9. "Stop Wearing Skirts, Dude."

At the Firm’s New Hire Orientation I attended in October last year, we had a game on dealing with cultural differences. We were divided into two groups, and were given some color-coded cards printed with several lines of poems. In my group, we traded cards in order to get a total of 24 lines of poems on cards of a single color. To trade, we had to make various animal sounds and hand gestures indicating what was desired and whether the trade was agreed to. We wore hats with different colors, but the colors didn’t mean anything. It was soon obvious that it would be almost impossible to get 24 lines by trading within our group.

The two groups exchanged visitors in four waves. The first was to observe only. The remaining three traded as well as observed. I was among the first wave. The ways of the other group appeared "strange." They gathered in groups and read poems. Some people begged for cards; others gave out cards freely. It wasn’t clear how to enter a reading group, what the rules were for exchanging cards, and what their goals were. The colors of the hats seemed to mean quite a bit.

After each exchange, we discussed amongst ourselves and tried to figure out what the rules were for the other group. In the end, both of our groups had figured out most of the rules. Supposedly my group was the Dutch Traders and the other was a Medieval Society. With all the ruff, ruff, quack, quack, oink, oink here and the weird poetry reading there, we more aptly named our culture the Animal Farm and the other the Dead Poets Society.

Figuring out how the other group operated took quite a bit of observation, discussion, and analysis. This, for rules that could be explained in ten minutes.

Fast forward five months to Riyadh. The jet age meant spreading the latest variety of flu virus across continents in hours. With equal ease and speed, animal farmers were parachuted into a dead poets society.

Having to find out the rules is hard. James, our Amex rep who had been with the Peace Corp. in Morocco said that they had months of cultural training in the host country before they were let loose. We, on the other hand, were simply dropped into an Arab country - the most conservative and the least tolerant no less. Lacking the simplest understanding of the Arab world meant misinterpretation and frustration.

For instance, addressing people by their first names does not mean that the Arabs are informal. One has a given name; his second name is his father’s given name; his third name his grandfather’s given name; and so forth. Theoretically one can trace his lineage all the way back to Muhammad. Their names are like shift registers. Some Indians are named in this way too. No wonder Srini likes to go by his first name alone. There is no such a thing as a family name. Therefore, to call a Saudi by his "last" name doesn’t make much sense. Ah ha, it was in fact to be more formal that I was addressed Mr. Terry. Now that I think of it, it was somewhat of an argument during a meeting when I was addressed so.

The superficial oddities seen from a Western perspective are in fact easy to get over with if one would just pause for a second to twist his mind a little. For instance, the Saudis like to hold hands. No, I don’t mean holding hands between a man and a woman. That would probably earn him and her some lashes. I mean holding hand between two men. In public. The policemen too. The moment you see two policemen holding hands, the air of authority simply evaporates in a millisecond, not that they had much of an air of authority to begin with if they are already seen as arbitrary and corrupt.

What can be frustrating in daily interaction with this culture is the fundamental differences in world views. Not just the customs of the working days or dress, but the fundamental world view. A world view that translates into business practices that are antithetical to the Protestant work ethics and especially to the purported consulting culture of youth, speed, and energy.

Saudi Arabia is a society of rigid class structure. At the top is the royalty, which supposedly numbers around ten thousand. These are the people who don’t have to pay phone bills, and no one would dare disconnecting their lines. These are the people who have their own airport separate from the general airport in Riyadh. The Saudi nationals come next. The Westerners may be closely behind. The entire lower class is imported – the foreign laborers. The classes occupy well-defined positions and are expected to play well-defined roles in society. Even the clothes are clearly coded. Stepping outside the boundaries of class is not well received. This is why foreign men are not welcome to wear the Saudi dishdasha and the Saudis don’t wear Western clothes. Women belong to one class and therefore all women, foreign or Saudi, are required to wear abayas. This even extends to the repairmen, the gardeners, the street sweepers at the compound – gray, green, white coveralls. Social mobility of the kind embodied in the American Dream? What social mobility?

Mike, a British American in the same sense as my being a Chinese American, pointed out the distinctly different mentality of the British versus that of the Americans towards social mobility. To a British, if he is a coal miner, then it’s good enough for his son to be a coal miner. To an American, he might be a janitor, but he harbors the ambition that one day his son would be a doctor or a lawyer. This is not to say that there is no class distinction in America, but only that the upward movement through the classes is achievable and achievable through effort.

