Brownies and Kalashnikovs Read online

  Many Saudis could not read or write at the time when oil was discovered in Arabia, nor did they have any knowledge of basic hand tools such as hammers, saws, screwdrivers or measuring tools, much less gauges, meters, generators and pumps. How did Aramco convert a country like Saudi Arabia, which was devoid of any industrial or technical manpower into one with competent and reliable employees versed enough in the technicalities and management skills necessary to carry on large blocks of Aramco’s work? The answer I would discover was through selective training and education of Aramco’s non-American personnel by qualified American trainers with a sharp eye on America’s interests in the region.

  The first person I started my research with was my father.

  The Wild Wild East My father’s relationship with the Americans was complex and shot through with many murky shades of gray. Aramco was my father’s first window onto the world. He had joined it in 1944 at the tender age of eighteen and became the first smiling Saudi face used by Aramco’s Public Relations Department to portray Aramco’s benevolent Saudi-American partnership. Privately, he was all too aware of the façade, and he ended up viewing himself as his employers viewed him during his 40-year- long stint in Aramco – as never quite up to the standards of his American counterparts. This painful self image turned him into a very angry person.

  “How in the world did you end up in Aramco at such a young age, all the way across the desert from Medina?” I asked my father.

  “Purely by chance,” he answered, looking at me in surprise at my uncustomarily personal question.

  “My father,” he continued, “God rest his soul, was Hijaz’s Director General of Police Investigations. I asked him to take me on as a trainee but I never thought that the work would be so tedious. I did nothing all day except file reports in a small stuffy office. One afternoon I came across an ad for jobs for single Saudi Arab men in an oil company in the Eastern Province. No one really knew much about it except that it was run by Americans, and that it was the only job outlet in the country. I thought, Why not? It can’t be any worse than here. So I went to be interviewed by the local recruiter. I was very nervous because I only had a sixth grade level of schooling.”

  My father gave a small laugh shaking his head at the memory: “All the recruiter, Ahmad Rashid Muhtasib, wanted to know was if I was literate! Ahmad Rashid placed his hand on my shoulder looking very relieved and said:

  ‘Okay, Fahmi Basrawi, we’re going to hire you as an English teacher.’

  ‘A teacher of English? But I don’t know a word of English!’ I told him, completely baffled. ‘Never mind, never mind,’ he reassured me, ‘we will teach you.’ And he offered me a salary twice what I was making as police department clerk, 35 dollars.”

  The new ‘job outlet’ my father was referring to was, of course, Aramco.

  ***

  My father turned up the following morning at Aramco’s recruitment office, packed and ready to move to his new job. But there was a little problem: how was he to get there? It was not the first time he had traveled, he had spent his childhood visiting Egypt, Syria and Lebanon with his family, but east of Jeddah was uncharted territory. The urbane Hijazis, whose social and economic networks historically tied them to the other metropolitan cities of the Ottoman Empire, viewed the Eastern Province of Arabia as undiscovered desert wilderness. Separating the old cities of Arabia’s west and its backwaters in the east was the scorched desert aptly named the Rub’ al Khali (the desolate quarter), undeveloped and dangerous desert terrain where Bedouin robbers regularly ambushed and killed unprotected travelers.

  Aramco’s office led my father to a truck stop where Aramco received its supplies from the Jeddah port and he bought a ride to Dhahran. His ride across the Rub ‘al Khali atop sacks of wheat in the back of a pickup truck was with two others, the driver and an armed Bedouin to fend off Bedouin robbers. The trip took thirteen and a half hot, dusty days with bread and dates for sustenance and water from the oases they passed through. Half the time was spent bouncing atop the sacks of wheat and the other half digging the truck out of the sand.

