VISITING SAUDI ARABIA

While waiting for Saudi Arabian Airlines Flight 20 to depart from JFK, I was handed a black abaya and matching veil. I felt a mixture of emotions as amorphous as the formless garment, pulling the abaya over my head in the neutral territory of the airplane bathroom somewhere over Egypt. I had imagined that I would feel oppressed and objectified, wearing the polarizing black robe; instead, I felt excitement and curiosity about the cultural exchange I was about to experience.

The seven members of our Muslim Cultures Focus group and three students from the Nicholas School of Environment and Earth Sciences were leaving behind Gothic architecture and screaming Cameron Crazies and entering an entirely different world, with sandy skies and loudspeakers calling the faithful to prayer. The orientation sessions and the readings for my preparatory classes gave a theoretical foundation in the differences between these diverse worlds.

However, it didn't take me much longer than the first van ride to realize there were more similarities and unanticipated learning opportunities than I had expected.

Our two-week trip and exchange with four Saudi male and seven Saudi female students gave us hours of unguarded and informal conversations; yet, that downtime was jarringly interrupted by cultural reminders. At random checkpoints on our drives around Dhaharan, we would have to pull down the bus shades to conceal that women and men were sitting next to one another.

Throughout our journey, I was wearing the visible barrier between men and women-the abaya. It was a physical divide, but paradoxically it made me feel more comfortable and oddly normal. I was surprised to notice that even inside my hotel room, I felt awkward not wearing the abaya in front of males. At the same time, I was beginning to fully understand how the segregation of women limits ones knowledge of the world. I watched women and men sitting separately in restaurants and not directly exchanging ideas.

I originally thought that the symbols of oppression in Saudi Arabia were the veil and the abaya, but it wasn't until traveling for two weeks that I realized the real oppression comes from a lack of access to information. During a Middle East think tank's economic forum that we attended, women were put at an obvious disadvantage-a wall was blocking their view of the speakers. We were forced to watch the speaker on video screens and were not supplied with translating devices to understand this exchange of international ideas.

It wasn't until we were about to depart our hotel that all the Duke women took off their abayas in public for the first time since we arrived. The simple act of taking it off revealed to me the complexities and controversy surrounding this symbolic garment, and that we have barely skimmed the surface of understanding Saudi gender divide.