An Expat's Life

By DANIEL DEL CASTILLO
The ups and downs of being an American in Saudi Arabian academe

Last week's bombings may put an end to Arlo Schurle's stay in Saudi Arabia, but they probably won't end his days as an academic expatriate.

Throughout much of the 1970s, Mr. Schurle, now a mathematics professor and dean at Prince Sultan University, in Riyadh, taught math as a tenured faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Then he won a Fulbright fellowship to Liberia, and expatriate friends warned him: "If you end up spending two years away from the U.S. and find you really like living abroad, then you're hooked."

For the Schurles that popular wisdom proved to be true. "We came back to Carolina after two years in West Africa, and Carolina was the same, but we weren't," Mr. Schurle says.

His next overseas teaching job was at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, in Saudi Arabia's eastern, oil-rich city of Dhahran. The institution matched his American salary and then heaped benefits and an end-of-contract bonus on top of that. It was, in his words, "a very, very good package with lots of disposable income," although he declines to give the figure.

The Schurles say their first stint in Saudi Arabia, beginning in 1982, was a time of high living and adventure. "We came knowing there might be difficulties with the life and culture, especially for my wife, but it was a two-year contract, and we liked it." They wound up staying for six years.

During their stay, the Schurles also took advantage of another perquisite offered to professors at the time -- payment for tuition at private schools for their children -- and sent their two sons to the Middlesex School, a preparatory school in Concord, Mass.

In the late 1980s, when the Schurles' two sons were still in boarding school in Massachusetts, Saudi Arabia tightened visa policies, making it more difficult for their sons to visit them. The Schurles went to Guam, where Mr. Schurle spent nine years teaching at the University of Guam. Then the Schurles decided to uproot themselves again for one last adventure before retirement. "Nine years was as long as we had been anywhere, and it was time for a change," Mr. Schurle says. They decided to return to Saudi Arabia.

A Broader Role

Mr. Schurle says that working in foreign countries appeals to him partly because his teaching role is expanded. In Charlotte, all he could teach, essentially, was mathematics, but in a Saudi Arabian classroom he could become a roving ambassador. He has tried to instill an American approach to studying in his Saudi students by encouraging them to think and not just memorize, as they have been trained to do. He asks his students how they come to their conclusions. "It's not enough that they have the correct answer. They need to be able to articulate how and why," he says.

Mr. Schurle's Saudi Arabian academic life has had other appealing aspects: a 20-minute commute, a teaching load of two classes that totals eight hours per week, and administrative duties that generally end promptly by 4 p.m. each day. He warns that the lifestyle is addicting and says that, for the most part, there's no turning back. "It's difficult to get back into the U.S. academic system after teaching abroad, so I wouldn't recommend this to someone at the beginning of their career," he says.

While most faculty members reside at university expense in university-owned housing in Riyadh's Diplomatic Quarter, augmenting the sparse furnishings with items from the local Ikea, the Schurles decided to live somewhere a bit nicer, so they chose a three-bedroom rambler in Ranco Village, a compound of about 300 British, American, and Australian citizens. The Schurles' rambler has wall-to-wall carpeting and, aside from the mounted Oriental rugs and accents of Arabian culture, could be situated in the American Midwest rather than the Middle East. Ranco Village has two swimming pools -- one reserved for adults -- a fitness club, tennis and basketball courts, high-speed Internet connections, a restaurant, and a grocery store stocked with imported foods like Kellogg cereals and macaroni and cheese. For American academics homesick for fast food or shopping, Riyadh has a Baskin-Robbins, a Wendy's, a Saks Fifth Avenue, and many other American restaurants and shops.

Constraining Rules

Like many academics, Mr. Schurle considers reading an important part of his daily routine, but he has to cope with censorship. "All magazines, including newsmagazines, are examined, and although I don't know of any news that's chopped out or blacked over, they look for advertisements where women are uncovered, and the censors take a magic marker and blacken out each ad by hand," he says.

To underscore Saudi preoccupation with gender, Mr. Schurle led a visitor earlier this year just a few steps from his office and pointed to what was a long corridor until last year, but is now a short hallway to nowhere.

"This is how they have delineated the women's campus," he explained. A hastily built wall sealed off the access to the women's section of the university.

Most academic expatriates in Saudi Arabia have sought relief from the restrictions by traveling. The Schurles, for example, received plenty of vacation -- 60 days in the summer, three weeks during the Muslim holy days of Ramadan, two weeks between semesters, and numerous government holidays. Living at the juncture of Europe and Asia made travel to those parts of the world affordable and easy.

"There's not a whole lot of things to spend your money on here other than travel," Mr. Schurle says. He has gone on diving trips to the Red Sea on weekends and used longer vacations to go to places such as India and Iran.

Mr. Schurle admires some aspects of Saudi culture, such as reverence for family and the deep loyalty friendships foster, types of characteristics that only long-term contact can illuminate. "This isn't necessarily the culture that I would choose, but they're trying to preserve it against an onslaught from the West," he says.

