"GUEST WORKERS" like the Filipinos, however, have to find their own means of salving their own tortured souls and aching libidos. Those who were married but didn't have their spouses with them found bedroom buddies soon enough, partners without strings attached.

	KILLING TIME IN A HOT PLACE. Karate lessons were one way to pass the time, even for non-athletic types, although friendships with compatriots were easy to make, even if there were few public places where men and women could be seen together.

For some single Filipinas, meanwhile, marriage to a male kababayan was the only way they could live outside their assigned quarters. But not all the men who made themselves available to these women were single; the "marriages" took place because some consulate or embassy official was eager to "help," for a fee. It was not uncommon to have married Filipino men having another "legitimate wife" in Saudi.

In Jeddah, the shopping malls and restaurants in the Balad district became popular meeting places for homesick Filipino men and women who slipped each other bits of paper with their names and telephone numbers.

These days I am told they use text messages to arrange meetings in the family sections of restaurants, where the mingling of sexes is allowed.

Not everyone, however, sought racy outlets for their frustrations. Sports was a popular form of release; so were karaoke parties. The more artistic expressed themselves in poetry or theater. Although I wasn't particularly athletic, I took karate and aikido lessons to relieve the boredom.

I also had my lotion, as I had told Ramon. I learned about the "lotion solution" three days after arriving in Saudi Arabia. I stayed with Filipino male workers in one of their "villas" while looking for a place of my own, and I noticed that all of them had big tubes of Jergens lotion beside their beds or inside their bathrooms.

"You're becoming vain here with all the lotion," I commented to a construction worker. He laughed, saying cryptically, "You will learn soon enough."

THIS WAS back in the mid-1990s, when I had joined the hordes headed for the Middle East. Like most OFWs, I had been infected with the dream to work abroad and earn dol lars. I, too, wanted a house filled with the latest video and audio entertainment systems, a microwave oven, a washing machine. I wanted to have a room with pictures of camels and Bedouins on the walls and with large Persian carpets strewn on the floor.

I woke up from the dream when the first searing desert wind blasted my face as the aircraft's doors opened in Dhahran, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was just a stopover before the plane proceeded to Jeddah, my final destination, but Dhahran's heat melted whatever dream was floating inside my head. By the time I landed in Jeddah, it had practically evaporated.

I should have known working in Saudi was going to be rather rough when, as part of the application process, a stranger made me part my buttocks so she could have a better look at my butthole.

There we were, about 15 of us, inside a small room in a clinic somewhere in Makati. The medical attendant had just finished taking two vials of blood from each of us. Earlier, we had submitted our stool and urine samples. Next was the required "physical exam."

A nurse in her mid-20s entered the room. "Line up and face the wall," she commanded.

"Remove your pants and your briefs," she next said, still in an authoritative tone. Somebody giggled somewhere in the room. "Shut up," the nurse said. Then she ordered, "Raise your shirts, bend forward, and open your asses."

She peered into our bottoms looking for hemorrhoids.

Some of us could not hold our laughter, but the nurse wasn't laughing. "Face front!" she barked. Then she pulled out a ruler, which she used to poke our balls. "Wala ba kayong luslos (Anybody has hernia)?" she asked. Nobody answered. "You can now put your clothes on," she said.

I had no idea what kind of jobs the others had applied for, but I was going to work in a newspaper as an editor, and I couldn't figure out what my butt or my balls had to do with journalism. Of course, had I read "Lawrence of Arabia" or seen the film, I would have known about the predatory instincts of men trapped in the desert heat, and I would have probably pulled up my underwear and pants pronto and never even boarded that plane to Jeddah.

Intimate relations between men have long been illegal in the Kingdom. The punishment for sodomy is death. But even now there is no dearth of men looking for possible hookups, even in malls and supermarkets, where they are said to be on the alert for Filipinos. According to one news report, a street in Jeddah has become the most accident-prone area in the city because it is the most popular place to pick up gay Filipinos who strut their stuff on the sidewalk in tight jeans and cut-off t-shirts.

Some Filipinos actually find the Kingdom a place for the fulfillment of desires and lifestyles they could hardly afford in the Philippines. Gay men hold secret parties and fashion shows almost every other week. Most of them have foreign partners. Some even live together like family. Then and now, there have been OFWs who have made money out of these men's attraction to Filipino males.

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