Ashe

I know that there are many Saudi women are married to Non-Saudi men. The thing is I’ve always wanted to meet such couples just to ask them questions on how their marriage succeeded, and most importantly how did they convince their parents?

I almost had a chance to meet Saudi French couple but unfortunately, the Saudi woman was scared and didn’t feel comfortable to share her experience. So I felt disappointed a little because I’d like to be like them sooner or later. After that, I tried searching for women who are in the same situation but again I couldn’t meet anyone and that led me to writing this post on Tumblr.

However, It is more difficult for a woman to have interracial marriage in here and it’s less acceptable by society.

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Saving Lives With An Iron Fish

When Canadian science graduate Christopher Charles visited Cambodia six years ago he discovered that anaemia was a huge public health problem. In the villages of Kandal province, instead of bright, bouncing children, Dr Charles found many were small and weak with slow mental development.

The standard solution, iron supplements or tablets to increase iron intake, isn’t working. The tablets are neither affordable nor widely available, and because of the side-effects people don’t like taking them. 

I guess this is me fulfilling the ultimate cliché of writers writing about things that bother them, which, more than often enough is the thing that’s preventing them from writing — AKA, our best friend: writer’s block.

For the past month and a half, I’ve had pretty bad writer’s block.

It’s somewhere between “I don’t really know what to write about …,” “I’m not in the mood to write,” and “I have an idea I want to write about, but I can’t find the right words to describe it.”

If I don’t have anything worth saying — any sort of good ideas — what’s the point in writing? If I don’t write things I actually believe, to a certain extent — as opposed to random stuff I’m spewing out in order to just hit some sort of conclusion and finish something — what’s the point in writing? If I have an idea but I don’t have the tools — the words — to craft it perfectly and communicate exactly how I feel — what’s the point in writing?

These are just some of the questions that I’ve been trying to come to terms with in the past month and a half.

A few days ago, my friend messaged me asking for the link to this very publication. I gave it to her, but added that I hadn’t really written anything in over a month. She told me to write based on prompts I saw on Tumblr, because “[I] can actually write.”

This struck me.

I can actually write? What does that even mean?

I didn’t continue to ask her about it, but her words stayed in my head. What does it mean to actually write? Isn’t writing just putting words on a page or screen — words that are coherent, words that communicate, words that resonate with others?

And therein I found my answer.

Writing, I guess it turns out, is just as much for others as it is for myself. Writing is for showing others the reality of a situation they may never experience themselves. Writing is showing another side to a situation they experience every day. Writing is letting others laugh with you, cry with you, whether it be on the other side of the screen or from the opposite page. Writing is opening your heart for people to empathize with it. Writing is healing. Writing is caring. Writing is getting to know yourself. Writing is learning from past experiences. Writing is maturing. Writing is accepting. Writing is understanding.

Writing is documenting your day, meticulously, until you find that one event you finally deem interesting enough to really write about. Writing is describing something 10,000 ways until you find the single way where the words just flow to a point where they become that thing in your mind. Writing is being patient. Writing is taking jokes too seriously and ironically fashioning them into a full-blown story, because you can and you, as a writer, have the power to do so. Writing is crafting a perfect joke and imagining people laugh as they read it. Writing is being able to take a private joke between you and your friends and make the Internet understand. Writing is imagining crazy things and what would happen if-scenarios because you are the writer, and you are omnipotent (at least for a little while). Writing is creating a new world and playing God. Writing is researching everything from baby names to how much a kidney sells for. Writing is becoming your characters, charismatic and brave, smart and kind. Writing is developing style and sass. Writing is improving as a writer. Writing is bringing odd black marks, on a screen or a page — to life.

If you don’t have any good ideas — write. Because you have ideas. They’re the events that happen to you every day, no matter how mundane. Take them. Use them. Create something undoubtedly not mundane out of them. You have a world at your disposal — your world. Yours to explore.

If you’re not in the mood to write — write a little bit every day. This post was written over the course of three days. Some have taken me a week. Every little bit helps. Write a sentence. Write your perfect word. Write the general feeling you want your readers to have while reading your piece. Write to get yourself into the mood to write.

If you can’t find the proper words to write what you want to say — write them down anyways. Because if you can never get past finding the perfect words, you’ll never get to the other, sometimes more fascinating parts of your piece. Finding the proper words is important, but writing is not editing. You can nitpick about words when you actually have a piece to nitpick.

If anything, write for the sake of writing.

Because it’s so much more than — and always has been more than — just “writing.”

By Joyce Kung, YUNiversity Writing Intern

Hot Coffee

The sign on the office door at eTree, an online advertising agency, says “Girls Only.” The company founder, Esra Assery admits that it’s a little sexist and we both laugh at the joke in male-dominated Saudi Arabia.

Assery recruits only women because she says they are more motivated to work than Saudi men. Her company is a striking example of the push to get Saudi women in the workplace.

Women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. It’s the only place in the world where tradition and conservative interpretations of religion keep the ban firmly in place. So, you can imagine that getting into the work force isn’t easy either. But in this trip to the Kingdom, I met women who are breaking the employment barriers with government support.

Many Saudi women say they want to drive. As it turns out, even more say they want a job.

Thirty-year-old Assery built her business based on an understanding of social media, which is huge in the Kingdom. There are eight million Facebook users, and three million on Twitter, with estimates of 70 million tweets per month! Twitter has become the platform for an unofficial national dialogue. You can chart the trends in the Kingdom as well as the debates.

Assery turned this into a business. She represents companies that want to build their brand online. She also built a company to employ women.

“It’s 100 percent Saudi, 100 percent run by Saudi females. So, it’s a commitment to create jobs for Saudi females,” she says.

Assery has more than 30 women on her staff. She’s expanding soon to a bigger office and she will hire even more.

Listen to a longer report on her story on today's Morning Edition.