Well not quite Arabia, but close enough.
Hello all,
To those of you for whom this is the first email you’ve received from me, I apologize both for not having had you on my contact list earlier and for having been out of touch with you for anywhere between a couple months and 5 years. Better late than never, I suppose.
To the rest of you who have received previous updates (all 1 of them), I apologize for taking so long to send out this installment. Hope you enjoyed the pictures I sent in the interim.
So I figured the best way to give you all an impression of my life in Abu Dhabi would be to just hit you with a smattering of observations and anecdotes that I’ve accumulated in my short time here. Here’s the first round. Get comfortabe; it’s a long one.
I’ll begin with words I never thought I’d utter during my time here: I went for a run in the rain last night. That’s right; believe it or not, in the middle of a country whose average annual precipitation is just slightly less than that on the moon, it rained pretty much for three days straight, and not just drizzle either – real, honest to Allah rain. It seems that our good ol’ prez decided to bring that black cloud that’s been hanging over the U.S. for the last 8 years with him when he visited here, and the cloud just decided to extend its stay after Bush left (I suppose, given the choice, I’ll take the cloud).
And, go figure, but a city in the middle of the desert has no idea how to handle this kind of weather. I actually lost power for a while yesterday, and the streets are a mess b/c there’s no drainage, so veritable lakes have collected in certain places, such as the driveway to my apartment complex, which is so flooded that the police had to call in Moses to deal with the problem. What’s more, my student and all his classmates are fascinated by the rain since they so rarely get to see it. It’s analagous to what the concept of snow was like to my students in south Texas. My kid is especially obsessed; during a torrential downpour yesterday, he asked me about 8 times if I noticed that it was raining. I responded by calling him Captain Obvious and remarking that despite what he may have thought, I did still retain my powers of sensory perception.
Speaking of my student, he is still a blast to work with, and his sense of humor continues to amuse me to no end. It even manifests itself in his behavior problems. When I upset him by telling him to do a math problem without a calculator, he complained “This is not the prehistoric age. Why can’t I use a calculator?” I somehow resisted the urge to laugh and even felt a little bad for following through with his programmed consequence for talking back, but consistency is the cornerstone of a good behavior intervention program, after all.
His classmates at the British School prove to be just as entertaining. Now, I’m convinced that 8th graders are equally goofballish on one side of the globe as the other, but this is my first exposure to the unique humor, attitude, and vernacular that is representative of the British culture. Teachers routinely demonstrate effective classroom management through expressions such as ”Do shut up” or the always-eloquent “Oy!”, kids use words like “hell” in class regularly w/o batting an eyelash, and everytime I hear a student ask another to borrow a “rubber”, I have the fleeting impression that I’m in a sex education video before I remember that all they want is an eraser. What’s worse, it seems that Brit-speak is contagious: while chastising a boy for stealing a girl’s purse at lunch break, I meant to say ”Luke, I see you like women’s things,” but it came out “Fancy women’s things, do we Luke?” Honestly, I wanted to hit myself.
The Emirati culture is an entirely different but equally perplexing enigma wrapped in a conundrum wrapped in a kandoora. Let me first say that with very few exceptions, everyone I’ve met here has been amazingly friendly, helpful, and generous in a way that we isolationist Americans might find odd. And much as I hate to make generalizations about an entire people (except Americans), there are a few common traits that seem to underlie all walks of life here.
First is the concept of “insh’allah.” The literal translation of this word is, I believe, “God willing,” but it has come to take on all manner of meanings, often dependent on the tone and inflection of the person using it at the time, ranging from “hopefully” to “maybe” to “don’t hold your breath” and everything in between. Furthermore, this expression is as perfectly acceptable a response to “So I’ll see you later?” as it is to “So you’ll have that project upon which the entire fate of this corporation and all its employees rests done by tomorrow, right?” While the concepts of time, deadlines, and schedules aren’t nearly as rigid here as they are in the West, it’s not that people just don’t care about breaking plans or promises; it’s that for Muslims, and not just the most devout among them, EVERYTHING, from the mundane to the monumental, is subject to Allah’s will. Assuming that any future event is certain or written in stone is tantamount to ignoring Allah’s power to influence human events. While I am not and probably never will be religious or spiritual, I do find the depth of these people’s faith and the degree to which they acknowledge and accept that much in our lives is beyond our control to be both interesting and inspirational. At the very least, it’s lead me to avoid getting overly-frustrated when things don’t work out as planned.
Yet another and just slightly less significant hallmark of Emirati life is an obsession with pretty much any type of motorized vehicle, coupled with a complete disregard for any laws, suggestions, or common sense designed to encourage operating said vehicles with anything less than reckless and life-threatening abandon. Nowhere does this trait manifest itself more clearly than on the city streets of Abu Dhabi. Taxis and luxury cars alike dart in and out of gaps so small that you wonder how the streets aren’t littered with front and rear bumpers, every lane is “the passing lane,” and drivers have about as much regard for pedestrians as they do for their own turn signals. It’s as if a bunch of NYC cabbies, Hollywood stunt drivers, and Formula One racers somehow cross-bred and produced an unholy brood of speed-crazed children who were nursed on a cocktail of Red Bull and crystal meth. Well those kids grew up, and now they all have licenses.
Then there’s the passion for quad biking, which I do not share but which has nonetheless affected my experience here. As the desert camping trip with my student and his brothers proved, it seems to be the goal of the Emiratis to turn any bare patch of sand into a playground for these cacophonous vehicles. In my opinion, hearing their incessant drone kind of spoils the natural beauty of the desert, by which I was more captivated than I had anticipated and which is impossible to describe in words – even my pictures don’t do it justice. Also, the area where we camped, though miles into the desert from the nearest town, is a major staging area for quad bike races, so between people riding into all hours of the night and the giant floodlights they’ve set up to allow such recreation, the night sky, while still better than anything I’ve seen in while, wasn’t as brilliant and star-filled as it should have been. Luckily I got to see a better star-gazing sky this past weekend when I went camping and rock climbing in Oman – we were in a pretty remote area and were only disturbed by a few quad bikers once or twice, and those times only during the day.
I guess my idea of desert camping is just different than that of the locals, which is understandable: if my ancestors had spent thousands of years wandering the desert with nothing but their camels to keep them company, I’d probably want more than an endless expanse of sand and stars too. And I really can’t complain; aside from the quad bikes and floodlights and the tragic fact that people here treat the desert like a giant trash can, the trip was wonderful, and I guess I got a healthy dose of the Emirati experience. I ate Bedouin style – sitting on the carpeted ground inside the kaimah (which is Arabic for “needlessly complex miniature circus tent comprised of far too many individual sections that takes 14 people 2 hours to set up in the dark”), taking food, most of which consists of rice and meat dishes, from communal plates and eating it with the right hand only; I convinced the kids to abandon their quad bikes for an hour or so to hike up (and roll or jump down) the dunes; and I took in the view from the tallest dune in the world. All in all, not a bad way to spend a weekend.
Ok, that was more than enough for one email. I congratulate those of you who read the whole thing in one sitting (or at all), especially since I didn’t write it all in one sitting. I’ll pass along a few more stories and hopefully more pictures in another email soon. Til then, hope all of you are well, and as always, I’d love to hear from each and every one of you. Take care.
Maxa salaama,
Jared