  Upon arrival my father jumped off the truck with immense relief and looked around for his welcoming committee. Sure enough, the ‘staff ’ of the school were there, two men: Vincent James (who would become my father’s mentor and Dhahran School principal), and an Iraqi translator, Wadi’ Sabbagh, who also filled in as part-time secretary and part-time instructor. Both men were standing outside the main administration building of Dhahran, known then as ‘American Camp’ on what became ‘Main Street,’ then a wide unshaded desert road rutted with the tire tracks of the heavy-duty desert trucks parked nose-to-pipe-rail outside Aramco’s headquarters … the modern day horses of America’s new oil cowboys.

  As he walked down the road flanked by the two older men to his new living quarters, my father’s spirits rose. In his parched, disheveled and hungry state he saw a dream come true: a group of neat bungalows with air-conditioning units jutting out from each house. Ice water tanks and a communal mess hall completed the dream. As he quickened his steps in their direction, Wadi’ Sabbagh put a gentle hand on his arm, stopping him.

  “That is American Camp,” he said, “It is for the American employees only.” He pointed in another direction farther down the road, “Our camp is there, Saudi Camp.”

  The camp he was motioning to consisted of starkly barren rows of tents and barastis, wooden pole frame abodes with dirt floors and woven palm frond ceilings and walls. It was the non-American bachelor housing camp, teeming with a multinational workforce. Signs pointing to the entrance were in Arabic, Swahili, Urdu and Italian.

  “Italian? What are Italians doing here?” My father asked Wadi’ in surprise.

  “The Italians are remnants of the Italian army – 2000 of them – who were stranded in the shambles of Mussolini’s retreat from Eritrea in 1941. Somehow they managed to find their way to Dhahran and were employed immediately to design and build the major administrative buildings for Aramco. Their talents are in high demand but not high enough to get them to share quarters with the Americans,” Wadi’ commented dryly.

  “And two more things,” Wadi’ informed my father, “You are to address the Americans as sahib or else a chunk of your paycheck will be subtracted in punishment. The same punishment applies should you drink this ice water. It is only for the Americans. We drink this,” and he pointed to a well with brackish water.

  Those were the first of many discriminatory acts my father and others like him had to endure in the American oil company. He certainly wasn’t expecting a bed of roses (nothing in his young life so far had been) but he hadn’t been expecting such blatant unequal treatment from his new employers.

  Walking in their direction was an American supervisor who knew of my father’s arrival and casually nodded, “Baswari, I’m Mr. Kennedy.”

  “I didn’t know English, but I did know my name and it wasn’t ‘Baswari,’ ” my father recounted. “I also noticed that Mister preceded only Kennedy’s name. ‘Mr. Kennedy,’ I answered, ‘Ana Mister Basrawi.’ And here my father chuckled happily at the memory of the scowling American walking off stiffly leaving Vincent James and Wadi’ Sabbagh grinning widely at this unusual repartee between Arab and American.

  There were plenty of racists of Mr. Kennedy’s ilk known to refer to Saudi employees as ‘rag heads’ and ‘coolies.’ My father’s urban middle-class Hijazi background heightened his awareness of, and indignation at, the Americans’ disrespectful treatment. For the moment, however, he was content with this brief show of defiance. Now, he needed to concentrate on the work ahead of him, namely teaching a language he knew nothing about.

  Six thousand one hundred new employees were hired along with my father that year. Aramco was actively recruiting new hands from the United States and from Saudi Arabia in anticipation of demand for more Arabian oil to feed the war machine in the Pacific theater. One year previous to my father’s arrival, the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (Casoc)
had changed its name to become the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), in preparation for a massive new construction project of the oil refinery in Ras Tanura. Saudi labor was desperately needed for the unskilled physical work of oil production in the rapidly expanding oil company.

  So urgent was the demand for laborers that watering stations were erected in the middle of the Rub’ al Khali desert to lure curious Bedouins who flocked to them with their camels to apply for jobs. As the illiterate Bedouins began pouring in for work, Aramco headquarters realized that this new labor force knew nothing of the world outside the desert. They needed to do much more with these incoming recruits than just issue overalls and a hard hat. My father’s job was to help these new recruits gain some sort of rudimentary knowledge before they entered training as office boys, waiters, house boys, and most importantly as the unskilled labor force of the refinery.

