Compendium of my Life

This book is a biography of Fahaad Al Hammad, who was born and raised in Sakaka, a small peripheral town located in northern Saudi Arabia. He suffered from difficult living conditions during his childhood and faced many challenges and obstacles in his journey to achieve his aspirations in life. However, with determination, perseverance, and struggle, he achieved several successes in various stages of his life. Al Hamad started his professional life as a teacher and ended up as a minister and member of the Saudi Council of Ministers. His orphaned father was compelled, at an early stage of his life, to leave his hometown in search of a livelihood. He went to work in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq, but did not achieve the financial improvement he had hoped for. He returned to his homeland and worked in agriculture, well-digging, and other professions as much as the scarce conditions of Sakaka allowed at that time. As the eldest son in the family, Fahaad had to share his father's struggle and hard work from his early years. He participated in watering the date palms, cutting and selling alfalfa, and other farm chores, balancing between study and work. However, these efforts did not even succeed in meeting the basic needs of the family, and their suffering with poverty continued. Due to this hardship, young Fahad decided, after completing middle school and despite his excellence, not to continue the study at the high school but to enroll in a school or institute where he could obtain a suitable job upon graduation. His choice was the Institute of Art Education in Riyadh, even though fine arts were not among his actual academic options. After three years, he graduated at the top of his class, which included students from all regions of the kingdom. Fahaad returned to his hometown Sakaka to work as an art education teacher at the middle school he had left three years earlier, only to find himself teaching some of his former classmates and being a colleague to some of his former teachers. Although the job and its salary were very suitable by Sakaka standards at the time, Fahaad was not convinced by what he had achieved. He was very anxious and found himself at a higher academic level and in a higher job position. After a year marked by anxiety and suffering, he decided to return to studying alongside work, starting with high school from home and relying on self-study, only taking exams with regular students. He then enrolled as an external student at the College of Economics and Administration at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, which was over 1200 kilometers away from Sakaka, with only regular mail communication available at the time. He balanced work and study, relying on self-effort until he graduated with honors after four challenging years, which were psychologically and financially taxing. Yet, it was determination and perseverance that enabled him to overcome obstacles and achieve success. Fahaad spent nearly a quarter of a century in the Institute of Administration, during which he obtained both his MA and PhD degrees in public administration from the United States of America, sponsored by the institute. He progressed through the ranks, starting as an assistant trainer at the bottom of the organizational ladder, until he became the Deputy Director General of the Institute for Research and Information. The Shura Council was the next destination after the Institute of Administration, where he was selected as a member of the fourth session of the council. After seven years of council membership, a royal order was issued appointing him as an assistant to the Speaker of the Shura Council. Then came the moment of culmination when this journey was crowned by a royal order appointing him as the Minister of Communications and Information Technology and a member of the Council of Ministers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

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