a love letter to minnesota

My Beloved Minnesota,

Oh! How I miss you. I have been living in a state of perpetual hot and dusty winter. It is forever March in this country, you know, the month when everyone is angry inside, depressed, thinking spring my never come to their home or their hearts. The time of year when people are unnecessarily rude to strangers, when your coworkers seem on edge because the winter has been so long and hard and it seems like it will never break. It is a hot and dusty March for the whole calendar in Saudi Arabia.

Sometimes, I bring the computer in the bedroom and put on frog and cricket noises. I turn off the air conditioner and let the hot, thick dessert meets sea air into the blackened room. It is so still, and the frogs and crickets make me believe I am in a tent after a long day of hiking. Other times I will go to the mall and get frozen yogurt with raspberries on top. I taste one and close my eyes, dreaming of the day summers ago when I went raspberry picking with my friends in Duluth. I didn't have time to can them all so I carried a huge bucket around with me up the north shore to a luxury cabin and spent the evening eating as many as I could as I sat on the lake with Scott, Kathleen and their friends. That night I slept alone on the beach of Superior, cradled in the tiny rocks as I watched a meteor shower. I try so hard to remember what it feels like to lay in a lush green lawn and read the newspaper. How the grass smells, and how if you stay long enough the moisture from the plants and dirt make your clothes damp. I swirl my hands in the full laundry tub and remember your lakes, rivers, and streams.

Your people are quiet and forgiving. They form lines at shops, drive in a courteous manner, and say hello as you walk past them on your sidewalks. They keep to themselves and treat each other fairly. Your people value education, new ideas, quality, cleanliness, and systems that work. Last summer when I came for a visit, I got to the airport terminal to board my Minnesota flight. I could feel you in the room, Minnesota. I could see you in the old man who read the paper and made snarky comments about republicans that sat by us in the airplane. He offered us half his pizza and half his kit kat. I had a cup of caribou coffee on my affordable and modest Minnesota flight. I can not wait to be on that same airplane, my head glued to the window looking for signs of Wisconsin big woods, muddy streams, and baseball fields in parks. When I see the Mall of America right before we land I will probably choke up a bit.

I can not wait to go to the State Fair and run my hands through the different breeds of corn in the agriculture building. I can't wait to smell that hot oil in the food building, and to drink honey lemonade in a grove of Christmas trees brought in from all around the state. I want so badly to get stuck in a crowd watching a cow give birth on Seniors and Kids day. My heart just aches when I think of how great it will be to watch live music with a 9 o'clock fair breeze blowing through my hair. This year I want to take Mariam on Ye Old Mill and make animal sounds from the bench behind her as we float and bump around in the dark.

I cut out a paper version of you, and taped it to the wall in my living room. The colored paper is already faded from the constant sun. Thirty days till I am in-route to you again, my beloved Minnesota. Even if just about everything goes wrong or nothing fun happens at all, as long as I am in you this summer, I will have the best time of my life.

beauty salon.

A few days ago I played a round of "How old are you, why do you have so many gray hairs, why don't you dye your hair?" with the mother of my tutoring students. The day after, she and her 29 year old niece cornered me. "If you want to dye your hair I know of a place you can go to get it done!" Turns out the niece was going there the very next day, and that meant I was going along too.  Now, I have been growing my natural hair out for a few years, and had decided against coloring it to see how gray a girl in her late 20s could get. But apparently it was aging me terribly. After some womanly pressure, I was signed up to go to a Jeddah salon.

At five o'clock on Wednesday we picked up Shoda (the niece) and Mike drove us to a big white building that has fancy color changing lights on it at night, Rima Salon.  We got dropped off at the door. It had a sign taped to it "ABSOLUTELY NO MEN ALLOWED". (what happens if a pipe bursts or a computer needs fixing? I have a feeling there isn't a listing for female ITs or plumbers in this country.) I knew I was in for a treat. We walked into a lobby that went up about three or four stories, with hundreds of little glass bubbles suspended from the ceiling. Three older women with various versions of blond highlights and skin tight shirts greeted us at the front desk, two were smoking cigarettes. Shoda signed us in and one of the women laughed when she was given my name, "Arab name!" (by the way Saudi Arabia, my last name is not Ibrahim, no matter how bad you want to spell it that way.)

