Single in Saudi

The following weekend, I was off and was invited to go on a picnic with an American doctor and his wife and a couple of other nurses. We went to a flat plain at the base of the mountains. We saw Bedouins in the distance but didn’t pay much attention to them as they were just tending their flock of sheep. We were talking and eating when Ann looked up and saw a Bedouin woman approaching us. We were surprised and a little frightened as these people tended to keep to themselves. She approached us cautiously and spoke to us in a distinct British accent. We were speechless for a moment but asked her to join us when we recovered from our shock. She sat with us, nervously looking over her shoulder to see if she had been missed. She said she recognized us as Westerners and wanted to know if we could get a message to her family in England. Her story was truly heart wrenching.

She had married a young Saudi while they were both in university in England. She had come to Saudi Arabia with him after he had promised her family that she could go home to visit every year and that he would take care of her. Her mother had been apprehensive about her leaving some twenty years earlier, but she was a young woman in love and was looking forward to living in an exotic land. Her husband was kind at first but when she failed to produce any children he sent her to live with his parents in this remote province. The parents were farmers and shepherds and lived a very meager and austere existence.

Her husband had become a successful businessman in Jeddah and had remarried twice, but never allowed her a divorce, nor did he allow her to leave the "Kingdom", fearing she would never return. Although her husband was wealthy, his parents refused his attempts to modernize their way of life so they had no electricity, telephone or mail service. She said she was treated as a servant and preferred to tend the sheep rather than be in the house all day with the shrewish mother. She hadn’t had contact with her family in eighteen years and asked if we would write or call her family in Kent, England and tell them she was alive.

We were dumbstruck but eagerly wanted to help this poor woman. We offered to take her to the hospital and contact the British embassy for her but she refused. She was legally married to this man and could not leave the "Kingdom" without his permission and had no passport as he had kept it when he had banished her so many years before. It was now expired and she feared he would hunt her down if she ever did manage to escape. She was trapped in this awful life and had no recourse according to Saudi law, nor did she have the financial resources to fight the powerful man her husband had become. She gave us her parent’s address and phone number and we promised to come back next week at this time to collect a letter that she wanted to write. She tearfully thanked us and scurried around some rocks and back to her flock of sheep, fearing that other women in the tribe had spied upon her.

Everyone was so appalled by her story and her lot in life we packed up quickly and silently, as we were all lost in our own sorrow for this pathetic woman. On the way into town we decided to stop at the local international telephone exchange and try to place a call. We got a disconnected number and had no luck with directory assistance. We all wrote letters that evening but no one got a response. I had to work the next weekend but the doctor and his wife went back to the spot where we had met the next weekend and several weekends after but never saw her again.

I have always been haunted by this woman and wondered if she ever escaped the horrors of her life. I wondered how many other women had a similar story as they hid behind the veil. It strengthened my resolve to stay away from Al. He was very westernized in his thinking, but he was still an Arab and I could not imagine my life as the wife of an Arab man.