A few weeks ago my college alumni page on Facebook featured me in an ongoing series called "Where Are They Now?" - that highlights former students and where their lives have taken them since graduation. I thought you might enjoy learning a little more about me and my story.
Where are they now?
She has traveled the world, waited patiently (13 years) to be married to the man of her dreams, had ambitions of becoming a judge, and writes blogs about her experiences in foreign countries.
Susie Johnson Khalil, (1975, AA, Police Science), is the daughter of Trudy Johnson, who served on the founding committee to get Cochise College up and running. She has four brothers: Roy and Gary (both Cochise College alums) and Doug and Barry, and her dream was to eventually become a judge - but Iife took her on a different route.
She truly enjoyed instructors Keith Jackson and Dewey Tally, who made learning about the law, self-defense, crime scene investigations, and analyzing forensics so fascinating – as she says, “long before shows like CSI were on TV.” Art was also an interest of hers. She attributes her appreciation of art to Ray Levra, who showed a true exuberance in teaching.
She was hired by the Douglas Police Department as a dispatcher. She left for a job at Fort Whipple in Prescott, AZ, with the Veterans Administration as their first female Police Officer. She loved being on patrol and out and about. Her routine included duties like directing traffic, patrol, and raising or lowering the flag. And then there were other more memorable moments in the line of duty, like capturing a huge snake on the loose, subduing a hallucinating mental patient, and discovering a dead body in a car in the middle of the night.
Every two weeks the working schedule rotated, making life harder for her as a single working mom. Finding a reliable babysitter to accommodate the shift work was practically impossible back then. So after a couple years of struggling and juggling police work and motherhood in Prescott, she decided to go back to Cochise College with a focus on Journalism and Creative Writing. Instructor Baysol Turner challenged and inspired her.
During this time she was also in charge of Cultural Events at the college, working in Don Fry’s office. She brought in acts like an awesome musician who played a Moog Synthesizer and a fascinating UFO expert. Friends that she remembers hanging out with at Cochise were Pam Halfin Wombles, Debbie Sywassink Hruschka, Robert Clare, Margarita Quinonez Neverman, and Edna Elias Smith.
Susie soon transferred to the University of Arizona, and there she met her future husband. They met shortly after the fall semester began. Adnan, from Saudi Arabia, as Susie describes him, was a “tall exotic handsome hunk with the biggest Afro you ever saw.” He walked in to play pool while she was working in the games room at the Student Union. She was instantly smitten. Within a few short weeks, they were inseparable.
Getting to know Adnan and his Saudi friends instilled an interest in her to learn more about their culture, beliefs, food, passion, humor, and world views. Susie took a job with Braniff Airlines in Houston, and eventually moved back to Tucson and worked for travel agencies. The perks she enjoyed in the travel industry took her to places like Egypt, Australia, Tahiti, and Rio de Janeiro.
Meanwhile Adnan finally was awarded his PhD in Linguistics and Reading in 1989, which meant that he would be going home to Saudi Arabia to try to find work in his field. Once back in Jeddah he looked for work, but to no avail. Even though his government had paid for all those years of schooling and he was highly qualified, they refused to hire him because he was not a native speaker of English – which ended up being her good fortune! Frustrated after looking for work in his field for a whole year, he returned to the USA. They married immediately – she had waited for him for 13 long years and as she says, "I didn’t want to wait another minute!"
Eventually, they decided that perhaps Saudi Arabia would indeed be a good place to live, so they arrived in Jeddah, a captivating city of about 3 million people on the Red Sea coastline. Susie started a blog to share her experiences, to educate others, and it gave her a purpose in her new life. Little did she know that people from all over the world would be interested in her blog posts, and she became a resource for people seeking information, helping many interested in moving to Saudi Arabia to find jobs.
She is the founder of two Facebook groups. One is called “Susie of Arabia” and has over 20,000 members. It’s dedicated to providing information about Saudi Arabia. The other is “Our Hometown - Douglas, Arizona,” for anyone with a connection to Douglas. It’s been a lifeline for her living so far away, keeping her in touch with many old friends and neighbors.