Shoda started guiding me around the salon with six floors, mazes of frosted glass walls and small rooms, doing all of our business in Arabic. Shoda had big plans for me. First she found her preferred stylist. She told the lady that she wanted a dramatic change for me, black hair, "corrected" eyebrows. The stylist began touching my hair and telling Shoda "Haraam! Haraam!" basically saying it would be a sin to do that to my hair. I went the entirety of my teen years looking like a homeless clown, trying every hair color, so hearing that I might be getting a black dye job did not shake me up a bit. But, Shoda folded on the black and picked a dark brown from the samples instead. "I am going to make you look Arab" she said. I got visions of huge hair and tropical pink and blue eyeshadow. She assured me that she preferred the "natural" look, and that I would love it and be addicted to it like caffeine. 

The dye went in and she began to talk eyebrows. I guess my norwegian eyebrows had bothered her since the first time she saw me. I will admit, they are a bit lighter than my hair color somehow, and a little sparse. Truthfully I never knew what to do with them, so I left them alone in fear that if I tried anything they would end up drawn on like my grandma's.  Shoda reviled that her eyebrows were tattoos, but advised me against getting them tattooed because you can't change them ever again. I also learned that in Islam, you are not supposed to pull hair out of your face. That means no waxing or plucking on your head, so I started wondering what they were going to do to my eyebrows in this Muslim country. Shave them. They shave and bleach any hair on the face. Apparently it is fine to wax the entire rest of the body, and to tattoo on eyebrows, but no tweezers anywhere above the neck. I have no clue why.

It was time for my color to come out and for the haircut. I like having my hair done by people who don't speak my language, you are always in for a good surprise, and you don't have to chit chat. The lady working on me had orangey Farah Fawcett hair, and her assistant looked like Left Eye from TLC. I honestly felt pretty confident in them, and they did a great job on me. Left Eye did go a little long with the hairdryer though, I don't care to see smoke or steam or whatever was floating off my hair from the round brush. The style turned out cute, with more of the natural look that was promised. Also, as I was being cut, I was treated to the sounds of an Arab cat fight outside my room. Screams like you have never heard before, in a language that lends its self a little too well to sounding angry like you have never heard before, doors slamming, then the hairdryer came on. Sigh. The fight was coming from the bridal section.

Finally I was ushered into the eyebrow room. A few women waited on couches with bleach all over their faces. I was seated in the operating chair, and my eyebrow "problem" was discussed over me in Arabic. I closed my eyes as a little straight razor was waved above them. Scrape, scrape scrape. Done. Then I felt a little brush of cool thick liquid on my eyebrows. COLOR. Once she was done, I was tilted up to a mirror to approve the shape, well no going back now really. I was told the tint will only last about a week, as I waited the ten minutes in uncertainty. The girl bushed off all the dye and underneath were little dark eyebrows. Totally reasonable. Shoda was not happy, she wanted darker, more drama! The eyebrow girl disagreed and told Shoda that she was afraid I would yell at her, because the only other American she worked on had gotten very angry and yelled at her. I told the girl I was pleased, and Shoda asked what my husband would think. I said, "He will like these, no problem." Shoda seemed even less satisfied and whisked me away to a mirror that was not being used. She got out her makeup bag and started painting gel eyeliner on my still too light brows. "You need to buy this makeup, you will love this. You will become addicted!" She showed me my new brows and asked, "What will your husband say?!" "Uhh, nothing," I replied. Shoda loved them, and at last felt accomplished. 

unearthly

Michael came to pick us up. I got in the front seat and Shoda sat in back next to Mariam. The car was silent. I looked back at Mariam, she was squirming around in her car seat, covering her mouth and trying to look out the window between wiggles. After about three minutes of quiet, Mariam appropriately shouted "EYE-BOROWS!" I just about peed my abaya laughing.

Natural. When I got home. After some scrubbing.

personality flaws and cultural differences.

