As our traveling adventures slow down due to weather, money and lack of vacation days, I figure it’s a good time to start writing about past travels. My longest and most immersive experience was a trip to Kuwait for work. I was working for a local chocolate company called DeBrand Fine Chocolates. At the time, we were very local with only three locations in Fort Wayne. The owners had been approached by a businessman about bringing a store over to Kuwait for his wife. If you know anything about Muslim culture, it doesn’t sound too far fetched. Alcohol is illegal in Kuwait and several surrounding nations. This means that coffee and chocolate play an integral role in their society. Rather than having friends over for drinks, they have them over for chocolate. It’s a very common business gift is treated like a luxury item. Once they came to the decision that they would open a chocolate shop under the company name, they decided it would be best to bring some employees over to train the locals on how to properly store and handle the chocolates. I felt like I won the lottery when they asked me to go. Looking back, they didn’t really have any other male options but it was awesome nonetheless.

I had known they were planning on sending people over for quite awhile, but didn’t know until a few weeks before they actually sent me. I also found out that rather than a couple week trip, they wanted me for six weeks. That is a long freaking time to spend in the Middle East without friends, family, money or a car. I spent two weeks stressing over what I would need to be ready, and the last couple days sitting around trying to wrap my head around it. Kim and I had only been dating for a few months when they made the decision to send us over, so I had to prepare for a lot of Skyping.

 

The trip started off pretty horrible. My coworker and I flew out of Fort Wayne, where they struggled to find the tickets that the company in Kuwait had booked for us. After about ten minutes of clicking and typing, they found out they booked our tickets with our first and last names switched. My name was so long they had me down as “Wickersha, Joshua”. They let me board and told me to inform them of the situation when I arrived in Atlanta.

Atlanta was worse. My coworker and I had separate transatlantic flights and her name fit on the boarding pass and had no problems. When the first person arrived at my gate to get seats for passengers, I went to check in, where they informed me that I would not be allowed to board. I tried to explain the situation and they insisted that I would not be allowed to enter the country without a matching passport. Understandable. They didn’t, however, have to tell me that I would be interrogated because I’m an American entering a Muslim country. I was stressing out and spent the next two hours on the phone with customer service. I received updated boarding passes and boarded not less than 10 minutes before taking off. Thankfully i was able to sleep the entire flight, but I eventually made it over. The rest of the connecting flights through Amsterdam and Dammam were painless.

Walking off the plane was an interesting experience. There are military guards everywhere, and it was a little intimidating. However, the process was rather smooth, except we were unaware that the visa process would take awhile to complete so we were stuck in line for an hour and a half. We were met at the airport by the operations manager for the company who is an Indian gentleman. We arrived during a Saudi Arabian holiday and every single hotel was booked near where they wanted us to stay, so we had to change apartments a day later. He drove us to our accommodations where we dropped our bags off and walked to the nearest food establishment that was open. It happened to be Subway. The love to eat in Kuwait. Sadly, they really love to eat American food. That was one of my biggest disappointments, as I enjoy trying to live in other cultures as much as possible. TGI Fridays was everyone’s favorite, and KFC came in a close second. I’m pretty sure I was the only one who went to Taco Bell in the entire country, but I loved it. We were able to eat at an authentic Kuwaiti restaurant where we sat on the floor and I ate with my hands. It was both tasty and fun. I also had the opportunity to go to a Hookah bar, which was extremely fancy. One bowl of sheesha was around $35 dollars.

Our working experience was not quite what we had imagined. We expected to work 8 hour days, and have a bit of free time to explore the country. It turns out, the company was severely under staffed and we ended up working 11 hour days. We became very close with our coworkers, and it gave us some insight into what the country is like from a completely different perspective. The majority of Kuwaiti nationals do not work. They simply sit back and collect checks from the government for oil exports. Those that do work, own businesses. Not to say that there aren’t a lot of hardworking business owners there, but the ones we dealt with tended to embody the term “owner” rather than hardworking. The workforce of the country is made up of foreigners. Mostly from the Phillipines, Lebanon, Indiana and Egypt. The hardest thing for me to understand was the amount of racism that goes unnoticed. Job titles and salaries were given based on nationalities, not experience or knowledge and no one questioned it. Companies would literally order employees based on physical characteristics. It was a big deal when they accidentally sent us new employees and one did not match the description. She did not speak english well, and was sent back. That’s what it was like, and i will never understand or agree with it. The saddest part is that every single employee was thrilled to be there under those circumstances. Two of them were mothers with families thousands of miles away that they would send checks to. One of them was from eastern Europe and spoke 7 languages, way smarter than me, and she was happy to have that job. The bright side of this is that the upcoming generation of Kuwaiti nationals are attending many western universities and have a desire for education and knowledge. Hopefully this will have an impact on employment situations.

