Learning About Dubai

Ejo #65 – Please Give Me Your Money

Learning About Dubai, Roshni In Dubai, , , , , , Leave a comment

Please give me your money so I can buy some food with it. Not for me, but for the guys that toil and struggle every day in their efforts to build (and maintain) this sparkling, modern metropolis called Dubai.

Workers in Dubai

Workers getting on the bus heading back to camp.  The skyscrapers that they build in the background. 

I don’t normally beg for food. And if it was for me, I would actually just rather do without (I could probably stand to lose a couple of kilos anyway). But the money I’m asking you for is for a more worthy cause – one which my longtime readers will already be familiar with. Can you believe it’s been 18 months since I last asked you, my friends and family, to help me bring a smile to a labourer’s face (by putting some food in his belly)? Well, indeed a year and a half has tumbled past, and it’s time for me to once more get on my knees and ask you to part with some of your hard earned dollars.

Those of you who have contributed before know that the driving force behind the food donations is Roshni Raimalwala, the hard-working, behind-the-scenes advocate of the labourers and workers of the city – the ones that the government should be doing more to look after (check out the other work she does with Care 2 Share UAE).  She is out there every week (sandstorms and searing sunshine be damned) organising food and grocery handouts on behalf of companies, schools and sometimes individuals – like us – that wish to help.  During religious holidays like Ramadan and Eid, she also arranges larger hampers filled with toiletries, clothes and bedding.  Things the workers need and want, but simply can’t afford to buy on their own.

Standing in front of the building they'll never be able to enter.

Standing in front of the building they helped to build but will never be able to enter.

On Friday, 24th April 2015, David and I will be going to Muhaisnah labour camp (more commonly known as Sonapur, which ironically translates from Hindi as “Land of Gold”) where Roshni has facilitated a handout to be done by some children from one of the local schools. How wonderful is that??  I really think that growing up in this city, it’s super important for young kids to realise that Dubai is not all about beach clubs, malls, nannies and sparkling new bikes.  If they can see that the reason this city even exists is because an entire collective of human beings from another continent have built it from the ground up, surely that’s a great lesson for them to learn.  Another important lesson is to see that there are people less fortunate than they are, to put a face to those people and to reach their hands out to help them.  To make the situation real.  I believe that compassion is one of the most meaningful things that anyone can learn, and even better to learn it from a young age.  I am really looking forward to participating alongside, and meeting, the young philanthropists who have promised their time and energy towards the cause.  I wish you could come along too – and if you’re in Dubai and are interested, please get in touch with me and we can make that happen.

But if you are in Australia, or the US, UK or anywhere else in the world, and would still like to be involved, then please just pledge me a little bit of dough.  It doesn’t have to be a lot.  If you can make do without ten pounds, or five bucks or even just 20HKD then that will still contribute a great deal towards providing a tired, hungry, poor worker with some food that he otherwise would not have enjoyed.  If you can spare more, that would be even better.

Between us, David and I will match every single overseas donation.  So if you all raise the equivalent of 2000dhs, that’s how much we’ll put in the kitty too.  If it’s more, then we’ll be happy to dig deeper.

After all, it’s just money, right?

Ejo #62 – Freedom

Learning About Dubai, Writing, , , , , View all 10 comments

Last month I wrote about us choosing to stay in Dubai even though I don’t enjoy living here.  One of my (formerly) loyal readers didn’t like the post and left this comment on 3rd January:

Hello, I had already written to you and I read your posts each time there a new one, but I am so disappointed by your latest one, this will be the last one I read from you as we do not share the same vision of expatriation.

Indeed I am very disappointed by the way you think.  Of course we are all free to express our thoughts and feelings but I experience this everyday in France where I live and that just pisses me off. I keep hearing people living in my country saying they don’t like anything about it (and sometimes anyone).  This is so disrespectful.  I am not saying we should like everybody and everything but at least we shouldn’t be allowed to be so ungrateful towards a country which has accepted you, we shouldn’t stay in a place we don’t respect (although some might say this is not a matter of respect, I do believe that you can’t respect people or a place you have absolutely no positive thought about).

