Reem Asiri

Okaz/Saudi Gazette

ABHA – Many female college students who live away from their parents are facing great difficulty leading a normal life. They feel trapped between college premises and the apartments in which they live in. If they decide to go out alone and sit in the nearby park, they will have to put up with the way others, men and women, look at them.



Bashayer is one of those students. She comes from Mahayil Asir, but goes to college in Abha. She studies medicine and shares an apartment with a female roommate. She said,“It’s difficult for girls here to go out alone without being harassed by young men.”



One afternoon, Bashayer fell sick and needed to go to hospital.



When her roommate called her family to get permission to accompany her to hospital in an ambulance, the roommate’s family refused to let their daughter go out alone.



Bashayer had to call her parents, who live in Mahayil Asir, 80 kilometers away from Abha, to come and take her to the hospital. They arrived around midnight to find their daughter in bad condition.



But this is not the only problem students like Bashayer have to face on daily basis. Some drivers, who run errands for girls, demand a lot of money for a simple and short errand, taking advantage of the fact that the girls cannot drive. Having no other option, the students pay whatever the drivers charge them.



One of the students, who preferred to stay anonymous, said she had to move from Riyadh to Abha and stay with her grandmother in order to go to college there. She studies medicine and finds it extremely hard to go to the university library on a daily basis.



She does not have a driver because she cannot afford one. “I hope the university considers building a girls’ dormitory to end the suffering of students who have to rent apartments near college,” she said.



Another problem is harassment, as young men tend to flirt with girls who are not accompanied by male guardians. Many female students opt to stay indoors for weeks than go out and get harassed on the street.



Asma, who lives near college and shares an apartment with three girls, has complained about the low monthly stipends. Asma and her roommates each get SR850 a month and have to pay a total SR1,500 for rent. Not only that, each one of them has to pay SR500 for the driver who drops them off at the college and takes them back home. If they decide one day to go out to a mall, they have to pay extra for the driver.



One of the most difficult situations she and her friends faced happened at a mall. The driver dropped them off there and left. When they called him after 10 p.m., he did not pick up the phone. They felt helpless and stranded in the mall.



However, an old lady with her son offered to give them a ride back home.