My College Experience (1)

When I was freshman in at the English Department at Umm Al-Qura University, I used to go to class in the afternoon. Classes used to start 4:30 p.m. and last until 9 p.m. There were 12 students in my class and we did not have teachers for the Islamic education and other Arabic courses, so we had to study them on our own and sit for the final exam. It was not easy for us to buy the textbooks for the courses as the local book stores did not sell them and we had to order them from London, Beirut or Pakistan. We could not photocopy books, homework, articles and other things as photocopiers were not available then. Sometimes we would have few books and the students had to share. The library did not carry any references. Our instructor used to lend us her books in order to use them for writing our research papers. We took turns in borrowing the books. We could borrow any single book for one night, read and write as many things as we could from the book as we could not photocopy the book.