Extraction 10: The End

I've written this post on the flight from Amsterdam to Washington. I am hoping that by the time we all get to our hotel north of Dulles that the dogs will want to do nothing but play and get hugs, that the cats will be chilling somewhere other than under the bed, and I will be busy with more important things than typing into this iPad.




Update: after some food and lots of walking around outside, there hasn't been much playing!

I got a little teary when the flight purser told me that the animals had all been loaded. Couldn't help it. All I could think was, we escaped.

This somewhat overly dramatic sentiment ties in with an interesting comment a friend made at my last book club meeting. My friend, as well as several other members of the book club, has been in KSA for 20 plus years. She's raised several children here. So when someone she recently met at a professional meeting taking place outside of the kingdom, upon learning about this, said to her, why would you waste so much of your life there, it came as quite a shock to her.

It's a fine line we escapees have to walk. All expats have to leave KSA eventually. The mandatory retirement age for Aramco employees, Saudi and expat alike, is 60 (although it is possible, and common, for skilled expats to get extensions for a couple of years). Lots of people choose to come here, choose to stay, choose to raise their families here. They most certainly don't feel that they "wasted" their lives.

But I made a different choice: to leave. I don't think that I wasted my time but my experience has been enormously different than that of someone here with their family.

I can see clearly both sides of this fence. I only made it a few years and gladly, willingly left. Yet there are seductions to living in this weird place that I recognize even if I didn't succumb to them.

I would not insult my friends by telling them that they wasted their lives here. We all walk different paths in life.

But...hell yes, we escaped!