For Teresa Malof, the advertisement searching for nurses to focus in Saudi Arabia ended up being the opportunity to reboot her life. She had been 29, her mother had recently died and her marriage that is first had in breakup. So she would keep Cincinnati and invest a 12 months working at riyadh’s king fahad nationwide guard hospital and then make cash.
Which was in 1996. A lot more than two decades later, she’s nevertheless there and Saudi Arabia became house; she remarried and took that loan to purchase a property within an upscale suburb of Riyadh she distributed to her now ex-husband, Mazen, a USC grad, and their three kids, Naif, Shireen and Mishal.
But once Malof desired to extricate herself from her very nearly marriage that is 18-year she states she quickly crashed against limitations imposed with a sharia-based appropriate system that features frequently treated women since second-class citizens, and that has kept Saudi wives, including foreigners such as for instance by herself, with little to no recourse in court.
Malof and Mazen divorced four years back, but she actually is nevertheless making repayments for your house despite having been obligated to transfer fleetingly after the marriage finished. a hallway of mirrors of claims and counterclaims has frozen the deed, therefore even the though the house is in her name, she cannot offer it or move the mortgage to her ex-husband’s title.
