In the 1990's, while living in Saudi Arabia, I tutored the children of a Saudi family in English. I still think about those children often. What are their lives like now, what kind of people are they? Are they happy? It's not just about what effects the religious and cultural restrictions could have on one delightfully, irrepressibly spirited girl, but also on her equally curious and carefree brother.

When I taught her, she she was at the age when the weight of all the Saudi cultural and family norms for girls and women were about to descend on her, putting her firmly in her place. She would need to cloak herself in a flowing black abaya in public, to restrain and subdue her movements, to refrain from doing things girls in the US take for granted.

With the beginning of puberty, she could no longer ride a bike in a park outside of her family's private compound, play with boys not closely related to her, go to an amusement park or zoo with her father and brothers. She would be restricted to restaurants, malls and stores that catered to women and families, with "women only" sections or "family sections."

The retrictions go on and on. The cost of ignoring such cultural, religious and legal taboos and laws? Risk the wrath of the Mutawwa’in, or religious police, and/or bear the consequences of offending or shaming one's family.

For the time I knew her, at least, she was still allowed to be a little girl, providing sharp contrast to the reserve, circumspection and outward docility of her older sisters. However, by the time I left, the circle of doting adults around her was visibly stepping up efforts to tone her down.

Watching her, I felt some anxiety about her future.

Fourteen years later, as I read about the nascent and growing women's movement within Saudi Arabia, I believe that somewhere among them is a young women who once delighted in teasing her English tutor by sprinkling colored pencil shavings into the water channel that flowed from the water fountain connected to her family's Moorish-tiled spa rooms. She would chase them, laughing, out through the sun room around the channel where it mirrored the past the pool relecting the blue of the Arabian sky.