Sometime in our first year, New Zealander, Dan Bond suggested Sangthong started cooking lunches for teachers, and Nook's Kitchen opened. Over eight years, she developed an original menu of Thai favorites, plus spaghetti and crispy chicken, all halal since that's the only kind of groceries available in Saudi Arabia. She woke up at 4am to start preparing and cooking box lunches for teachers on the 630 and 8am buses, then turned to lunches for the kids' compound daycare, and ended the afternoons delivering plate dinners to apartments. Sangthong worked seven days a week, sometimes sixteen or more hours a day between preparation, cooking, delivery, and cleanup. Our Saturdays were spent going to three supermarkets and the local fresh veggie market, haggling over bulk prices for ingredients that we could hardly keep in stock. By the time we made our exit, we had two refrigerators and a freezer, plus shelves in our apartment that were constantly being used and restocked through the weeks as hungry teachers and kids ate no fewer than ten thousand chickens, acres of cabbages, groves of coconut trees, and who knows how many paddies of Thai hom mali rice. To say that she was welcome on the compound more than me is something of an understatement, and who can argue with all that great Thai flavour?

Free to write at home

During my tenure at King Faisal University, I helped with accreditation writing and editing. As an instructor and mid-level manager, I also built quite a bit of the program's curriculum. Being an energetic sort of fellow, I continued with writing in my spare time. My main research position was in Thailand with Palapan Kampan at National Institute of Development Administration, but since I was stationed in Hofuf, KSA, I found opportunities at the university to continue work regarding foreign language classroom anxiety. 

Peer-review is a difficult process. Sometimes reviewers are harsh. They almost never give specific guidance - something I've made certain to do when I review articles. The 2017 article was accepted by IEJ, the same journal as my 2014 article on a similar topic in Thailand. I was unable to find an outlet for the 2019 multidimensional study, and I suspected a main reason was that conclusions supported a potential reduction in foreign workers in English language training, which is never popular among industry professionals who want more jobs, higher pay, and fewer employer demands. Nonetheless, I could not help but feel the research was either influential within the Kingdom or accurate in predicting the future of Preparatory Year English Programs which have lost some funding and support in years since.

In those years in Saudi, like all my years abroad, I thought, said, wrote whatever I wanted, and nobody ever tried to stop me. In fact, I have remarked on more than one occasion that I had more latitude to speak and write abroad, because I knew what the banned topics were, which coincidentally I did not have much interest in discussing, and there was never threat of tortfeasor private abuse of public right. By comparison, at home in the USA, I know the government is not going to arrest or significantly threaten me for anything I communicate, but there is much less comparable sense of security with regard to employment or academic exclusion. Oh, the irony...