education and experience as a back up even though those skills had been mothballed for over a decade. I sometimes wonder if my time in Milford should be renamed "the lost years". That is for another time.
Getting there
I found a position at King Khalid University online and sent my resume. They got back to me quickly - there would be a face-to-face meeting with the Dean of the School of Languages and Translation at the Saudi Arabia Cultural Mission in Fairfax, Virginia. Luckily, I was in DC at my official phoenix-rekindling address on Perry Place, NW with PM and DV. I was nervous about the interview. I got dressed up and took the metro out to Northern Virginia and walked to the Cultural Mission. There I was rebuffed and told there was no Dean coming from King Khalid University and my name was not on any list. I was shocked but insistent. Finally after some nervous waiting, I was told there had been a "misunderstanding" and I was ushered inside.
I met Dr. Abdullah Al Melhi wearing a drab, ill-fitting suit. He looked exhausted. Another man accompanied him from the finance department (until this day, I have no idea why he was along - he wasn't part of the Faculty of Languages and Translation administration). I came prepared to plead my case for the job and explain why I had not taught for a decade. It was Dr Abdullah, however, who took the initiative and it was HE who was pleading. He said I had excellent qualifications and he needed native speakers like me. "We have Romanians teaching English, for heaven's sake, Mr. Matthew" (said Romanians would later become my friends and colleagues - they all had PhDs in English Literature). I was offered the job, but I had to reply quickly because the Dean was interviewing several people and was leaving Washington. As it turns out, I had a competing offer from Prince Sultan University in Riyadh for slightly more money, but it felt a lot more unknown. The Dean of King Khalid University Faculty of Languages and Translation made the effort to fly to the USA and interview people. He would be my future boss and that impressed me. Also, the Prince Sultan University offer was non-flexible - they would not even give me an extra day to think about it. I didn't like that for some reason and went with my gut. I would like to think it was the right decision, but as we all know, there are no right or wrong decisions, only the decisions we make and must live with.
I was going to Abha, Saudi Arabia.
My contact for getting the visa and "attestations" necessary was Abdul Rauf Khan, a Pakistani with a Canadian passport who was going to stay in Saudi Arabia as long as he could because he was a devout Muslim. Rauf was a very helpful and kind soul. He really was my first friend there. In the many moments where I wanted to give up and throw in the towel over the maddening process, he encouraged me to stick with it. I employed an agent to get the visa (too difficult to do as an individual), but I had to have my experience letters (recommendations from former employers) as well as my diplomas "attested". That required me to go to a local notary, a county seat notary, then the Secretary of State of Pennsylvania, and finally the US Department of State (they have notarial power, so I actually had my diplomas notarized by the Department of State!) That process took so much time that the final paperwork had to be FedExed to me (by TFR) shortly after I arrived in Abha.
My colleagues
The university had done a large hiring of Westerners as it received a tranche of money from the Ministry of Higher Education in Riyadh to improve their programs. I was in the right place at the right time. I arrived at King Khalid University to find a baffling place. It took me at least a year to get my head around the institution and a handle on working there. One thing was quite clear though, we were under the Dean's protection in case anything happened - especially that first year. The Dean was quite explicit about it with everyone, Saudi and non-Saudi. It was comforting and simultaneously unnerving. Unfortunately, it was also necessary.
The most benign of all the people at KKU were the Saudi staff. They worked very much like the song "In the Merry Old Land of Oz" from the film the Wizard of Oz:
We get up at twelve and start to work at one,
Take an hour for lunch and then at two we're done.
Jolly good run!
No joke, the staff clocked in at 8:30am and immediately took breakfast (out of the office). Their peak productivity time was 11;00am-12:00pm. Then at 12:00pm was prayer time and lunch. Often in the afternoon they had family matters that took them out of the office and they would perhaps return and perhaps not. Another possible time to catch them was 3pm-4pm, just before they left for the day. They were all worthless and yet thought if they made one photocopy per day they actually had worked hard. The office manager, Abu Yahya, was a ball of energy and basically did everyone's job. The Dean expressly asked him to come and replace Abu Dhamma, the office manager when I first arrived at KKU, whose answer to every question was "after tomorrow". In the end, the entire school had ONE administrator who worked and that man was worked ragged. He did occasionally rage in Arabic at his useless staff, but the effect was never long lasting (an hour perhaps?)
The expat teachers were divided into the "other" Arabs, the South Asians and the Westerners (of which the Romanians were a subset).
