Al-Huwaylat

Dishing out departmental cake in the ICU at Al-Huwylat Hospital in Jubail (1988). We closed out the hospital a few months later.

The 200-bed Al Huwaylat Hospital was built by the H.B. Zachry Co. of San Antonio, USA, and arrived on site virtually in kit form. It was then assembled room by room, each module having been delivered complete, down to the toilet-paper holders in the bathrooms. Even the hospital's prayer room, which had mosque carpets and lighting directed toward Mecca, was built in Alabama and transported the (then) remote area of what was to become the Jubail Industrial City. It was opened in 1980, and closed, having fulfilled its purpose, only eight years later (when GEH handed over all the medical equipment to the new Al-Fanateer Hospital). Al-Huwaylat is now operated as a private hospital by Ebrahim Almana. I last visited there in December 1996.