Most of you are probably aware that I suffer from a very thick form of shyness. Garrison Keillor would quaintly blame my Minnesotan upbringing and my Scandinavian relatives, and I wouldn't be quick to prove him otherwise. You could label it Social Anxiety. It has been diagnosed, medicated, counseled, and I have made large attempts to rewire it out of my brain.


I feel like in the past few years I have gotten to be ok and pretty functional with my everyday irrational feelings of self-consciousness, judgment, evaluation, and inferiority in social situations. I have taken, and done well in, several highly interactional jobs as a challenge to myself. Recruiting, training, placing, and managing 130 college kids to volunteer within a school, no problem. However, I have never in my life been up to calling to order a pizza or paying for a tank of gas inside the store, ever. (what if they laugh at my topping choice!?) Even small social interactions with people I know can be incredibly taxing for me.


In this country and culture I moved into, social anxiety is not a recognized or understood thing. People are loud, aggressive, and the passive question simply dose not exist in their language. It is not, "May I have a cup of coffee?" in this place it is, "Give me a cup of coffee!" and if you do not have one to give you are just expected to explain yourself frankly. Women approach me randomly in public outright asking for my phone number so I can come to their house and we can be friends. I tell them I do not have a phone. I curl up inside. I lie.


My husband has explained to many others before I meet them, "she is shy". I don't know if this really helps me or not. Here they take shyness as a positive virtue, a sign that this woman is modest and therefore probably loves god a lot. They would never think it to be a selfish and rude thing, but then again they have never experienced my "shy". A person with my "shy" would probably be committed to the back of their parents house in embarrassment from the family.


The woman downstairs was warned of my shyness, and treats it the nicest way she knows how. It is also my nightmare. She points things out directly, "You are not relaxing! Here are seven more pillows to put behind your back and you must put your feet up like this..." When a long time goes between visits she exclaims as I enter her home, "You have forgotten me?! You do not like me!? Why!?".  I like her fine, I am just afraid she will not like me.


This week I have started my new job working with two second graders after school each day. I go through lessons with them, make them think for themselves, and have them coloring some serious butterfly lifecycle diagrams. I go to their beautiful apartment and I bring my two daughters along to be watched by their mother and maid as I teach. I get paid quite a bit and they feed me all kinds of nice things when I am there. It is a wonderful job, but I want to find any excuse to quit going.


The problem is not my students. It is not the extra time it takes out of my day. It is the fact that I have to interact with a Saudi woman on a regular basis, and she is not only judging me, but also my children. She is a nice lady and wants me to like her very much. But that dose not stop the cultural differences, "Lindsay, do not hold your baby like that!" I guess for the first four or five months infants here are not allowed to be in an upright position. Nora loves being held sitting up in my lap, her favorite is being held vertically against my chest. But this prompts a stern look and a comment in this country, you know, because they better save Nora from developing good head control and muscle tone, it might be too stressful for her. 


Yesterday Nora was brought into my room crying. "You must take her to the hospital!" I try to assure the mother of four that Nora is simply overtired and needs to be placed in a dark, quiet room. "Oh Lindsay, Lindsay! No you must take her to the hospital as soon as we are done here. Something is wrong! You will not sleep tonight if you do not take her!" I should tell you that everyone here goes to the hospital for each cold or bump they get. The doctors give a note to give to the pharmacist for some Panadol (tylenol) and the patient is happy and cured! There was nothing wrong with Nora at all. The maid took her and put her in a dark room and all was saved. This did not stop me from my feelings, even though I was proven correct. My whole body shook in under-confidence and panic. I sent the kids to go work on their science project and I sat and drank some tea, hoping that no one would notice my unsteady hands and send me to the hospital.


I guess I am writing this to avoid letting myself quit. I am not looking for pity in this confession to you, I am simply trying to out the negative thoughts from my brain. Reinforce the point of not walking away from my fears. I have been strong before. Now, I should go work on my lesson for today. It is looking kind of cloudy out, and a bit windy, so I will honestly be hoping for rain. Then I do not have to go. Because if there is one thing that these people are more afraid of than holding your baby upright, it is the rain.