American Chick in Saudi Arabia Read Free Page A

a skilled medical technician in radiology. Jenny is a nurse, a dark-skinned, beautiful woman originally from Sri Lanka who holds a British passport.
    The accommodations are plain but adequate. The unit has a basic kitchen, combined living and dining room, three bedrooms, and one full bath and a half bath. This will do, I tell myself, as I make a grateful mental note that both roommates appear cordial. Despite the necessity to co-exist in small quarters, I believe that we will get along easily. I'm even more optimistic when I learn that both Joy and Jenny are also non-smokers.
    We all rush to disappear behind closed doors into our individual bedrooms. My mind is still racing but I force myself to close my eyes and summon sleep.

Chapter Three: Allah Akbar

    I am abruptly awakened by the sound of a loud but sonorous male voice. "Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!" I rub my eyes. Why is a man wailing?
    Then I know that I am hearing a muezzin , the Muslim cleric assigned the job of calling the faithful to pray. Evidently there is a mosque very near our apartment building. It is sunrise and time for the first prayer of the day. We have been told that the Saudi government builds mosques in every neighborhood in the kingdom so that the faithful can walk to prayer. With five prayers each day, I can understand the need.
    Enormously enchanted by the muezzin's haunting cry, I instinctively know then that I have made the right decision to accept a job in a foreign land. Any previous doubts are pushed aside at leaving my small-town life to travel around the world and live in a land ruled by kings.
    I continue to listen to the call to pray, a prayer that is repeated in hundreds of thousands of mosques all over the world:

    Allah Akbar! (God is most great!) Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!
    I bear witness that there is no God but Allah. I bear witness that
    there is no God but Allah. I bear witness that there is no God but Allah.
    I bear witness that Muhammed is the Apostle of Allah! I bear witness that
    Muhammed is the Apostle of Allah! I bear witness that Muhammed is the Apostle of Allah!
    Come to prayer! Come to prayer! Come to prayer!
    Come to success! Come to success! Come to success!
    Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!
    There is no God but Allah!

    It feels magical to me to know that five times each day, nearly a billion believing Muslims are reciting the same prayer and are synchronized in the same postures, all across the slow-turning earth.
    I return to bed and fall asleep. A few hours later, my excitement overcomes my fatigue when I rush from the apartment to join the other new hires that traveled with me from Nashville and London. We are to be taken via bus on a short tour of the desert city.
    First we take a quick drive past the hospital, the place I will spend six out of seven days a week. The hospital is built of unusual tawny-shaded stones that have been perfectly fitted to form the exterior wall, giving it a golden hue. A circular driveway takes us past a decorative water fountain. The hospital is surrounded by carefully tended grounds carpeted with immense beds of green bushes and vividly colored flowers, something I did not expect in the middle of a desert.

    The King Faisal Hospital and Research Center, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    The King Faisal Hospital and Research Center at dusk

    We leave the vast hospital complex and travel Riyadh's main streets, which are modern boulevards. Enormous construction projects are ongoing and fill the skyline with hundreds of gigantic building cranes. The sight of endless building cranes causes a lot of talk in the bus. The shiny exteriors of modern skyscrapers mirror neighboring mud dwellings. Riyadh is nothing like I had expected.
    The name Riyadh is the plural of rowdhah , an Arabic word which means an area where grass can be found for grazing camels or sheep. To simplify matters, the city became commonly known as "the gardens." Riyadh was part of a series of villages along the Wadi