nualum
From: Germany
4/10/2003 09:15 EST
It has been about thirteen years since my wife and I lived and worked for Aramco, so things will have changed, but I can answer some of the questions raised.
While the tax balancing issue is a bit mysterious and seems counter-intuitive, the real point is that you will come out ahead on your taxes. For one thing, many benefits are taxable such as home leave transportation. If you have kids, the transportation benefit can be many thousands of dollars. If any of those kids is/are in high school, Aramco pays for them to go to a prep school abroad, and that hefty tuition is also taxable. All these add-ons to your pay will quickly move you well beyond the foreign exemption. Aramco pays the taxes on the excess plus the taxes on the taxes (since this compensation for the taxes is also taxable income). Another way that Aramco was generous in my day, and probably still is, was that in its calculations, it assumed that my deductions would have been 10% of my gross--much more than most people can dredge up in deductions.
As for the physician/nurse family, the Aramco compound with the hospital is huge--many miles square with plenty of area for walking a dog, exercising onesself. Comparing its facilities with a typical military base is a qualitative comparison--with the military base being a trailer camp and an Aramco compound being a lavish gated community. Most of the housing, for example, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit. It is very, very comfortable. Sports facilities are hard to beat including exercise rooms with the finest equipment, golf courses (without grass, of course), swimming pools, beaches, even a "yacht" club for our sail boats.
In our day, women did not wear an abaya on the compounds, and I am confident that this is still true. In local communities, Aramco women wore long skirts and blouses which covered the arms. My wife and college-aged daughter never felt this was difficult. My daughter actually liked the abaya. She could throw it on when she wanted to go into the local towns wearing shorts or anything at all underneath it. She ended up wearing it as her graduation gown at university since, while it looked like a graduation gown, it was better made. Women were also able to drive on the compounds, though that privilege was periodically threatened.
It is hard to predict whether you would be too outspoken to work in the hospital. The Aramco hospital is JCHA accredited, so it is a professional environment with well-qualified professional staff. Working in any other culture always requires diplomacy and sensitivity and being confrontational is unwise in many cultures, including Arabia. On the other hand, if you have been in the military, you know you had to exercise diplomacy and even a certain amount of self-censorship in dealing with some people (and their spouses) in your chain of command.
What is more likely is that you will soon come to like the life, the job, and the people you work with--in which case you are likely to want to be both professional and diplomatic, not wanting to cause unintentional offense.
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