  Learning the Ways of the West On the following day, my father showed up for work bright and early and waited patiently to meet the tutor who would teach him the English language as had been promised. He was introduced to his class, seventy Bedouin students ranging from the minimum age of eleven up to eighteen, all classified as ‘educational trainees.’ At that point Company policy ruled that Saudi Arabs were not to be employed for anything more than running the basic services for Americans. My father smiled and nodded as he was informed that his job was to give these boys a start in English and Arithmetic until they became literate enough to begin their industrial training. He stopped smiling when he was also informed that he would have to wing it on his own. There would be no one to teach him the English that he was expected to teach them. This, he was not prepared for. How was he to teach something he didn’t know?

  Determined to rise to the challenge, he cobbled together his own English language program and managed to teach both himself and his students American English. “I posted new English words on the wall above my head where I slept so they would be the last thing I saw at night and the first thing I saw in the morning,” he told me. “This way I was able to memorize about ten words a day out of Ogden’s Basic Ways to Wider English, Books 1 and 2, which the British had used in India, and stay two or three lessons ahead of my class.” Any student who advanced ahead of the rest was pressed into service as a teacher for the slower learners. Included among my father’s students, both the smallest and youngest of the group, was Ali al Nu’aymi presently head of OPEC. He had entered Aramco’s Senior Staff in 1970 as a petroleum engineer and went on to become Aramco’s first Saudi Arab President and subsequently Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Oil. Ali al Nu’aymi, my father remembers with a fond smile, was a tiny power ball of intellect and enthusiasm who had obviously lied about his age to gain entry to the Aramco workforce. The age for entry was eleven and he was barely nine years old.

  The rest of my father’s early employment years I was familiar with. As he became proficient enough in English, he began to diversify into other activities in the fledgling oil company. In his spare time, he tutored Americans in Arabic, launched the first Aramco taxi service and taught himself photography. With this new skill, he was instantly put in charge of snapping photographs of the new Bedouin recruits for their company ID cards. This job was a major feat of diplomacy in itself as the reproduction of the human figure is forbidden in Islam. It took a fatwa to convince the apprehensive Bedouins to accept to sit in front of a flashing camera, which to them personified the devil.

  The outcome of ‘Bedouin-recruit-meets-camera’ was a historical batch of ID photos of faces frozen in fear. Many years later, as a temporarily employed returning student during the summer, I was assigned to classify these same photos in alphabetical order, matching the first photo on entry with the equivalent one after the recruit had become employed. The new employees were issued regimental white safari outfits with mandatory instructions to shave off all head and facial hair with the only option of a small mustache. Shorn of their voluminous red checkered kaffiyehs, kohl eyeliner, luxurious braids, earrings, and bristling beards, it was hard to match the untamed ‘before’ photo with the expressionless and clean shaven ‘after’ photo where all that remained of their manly and poetic Bedouin personas was a small white skull cap (normally worn under the kaffiyeh) and an abbreviated mustache.

  The photography session was just one of the many firsts in Saudi Arabia that my father would spearhead in Aramco. He established sightseeing tours to the nearby Al Hasa Oasis, which was historically a central port of call on the ancient Frankincense route that began in Abyssinia and continued onward to Persia, India and the Far East. Until about a century ago, most of the dates in Europe came from Al Hasa and the area was a thriving market center for wheat, fruit, pottery, Arabian horses and camels. As the biggest oasis in the world due to its copious reserves of underground water, it became famous for its equally copious reserves of oil when Aramco discovered the world’s largest oil field of Shimaniya right next door to it. The enormity of the oasis, its rich past, and the lush greenery of the villages scattered through it, gave my father the idea of arranging leisurely organized drives as a pleasant way to spend a weekend afternoon. But the intrepid Americans’ dreams of ‘leisurely drives through greenery’ quickly vaporized after they were pelted with hails of small stones from mobs of local boys who chased after the cars screaming kuffar (infidels)! These boys were not only seeing foreigners for the first time in their lives but cars as well. The 500,000 Shiites of Al Hasa, severely marginalized from mainstream Saudi affairs, endured brutal discrimination for decades under the ruling Sunni Wahhabis who blatantly curtailed their mobility, sealing them in a time warp out of sight from the rest of the world.

