2022
Interview with Aziz by Elizabeth Curtin ’26
Aziz is a 43-year-old Yemeni refugee. His grandparents immigrated from Yemen to Saudi Arabia, and both he and his mother were born in Saudi Arabia. He is considered a third- generation Yemeni immigrant under Saudi Arabian law and thus not entitled to any of the privileges of being a Saudi Arabian citizen. Today he lives in Ethiopia and runs his own startup.
There is no greater bridge across cultural, linguistic, or religious barriers than family. It was something that Aziz and I immediately connected on, and I believe that it is a value that most people share. As humans, we understand the desire to feel unconditional love and to return it. We understand that sometimes family is not the community we are born into, but the people who we choose to surround ourselves with. It is in our understanding of what it means to belong to people that we gain our capacity to empathize with the profound grief of losing a loved one or choosing to leave them behind. For Aziz, there is nothing more important in this life than his family. It is a value that he attributes to Middle Eastern culture, saying that he was taught as a child that the family is at the heart of everything and to them you must always return. His love for his Yemeni culture is directly tied to his love of his grandmother as she was the one that told him bedtime stories of his home country (a home that he was not born in nor has ever visited yet still belongs to). In many ways, his understanding of his Yemeni identity is tied to his role in his family, and thus to lose his family would mean forfeiting all understanding of his identity. Aziz is the oldest of seven siblings, and he handles this responsibility without complaint. He sacrificed his dreams of being an engineer so that he could work in construction and help pay for his younger brothers to attend university in India. However, as his brothers found steady jobs because of their college degrees, Aziz found himself sinking further and further into poverty. As his siblings got married and had kids and talked about their future, Aziz spiraled into depression as he felt stuck in a life with no future. In his darkest moment, Aziz contemplated suicide as he felt like there was no escape, but it was his faith in God that pushed him to re-imagine his future. He realized that his life depended on leaving Saudi Arabia even if that meant leaving the family that meant everything to him. It took immense bravery to leave behind the collective identity that had defined his life and redefine himself as an individual in a completely new environment with new opportunities and challenges alike. Today, Aziz is running his own startup that helps Arabs with hearing impairments find online jobs so they can be self-sufficient financially. His new mentors, friends, girlfriend, and four newborn puppies make up his chosen family and his family in Saudi Arabia remain ever present in his life as he checks in with them on the phone daily. I gained so much from bearing witness to Aziz’s resilience and wisdom, and I hope you too will find inspiration in his story.
Listen to his story, below:
Transcript:
My full name is Abdul Aziz. I’m a third generation of Yemeni immigrants to Saudi Arabia.
My mother was born in Saudi Arabia, and she never been to Yemen. I was born in Saudi Arabia; I spent 40 years in Saudi Arabia before I eventually I left because I felt like there is no future for me there anymore.
My childhood, I considered myself like until 1990. 1990 I was 11, so my childhood was before that. And why 1990? It’s the year when Saddam Hussein of Iraq, he invaded Kuwait and that was like a critical moment for Yemenis in Saudi Arabia. Because before that time, the Yemeni community was a real community there. It was the second population after Saudis themselves. So, you could see the culture of Yemen there…the restaurants, the language, the dialect, the people, the habits, the customs. If someone came from Yemen…we hosted them in my father’s house for like two to three days, so, there was always this connection. My grandmother and my grandfather, they are real Yemenis because they are the ones who left Yemen, so they still speak real Yemeni dialect with all the traditions…with all the culture…with all the sleep time stories from my grandmother. Actually, I…I spent most of my life at my grandmother’s house…not my parents’ because I was so attached to her. Everything there, you feel as in Yemen.
And after 1990, it changed a lot.
I graduated in…from high school in 1997 and at that time as a foreigner I had no right to go to college in Saudi. The system doesn’t allow any foreigner to continue to join college there, so you have two options: either to go abroad to college or to start work. And I’m the eldest so I was expected to help the family.
In the Middle East the family is still the core so it’s all about the family…it’s not about yourself.
My siblings are all um…so the boys they are all married, and they have kids. They all got married but not me because I spent my money on the family, and I found myself broke eventually.
My darkest years were in Saudi…the last three years in Saudi. So, my family started to concern about me and my mental health. And I said like “look I am depressed but I am not losing my belief.” That was my real motivation to keep fighting because I knew that the situation in Saudi, it was more personal, more psychological, at some point I lost my…my willing to live. And I know that it was because of the place I was in. So, I…I just did my part of the job to go out and I asked for support from God and that was always with me.