Without mobility then what of effort? Wealth accumulated through effort doesn’t count very much in the Arab culture. Telling a Horatio Algier story of rags to riches does not earn one much respect. Wealth chanced upon one through sheer luck is preferred. Gold pumped out of the desert sand is better than profits earned from making the best koo-koo clocks. Manual labor and by extension hands-on technical work are not valued and perhaps considered to be beneath one’s station. The ideal job is a desk job as a manager. Most management positions at the client are reserved for the Saudis, but without the qualifications to match the positions. At times it seems that every manager at the client has a shadow foreign advisor. What the managers do are often rather vague, and their advisors’ vaguer still. A great number of consultants and advisors, us among them, can be found at the client’s. Yet finding someone who’s responsible for something is often a monumental task.

No one wants to be responsible for anything for fear of being blamed if anything goes wrong. The client’s contractor delivers something to a site of the client’s. Yet no one there would sign the shipping slip if the manager was not there. Any reference to some future time is followed by the phrase Insha’allah, or God willing, as if to say that the course of future events are in God’s hands and the guy cannot be responsible if that event doesn’t happen. The Arabic language is full of references to God, but Insha’allah must be the one phrase that irks the Westerners the most. The phrase is used even in conversations in English – "Okay, after he come back on Tuesday, Insha’allah, we will have the meeting on Wednesday, Insha’allah." If you hear one Insha’allah the meeting has a chance of not happening. That is to say, all meetings have a chance of not happening when you show up. If you hear two Insha’allah’s, forget it. On the second or third day on the project, I spoke to two people from our client’s contractor and asked them about the progress of some project they were implementing. One guy wrote down "Saudi time" on a Post-it sticky for me. Things like shipment being refused for lack of a manager or people not showing up on time cropped up so much that there was no chance they could stick to a schedule developed by expats with Western expectations. I estimated what I termed the Saudi factor to be 2 - things take twice as long, twice as many people, and twice as much money to get done. After you do all you planning, throw in a factor of 2 and then you have a remote chance of meeting you plan.

Although frustrating, gradually one does learn how a different culture operate. Sometimes it’s a simple conditioning process. D. of consulting company N. told me that the Saudi M. he works with would demand certain things to be ready by the next day. Initially, D. would stay late and work hard to get them ready, but then nothing happened to them. If he just kinda promised to have them done but when the time came just said that he couldn’t get them done, nothing happened. He admitted that he had been Arabicized in some ways.

Words that mean one thing to us can carry different meanings in a different culture. I had made a great number of jokes out of the expression "No problem" so frequently heard around here. We had a taxi to Assaraya Turkish restaurant. We asked the driver if he could wait for us. No problem. One hour? No problem. Two hours? No problem. It turned out to be a 100 riyal bill. No problem had cost me fifty bucks for a taxi in Jeddah. "No problem" is Arabic for "It’s gonna cost you." This is not too say that the Arabs are necessarily hypocritical and dubious, only that the rules and expectations are different.

Srini and I went back to New York on Thursday, April 8. I went directly to the office. By chance, I met Chris who was also ready to submit his visa application. Srini, Chris, and I went to the Saudi Consulate in the afternoon. Srini and I explained to them that we had applied for a multiple entry visa, showed them the letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the reminder letter on the Firm’s letterhead, and asked that a multiple entry stamp be added to the visa. We also explained that our contact person in Riyadh, had spoken to them and had made sure that what we asked for could be done. The response was that our visas have been used and therefore could not be changed. A new one would have to be applied for, whether single entry or multiple.

Of course, the guy sitting behind the bullet-proof glass couldn’t resolve the problem and had to get the vice consul, to whom we again courteously explained the situation, careful not to say that anyone had made a mistake but that such and such was what happened and that we were asking to have the multiple entry stamped added. The same answer was given. However, he said that a fax of a letter from the Firm sealed by the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce, requesting a multiple entry visa, is good enough to give us a multiple entry visa.

The visa mess had aggravated me a great deal. I hated being forced to come back to New York to deal with the visa mess while I had planned to go to Greece for this break. At the moment, I was completely stuck in New York. Furthermore, it looked like I might have to get another single entry visa if what the vice consul said turned out to be not the case. This is the situation I had very much wanted to avoid. I couldn’t understand why the Saudis make everything so hard as if we actually want to go to their country.

I spoke to Terry, the administrative head of the Firm’s office in Riyadh, about our situation. The next day, I got a message from Terry that his government relations person had spoken to the vice consul at length. He said that the vice consul had taken things personally for whatever reason and that it would be best if we did not go to the consulate ourselves but instead use a third party. This surprised me greatly as for the God of me I couldn’t figure out what ticked the guy off. Although I had been very frustrated and irritated by the whole situation, our exchange with the vice consul was courteous, calm, and professional. What’s wrong with these people? This is when you throw up your hands and say like Ricardo would, "Stop wearing skirts, dude." Get into the 20th century.

Terrence
Riyadh
Thursday, June 17, 1999