The other Arabs (Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia) were generally good guys who had their own crosses to bear (poor choice of idiom) in Saudi Arabia. They were Muslim and spoke Arabic which enhanced their lives, experiences in the Kingdom, and work exponentially. They even held relatively high positions (but never Dean or Chairman). NH, my Jordanian colleague and good friend, was our Registrar. For we Western expats, there was no expectation ever to fit into the university or become part of its inner workings. The "other Arabs", however, were better educated than the Saudis, a lot more refined, and worked harder, BUT were constantly reminded of their second class citizenship. In this we found great solidarity. In addition, they were all appalled at the way religion was applied to every day life in Saudi Arabia. I had so many of those colleagues pull me aside over the years and explain to me that Islam was nothing like what I saw in Saudi Arabia. I usually just smiled and said the whole issue didn't bother me. It was simply too explosive to discuss.
As I have mentioned in earlier posts [see: Dalagan Park], the South Asians were certain the new batch of Westerners was being brought in to push them out of their jobs. They were, overall, some of the least helpful, least kind, most backstabbing colleagues I had ever known. I used to tell Rauf, "I am so happy I had good South Asian friends before I worked here otherwise I would most certainly dislike the lot of you." ha! He laughingly agreed. What a den of lying vipers I had arrived to work with. The kicker? Many of them barely spoke English!
The Western expats were a mishmash - Muslim converts who thought they were arriving to the holy land for some otherworldly experience, people who did not fit into their home societies easily - lost souls who had fallen through the cracks, and most importantly, those who worshipped Mammon. Each case really deserved its own, individual description as each person was superlatively "unique" (I am being generous). To sum it up though, the crème de la crème of the Occident did not find themselves working at King Khalid University, Abha, Saudi Arabia - it was more la lie de la société. One excellent detail emerged from this rabble, however. As Saudi was an extreme place and a restart for many, it was understood that there were not a lot of probing personal background questions asked. That suited me and my life situation just fine. I was Matthew from Pennsylvania and no one particularly wanted to know more. I was grateful since a lot of background healing was going on in my head.
My Saudi colleagues ranged from incredibly intelligent and gifted people who had benefitted from their study overseas to complete nincompoops who must have had other people write their PhD theses. Those who had learned something and wanted to impart their hard-earned knowledge faced a strong uphill battle. As I quoted in a different post, my dear ex-colleague EB once stated, "If anyone learns anything in this program, it is purely by accident". The level of frustration felt by anyone who had the goal of REALLY teaching was simply off the chart. One thing, however, that all the Saudis had in common was their total avoidance of work and their ability to milk the system for every last riyal they could get. Saudi teachers cancelled classes for no reason, they were often ill, and a few simply never showed up at all and just gave a couple exams where all students got high marks. No one complained. All the while we were checked on and observed by the Saudis to make sure we were fulfilling the terms of our contracts. The Saudis were paid extra money to attend meetings! There could not have been more of a double standard. In the end, none of us, even the South Asians, took the Saudis seriously. At best, we tolerated them as colleagues. Exaggerated? not really. At the start of the term the coordinators of courses with multiple sections (responsible for all the syllabi, exams, and final course reports) were selected and ALL of them dreaded having a Saudi in their groups. There were literal groans "Oh my God, I have XXX in my group". It was that bad. Having a Saudi basically meant doing their work and covering for all their absences and transgressions.
Stories of Saudi colleagues are so numerous, it's hard to decide which ones to relate. Dr. Abdulkhaliq Al Qahtani complained to the Dean that he thought I was wearing sexually provocative clothes to entice the students. When I heard about it, I laughed till I cried. I simply responded that I was flattered anyone found me "sexy" in my late 50's wearing clothes from Target. Ahmed Al Faifi, a much reviled super-religious guy, once spat in my path in the university corridor when no one was around. Such hatred scared me, but I shrugged it off. I told my boss, Dr. Abdullah, about a year after and he went ballistic (I knew he would). Since so much time had passed, nothing could be done. That's the main reason I kept it to myself - I could see nothing good ever coming from that confrontation. Dr Hamad Al Dosari once invited me to his multi-level mansion (where he kept different wives and different families on each floor) which included a man-cave on the rooftop. He was a super pious guy, but he had no problem showing me porn on his big screen TV. How does one act when a senior (and powerful) professor at the university shows one porn in their home? I must admit, life stumped me in that moment.