People always endeavour to live in a better world but how will it ever be possible when after years living in a place where you have been given a new start in life your conclusion is that the only thing you like about it is escaping it!!  For sure no place is perfect in this world and we can rightfully talk about the pros and cons objectively but rejecting so many things and all the people as a whole is just unacceptable to me.

You may not understand my post.  You might even be angry at me, telling me not to come back to your ejo if I don’t like it. But I just needed to express myself!  I don’t understand how you can enjoy travelling so much and be so narrow minded. Peace in the world will never happen with such comments, I am not sure you would understand people liking nothing about your country and staying anyway, that is unfair and you talked about racism but do you think such a blog will help?  This is quite sad.

My reaction to this letter was physical.  I felt out of breath, like I’d been punched. I felt sick.  The concept of her statement was nothing new to me.  David and I often argue that if I hate Dubai so much, perhaps we should just leave.  My therapist, Zimmy, always tries her best to help me see Dubai more positively.  But it took the words coming from a complete stranger to have the most impact on me.  I felt gutted.  And I went to bed in tears resolving to change.

After sleeping on it, I woke up seeing a more balanced picture.  On the one hand, I don’t want to be perceived as a horrible, twisted, negative, complaining person.  On the other, I want the freedom to publish exactly how I feel.  I have never set out to sledge Dubai.  I have only attempted to convey my own difficulty at finding a connection and love for the city I live in.  And, as I wrote to Flo (my former loyal reader), “I have always imagined that my ejo rants were written in an entertaining way, tongue-in-cheek”.

Four days after Flo wrote to me telling me she didn’t like the way I was using words to disrespect the city I’ve chosen to live in, the world was shocked by the appalling Charlie Hebdo attacks in which twelve people were killed, ostensibly in an assault against freedom of speech.  I was too stunned by the magnitude and the meaning of what had happened in Paris to make any kind of connection between that and my own freedom to express myself in my ejos.  But it occurs to me now that while it would be foolish to make a comparison between myself and the Parisian publication, parallels can be drawn to any person who elects to express themselves publicly.

Was Charlie Hebdo promoting racism by reprinting supposedly blasphemous cartoons of an Islamic prophet?  Or were they using satire to make a point?  Have I unwittingly been promoting racism by bitching about Dubai?  Or have I been trying to draw attention to a monster problem that exists in this city?  Is Flo’s response to my ejo a charge against my own freedom of speech?  And if so, should I fight back by continuing to publish and voice my opinion?  Or should I fold to her criticism?

I’ve decided that Flo’s comments are simply her freely expressing how she feels.  And that’s OK.  I don’t think she’s trying to tell me to change the way I write.  I think she’s telling me that she just no longer wants to read it.  And that’s OK too.  Am I sad to lose a reader?  Yes.  But I don’t write my ejos in order to collect subscribers.  I write them for me.  I can not, and will not, allow someone else’s opinion of me to change the way I write or what I write about.

Je suis Chryss.

Ejo #61 – Status Quo (Not Coming Home)

Learning About Dubai, Travel, Writing, , , , , , , , One comment

So, I don’t need to tell anyone how I feel about Dubai. We all know. No need to beat that dead horse. So surely, given the opportunity to leave this joint and go back home to Australia, I would jump at the chance, right?? Well, I guess if that had been the case, this ejo would have a very different title. Something along the lines of “Ejo #61 – Escape At Last” or “Ejo #61 – Fuck Off Dubai, We’re Going Home” or similar. You get the gist. As it is, my ejo this month is not about the colossally magnificent news that we’re packing up and moving back to Australia. Nope. It’s about having the opportunity to do so, carefully (oh, so very carefully) considering it and then rejecting it.

For the first time since we’ve moved to Dubai (way, way back in October 2008) Airservices Australia (the country’s only Air Navigation Service Provider – and our previous employer) has opened up recruitment to overseas air traffic controllers. When we first heard about it David and I kind of looked at each other sideways trying to assess how the other felt about the possibility of chucking it in here and finally heading back from whence we came.  Neither of us wanted to ask the question, and neither of us wanted to answer it.  But we both knew what the question was: Are we ready to go home?

Eventually we got around to talking about it.  The conversations would go something like this:

“So, do you want to apply?”

“I’m not sure.  Do you?”

“Not sure”.

