The Desperate Housewife

Yanbu Al-Sinaiyah...............
Never heard of it, until my then fiance mentioned it.
Industrial city, western part of Saudi Arabia, right on the Red Sea, largest oil drill in the country.
Hmmm.....not bad....or so i thought.

I came to Saudi with some measure of hope....that the innate arabinism (is that a word? lol) would be overridden by the principles of Islam. After all, this is the birthplace of Islam isn't it? Of equality, honesty, justice, tolerance, compassion....and all those things that make you go warm inside........
I quickly came to realize........NOT.
First shocker was, contracts are not really honoured, so the verbal contract i had with the major hospital here all but went up in a sand storm me thinks.
They didn't like how i looked it turns out....I had too much of a tan for their liking.....I might scare the patients.....
Neither did they like the sight of my passport...it had 'dark continent' written all over it...Surely, i must think like a monkey if i come from that end, don't i?
Sigh.

I got used to being driven around by my chauffeur....oops, read that as being the hubby....
And i got used to sitting around doing nothing much for days on end........days merged into nights and nights merged into days.
I sometimes felt i must be in a nut house.
Maybe I've been incarcerated and i don't know.

So.....how did the desperate housewives do it then??
I may be in no Wisteria Lane, but Plan B was going into swift action.......Going grocery shopping at 10pm in super high heels just makes my day:-)
It really does have a high of its own. Try it!
Call it a coping mechanism....I call it spicing up my life.
And here we go, started the run-ins with the Arabs. LOL.
I had now totally challenged their way of life......from walking around in colourful clothes, with my face uncovered and lo and behold, make-up on(!), to speaking out loud wherever i was, and EVEN bending over to reach for something at the bottom shelf in the store.
How scandalous!
can her husband be a man and take control of her??
Their society was going to the dogs with my wanton display with what they all deemed was arrogance. And how dare a Non-Arab woman of colour lock horns with the Bedouins of the desert?
Their first encounter with a true lioness of Africa me thinks.

Life pretty much turned into a Tom-Jerry situation....raising of eyebrows and constant stares.
All the more to feed the ego.
I am the star of my very own reality show.
Countless other women have been cowed down into submission with their ways......I still refuse to bow down to anyone other than the Almighty.
And so i forge ahead.

The Desperate Housewife of Yanbu Al-Sinaiyah lives to wreck havoc another day!....:-)))