Saudi Culture

One aspect of Saudi culture that the Schurles, and nearly all Westerners living here, find frustrating is what they believe is a Saudi hesitance to mingle freely with foreigners. Because of its traditional tribal composition, Saudi society is much more private and intimate than society is in places like Jordan or Egypt, where it is easier for foreigners to be accepted. Mr. Schurle and his colleagues say that it is extremely rare for them to socialize with fellow Saudi faculty members. But he says that before last week's bombings, he never ran into any open animosity in the Arab world.

The Schurles plan to spend another six to eight years working, perhaps in the United Arab Emirates, but they are already scouting out a place for retirement. He and his wife hope to find a place to live near a university in the American Southwest, where Mr. Schurle might teach an occasional class. "I'd hate to give up teaching completely," he says.

Why did you want to teach in Ethiopia?

I actually started out looking for a position anywhere in Africa, but it’s hard to even begin a search that broad. So partly, by chance, I ended up focusing on Ethiopia. I’m a computer programmer by trade, not a professor, and I was looking for a school where my experience would really add something. I mean India has plenty of eager computer science students, but it also has a much larger pool of teachers with the relevant skills. The last thing I wanted to do was end up taking some local teacher’s job.

Ethiopia has a pretty extreme shortage of computer science teachers relative to local demand. It’s also a country I knew very little about, so coming from Canada I figured I’d learn something about what life was like for people in a very different place.

How did you get the job?

Well, my boss at a previous company was Ethiopian, but I didn’t use that connection as well as I should have. I started out looking for an NGO that could help set up the trip. But I didn’t find much. CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency) has a program for young Canadians wanting to work abroad, but it seemed to be aimed more at fresh grads than at more experienced workers like myself. I didn’t find anything like International Professors Project.

Fortunately, this was 2002, not 1992. I just spent a few weeks searching the Web and sending emails to various random Ethiopian organizations and potential employers. Most went nowhere, but one guy referred me to an Ethiopian company that ended up hiring me as a software consultant.

I actually had two jobs – one with the company and one at Addis Ababa University.  I knew about AAU first, but getting a job there took much longer.  It came down to several months of bugging people, which still would have failed if I hadn’t had the department head’s support.  AAU has an enormous need for computer science instructors, but one of the things I learned is that just because you have something to offer doesn’t mean an organization will jump at the chance to hire you.  In fact, part of the reason the demand is there is because the hiring procedure is so laborious.

What were the best and worst things about your experience?

OK, worst thing first. The moment I got off the plane in a country where I had never met anyone. So obviously there were friends and family I missed.  But I knew that was part of the deal. There were other predictable sacrifices, like slow Internet and the occasional cold shower. But all that was actually less tough than I expected. Addis Ababa has around five million people, so I wasn’t exactly in the bush.

Less predictable was missing anonymity. A Canadian friend of mine who also spent a year in Ethiopia wrote me an email the day he left about a long complicated commute on the tube in London.  He was lugging around three huge bags and no one once offered to help or even looked at him.  Reading that from Ethiopia I really envied him – that may sound glib but I’m serious.  It’s a privilege to walk down the street unnoticed.

It was also frustrating to know I was doing a lousy job sometimes, giving badly prepared lectures or, especially, losing my temper at students.  I think to some extent that was just a consequence of trying to balance two jobs in a completely new environment.  So I have mixed feelings about the two jobs thing.

Good things, well there were a lot but the best is easy: the people. I met Ethiopians I’m still in close touch with and really grateful to have met. Teaching students with so much motivation was also a constant buzz. I’ve already written about these, so I’m not going to repeat myself here – see my webpage about the trip.

Do you have any tips for others interested in teaching at an Ethiopian university?

I’m talking to myself here...

• Pay attention and adapt. What made sense back home may no longer be the best course of action. Do your students need to learn what you’re teach- ing?  Do they want to?  Do they even understand a word you’re saying?  Maybe if you slowed down your English a bit?

• Follow the procedures.  At AAU, I was supposed to go to a special booth on a separate campus every month to collect my salary.  At one point, I neglected to do this for four months in a row.  OK, that was stupid, but I figured I’m teaching three courses, I can collect it at the end.  The result was a huge six-month struggle to collect the back pay.  I ended up getting it literally two days before I left the country.  I have a lot of stories like this.  In Canada, you can often get away with following the spirit rather than the letter of the law.  Not so in Ethiopia/

• On the other hand, if someone gives you a form with ten pages of seemingly irrelevant information to fill in don’t just sit down and start writing. Ask someone who knows the system what’s actually expected. You absolutely need people like this on your side.  Entering a bureaucracy without one is roughly like setting sail without a map.

• Show respect. First, don’t interrupt. A more formal social behavior that you intend as just friendly may come across as downright insolent. Second, because the whole premise that you have some special knowledge or skill to impart puts you at risk of seeming arrogant.  Don’t forget that you have as much to learn as to teach.

• Aim for sustainable change. Your students will rotate out in four years. But if you can produce some lasting improvement to the system you’re working in, the benefits can reach new students for decades. I brought several boxes of textbooks from Canada, but despite my department head’s urging, I never did manage to put in place a system that would keep the books flowing after I left.

• Dedicate at least 2-4 weeks at the very beginning – before you have a bunch of distracting commitments – to getting a hang of the local language.  I still wish I had done this.

Finally, by all means contact me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if you think I can help with information or contacts. At the very least, if you go, too, I’ll be interested to hear about your trip.