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Saturday, June 19, 2004
Area residents concerned as violence escalates
By AUDREY PARENTE | News-Journal Staff Writer
As Shirley Gay clips customers’ hair at her beauty salon and listens to the news about Paul Johnson’s murder in Saudi Arabia, she is relieved her husband, Donald, is home from working in the Middle East.
The aerospace engineer spent four years, until mid-2003, working with Johnson for Lockheed-Martin in Saudi Arabia.
“When my husband said he knew (Johnson), I said, ‘I’m glad you are not there anymore,’ ” said Gay. “I really wanted him to get out of the Middle East because of what was happening there.”
Gay and other local residents fear working in the Middle East because of the current hostilities against Americans.
In the past, she accompanied her husband for three years in the United Arab Emirates and at other times to Egypt, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.
Recently, he traveled to Greece, and now is back in the United States.
Gay said she did not accompany her husband to Saudi Arabia because she learned from other workers’ wives that “women are not held in the same respect there as in the Emirates.”
One local businessman, whose company had operations in the Middle East, said he would rather help improve business in the United States right now.
“We have had people in the Middle East, and I have worked in Israel, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia,” said Don Ariel, co-owner of Raydon. The Daytona Beach company manufactures virtual reality training equipment for the military and for novice driver training.
“We are not looking as aggressively in that area of the world, obviously, because of the danger we would be putting our staff under.”
Tommy O’Neal of Ormond Beach worked for several different companies traveling to the Middle East for 25 years until his retirement less than two weeks ago. He said it wasn’t always dangerous.
“I was never shown anything but courtesy and hospitality by the people I was dealing with, but over the last year, I have seen attitudes change, especially after the prison abuse in Iraq,” O’Neal said in a phone interview from Costa Rica, where he has a second home.
“One thing that is bad over there, I felt, in standing and talking with someone — doing business — you don’t know where their sympathies lie.”