Single in the city: The sacrifices we make just to make a living …

Rym Ghazal

• Last Updated: May 13. 2009 7:32PM UAE / May 13. 2009 3:32PM GMT

The other day one of my female friends did the unthinkable by going to Riyadh alone for a job interview. She comes from a conservative Saudi family and they had a fit when they found out that she had gone to the capital, completed the interview and flown back home in time for dinner.

She almost missed her flight, and would have had to stay in a hotel, another act that would have been deemed as “daring” and “undignified” for a young woman from a prominent conservative family.

“They just don’t understand that if I want to have a real career, I may just have to leave them and move to another city or even country,” said my friend, a child psychologist, who was looking for a job in Riyadh after failing to find one in her home city.

She received the job offer but her family refused to let her accept because she is unmarried and has no relatives there. So, now what?

Well, she made the “sacrifice”, and didn’t take the job. She is now sitting at home on the lookout for an opening somewhere close to home.

For single Arab women, particularly those with conservative families and backgrounds, their status in society is forever tainted if they choose to just pack up and leave home for their careers. Going away for education is more acceptable, but even that is not always the case.

Personally, I have “fallen” in the eyes of many of my family members for pursing a career in journalism that includes travelling on my own and interviewing men, and I am not invited to some family events because of it. If I became a doctor or an engineer, then somehow it would have been more accepted that I work and live far away from my family, but even then, I would be judged and my standing within the family may have been diminished.

Pursuing a career also affects your “marriageability”. Only certain Muslim men will enter into a relationship with a working single woman who lives on her own. But bearing a personal sacrifice for one’s career or to make a living is not anything new.

It has never been uncommon for the head of the family to take up a job or even a degree that he didn’t particularly care for in order to secure stable, conventional employment. I know many who have given up their dreams of being a historian, or an artist, or even a writer, for the sake of their families.

I am sure my father didn’t exactly choose, like many other young Arab men coming from war torn countries, to work in the middle of nowhere for weeks if not months at a time, away from his family, missing out on the many small, but irreplaceable moments in his children’s lives. And that is often the case for some of my colleagues here. Their families couldn’t move here either because their children are in school back home or simply because life can be too expensive and complicated moving from home to home and country to country.

People may think that it is easy for a single person to just pack up and move to a new job and a new country, but this too is difficult as it means starting all over again, and on one’s own. Re-introducing yourself for the 50th time, making new friends, finding your way around and the whole package of moving for one’s career or to make a living can be one big headache.

And if that wasn’t enough, I have now seen ads in career workshops with the slogan: “One degree just doesn’t cut it any more.” Having a bachelor’s degree is not enough, and maybe not even a master’s. One of my cousins who has several degrees, including a doctorate, is working two jobs to support his family. Times are tough and the more I see, the more I believe that it is not what you know, but who you know. Whenever a new project or company starts up, it is no surprise that it will be comprised of people who knew each other before and brought on other people they knew from somewhere else. It gets more difficult once things settle in and the bureaucracy kicks in.

Gone are the days when hardworking people without schooling but with wit and charisma could make it big and even become millionaires.

Well, perhaps it still can happen, but there seems to be much less room for that chance these days. I can’t remember the last time I heard of someone just showing up at a major company and pleading: “Listen, I have no schooling and no experience, but give me a chance.”

The only thing similar that I have heard of recently was when one of my relatives was approached by a labourer asking him for a job. He had been fired but had a family to feed back home. My relative gave him the task of making the entrance to the office presentable. The next day, he cleaned up the entrance and planted flowers along the path. Two years later, he is my relative’s assistant and works inside a nice office.

I guess you just never know where you might end up “in the name of work”.


rghazal@thenational.ae