(7/7)

The man mentioned a Muslim name as the person who had used the phone to call and that he wasn’t at home but that when he got back home he'd let the caller call back.

I didn’t know anyone in Dubai by that name. It was when the man allowed her to call me back that I found out that it was my friend!

What I didn’t know was that she had told her boss that she had an elder sister in Dubai. My friend is Christian but in the Arab world, it is not advisable that you provide a name that is not Islamic and so she had adopted the Muslim name

A W A Y F R O M H O M E
________________________

(6/7)

I had spent two years in Saudi Arabia and I had nothing to show for it. I came to the country to work and earn some money but there I was in the airport with nothing. I called the big sister. She told me to use my remaining money to buy a train ticket from Saudi Arabia to Dubai.

The big sister met me at the train station and welcomed me. She was the one who connected me with a family in Dubai where I worked for a year.

The purpose was so as to, at least,

A W A Y F R O M H O M E
_____________________________

(3/7)

"Sometimes we’d go to the desert and spend some two, three days and the cold in the desert is indescribable. Whenever we are going to the desert, we will pack so many bags you’d think we were leaving for the moon. Sometimes we wouldn’t even spend more than a few hours in the desert yet they would pack everything they can pack.

A whole car is loaded with boxes and everything they believe they’d need to replicate their home in the desert.

It didn’t matter if we’d only be

A W A Y F R O M H O M E

(2/7)

"The worst period of work was during Ramadan. If you work within a house, just take it that you will not sleep for the whole period of the Ramadan.

The thing about the Arabs is that they love to see all sorts of meals on their table even if no one would eat it - so we’d set a grand table that has all sorts of meals.

On the day the fast starts, I’d begin to prepare sahur from around 11pm the previous day and I will cook all through the midnight till about 3am.

Now when sahur is over, I’d begin to

A W A Y F R O M H O M E

📍: SAUDI ARABIA 🇸🇦

(1/7)

"When agents pitch to you about working in Saudi Arabia, they will tell you great things about the place; they’d tell you that you can work as a nurse or paint some decent jobs to you. They would also tell you about the huge amount of money that you would be paid.

When you earn N10,000 per month in Nigeria and someone says you can earn N150,000 per month, the idea of traveling begins to look enticing.

My brother, it is all mostly lies.

In June, I was wrapping up my two-year project on the #SingleMothers series - I had one last person on my list to talk with and I'd wrap it all up.

Originally, we should have met in 2019 but then, she was in one of the Middle Eastern countries and she told me she wouldn't be back until last year.

COVID struck, and things dragged.

We couldn't meet up until June this year.

I casually asked her about life in Saudi Arabia where she had been and a flood of stories emerged.

Really, the meeting was for #singlemothers series but there we were talking

This is the story of @AdewaleYusuf_ and how he began what has become the biggest tech media company in Africa - Techpoint Africa.

He was magnanimous enough to share every detail - the good, bad & ugly and over the next 4 days, I'll be reposting the story here.

Here is 1/4 1/4

“People meet me and think I am one ajebota. I am not. My father had a block industry while growing up and I was always at hand to help me. My mother was a trader and so growing up was just the regular life. We lived within our means, no extravagance, no luxurious lifestyle.