Office mates
Some kind of penance was being being paid by me, I was certain. I had two of the most ridiculous office mates for those years in KKU - Ahmed Sweity and Mohammed Amin.
Dr Ahmed was a dour old man most of whose family had already migrated to the USA from Jordan. Apparently he still had children studying in Jordan and was working to pay for their education. I wondered why he did not retire and just move with one of his kids in the States because he hated everything about Saudi Arabia, KKU, and its students. He did the bare minimum. He was one of the worst teachers on staff mostly because he had stayed in the job too long and had been treated so poorly. He was quiet in the office and rarely disturbed me. In my early days of getting to know him, he confessed that his favorite American film was "Hannah Montana". After meeting Dr Ahmed, the last actor one would ever expect him to be a secret fan of would be Miley Cyrus.
Dr Ahmed represented a particular group of teachers at the university - those who were so burnt out they just did the bare minimum, gave high marks, and collected a salary. Granted, many of the students wanted that kind of teaching because they wanted "the piece of paper" without the work that went into it. It was, however, such a disservice to the small percentage of students who WERE good and WANTED to learn. Even on my worst days, I still realized I had a few good students who benefitted from my teaching.
The other office mate was Mohammed Amin from Cairo. The man was vile. It was as if someone distilled every annoying characteristic of a human being and put them into one, short, fat Egyptian. He knew everything. He advised me on everything. He talked about sex relentlessly in the way a 12 year old boy would talk after just learning the word "p....y". Unbelievably, I got used to him - or at least got used to tuning him out. Most incredibly, he was close friends with Dr. Abdullah, our Dean. Abdullah was a classy guy - how he wanted to spend any time with potty-mouthed Mohammed Amin was beyond me except (dramatic pause) Mohammed Amin was a phenomenal editor for journal articles. I copy edited some of his work just to check for small mistakes and for a non-native speaker, his edits were astounding. In that way, he was brilliant. I believe they put up with his bizarre behavior and overall rude language just so he would keep editing their articles for scholarly journals. I was very happy the day I bid a final farewell to him. He was, in a word, an asshole. Mohammed Amin represented another group of teachers - those who constantly ingratiated themselves to the Saudis but secretly despised them. I had no love for my Saudi colleagues who were useless, but in the end, it was their country and I could do nothing to change it. I think there was a certain amount of envy among those who kissed Saudi butt all the time. They were hoping for some trickle down effect in money or time off (and it worked occasionally) all the while seething that Saudis had so much money and so little responsibility. It was one of the strangest love-hate relationships I have ever witnessed. Mohammed Amin did tell me one thing early on and it was true. He said, "These Saudis will be your best friend and help you a lot, but if anything ever goes badly for you, they will never stand up for you in any way that puts themselves at risk". At work, I found that to be 100% true. To generalize this to ALL Saudis, I am not sure. My own experiences showed me that Saudis were fiercely loyal once they became close friends.
My students
Of course one cannot leave out the students. Saudi Arabia took tertiary education seriously from the point of view of infrastructure. They built universities, colleges, and technical institutes across the land with all that oil income. Saudis had a right to be educated and they were all being pushed into some kind of post-high school program. High school students were given National Exams which determined which programs they were eligible to apply for. Those who attained high marks easily walked into Engineering, Dentistry, or Medical studies. Those who scored the lowest went into English or Sharia (Islamic Law). To say I was in a School that was getting the scholarly dregs with no motivation to study would have been an understatement. As further encouragement to continue their education, the Saudi students were paid a monthly stipend to attend university. Basically, my students were PAID to go to a program they had no interest in. English was, however, still preferable to Sharia for some reason. The number of students who would tell me in at the start of a class "no English, no English" never ceased to amaze me. Of course, everyone passed; everyone graduated.
The university uniform was the traditional "thobe" (robe) and schmag (head scarf). While students in the big cities had already abandoned such clothing for Western dress, at KKU almost all students wore "the uniform". In a way, I liked it as a social leveler. At first glance, no one knew who was rich or poor wearing a thobe. My few students who bucked the trend (AQ included) were ridiculed when they wore Western dress. Khalid Al Qahtani, one of the funniest students I had in my time working there, told me students constantly harassed him for being gay (??) because he wore Western clothes. I don't think I appreciated how strong some of my students were to buck the trend.
