Journeys to the Middle East: Part 1

Have you ever visited a place, and found the place changing your life before your very eyes? Is there such a thing as fate that happens in your life?

Six months after the horrors of the September 11th terrorist attacks (2001), I made my very first trip to the Middle East. And nothing about my life could ever be the same again. It wasn’t anything that I chose to do – but, as I’ve come to see, a thing that somehow was chosen for me. What’s more, to feel so much at home in the Middle East was something I could not have imagined in a million years.  I was a privileged boy from Manila, who became an American citizen from Chicago and who had rarely traveled outside the North American borders.

How and why does a Filipino-American feel at home in Middle East? I’ll tell you the story.

Diplomat Radisson, Bahrain, Friday brunch (2004).

I was working for a US-based international consulting firm, and a colleague contacted me about a consulting project in Bahrain – leadership programs. Apparently my General Manager had assigned me to be part of this team, because of the successes I’ve had in consulting on such programs – and because, I imagined, he knew I was ‘game’ to travel to some place new. At first, I had no idea where Bahrain was on the map. So, yeah, it was new alright!

The client was Saudi Arabian, the biggest oil producer in the world. And, collectively, the projects we were doing for them came to be among the top two or three projects that our firm was doing worldwide. Fairly quickly, I was involved in something that had high visibility in the firm – not just because of the business potential of working with this client, but also because there was quite a stir in the American media and public about the fact that the majority of the terrorists were Saudi.

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The trip from Chicago, through Amsterdam, then to Bahrain in March 2002 was interminable. We arrived in the middle of the night, tired but too restless to fall asleep. Our client planned to take the team out for lunch, so he met us at the hotel. The noonday sun was way too brilliant for my eyes, even while standing inside the gilded lobby of the Intercontinental.

Well before this trip, we were oriented to Arabic culture and trained on how this project was going to be different from others we had done. We were schooled, for example, to never show the soles of our shoes, and this meant that we were to keep our feet on the floor whenever we sat with our client. On our first meeting, I sat nervously like this, upright with a stiff back and as alert as possible in the haze of jet lag and sleeplessness. We were also told not to eat with our left hand, so even lunch and dinner were, at first, an awkward experience, as I kept my left hand on my lap and ate with my right hand.

Further, we were not to extend our hand to shake an Arab lady’s hand, unless she extended it herself first. Remember, we were working with a client from a country that was among the most conservative and strict in the Islamic world. So, knowing this, I took these cultural lessons further and made sure that I made no eye contact with Saudi ladies (many were completely covered). I also made sure that there was absolutely no risk of brushing up against them. Now, don’t think I was taking this to an extreme. I was spot-on with the extra caution I was taking. In fact, our security detail in Riyadh, for another Saudi project, told me that, yes, even the slightest, incidental contact with a Saudi lady could land me in jail.

David, one of my consultant pals.  We ventured to the Van Gogh Museum on our first layover in Amsterdam.

Thankfully, all such nervousness passed in short order. I quickly and markedly came to relish my trips to the Middle East – which were about once a month, lasting two to six weeks.

I found the diverse people in the region to be the friendliest I’ve known, without question. For example, I was in Kuwait, and had a business meeting scheduled with a prospective partner. But the taxi driver didn’t know exactly where the office building was, so without speaking English, he vaguely pointed me ‘somewhere over there.’ After walking around for a few minutes, and running late for my meeting, I walked inside the Kuwait Finance House for help. The Arab gentleman at the front desk must’ve seen on my face that I was lost. Well, he not only gave me directions, but he actually got up and walked me to the office building! No way would this happen in Chicago.

What’s more, the Saudi managers we were working with often invited us for dinner at their homes. I had my first ‘dose’ of their hospitality – and further lessons on their culture – when a colleague and I arrived to find our host’s wife and daughters separated from anything we did. The four of us, including his brother, had a lavish spread for dinner, which his wife had prepared for us. An Omani manager I was coaching offered to show me around Muscat, as our visits were often consumed with work so I had had very little chance to tour the city. In Dubai, too, I easily made friends, in just a matter of a day or two, during extended layovers, for example, from Riyadh to Muscat. For instance, an Emirati gentleman took me out for dinner, the first time we met, and we talked for hours as if we were brothers.

Interestingly, I’ve had a number of friends tell me that people in the region weren’t very friendly. So they’d look at me with a fair amount of skepticism, when I kept saying the opposite.