Single in Saudi
by Genia
Category: Biography & Autobiography

Bored at work and nursing a broken heart, a thirty something R.N. leaves her prestigious job at a Houston medical center to work at a military hospital in Saudi Arabia in 1978. She arrives in a land struggling to catch up to the Western world while retaining its strict Muslim morality — at least in public. “Genia,” a bold, single, blue-eyed blonde, discovers that sex and drugs are very much in demand inside the high-walled compounds of the Western-educated Saudi elite. During two years in The Kingdom, Genia manages to break every rule short of theft and murder while befriending Arabs of all social standing, including her grateful patients. A hot-shot Saudi Air Force pilot and a top Saudi official become her lovers, and she parties with princes and princesses at their opulent homes and Bedouin camps. But she also dons the veil and long, black obaya in order to move freely among the ordinary Saudis who welcome her into their homes. With plenty of overtime pay and vacation time, Genia travels to more than twenty five countries while based in Saudi Arabia. She describes these travels, along with her relationships, nursing work, and unleashed feminism in this extraordinary memoir of a time when America wasn’t a dirty word in the Arab world.