In the end we decided that we would write to the recruitment people and ask them a few questions.  Dealbreakers like where we could expect to get placed and whether or not we could expect to get placed in the same city.  If Rockhampton was our only option, the scenario instantly became less palatable.  And if one of us could go to Melbourne but the other would be placed in Sydney, same deal.  I’ve always said that my marriage is more important to me than my career, and I’m not about to start a long distance relationship with David now.

When they got back to us we discovered that Melbourne Tower was not even on the board.  This drastically reduced the attractiveness of the idea of moving back for me.  If I go home, it’s to go home.  And for me, that’s Melbourne.  If I’m living in Sydney or, even worse, Perth then I’m not home and I might as well stay where I am.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against either of those places, but the deal would be made a lot sweeter if we had the chance to move directly to Melbourne.

In case you didn’t know, the main reason that David and I moved to Dubai in the first place was an increasing level of disenchantment with the management style of Airservices Australia.  When we first got to Dubai, our employer was the sharing and caring antidote to that and we were happy.  Unfortunately, over the years our current employers’ management style has rapidly deteriorated to the same level as we were experiencing back home.  I’m talking about deceit, derision and downright hostility towards their air traffic controllers.  Morale here is not good.  People are resigning in droves and returning to their home countries leaving behind radar units and towers that are painfully short staffed.  The company is unable to recruit air traffic controllers from elsewhere because they aren’t offering an attractive enough package.  And we’re not just disenchanted, but also disillusioned and disengaged.  So it ain’t a happy place.

So why do we stay?  Let me make you a list of things I miss from Australia.

* my family

* my friends

* coffee (oh my god, the coffee)

* no smoking in restaurants, bars and cafes

* the weather

* the amazing restaurant scene

* the sound of birds

* the lack of in-your-face racism

* the culture

* our house

* our neighbourhood

* road rules

* clean air

* trees, plants, flowers, the colour green

* jobs done by those who want to do them, rather than jobs determined by nationality

* quality healthcare

* good service

* not being called sir EVER AGAIN

* being able to wear whatever I like

* being able to kiss my husband in public

* being able to swear in public (I’ve started doing this here and think I’d best stop)

* not being afraid to be drunk in public for fear of being arrested

* not being afraid of being thrown in jail for no good reason

* being able to flip people the bird if I feel like it (it’s the principle)

* great fashion

* reliable mail

* no freaking construction

* no sand EVERYWHERE

* Madame Brussels

* cleaning ladies not being terrified that I’m going to beat them

* pornography (again, not something I necessarily want, but give me the choice god damn it)

* freedom of speech

* reading magazines where they call it wine and beer, not grape and hops

* bacon, oh crispy bacon

* being able to log onto Skype, Spotify etc. without having to hide my location using a VPN

* the countryside

* being able to ski within three hours of the city

* OPSM (seriously, I’ve never had a pair of prescription glasses made properly here)

* no in-your-face wasta

* people that turn their headlights on at night (der)

* wineries

* skilled tradespeople

* OH&S

* minimum wage

* human rights (OK, Australia’s record of that isn’t so great either, but at least you aren’t subjected to it on a daily basis)

* recycling

* addresses (there’s no street name/number system here – you navigate using landmarks)

* great live music scene

* people washing their own damn cars

* not needing the aircon on 24/7

* good hairdressers*

 

I really could go on, but I think you get the idea.  Now I’ll list what I would miss about Dubai if we were to move back home.

* the travel.
 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, maybe the cheap and plentiful taxis too.  And that’s about it.  But that one thing, right now, is worth sacrificing all those other things that I miss about home.  I’m not done travelling yet.  I don’t know if I ever will be.  I’ve got a severe case of wanderlust, and I’ve got it bad.  And living here allows me to regularly, and frequently, scratch that itch in a way that I wouldn’t be able to do from Australia.  So I forfeit my family and my friends and great coffee in exchange for being able to see the world.  I can’t even say if it’s a fair exchange.  I just know that I’m not ready to give it up yet.  And (thank goodness) neither is David.  If one of us wanted to go home, we have agreed that we would go.  But for now we’re staying.

In other news, we are coming home in February for a  couple of weeks so that we can get our fix of all those things we miss about it.  Best of both worlds.

 

 

* If anyone can recommend a GREAT hairdresser in Melbourne, I’d be extremely grateful.