In Susie’s words, “Every day I am thankful for the wonders of the internet and other modern technology. If it weren’t for these things, I don’t know that I could handle living so far away from my family and friends. The question I’m asked most when people find out I live in Saudi Arabia is “Aren’t you afraid?” The truth is that I feel much safer living here than when I am in the U.S. I’m happy living here. My husband is very good to me, spoils me. Moving here has changed my life in countless positive ways. Sure, this country is not perfect – but what place is? My hope is that I’ve helped to change some of the negative perceptions the rest of the world has about this fascinating country and its people.”
The following is an article which appears in the latest issue (Jan. 11, 2016) of New Yorker Magazine, written by Katherine Zoepf.
"Sisters in Law"
Saudi women are beginning to know their rights.
The guardianship system gives a woman a legal status resembling that of a minor.Credit Illustration by Eiko Ojala
In September, 2014,
Mohra Ferak, twenty-two years old and in her final year at Dar Al-Hekma
University, in the Saudi port city of Jeddah, was asked for advice by a
woman who had heard that she was studying law. The woman was the
principal of a primary school for girls, and she told Ferak that she had
grown frustrated by her inability to help children in her charge who
had been raped; over the years, there had been many such cases among her
students. Regardless of whether the perpetrator was a relative or the
family driver, the victim’s parents invariably declined to press
charges. A Saudi family’s honor rests, to a considerable degree, on its
ability to protect the virginity of its daughters. Parents, fearing
ruined marriage prospects, chose silence, which meant that men who had
raped girls as young as eight went unpunished, and might act again. And
for some of the girls, the principal added, the secrecy only amplified
the trauma. She asked Ferak if there was anything that she, as
principal, could do to help them.
“I
told her, ‘You can go to court and ask the judge to make the
proceedings private and save the girl’s reputation,’ ” Ferak recalled
one recent afternoon. We were sitting in a modish Lebanese restaurant
near the Jeddah corniche, sharing plates of tricornered spinach pastries
and stuffed grape leaves across a black butcher-block table. The call
to afternoon prayer had sounded several minutes earlier, and the
restaurant, in accordance with law, had locked its doors and dimmed the
lights. The “family section”—the secluded area for women that
restaurants serving both genders must provide, where female diners who
cover their faces can eat comfortably—was quiet. Except for a waiter, we
had the place to ourselves. Ferak is slight, with a lilting voice and a
round, bespectacled face framed by a tightly wound black shayla. Head
scarves, which Saudi women typically wear unfastened, have a way of
slipping off, and Ferak fidgeted with hers as she described her
conversation with the principal, repeatedly tugging it back down into
its proper position.
The
principal was amazed to learn that Saudi plaintiffs can request closed
court proceedings. She began peppering Ferak with legal questions, many
of them about how to advise teachers who were in abusive marriages, or
whose ex-husbands wouldn’t allow their children to visit. The principal
was in her early fifties, which meant that, as a school administrator,
she was among the best-educated Saudi women of her generation. Well into
the nineteen-eighties, according to UNESCO, fewer than
half of Saudi girls between the ages of six and eleven had received any
education outside the home. But, Ferak said, it quickly became clear
that the woman knew little about the fundamental principles of Saudi
law.
As a former police officer myself, I was quite excited when I saw this news video of Nadeen Alsayat, the first Saudi female trained for police work. Nadeen recently graduated from Colorado University with a Master's Degree in Criminal Justice paid for by the Saudi government and will become Saudi Arabia's first female detective. She spent six months interning with the Commerce City Police Department in Colorado.
In addition to Nadeen's accomplishment in the USA, Saudi Arabia will be graduating its first ever class of female police officers as well this year. Congratulations to Nadeen on achieving her childhood dream of becoming a police officer - and
congratulations to the graduating class in KSA for leading the way for other females to break into careers that were
previously taboo for Saudi women.
To read more about Nadeen Alsayat's training experience, CLICK HERE.
There
are times when I feel that Saudi Arabia has made great strides - especially with regard to women's issues - in the past five years that I have lived
here. And then there are other times when I can only shake my head in
disbelief when I see that Saudi Arabia is still a very misogynistic society and
with each step forward, the country seems to take two steps back.
