Whatever part of me thought that life here would calm down once I got settled in was clearly mistaken. It seems like now that I have all the basic essentials of life here sorted out - flat, furniture, car, bureaucracy, etc - things have only gotten busier/crazier. I didn't manage to get to bed before 5 AM either night last weekend, and this weekend isn't on schedule to be any less overloaded. And the week in between - where did it go?!
Part of the craziness I attribute to Ramadan, which is like Christmas party season in the US (only with less booze and more conservative clothing). Every night this week I've had someone's company's iftar or sohour (the second post-fast meal) to go to, which then devolves into a trip to a Ramadan tent for shisha, which in turn devolves into tea and board games... and before you know it it's 3 AM and you're stuck in the rush of people going home to eat again before the first morning prayer at 4:30.
All this Ramadan socializing has led to several more unsettling conversations about the, er, darker side of this place that is apparently not all sunshine and Range Rovers and diamond-encrusted camels. At a friend's dinner party the other night, it was brought to my attention that according to UAE law it is illegal for unmarried women to give birth in Dubai. Not illegal like "we'll turn our back and not enforce it if you're Western," but illegal like "you can have free prenatal care and great doctors and then we'll have to imprison you after you deliver." Not surprisingly, abortion is illegal as well.
I'm not really going to comment because hey, that's the law and I've chosen to live here. But it is shocking to realize that if a single woman gets pregnant, whether of her own volition or not, her options are: (a) leave Dubai in order to have the baby, (b) marry the father, (c) travel abroad for a legal abortion, (d) have an illegal abortion in Dubai. Luckily if anything ever happened to me, I'd have all the options on the table, however unpalatable they may be - but most of the women here? Let's just say that your average Filippina secretary probably can't afford to take 6 months off to go back to Manila and have her baby, and your typical Russian waitress sure can't get a visa to fly to London for a "procedure." So that leaves (b) or (d) and, well... who knows.
In the same conversation though, an interesting point came up amongst several Jordanian/Lebanese/Syrian acquaintances about how, yes, it's easy to gripe about Dubai - but where would they be if there was no "Dubai"? It's pretty much de rigeur for the city's 20-30something Arab professionals to be jaded about Dubai: the contradictions, the segregation, the restrictions, the soullessness, all of which - for them - isn't offset by the excitement of being in a new region and a different culture, as it is for Western expats. (Plus, to be honest, non-Emirati Arabs get paid way less than Westerners - that's just a sad fact of life.)
[Can I take a moment to point out that I am using "Western" here not to make Edward Said roll over in his grave, but because it is far easier than saying "British, European, American, Canadian, Aussie, or Kiwi" every time I want to reference the concept.]
So anyhow, I understand their rationale - after all, hailing from the Levant they come from places with vastly richer history, culture, and traditions (but vastly smaller economies and fewer jobs) than this random piece of desert which has only recently sprung up as an overnight metropolis. So the point they made was that as much as they all gripe about Dubai (and believe me, they do - I don't think I've met a Lebanese here who hasn't elaborated for me at great length about how much they'd rather be in Beirut if they could be), it's also a unique opportunity for them.
It was interesting to hear them speculate about where they'd be if there wasn't a place in the region that filled Dubai's role. Their responses basically fell into two categories: either they'd be back home in Amman or Beirut or Damascus, overeducated and underemployed, living near their parents and prodded into semi-arranged marriages with lots o' kids; or they'd be in Saudi or Kuwait, working the same kinds of jobs they have in Dubai but stuck with a shitty quality of life, tons of social restrictions, and a good deal of scorn/segregation from the locals. And that's basically it; maybe if you have some kind of hyphenation going on (Lebanese-Canadian, Jordanian-British, etc) you can find a job in North America or Europe, but barring that it's next to impossible to find jobs in those places on Arab passports these days - come on, the entire year's quota of H1-B visas for the States was allotted in a day. So khellas (that's it, it's finished, game over ... incidentally Jenn, how pleased are you that I have learned the expression for "game over" in Arabic?).
Anyhow. It's interesting to think about what Dubai is to me (sunshine, Range Rovers, diamond-encrusted camels) versus what Dubai is to them (the rare place where they can have a great job, live an open lifestyle, and still be connected to their proverbial roots). I guess at the end of the day, we're all here for very different reasons - but that's what makes this place so interesting. Maybe there's a PhD dissertation on human geography in there somewhere... haha, just kidding. (I hope.)
In closing, I would just like to say that I was in a meeting this morning where one of our project consultants made reference to a JV they had done in Saudi with Bin Laden. I mean, I'm assuming they mean the Saudi BinLaden Group and not OBL himself, but still. I love that I'm in a place where that just gets thrown around as a casual reference. Where do I live?
