by Jose Torres Jr.

	SURVIVING SAUDI. The author clowns with friends, fellow migrants to whom Saudi Arabia's conservative culture is alien and unforgiving. [photos by Jose Torres Jr.]

THERE WAS no saying no to Ramon. He invited me to his one-room apartment one day in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan. There was no work for a week and most shops were closed during the day. There was nothing to do but watch television. Ramon, a Filipino who had worked in Saudi Arabia for 10 years, was my driver, guide, and friend. He said he wanted to show me something that I would enjoy.

He turned on the television and inserted a videotape in the VHS player. On the screen appeared Ramon in all his naked glory, and an equally naked woman on his bed. The video was obviously taken from a camera hidden somewhere in his room. My friend was laughing. "Can I pass as a porno star?" he asked, grinning.

He said the woman, a Filipina with a daughter and husband back in the Philippines, had been his sex partner for the last two months. She had been working in the Kingdom as a domestic helper for six years and went home to the Philippines only once every two years. Ramon was also married and had two children back home.

"We do it once a week," Ramon said. But he added that she wasn't his girlfriend. "We just spend time together to fight the loneliness," he said. "We love to experiment and we're looking for someone because she wanted to have two partners. Are you interested?"

I wanted to laugh but Ramon was serious. "I make do with lotion," I said quickly. Fortunately, he left it at that.

But reality was harder to shake off. We were in a place so alien that the word "loneliness" did not even come close to capturing what one ended up wallowing in for days on end. That's why the need for physical contact was so acute, and that's why many OFWs like ourselves sometimes did things they wouldn't even have thought of doing back home. I hadn't gone as far as Ramon had at that point, but I felt the need just the same. And by then I knew that even in a very conservative country, there existed, for OFWs, a seething sexual scene underneath a seemingly placid surface.

A British pilot was supposed to have been jailed after he told passengers in jest to set their watches 500 years back when they were about to land in the Kingdom. It was a story I had heard from friends, and I had dismissed it as an exaggeration. That was before I went to Saudi myself and saw and lived the kind of life OFWs were enduring in the middle of the desert, where time seemed to have stood still.

SAUDI ARABIA is home to Islam's two Holy places, Makkah (Mecca) and Madinah (Medina). It is a country where women are still fighting for the right to drive and unmarried couples who mix in public risk the anger of the mutawah, the stern-faced religious police armed with thin wooden canes. It is a country where words like alcohol, sex, rape, mini-skirt, prostitute, Christmas, communism, and anything that connotes Christianity, "immorality," or godlessness are taboo and not allowed to appear in newspapers and magazines. It is also a country that has hired fun-loving and eager Filipinos by the hundreds of thousands at a time for the last three decades. Up to now, no day passes without a Filipino boarding a plane to work there.

Many OFWs spend several years working in Saudi Arabia. But they never get used to its culture. All alcoholic drinks, for instance, are prohibited in the Kingdom, not exactly comforting for Filipinos used to the delights of San Mig after a hard day's work. Yet these delights can still be had, although very expensively, including the sadiqui, a concoction of rice and yeast that tastes like lambanog (a fiery drink made from the nectar of coconut flowers) and that Filipinos have managed to source secretly.

For most Filipinos, the Kingdom is a confusing country of contradictions. While drugs are prohibited, for example, kababayans say it could be had more easily there than in Manila. "And it is cheaper," one Filipino told me. Multiple partners would also seem common in a place where the law allows a man to have up to four wives at anyone time, so long as the women are given equal treatment — from the size and design of their respective homes to the number of visits each gets from their husband. But even as intimacy with other women outside of marriage is high on a long list of taboos, some have figured out ways to wriggle out of the rules. When I was there, some "marriage brokers" offered men "trapped in unhappy marriages" an easy and safe escape — the so-called "marriage in passing" or zawaaj al-misyaar in Arabic.

Friends said that they had tried calling the five telephone numbers listed in a fax message. Once they got through, a female voice instructed the caller to punch in a secret code "to learn more." That done, this was what the caller would hear next: "My dear brother, may God help you find a wife to compensate for your troubled life. Know that the broker charges these prices. Five thousand riyals for a virgin. Three thousand riyals for a nonvirgin." A leading Muslim cleric described the process to me this way: "The man can pass by anytime, in the morning, afternoon, or evening. And he does not have to stay over."

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