The latest headline coming out of Saudi
Arabia that is quite troubling and disturbing concerns a Saudi author named
Abdullah Mohammad Al Dawood, who unfortunately has 97,000 followers on
Twitter. He recently tweeted a call to action for Saudi men to sexually assault working women in Saudi Arabia, especially those working in supermarkets. His “logical” explanation is so the women will stop working and stay home
where they belong and thus “protect their chastity.” Al Dawood writes self-help books (God help us!) and has also
been called a Saudi cleric in the past.In fact this
is the very same guy who popularized the term “Burqas for Babies” when he made the
ridiculous suggestion a while back that baby girls here should be veiled so perverted
men won't be tempted to molest them. He is obsessed with sex - He sees
baby girls as sexual objects.
Abdullah Mohammad Al Dawood (Twitter photo)
So now, on the one hand, he's supposedly
"protecting" little girls from perverts, and on the other hand he's
calling for their mothers and older sisters to be sexually assaulted.What kind of world is this guy living in?Or better yet, as Waleed Al-Khawaji, another
Saudi tweeter responded, “What kind of person urges the youth to commit
debauchery?”It seems that Al Dawood’s
objections to women working are based on his belief that men and women mixing
in the workplace will lead to western-influenced immorality and corruption.
Another disturbing part of this story
is that Al Dawood tried to use Islam as the basis for his wicked idea.He cited an old obscure story about Al Zubair,
a famed warrior, who wanted to stop his wife from her habit of leaving home to go pray in the
mosque.Apparently Al Zubair chose to
teach his wife a lesson by hiding and attacking her as she walked by on her way
to the mosque. Unaware that her own
husband was the attacker, she ran home frightened and swore she would never
leave the safety of her own home again.
Abdullah Mohammad Al Dawood (YouTube/approach channel photo)
By the way, allow me to interject here
that this story that Al Dawood cited projects what is to me a very confusing contradiction of
Islam.Clearly Islam forbids anyone from
trying to prevent someone else from going to pray in the mosque, while at the
same time, saying that it is better for women to pray at home. I have read texts that say that women should ask their husbands for permission to go pray in the mosque. Yet if the husband
says no, isn’t that actually preventing her from going?So to me, this is a murky Catch-22 situation, with no clear meaning one
way or the other, and one part contradicting the other. And dear readers, please don't bombard me with your explanations of this and how it makes sense to you. It will never make sense to me.
But encouraging men to sexually assault
working women?Right - Let’s molest these women to protect
their chastity!Makes perfect sense to everyone.Is this really a “religious tactic” that
Saudi Arabia wants to use and promote?Many of the women working in Saudi Arabia are working because they have
to work, to help support their families.Many are divorced, or widowed, or deserted by their husbands and need
the income to feed their children.Many
working Saudi women are married and are working to ease the stress on their
family’s financial situation.What do
their husbands have to say about this loony bird’s call for men to attack
working women?I honestly can’t recall the last time (if
ever) that I heard of a woman being sexually assaulted in a supermarket, yet
here is this pervert in Saudi Arabia promoting that very idea.
Men like Al Dawood are doing absolutely nothing for Saudi Arabia's image to the rest of the world and are giving Islam a black eye by spouting absurdities like this. Sexually assaulting women is a
crime.Inciting men to violate women is
a crime.Abdullah Mohammad Al Dawood
should be promptly arrested for promoting violence against women.And in my opinion, he should be castrated too.Maybe neutering him will calm him down and he
won’t be so obsessed with sex all the time...
I really try my best to present a balanced view of Saudi Arabia, but there are certain times when some issues just drive me batty. Gender segregation here is taken to such an extreme here that it tends to create many more problems than those they are trying to resolve - not to mention making Saudi Arabia look like an absurdly backward place where men are not held accountable for their actions, and the blame and punishment is usually aimed at women. Weddings are segregated affairs, restaurants have separate entrances and dining areas for families and single men, even many private family gatherings I've attended have been segregated.
At a local mall event, notice how the men and women are mostly segregated, left and right.
Is this way of dress alone not enough of a barrier?
