Family, friends, and regular readers of this blog know that we lived in Saudi Arabia once upon a time. That was in mid-1981 to 1983. Our children were 2 1/2 and 5 mo. when we first went there. The company I worked for at the time, Black & Veatch, had lots of engineering work in the Saudi Eastern Province, and I was one of those sent there for civil-environmental engineering work.
At the time, the Iran-Iraq war was in its second year. The country was still rather primitive. The road network was good, and rapidly being improved. The shops were full of the world’s goods; you could find almost everything you wanted (except when all shipments of peanut butter were held up in customs for a month). Plenty of other expatriates lived and worked nearby, and we struck up fast friendships. And we had a church to go to, meeting with permission of the Saudi government on the condition that no evangelism of Saudi natives take place.
But the one thing we didn’t have was a telephone. That infrastructure was way behind in development, and only offices, stores, government offices, and probably a few wealthy Saudis had phones. We could go to the B&V office and make calls (frightfully expensive), or, if previously arranged, receive one. So to keep in touch with the home front, we wrote letters. That seems almost anachronistic now, but a fair amount of our time was devoted to writing letters. I wrote about this before concerning our years in Kuwait from 1988-1990.
Back in 2020 to 2022, I spent a lot of time transcribing letters from the Kuwait years and making a book out of them. It was just for family members. I think a total of four copies were bought (3 by me) before I removed it from sale. My second-oldest grandson read it and seemed to like it. He enjoyed reading errors in his mother’s letters. She was 6, 7, 8, 9 years-old at the time. His family’s copy of the book is on the bookshelf in his bedroom.
Having completed the Kuwait years letters, I took a break for a while, other than bringing our letters-in-hand to a better state of organization. Then, in early 2024, while recovering from my first stroke and not getting out much or doing original writing, I decided to transcribe the Saudi letters. I had almost all of them done by September when I had my second, bigger stroke and my open-heart surgery. In October, our daughter visited us and began the process of selecting photos to illustrate the book and scanning them.
I completed the scanning last month and cropped them and loaded them into the book document over the last two weeks, taking time to arrange the photos in some logical way relative to the text of the letters. I finished the process yesterday. A quick pass through the book showed that my pagination was acceptable. So, this morning I “slapped” a cover together and uploaded the book to Amazon. One photo needed adjusting, which I got done. The Zon then said the book was acceptable. I ordered a proof copy. I’ll use the copy to doing any proof-reading needed, and will have the finished product ready in a month, maybe less.
This book is more richly illustrated than the Kuwait letters book was. I’m coming to learn a little about working with photos and how to use the tools at my disposal. I’m far from an expert, but I’m for sure better at it now than I was three years ago.
I’m scheduled to make a presentation to our letter writers group on letter collections when we meet on June 10. My voice has not fully recovered from the stroke and seizures, but I think it has enough to allow me to make myself legible. Thus, I think I will present this rather than one of the letter collections I’ve read.
