Hoarding

I don't think they realize it, but many of the expats working in KSA become hoarders. Some types of goods are not available here. Other goods are available but are of poor or questionable quality. Either way, we find ourselves shipping in multiple bags, bottles, and boxes of the things we think we can't live without.

Food is another matter. At first I thought the commissary managers were simply capricious in their buying and stocking decisions. One week we have canned tomatoes, the next week only tomato sauce. One week we have unscented laundry detergent, the next week it's as if it never existed.

With time, I realized there were some larger forces at work. For example, in the week preceding Valentine's Day, the mutawas didn't let customs agents approve any shipments of red food. Seriously, I'm not making this up. Red food could be used to, gasp, celebrate a pagan holiday specifically designed to encourage "mixing of the sexes," the phrase used by the mutawas to refer to any social interaction between unrelated males and females of any age. Mixing of the sexes is the thing most feared by the Wahhabis and is in fact the justification they use for not letting Saudi women drive or work, among a long list of other restrictions on social and cultural behavior for both men and women. Anyway, in February, red fruit, vegetables, and candy sat rotting on the docks at Dammam for a couple of weeks until the customs and delivery pipelines were able to start back up again.

For similarly bizarre and usually completely opaque reasons, Saudi customs will simply not let some items in. If there is a whiff of any company or product having been involved with a Jewish person or company, or Israel in general, even if they let the same goods in the week or month before, the rumor alone is sufficient for Saudi customs to deny a shipment. Sometimes, there is no reason at all. That pallet of clumping cat litter? Not getting in this time. Why? Because it's not getting in. Not even Alice would be able to navigate this wonderland.

The end result is more hoarding. I don't care for scented laundry detergent and I really hate the heavy scents they put in everything here. So when I see the unscented stuff on the shelf, I buy three big bottles. It might not be there the next time I go in. I like unsalted, unflavored canned tomatoes. I buy a dozen cans when I find them on the shelf. I prefer tuna packed in water, not oil. I buy a dozen of those too. That's enough laundry detergent, canned tomatoes, and tuna to last me months. And I don't have enough room in my crappy dollhouse kitchen cabinets to store even a normal amount of food so I end up stacking cans and bottles in a corner of the living room.

Hoarding. We slip into it without thinking. Living here changes us in ways I would not have predicted.