Eugene weekly., June 18, 2015, Page 13, Image 13

Abusaq says he only had one negative experience in
Eugene, not too long after the Boston Marathon bombing
in 2013. “I was walking beside the Willamette River here,”
he says. “Someone on a bike comes by and says, ‘Boston,’
and then he leaves us.”
That experience did not diminish his enthusiasm for the
area. “You can say I fell in love with Oregon,” he says.
“It’s not hard like the East Coast … like the South.”
Abusaq explains he’s heard stories from friends who live
elsewhere. “They really face some racist things,” he says.
Hamide, who has lived in Eugene for more than 40
years, has seen quite a few changes. “I remember when I
came here, it was so beautiful,” he says, recalling how
open people were, how they accepted him without qualms,
how his neighbors used to come check on him. “I miss that
innocence.
“Now it’s been tainted by the fears that the terrorists are
going to come get us,” he says.
But the Eugene he loves is still there, he says, even
after all these years. “I tried to leave,” he says. “I went to
California. It just reeled me back. I love it here. I’ve been
here longer than a lot of folks in Eugene.”
PHOTO BY TODD COOPER
sometimes feels. He explains that students from the
Middle East can feel like they need to conform to more
liberal standards, especially on a campus where pre-
marital sex is the norm and the full range of sexualities is
openly discussed.
Abusaq says he tries to be honest about the realities of
his more conservative background. “We need to represent
our culture as it is,” he says. “We are not that open-minded.”
As for the Al-jadanis, they face a more domestic
challenge — taking care of triplets. “We have come away
from our family, so we have a lot of responsibility,” Asma
Al-jadani says. She adds that when she was pregnant, her
family encouraged her to come home to have the babies,
but she decided against that because of the better health
care in the U.S.
After the babies were born, both Adel and Asma
Al-jadani went back to school the next term, so they found
a nanny on Craigslist who was able to help them. But at the
beginning of spring term, they learned the nanny would no
longer be available. That’s when Adel Al-jadani decided to
stay home with the babies. “He is a good father,” Asma
Al-jadani says.
‘I think in our country now,
everybody likes to complete their education.’
Social Sciences, Oregon has the tenth-highest number of
Saudi Arabian students in the country. The paper says that
not all colleges are eligible for the scholarship program,
and schools are selected based on recommendations from
specialized committees in Saudi Arabia.
Wigham says that, at first, the students were exclusively
male and pursuing engineering degrees — the idea being
they could go home and help build Saudi Arabia’s developing
infrastructure. Now students study a variety of disciplines
— everything from linguistics to special education.
And women can participate in the scholarship program,
as long as they have a male sponsor (as is the norm back
home, women are expected to have a male chaperone).
But Wigham wonders how long the current trend will
last. “It depends on the government in place and their
decisions,” she says. The late King Abdullah made the
original scholarship deal with President George W. Bush a
few years after 9/11, in part as a diplomatic gesture.
Today, the world is different — for example, King
Abdullah’s successor — King Salman — recently backed
out of a high profile visit to the U.S.
Student demographics can also depend on fluctuations in
the global economy and changes in the price of a key
commodity that the economy of Saudi Arabia depends on
heavily. “What worries me is the price of oil,” Wigham says.
“Are they going to be able to send their students to a country
where the cost of education is absolutely ridiculous?”
stUdent
Perception and Reality
Ebb and Flow
America is a dangerous, violent and racist place — if
you just watch the news or movies. For Hadis Hadipour, a
masters student in architecture at the UO, that is all she had
seen, at least before she left Iran to study in Oregon.
Hadipour, who lives in Corvallis with her husband,
says they were particularly concerned about the widespread
gun ownership in the U.S. “It was kind of frightening for
us,” she says. “It was a big issue.”
But she was pleasantly surprised when she came to
Oregon. “Fortunately, I haven’t had any problems here,”
she says. “Fortunately, people in Eugene, in Corvallis, are
well-informed.”
Gun violence is relatively low in Oregon, and the number
of hate crimes is low as well — 52 hate crimes of all types
were reported in 2012, according to the FBI. But they do
happen. A mosque in Corvallis was firebombed in 2010, an
incident which occurred in response to an FBI sting operation
that exposed, possibly through entrapment, a Muslim
student’s plans to detonate a bomb in Portland at a Christmas-
tree lighting ceremony.
The trend of students from the Middle East is driven, in
part, by policy decisions made by foreign governments,
especially the King Abdullah Scholarship administered by
the Saudi government.
Wigham says that when she first started at AEI in 1997,
the student population was around 5 percent Middle
Eastern. At one point, she recalls, the school saw an
increase in its proportion of Kuwaiti students — until the
Kuwaiti government changed its English proficiency
requirements, bringing AEI’s enrollment of Kuwaiti
students back down. “That’s international education,” she
says. “You have a government decision. Boom.”
The latest trend of rising Saudi enrollment began in
2005, when the Saudi government launched the King
Abdullah Scholarship, which pays educational expenses
for Saudi students at select schools in the U.S. “When the
scholarship opened up, we started getting students from
lots of different parts of Saudi Arabia,” Wigham says. “We
now have a variety of social classes.”
According to a 2014 paper in the Open Journal of
An Education
ABDULMOHSIN ABUSAQ
PHOTO BY TODD COOPER
— A smA A l - jAdAni , UO
WEDAD AL-LAHJI
Most students eventually return home after earning
their degrees. That, after all, is the main motivation: to
send students abroad for an education and then bring them
back to contribute at home.
For Adel and Asma Al-jadani, there’s still a lot of work
to do. Initally, they had decided to go to a school in New
York next year, where Asma would be able to earn a
masters degree in accounting and Adel could continue his
studies in business administration.
But recently the Saudi government, without warning,
removed that school from the list of schools approved for
the King Abdullah scholarship.
It will be a long road. The Al-jadanis still have years of
balancing their studies with obligations to friends, relatives
and the Saudi government, all while raising triplets far
from home.
They say they will continue looking until they find a
school that is a good fit. “They encourage everybody —
women and men — to complete their education,” Asma
Al-jadani says about her family back home. “I think in our
country now, everybody likes to complete their education.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: The author’s partner works at the American English
Institute at the UO.
eugeneweekly.com • June 18, 2015
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