Few of the students wanted to do academic work nor attend class. Attendance taking was mandatory and there was a complex set of rules applied to absences and excused absences. Students brought the most ridiculous official reasons for their absences. My favorites were always written in Arabic to which I would respond: "how do I know this isn't your mother's shopping list for the supermarket?" I gave Saudis one thing, they had an excellent sense of humor. I think they needed it to put up with all the contradictions in their society. The game of excused absences was intense because if that certain absence percentage line were crossed, the student automatically failed the course.
When final exam time came the whole dynamic of the university changed. Students who had been arrogant and aloof now became flatterers and flirts doing anything in their power to secure the highest mark. One of my colleagues said, "they believe their marks are owed to them as part of their share of the oil profit". After five years of teaching there, I believed it. "Oh Doctor, I will do ANYTHING for you to pass this course A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G. What do you need? I can get it for you" It got kind of weird and creepy at times. I know some of my South Asian colleagues were on the take with the students selling high marks in their classes. I hated that time of year. It just felt so dirty
Campus
KKU had moved around a lot. It started as a branch of King Saud University in Riyadh and then merged with an Islamic university already in Abha. I was shown old university locations both in downtown Abha and outside town on the Abha-Khamis main road. The Guraiger Campus was the one I worked at during my stint. Guraiger was in the dusty hills outside of Abha on the very edge of town near my neighborhood, Al Mansak (also on the very edge of town). The environment was perfect for roses and they grew profusely around the campus. It remains one of my few good memories of the university.
Many of the pathways and access roads between the buildings were tiled with, for lack of a better word, bathroom tile. The effect was stunning. It was visible on Google Earth! Two main problems, though: one, when it rained they became slick as ice - I am sure students broke bones since some of those thoroughfares went up steep hills; and two, they were never meant to be driven on, yet the Saudis drove on them and kept destroying the tile. Even in my five-year residence I saw a decline in the condition of those tiled ways. Great idea, bad execution.
For Saudis, praying at the mosque for the five required prayers was de rigeur. If at all possible, one should go to a mosque for prayer. The university had thousands of students and the mosque held only hundreds. Hence, there were prayer rugs taped to the floors of all the major corridors and lobbies of the university to accommodate those praying. AND, in another incredible design flaw (I swear the architect was not Muslim and the Saudis never vetted the plans), there were no places to perform ablutions before prayers. The university was open for three of the daily prayers which meant the bathrooms became places of ablution. Water and dirt were splashed all over the place (from foot washing). It was disgusting, yet the Saudis overall were quite clean people. I have no idea how they put up with the situation. The toilets looked like they were from some train station in Delhi rather than a premier public university.
Guraiger was built on a hillside, so some of the buildings had varying numbers of floors to match the underlying topography. That meant finding rooms was a challenge because walking along a corridor the first floor might suddenly change to the second floor including the classroom numbering! We had veteran Saudi teachers return to the main office on the first teaching day of each semester in frustration: "I cannot find my classroom". The main Registrar's office had a master list of all the rooms and their numbers. EVERY room had a number, even the toilets and the electrical closets. Students and teachers would routinely march into the Dean's office at the start of each semester and say "our room is a broom closet" or "are we to meet in the toilet?". My registrar friend NH once did a complete survey of all our rooms and sent a detailed list of which rooms were NOT classrooms to the main Registrar (it was a great idea and big effort). It had little effect. Everything looked new from the outside at Guraiger, but as soon as one scraped the surface it was clear that it had been built quickly and was never really meant to be permanent. Why so? Out by Dalagan Park (actually just a continuation of that geological area of boulders and rainwater ponds) was the true "new campus". KKU was moving there, as former office manager Abu Dhamma would have put it, "after tomorrow". We were given all kinds of dates that made the move seem imminent. As mentioned above, I even took a tour of the Chinese-constructed, half-completed campus. Just as I was leaving KKU our Dean was invited to a roughed-out building on the new campus to stake out his claim and make requests for the finishing touches. I asked him how it looked. He replied, "It will be fabulous.... one day" and smiled. Parking on campus was also a nightmare. KKU was a commuter campus. Guraiger had no dorms. The faculty parking close to each building where one was given a much-coveted parking sticker was strictly controlled. Even that became so crowded that those arriving late in the day often had to go to the overflow student parking. There was a MASSIVE parking area between the academic buildings and administration. That also was not sufficient and additional parking was provided on the hill behind the