When I first moved to Saudi Arabia five years ago, there were no women working in sales positions in stores or malls - because they weren't allowed to. In fact most women in the kingdom were restricted to working in female only educational facilities or in the medical field, where mostly foreign women have been permitted to work as nurses or lab techs side by side with men. Saudi women in medicine generally are doctors or researchers.
Nowadays Saudi women work in lingerie shops. Men can only enter these shops when accompanied by female family members.
It was bad enough – and downright creepy - that women here in Saudi Arabia were forced until recently to purchase their undies from men, when the women organized and demanded that women be put in these types of sales positions, including lingerie and cosmetics shops. Their voices were heard and the King ordered that these salesmen be replaced with women. It was a huge victory for women in Saudi Arabia. This eventually led to women being employed in supermarkets, department stores, and women’s clothing shops.
Saudi female cashiers in the supermarket chain HyperPanda here in Jeddah
Shopping here in Saudi Arabia - at grocery stores, malls, and even small shops - has always been mixed and has never been gender segregated. As a friend of mine pointed out recently, this "problem" that exists now seems to stem from the fact that women are the ones earning the money instead of just spending it. It was always okay here when men were the workers and women were the customers, but now that women are working in fields that were formerly dominated by men, the religious bigwigs are suddenly having tizzy fits.
Why is it okay for this type of gender interaction, but not when the female is the one behind the counter?
In a group discussion about this new development to prevent gender mixing in the workplace, one participant said: For a country with such high religiosity, it appears that the Saudi adult citizens cannot be trusted to behave with morals and manners in the most basic social and community settings. I call this a RED FLAG ... Obviously something is desperately wrong. When people are raised with such strict religious laws, norms / values and the government's actions repeatedly imply that Saudi citizens lack basic self-control and are not capable of social interaction with the opposite sex for fear of combustible consensual sexual intercourse, molestation, or rape ... Where else in the world does such a problem exist? Seriously! What is taking place in Saudi society and its institutions that would cause the Saudi government to assume that its citizens' behaviors are so spiritually bankrupt?
Is it better for Saudi women to just beg instead of working a real job?
So exactly what has prompted this move from the Ministry of Labor? Since women began working in other venues a few short years ago, I would ask - have there been incidents or problems with working women being harassed or complaints about men they work with? None that I am aware of have been reported in the news, although one article I read vaguely hinted that there have been complaints, but nothing specific.
Or does it perhaps have to do with the deadly threats from 200 members of the country’s religious police force causing a ruckus in late December 2012, whereby these “Men of God” told the Minister of Labor that if he didn’t do something to stop Saudi women from mixing with men in the workplace that they would pray that Faqieh gets cancer and dies? Nice, huh? Especially sweet coming from "Men of God."
I think I have a much better and easier solution. Why not give the men in Saudi Arabia a chance to prove that they can behave themselves around women in the workplace? And if they can’t manage to do that, then just FIRE THEIR ASSES!!!
Child molester, torturer and murderer Sheikh Fayhan Al Ghamdi
I'm getting off topic here now, but what I really want to know is: why aren’t these religious guys (who are so concerned with protecting morality and female virginity) focusing on more important things that pertain to women and children here?For example, why aren’t they totally unhinged about the recent ruling in the case of the Islamic preacher, Sheikh Fayhan AlGhamdi? Al Ghamdi brutally raped and tortured his own five year old daughter in December of 2011.She remained in a coma in the hospital and finally succumbed to her horrendous injuries some 10 months later, in October 2012.
The judge in the case has recently ruled that the few months Al Ghamdi spent in jail was enough and all he has to do now is pay the family of the victim “blood money.” Here in Saudi Arabia, the so-called "justice system" in place is along the lines of “an eye for an eye” and provides for financial compensation paid to the heirs of the victim. In this case, the girl’s family or heirs would include her own father who heinously killed her. However, the paying of blood money should only apply when the killing was unintentional. It was obvious that the injuries suffered by this poor girl were not an accident.
So why isn’t the religious establishment here in Saudi Arabia demanding Al Ghamdi’s head on a platter instead of concerning themselves with such trivial matters as building barriers to separate men and women in the workplace? I don’t get it.
