Now what does he do again???

It occurs to me that there may be some who don't have any idea as to what I do for a living, not to mention why it would take me "out there."  Let me enlighten you:

Firstly, I am an Instructional Designer.  That's just a high-falutin' way of saying that I create lesson plans for a living.  I know... right?...  "You can go to graduate school for that???"  

Well, yeah.  What of it?

Anyway, throughout my entire career, which currently clocks out at 17 years or so, I have been located in corporate training departments designing training programs of one sort of another.  Simple as that.  I specialize in ensuring that the education that is going on is being done in a way that actually results in people learning something.

"Ok... So why is he doin' that, you know, over there?" 

Well the answer to that starts with this photo:

That, my friends, is an oil rig.  (It's a big one too, I'm told.)

Basically, back in the early part of the 20th century, someone named Steineke (I think) discovered oil here.  So, of course, the prospectors came, led primarily by wealthy Americans looking to make some real money. They founded an oil company, which was American owned, but, of course, was located in Saudi Arabia.  So, it was named Saudi Aramco.

Well, Saudi Aramco grew and grew.  Eventually becoming the world's largest oil company.  In order to support this company, living quarters needed to be built for the people (mostly foreigners) to live in once they went home for the day.  So they built some:

As you can see, the foreground is about as desolate as can be.  But that green you see is the camp (and then the desolate further back must be the other side of camp, and the other side of that desolate would be the Persian Gulf - a.k.a. The Arabian Gulf).






Here's what it looks like close up but blurry (I took this shot from a moving car.).  You can almost see how the nice green stuff immediately stops and, just across the street, there's the desert again:

And this a slightly closer view from inside the camp:

Thousands of people from all over the world live here.  Many have families here.  This is pretty much what they were talking about when they coined the term "company town."

Well, the industry grew and grew and grew.  The company grew with it.  In 1980 the Saudi government nationalized the company so that it was wholly owned by Saudi Arabia. BUT, the people with the skills to run the company, you know, engineers, geologists, etc. were (and still are) largely foreigners.

Understandably, the Saudi government believes that a Saudi owned company (especially one valued at $10 Trillion dollars and is known as the world's most valuable company) ought to have Saudi talent running it.

And that's where I come in, literally.  There are many foreign born workers here who do a very specialized kind of work.  Many of them started working here 30 to 40 years ago.  That means they are looking to retire pretty soon.

These folks have skills that are valuable to the operation of the company.  Those skills need to be passed on.  That happens in the form of training.  Remember what I said about working in various training departments throughout my career?  That's why the company is willing to shell out a lot of money to encourage people like me to come help them out.

Enter me...

I got sucked in.  Only - not entirely.  The halls where they house the "bachelors" are full.  That means they get to put me up in a hotel.  The Dhahran International, to be precise.  On the flyer it looks something like this:

but it actually looks more like this:

or this:

but their food looks like this (yummy).