Growing up in Saudi Arabia

It is a rule of sorts that where you spend most or the entirety of your childhood is a place with some special significance. Saudi Arabia, particularly Jeddah, is where I spent the first 14 years of my life. Strangely enough, these days I seem to play down the significance of the place in creating the person I am today. When I visit nowadays, it seems as foreign as any place I may have been in for only a few years, not fourteen years.

In Jeddah, I used to live in a compound (as it is called there). It was a large private place surrounded by fences (sometimes with barbed wire fences). These compounds were usually built for foreign residents employed by certain corporations. They were by no means meant to contain us and seclude us, but it was an attempt at creating a more private place in the city where the usual citywide rules regarding dress codes and conduct would not apply. This meant in many compounds, women did not have to cover their hair and wear veils. These compounds were often more luxurious than their surroundings, but some were not.

It was an efficient way of containing cultures different from the predominant culture of region into a place of their own. Only something like a compound can be responsible for someone like me, a person who despite having spent such a long time in one place, never picked up the language or even made a Saudi friend. Maybe I liked having the extra privileges I had of growing up in  a protective thing like a compound, but I do know it did little to teach me about the real Saudi Arabia. In contrast to me was some of my other friends who grew up outside, many knew Arabic and could have a decent conversation in Arabic. They also had numerous Saudi friends.

However, the culture containment was responsible for making me a multi-cultural person as well. I grew up with so many diverse groups of people; it was nothing like living in mixed ethnic areas of the United States. We were all there in Saudi Arabia for a purpose, perhaps for a better life than in our actual homelands. We had the common bond of being people of different cultures there to live temporarily (foreigners are almost never granted permanent resident status nor citizenship). It is not as if we could look at it as our new homeland and neither could we pretend we were merely taking a long vacation in a different country. It was home to me, but not a true home knowing I was never meant to live there and be part of the nation. Now, knowing  that, I feel distant enough to give up calling Saudi Arabia my home. ©