To this day, Bathan’s name is well-known, and his reputation as a water well digger is legendary throughout the Bedouin migration routes and grazing areas of Saudi Arabia. People depended on his wells to survive.
Naushad Shah was just four years old when he left Saudi Arabia with his family in 1978 upon the death of his father, Aramcon Yousaf Shah. However, tales of his dad’s fearsome batting on company cricket fields...
We got up at 8:00 A.M. It was still windy, but the sky was clear. While climbing on the lava, Ron saw a long, skinny, brown snake. A herd of goats and sheep came through the camp and everyone took pictures of them. The Zbitowskys followed them...
The object of this trip was to visit the Wahba Crater and the Mahad ad Dahab Gold Mine. Our returning-student children, Pam and Steven, were with Wally and I. We traveled with Ron, Celeste, Britanny, and Holly Zbitowsky...
My Saudi friend, Quriyan Mohammed Al-Hajri, and I keep in touch every few days by video call. He is at his farm in Junayah, near Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia, and I am in California. In these days of the COVID-19 crisis, both of us are ...
Our flight plan from New York included many stops for refueling; first in Newfoundland, then to Lisbon, Portugal for an overnight to let the flight crew get some rest, onto Rome, Italy, Beirut, Lebanon and finally Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The overnight in Portugal was fun.
AramcoExpats readers might recall my short piece published in May 2018 that described a random encounter with a lone, enigmatic Bedouin deep in the Saudi desert in 1979. Here is an excerpt from that story:
Filmed by Peter Benjamin, this film shows the familiar landmarks of Dhahran beginning with the Gateway to Safety. The Mail Center is seen at 0:33, the commissary at 0:48, followed by the Ad Building and the Dining Hall. At 1:11 the scene cuts to the Swimming Pool and the returning students lounging in the sun.
Filmed by Aramco Brat and Aramcon Doug Webb at the ancient Sufi school in Aleppo, Syria during a visit in the mid-80s, this video is a crowd-pleaser. The dervishes dance to a drum accompaniment that is centuries old.
For centuries, Saudi Bedouins have passed down their rich oral and poetic storytelling traditions. Their elders have recounted and embellished vivid tales of bravery, skill, and family values, often over a glowing campfire...
In this clip excerpted with permission from the documentary The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power based on the book of the same name by Daniel Yergin, the story of Tom Barger’s first journey to Saudi Arabia is related through his movies and letters.
Filmed by Aramcon Dean Cantrell in the mid-60s this clip opens with a mare and her filly. At 0:20 riders from the Hobby Farm pass in a 4th of July parade. At 0:26 is Sher Lyn Cruise, followed by Lynn Martin, Patricia Dixon...
For centuries, Saudi Bedouins have passed down their rich oral and poetic storytelling traditions. Their elders have recounted and embellished vivid tales of bravery, skill, and family values, often over a glowing campfire...
Produced from film shot by Aramcon George Mandis, this video opens with scenes of a Jeddah that would be all but unrecognizable to residents of the city today if for no other reason than the virtual lack of automobile traffic.
Growing up in Dhahran, I was trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. Except maybe for obedient, thrifty and, almost certainly, brave. As a Boy Scout, after all, I took our Scout Law seriously. Sort of.
Tragedy seemed somehow inappropriate in perpetually sunny Dhahran, like the sudden death of a child on a bright, carefree afternoon. Indeed, only rarely did the horsemen of private apocalypse deign to descend on our community.
Amid East-coast Saudi Arabia’s desolate terrain, Dhahran, barely two or three miles square, stood out, a green exclamation in the endless tan. Even by the early 1950s, Dhahran’s camp forest of imported, multinational trees...
In the old days, the only other pockets of “civilization” in the area besides Dhahran were the indigenous Saudi towns of Dammam and Al-Khobar, one hour and 15 minutes away, respectively, and the Aramco camps of Ras Tanura...
By 1950 the horrors of World War II had largely receded, and America dominated the brave new, post-war world. The promising oilfields wildcatted just before the war by American geologists in the arid, menacing Arabian wastelands...
Oil men from Dhahran travel to Bahrain for a weekend. They visit the suq, the vast artesian wells of the island and then assemble for a demonstration of Bahraini stick fighting. The agricultural workers were prohibited from owning weapons so much like the Japanese practitioners of Kendo...