Status Updates From Acht maanden in de Gazastraat

The Arab News says that the Kingdom has excellent postal services.

The post boxes, too, were a failure. They were seen every day to be stuffed with letters and small packages, with overflowing mail to Madras, to Salt Lake City, to Kuala Lumpur and to Leamington Spa; but was it fresh mail, or the same mail every day? A rumor got about that the boxes were never emptied; and the Europeans, at least, started their search for post offices again. It was, of course, only a rumor.

A little while after this, the main post office closed down. Overnight, it stood deserted, and for days no one knew where to find its successor. Post office boxes went missing, and clerks were out and about all over the city, looking for them. O, Bride of the Red Sea! You give your suitors a hard time.

so it was necessary to go to the post office anyway. What happened next was a shortage of stamps. On the pavement outside the main post office, which in those days was situated near the Happy Family supermarket, a sort of sub-post-office system grew up; enterprising men sat on blankets, and sold stamps at blackmarket prices.

In the year 1403, a great innovation appeared in the Kingdom: post boxes. Mostly these too were situated on vacant lots, but a few were near the habitations of men, and friends could exchange news of them, and draw each other maps. At first it seemed that everyone would be saved a great deal of time and aggravation. But of course, to post letters in the post boxes, one needed stamps,

into the dust by the roadside. The clerks deal with this queue at their own speed; they take time out to read the newspapers, Okaz and Al-Madinah and the Saudi Gazette: often perching cross-legged on the counters while they do so.

The post offices of Jeddah are breezeblock cubes, sited on vacant lots; they are difficult of access, and have eccentric opening hours. The people who man them seem to be chosen for their piety, because post offices are almost always closed for prayer. When at last the staff take down the gates from the main door, and throw the office open, a long and cosmopolitan queue forms at once, and snakes outside the cube and

“Perhaps the process can be accelerated,” she said to Andrew. “Perhaps I’ve already reached the third stage.” “Oh no,” Andrew said seriously. “No, I wouldn’t worry, Frances. This psychiatrist was talking about guest workers, expatriate labor. I don’t think it applies to women at home.”

You coast along, and then comes Phase Three, the second wave of paranoia. And this time around, it never goes.” “So what do you do?” “You leave, before you crack up.”

This psychiatrist says so. He says there are phases. When you get here and everything’s so strange, you feel isolated and got at—that’s Phase One. But then you learn how to manage daily life, and for a while the place begins to seem normal, and you’ll even defend the way things are done here, you’ll start explaining to newcomers that it’s all right really—that’s Phase Two.

Frances seems to believe that nothing in the Kingdom can be taken for granted; that human nature, if indeed it exists anywhere, is not something that can be relied on here.

“Do you think that’s it?” “Yes, it’s like those people who go on fasts and give their lunch money to Oxfam. Religion without God.”

“All the khawwadjihs are on diets,” Andrew complained. “It must be next in popularity to snorkeling. Why do they do it? Some of them are quite scrawny.” “It’s guilt,” Frances said. She remembered Yasmin’s sly question: you know of guilt? “They feel bad because they’re making so much money. They want to punish themselves a bit.” “Do you think that’s it?”

It is not that you learn everything; but you soon learn whatever you will be allowed to known. This is a private society, which does not publish its flaws, or disclose its reasoning, which replies to pressing inquirers with a floodtide of disinformation, and then reverts to its preferred silence. One door closes, and—while you are gathering your platitudes—another door slams shut.

"-A las mujeres no se les permite bailar.
-Ya lo sé, me lo dijo Yasmin. Son los hombres los que bailan. En las celebraciones".

"Porque las esposas se pasan eñ dia visitando a otras mujeres como ellas. Yo no estoy segura de que me gustara algo asi. Todavía me considero una mujer trabajadora, no estoy acostumbrada a eso de quedar con amigas para tomar café a media mañana".

"Pero usted es una mujer-dijo el asistente-. Es una mujer, si o no? Pues ya está, ya no se la considera una persona".

“In the days when all the Arabs were happy and God-fearing, when every desert day was mini-paradise and there was no crime and no disease, before the wicked West came along and drilled for oil and gave them all that rotten rotten money.”

“But they used to have slaves,” Andrew said. “They only abolished slavery in the sixties.” “Yes, but I expect that was when they had to herd camels and make their own tents.” “Yeah,” Andrew said.

Do you know,” he followed her along the hall, “it always says in the papers that foreign servants are an immoral influence.” “Well, so they are. Yasmin says that the educated Saudi women are starting to want to go out to work, so the government’s campaign against maids and nannies is a way of nipping that in the bud. Making sure they don’t delegate stewing the goat.”

Ghettos are formed, even on the pavement; garments are twitched aside. The stranger you see today will be stranger still tomorrow. People fall into their national stereotypes; you note the beef-red complexion, the kinked hair, the epicanthic fold.

Men don’t come very well out of this diary. On the other hand, women don’t come very well out of it either. I said when I was writing before that the sexes live here in a state of deep mutual suspicion, but now I’m beginning to think it’s more like a state of mutual terror.

They just get too old to leave. They have to stay, if they’re allowed—war, revolution, come what may. They don’t know how to behave anywhere else. The Americans are different. Usually they don’t stay long. They don’t know how to behave anywhere at all.

No matter how much they complain about life here, they hate the thought of leaving. They see some gigantic insecurity staring them in the face, as if their lives would fall apart when they got their final exit visa, as if it would be instant ruin—as if it had to be straight from the Heathrow baggage hall and down to the welfare department.

They always say, we’ll just do another year. It’s called the golden handcuffs.

They’ve put their children in boarding school so that they could come abroad, but now the children are settled and it’s unfair to take them away, so they’ve got to stay abroad to pay the fees. They’ve put Mother in a nursing home because they weren’t around to look after her and now she’s got older and sicker and got ideas above her station.

Some people, though, are parsimonious. They stash away everything they can and treat their time here like a prison sentence, or a stint in an up-country field camp. They intend to stay on until they get a certain sum of money in the bank, but as they get toward their target, they decide they need more. They want to buy a house but house prices are rising so fast.

Expatriates do have this habit of laughing at everything. I suppose it is the safest way of expressing dissent. Sometimes I think we should be more open-minded, and not think that we are the ones who are right, and that we should contrive to be more pious about other people’s cultures. But after all, as Andrew says, we’re not on Voluntary Service Overseas.