administration building. Students were late to class routinely because they had to park in satellite parking and it took a long time to walk to campus (and face it, in a thobe, no one can run). Parking overall looked more like parking for an arena or an amusement park than a university. There was an on-campus stadium for events and football matches. I saw a few ceremonies there in my time at KKU. The one event that was NOT held there, however, was graduation. It simply was not big enough. For graduation KKU had to use the HUGE sports stadium (for real sporting events like Abha Football Club matches) in Mahallah, about halfway between Abha and Khamis Mushait. In short, Guraiger was built as a temporary campus until the Al Fara campus was completed, but then it grew exponentially and could not accommodate all the students. I even wondered if Al Fara would be big enough? Guraiger campus was apparently to become one of the female campuses as the one downtown was in a very run-down building and those women needed an upgrade. With the state of "falling-apart" at Guraiger, I hoped they wouldn't be disappointed when they finally inherited the building. Since I left, apparently the move to Al Fara started. I knew people who moved to Guraiger after it first opened and they said NOTHING worked correctly for the first year. I wish all the best to those pioneers at the new campus. I am happy I was not there for the final big push to move to Al Fara. It is FAR from both Abha and Khamis Mushait. How to get back and forth to either city? If the promised faculty housing was built, where to shop for food? Would there be any restaurants? I am sure all those things will come EVENTUALLY to that huge campus that will hold over 10,000 students. However, I would hate to be a trail-blazer there as either a student or a teacher. Those first few years are bound to be rough, not to mention working the kinks out of the new buildings as they had done in Guraiger.
Cafeteria
The faculty had their own cafeteria (the Saudis NEVER ate there) and the food was at least cheap. They did attempt to vary their menu a bit and in flavorless Saudi Arabia, it was actually not all that bad. The main problem was that the campus location was on the edge of Abha City and there were literally NO services nearby. We were, in effect, a captive audience. There was also a student cafeteria (where faculty were banned after too many South Asian professors tried to take advantage of the extremely cheap student grub) and a few coffee kiosks. The main problem with the faculty cafeteria was that it was also known as the "Elite Lounge". A nice place with a good view over campus. any important, university-catered event was held there. So? If there were a lunch time event, the faculty cafeteria would be closed, and after faculty got banned from the students' mess, there was no place to eat except the on-campus coffee kiosks for extremely unhealthy snacks.
One very funny incident from the faculty cafeteria was when they served kebabs. WBT and I agreed, although the taste was there, they really looked like dried pieces of dog doo (no exaggeration). WBT often said "oh, dog turds again". Well the servers (who were very kind to us because we were kind to them) thought the English name for those kebabs was dog turds. After some time, they would proudly tell us "today sir, dog turds". We actually took it in stride. My wonderful Pakistani British colleague Saqib from Birmingham said, "you know you really need to tell them what they are saying". WBT and I replied, "yeah, we should". We never did.
Administration
All things related to salaries, residency cards (iqama), and entry-exit permits were taken care of by the administrative complex on a small hill overlooking the university. It glittered on the hilltop and I quipped to John Kowalski, one of my ex-colleagues, that it looked like the Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz. He replied, "but it feels more like Mordor from Lord of the Rings". Truer words were never spoken. The place was a land unto itself and the university President's Office occupied the entire top floor. I dreaded trips to "the hill" as it meant dealing with lazy university bureaucrats who usually were as rude as they were unhelpful. Not all people there were "bad" though. A few of the Saudi guys honestly tried to help us and realized how frustrated we must have been. It wasn't just the foreigners either - even the Saudis themselves dreaded trips to the Hill.
It was the "People on the Hill" who determined each year three of the most important events: when we were paid our summer salaries (they were paid lump sum in advance!); when we would receive our annual plane ticket home (or its cash equivalent - most of us took that); and finally - the worst part, when we be granted that sought-after stamp in our passport (actually it was electronic by my time in KSA) that permitted us to leave the Kingdom. We were actual prisoners of Saudi Arabia. Not to heap too much abuse on the Saudi system, Japan did the same when I worked there in the mid 1980s. Whatever country it happens in, it is not a good feeling at all. Hence, the minions of Mordor ensconced in an Emerald City held everyone's fate in their hands. As was repeated to me so many times during my tenure at KKU, "We are all just servants of the Saudis". It really was true.
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It is hard to sum up a place as "different" as KKU, after five years. The above outlines mostly what campus and work life was like. I do not look back on that job nostalgically whatsoever. I did some of my best teaching there and a few of my former students went on to be incredibly successful. I don't think I can ask for much more than that.