Green Sands: My Five Years in the Saudi Desert

By Martha Kirk

When Martha Kirk left her small West Texas hometown in 1983 to move to the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia, she began a dual life that lasted for five years. Her husband, Terry, was hired to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0896723372
• ISBN13: 9780896723375
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Length: 321 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Learn to Live on a Desert Farm

As a memoir, Green Sands: My Five Years in the Saudi Desert gives you a glimpse into the life of a young woman raised in West Texas and then transplanted into the foreign culture of a Muslim world. When Martha's husband is offered a job to help establish and manage a farm in the harsh Saudi Arabian desert, she's very supportive, although frightened to venture to this new world. They are to be pioneers in the truest sense of the word, with no phones and no television. Women are not allowed to drive and food is hard to come by. Electricity is a sporadic commodity, and in temperatures that regularly exceed 120 degrees, losing power to an air conditioner can be devastating. In her five years there, Martha meets many men, women and children from cultures vastly different from her own and learns to cope with the language barrier, culture shock, and religious taboos. Not only was she to meet with Arab men, but also Egyptian, Pakistani, Indian and other foreign workers on their farm, all with their own special foods, religion and languages. If you are looking for a technical book that explores the Saudi culture, lifestyles and religion, you won't get it here. What you do get is a real-life diary about the conditions the author must endure, the friendships she makes, and her growing understanding of herself. The stories of the Bedouins who befriend her are entertaining and the encounters with camels, sheep and their herders humorous.I smiled when she recounted her husband's explanation to the natives about why she was always out running in circles. They wanted to know where she was going and when she was going to get there, never truly understanding what it means to go jogging. Attempts to get food and supplies are just that--attempts. You have to be creative and flexible to adjust to a place so far out of an American's comfort zone, and Martha did very well in this endeavor. by Rhonda Esakov for Story Circle Book Reviews reviewing books by, for, and about women

American vs. Saudi women life

Ok, this is not a college textbook detailing hundreds of differences between how American and Saudi women differ. It is a rewrite of an American wife's diary of living with her husband for 5 years in Saudi Arabia, while he developes a farming project during the 1980s. As she does not speak Arabic, she has little interaction with Saudi women. What little she learns is what is relaid to her in translations from other foreign women living there. Nonethless, any American (on non-Saudi) woman who plans on visiting Saudi Arabia should/must read this book to learn about the limitations that any woman has while living in a Muslim country, especially where it is difficult for women to obtain an education or run a business or try to break through the various social barriers that the country has to enforce the religious norms that women are severly restricted in meeting or talking with Saudi men, for either social or business purposes. The author does relate numerous experiences as to how Saudi men like to have their pictures taken with non-Muslim (western) women (and she expresses numerous times how the Saudi men seemed to be 'coming on'to or 'flerting' with her when her husband was not around); how the Saudi men not only hold hands while walking down the stree, but also frequently kiss other men (on the cheek) throughout the day. The author relates how Saudi women raise their children, but as she did not live with them, she was not really able to learn much depth about the Saudi women's lives. She relates how most marriages are arranged. An entertaining look at living out in the desert with Bedouins, and how the Bedouins on their camels would trample through the crops simply because that was the historical shortest route between two areas: the public sand-land really wasn't 'owned' by anyone until the 1950s, but the Bedouins didn't respect such new-fangled private-land ownership of the dunes. A book written an educated women too confind intellectually out in the boonies, and anyone can readily gain many useful insights about Saudi life and business and social norms. A book detailing how difficult it can be in getting spare parts out in the boonies, but true of many under- developed countries.

WOW!

I have so much more respect for the Islamic religion and culture now. This book gave me a deep understanding of that as well as an insight to the country of Saudi Arabia-something I previously knew nothing about. This book is fantastic. I would describe it as a page turner with an excellent author. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone. It gave me a new appreciation for being an American.

Suprising comedy of life and agriculture

I learned so much about how similar and how different it is in the middle east. The happenstance that a woman from West Texas could end up living, for five years, in a country where she must keep a driver handy makes the book worth the money.