Your Friday, My Sunday

The story takes place before the horrors of 9/11, but the simmering resentments existing among young Saudi males have already been recognized by the authorities, who seem powerless to prevent an outpouring of loathing for the patrician government. Your Friday, My Sunday takes place in a time when young Saudi males are going to fight the Russians in Afghanistan (Osama bin Laden being among them). Yet oil revenues by the end of the 1980s have peaked such that the ruling family of Saudi Arabia decides to further expand its health-care portfolio and provide Western-standard infrastructure at any price, at the highest speed, and as the story shows, with little eye for detail. They import Western expertise, with Western hopes and expectations, but without harming local sensitivities. They decide to build Medical City, a thousand-bed construct in central Riyadh, to treat every affliction known in the West and an emerging range of afflictions peculiar to itinerant rural people. It will be the most admired facility in the Middle East.

The three main characters in Your Friday, My Sunday are expatriate advisers who, having struggled with their work over the months, one night go out drinkingand get caught in a road traffic accident. The drunken driver has killed a Saudi pedestrian and, therefore, must forfeit his life. His companions are deported, but they hatch a daring plan to return with new identities to retrieve from a bank the bribes paid to them and to rescue their comrade from the enactment of the final judgment of the Islamic courtif they can get close enough.

Your Friday, My Sunday is a study of the uneasy relationship between the religions and cultures the staff strive to reconcilea story of our age.