Now that I’ve torn the culture down, let me rebuild it. One of the biggest misconceptions is that all Middle Eastern people hate Americans. This couldn’t be more wrong. Kuwaitis love us. If it weren’t for us, they would be Iraq. One of most uplifting experiences I had there was the day after the Boston marathon bombings. Every single person I talked to asked to make sure my friends and family were alright. They knew more of the situation than I did, and they were equally disturbed it. They are extremely nice and treated us with respect. They are moral people and nothing comes before family and religion for them, and are nothing like what Fox News depicts. They may be a bit narcissistic, as I’ve never seen so many people on smart phones instagramming every last thing in my entire life. I don’t know, I may have just been jealous that they had better phones and internet access.

I can’t even begin to claim to understand how their culturally relationships between men and women work.  Women weren’t treated unequally, they were treated… differently. Muslim women wear traditional clothing and cover up in public as a sign of respect. All they ask in return is that you respect them back. If you are not Muslim, you can wear whatever you want, bearing in mind that there are not many social boundaries and you are susceptible to every worker and stranger staring at you and trying to get your phone number. Our owner and her daughter were followed around for 5 minutes by a creepy man just because he thought they were attractive. He wasn’t trying to hurt them, he just thought it was an ok think to do and no one else thought twice about it. So odd.

Every single Kuwaiti guy was excited to talk to us because it gave them the opportunity to practice their English. I was actually very jealous of most of them because they have experienced more of the United States than I have. Their schedules allow them for a lot of travel, and they take advantage of it. Most everyone I spoke with travels to the United States during their summer months to escape the heat and buy things. Because the of their oil reserves, they are an extremely wealthy country and they enjoy being able to show it off. That quality was nice, because we received quite a few gifts that we certainly wouldn’t have been able to afford. All this to say they like to shop. There is not a lot of things to do in Kuwait, but you can shop. Some of the top malls in the world reside there. The Avenues, where we worked, is one of the largest in the entire Middle East, including Dubai.

Their architecture is innovative and stunning. The buildings all have lights that they can control at night, so the skyline is a beautiful light show at night. Unfortunately, the Kuwaiti towers were under construction so I was not able to actually go up in them, but they were cool to see. One of the nights, the owner drove us down to the old market where we walked the streets going from vendor to vendor getting samples of dates and various other foods. He bought us some cologne and perfume from one of his other companies that he owned. My favorite past time was to go down to the shore and walk along at night with my music because it was about the only alone time I ever got. The internet in our apartment had a bad signal, many American sites were blocked, and the cable tv station that played American movies had a weird obsession with Ethan Hawke. We had a driver from Sri Lanka that would take us to and from work, only reachable by leaving a missed call on his phone. It was obnoxious, but that’s how people who couldn’t afford extensive phone plans communicated. When we weren’t working or sleeping, one of our bosses would let us spend time with her family. They were Lebanese, and extremely great hosts. I spent a lot of time playing with their kids, and still miss them from time to time. Their father loved ice cream, cigars, and whiskey, though he could rarely have the whiskey. On a couple occasions, they took us out for a nice dinner and snacks. We went to see Olympus Has Fallen in theaters one time, and they loved it. I felt bad that they actually enjoyed it, because I though it was terrible. It was even worse because they had to sensor parts of the movie and it made the plot harder to follow. I had the same issue when I went to see Oblivion by myself.

I’m sure that I’ve forgotten a lot of information and experiences from this trip, so it’s likely to be updated as they cross my mind. It’s been a long time since I was actually there and I would love the opportunity to go back and experience it on my own terms. I would like to spend some time talking with the employees that I worked with, visit with the family that showed us the ropes, and hopefully find some new things to do and see.  I’d love for Kim to experience it, though she really doesn’t have the desire to deal with the nuances of being a woman in the Middle East.