  ***

  Among the assignments given to my father by Aramco was a ‘public relations’ tour of Saudi Arabia where he was to meet the elders of various areas in the country and explain what Aramco was all about and who the Americans were. One of his first excursions was into the depths of Wahhabi territory along the northern borders with Qatar. To make his lecture more understandable, he had brought a globe of the world with him to point out where the Americans came from. On producing the globe, he was stopped immediately by one of the Wahhabi ulema present.

  “What’s that?” the old man asked suspiciously.

  “It’s the globe of the world,” my father answered, surprised at the question.

  “You are a liar and an infidel!” the old man screamed. His scraggly beard quivering in anger. “All true believers of Islam know the world is flat!”

  And that put a quick end to that session.

  A controversial first for Saudi Arabia introduced by Aramco, and which centrally involved my father, was television. In 1955, the Dhahran Air Base inaugurated the first television station in the Middle East, followed a year later by Aramco TV. The major reason behind the creation of Aramco TV was to entertain the American employees of Aramco, especially those of the non-adventurous type who were streaming into Saudi Arabia along with their families to take up clerical administrative and teaching jobs. Of course, television had to go through the usual course of all the ‘firsts’ in Saudi Arabia, and that was the need to be legitimized through the ever necessary ‘fatwa.’ Television was considered the work of the devil by the Wahhabi ulema, who had been known to go on TV-smashing sprees in the non-Aramco areas of the country. After intense wrangling between Aramco’s Government Relations and Public Relations departments and the local government, it was finally agreed that American programs could be aired but with all the kissing parts edited out, men had to mimic women’s voices in the dubbed women’s parts, and all Arabic translation had to abide by the ‘no alcohol’ decree. This made for some interesting dialogue for the Arabic speaking audience, who would watch a burly cowboy stride threateningly up to the bar, scowl meanly at the quivering bartender, and holler for “a glass of milk.”

  To lure the non-television-oriented Saudi Arabian clientele into becoming familiar with Aramco, my father was asked to teach English, Arabic, and Arithmetic on Aramco T
V and eventually to host a quiz show for Arab employees from the three Aramco oil camps of Dhahran, Ras Tanura and Abqaiq. The quiz show catapulted him into stardom. Having limited competition as a screen star in that the only other Arabic-speaking personalities on Aramco TV were grim Wahhabi sheikhs expounding on damnation and hellfire, Fahmi Basrawi immediately became the heartthrob of the female population of the area, receiving overflowing bags of fan mail. All my father did differently from his fellow TV colleagues to earn him such adulation was look pleasantly at the camera and smile.

  In 1957, during our first year in Dhahran, the muttawa’a’s long arm reached us through Aramco TV. A children’s show was introduced, hosted by a Palestinian family friend, Jamil Hattab. All the Arab children in Dhahran were invited to the test run including my three siblings, myself, and two boys – an energetic mix ranging in age from five years to one year (Marwan). On the day of the test run, I remember the show’s director opening the door for us at the Aramco TV headquarters, taking one look at our heightened state of excitement and sighing deeply. We skipped and jumped and jostled as we followed him to a corner where Mr. Hattab sat in lavish costume, dressed as a caliph on a gilded chair with a huge aqua blue feather wafting from his turban, amidst a profusion of brightly colored silk cushions and scores of balloons. Whoever had thought of using all those balloons in a tiny area with lots of children did not have children of their own. For most of the show, poor Baba Hattab was almost completely hidden from the viewer save for that long blue feather, as we exuberantly waved balloons in his face while he attempted to tell us a story in Arabic that none of us had any interest in listening to. I had chosen to wear my favorite party dress for the TV show which flew out in a circle whenever I twirled. When I wasn’t waving balloons, I was showing off my twirling dress.