My name is Biba (Habiba Allarakia)

I am a mix, genetically and culturally but my homeland (where my heart is nestled and my heartbeat is reflected in the sand) is Saudi Arabia. I have lived in different places and travelled around a lot.

I worked as a market research manager for a good part of my life. That meant, that when I travelled I didn’t just do the touristic thing, business meetings thing, student thing or foreign worker thing.

I went to people’s homes and saw how they lived. I listened to them for hours talking, about products a lot, but also about their lives, dreams, joy, pain and concerns.

I spent a lot of time trying to understand how they think and what they feel (albeit for business purposes). Thousands of people in various countries, speaking different languages and coming from all sorts of backgrounds.

The one thought that struck me again and again is how alike we humans are at so many levels. Even when we insist on focusing on the differences.

People would say ‘Consumers in Russia are very different from the UK’.

Yes, but guess what? More than anything else, they are all human beings. They share so many things, joys, fears, wants, concerns, frustrations…etc. Maybe we also just take certain aspects for granted that we omit them from our thinking.

In most places and most instances, I was a curiosity. This little Saudi girl who is working in markets foreign to her. With a height of 150 cm and diminutive body, I was literally a little girl no matter how old I was!

Just saying I was Saudi anywhere was sure to make everyone swivel their heads to observe this oddity. Hell, at some point, it used to happen even in my own country for different reasons!

This used to make me uncomfortable at times until I learnt to take it with a sense of humour, even play with it a little.

It helped that people were mostly kind. However, in some instances, ‘Different’ seemed a threat leading to rather unpleasant incidents.

I was in a diversity workshop once where we all had to tell a story about a situation when we experienced discrimination. It was so shocking to hear that every single one, of those over 50+ participants, experienced it in some way.

It seems like everyone can discriminate against anyone for something! This was such an eye opener to me.

The other insight I had from this exercise was that, sharing these stories and listening to others seemed to have created a subtle, but perceptible, shift in awareness.

An understanding bloomed spontaneously. That all of us, human beings, can contribute in either making it better or worse.

I kept trying to find a way a mimic and perpetuate such an exercise.

Hence these stories.

They are all based on true experiences that actually happened to me. The names and some of the details are adjusted to ensure privacy. Some creative license was also taken, at times.

My hope is that they will add to similar stories around the globe and contribute to inspire insights similar to the ones I had after my ‘Diversity’ exercise and other experiences during my life-journey. To incite feelings about discrimination on one side and our human connection on the other.

There is such a beauty in the diversity of human beings as in nature. If we just care to see it and allow ourselves to experience it.

I hope my stories will give you a glimpse of that, in one form or another.