At work, the Arabian men all kiss and hongi every morning. They are very affectionate with each other and regularly run about the building giggling and holding hands. It's all very sweet. The ladies are the same, but there are not so many ladies in my particular work area. The only two ladies I work with closely have just been borrowed by the field department to oversee some Economic Survey field work in Al Ain, where they live, and won't be back in the Abu Dhabi office till after Christmas.
My favourite Mohammed (there are a lot of Mohammeds here) has also been sent off to oversee the field work, so he doesn't sit at the desk in front of me any more. He is a very sociable chap and consequently, every morning for the first couple of months I was here, all the men in the villa would pass by his desk and do the double kiss (sometimes triple), hongi and handshake (shake with the right hand and place the left hand on the shoulder).
Now that the Mohammeds and Ahmeds have gone off to do field work, the office is much quieter, and we have all moved desks. My current podmate is Wa'el. He is a very experienced economic survey statistician and analyst, the same age as me from Jordan, with a fabulous sense of humour. We had been working together for some weeks before Matthew arrived from New Zealand, who is our team leader. At the time poor Matthew was still suffering from the shock of arrival in a completely different culture and country. So I took it upon myself to tell him that he needed to shake hands every morning with all the men. And then, just for fun, I suggested to Wa'el that he needed to introduce Matthew to the local customs. I said I thought he should shake hands with him every morning, and give him a kiss. And, he needed to initiate because Matthew was shy (which he isn't!) and didn't know what to do! Wa'el said: step-by-step, Ruth. He has only been here two days. I give him a week, and then I shake hands. I said: what about the kissing thing and the hongi? (I told Wa'el it was called a hongi in NZ.) Wa'el said he didn't do the hongi because that was a Gulf Arabic thing. And he refused to kiss Matthew (they all know that in the West it is not usual for men to kiss each other in public). But eventually, he relented and said maybe after Eid, he would start greeting Matt with a kiss in the mornings. One step at a time! So now, Matthew and Wa'el are shaking hands every morning. And I'm really looking forward to seeing if Wa'el gets up the nerve to do the double kiss with Matthew when we all go back to work after Eid!
We have discovered that Matt means 'died' in Arabic, so we are calling him Matthew!
And I am still learning to say Wa'el's name properly. There is a guttural sound that we just don't have in English that is the '. I spoke to an Irish woman surveyor who's first language was Gaelic, and she said she was OK with it because that sound exists in Gaelic. Wa'el tells me I am saying his name right because he is polite, but I know I am not because someone else asked me who I meant when I mentioned him the other day!
Meanwhile, I have also discovered that my 'reputation' has been ruined because not only have I been smoking out the back of the villa with my some Mohammeds, and a couple of chatty Ahmeds (from Jordan and Sudan) as well as some of the other boys, but I was seen getting into Mohammed's car after a late meeting one day. He was a total gentleman and offered me a ride to my hotel which was in town because it's hard to get a taxi from the work villas as they are in the middle of suburbia. Apparently, he got a telling off from someone in another villa for compromising my reputation!
I fear I am trampling over all sorts of social and cultural boundaries and rules hour-by-hour, day-by-day, but its hopeless trying to avoid it. I don't know what the rules are till I have trampled on them and been informed by someone. I am trying to encourage people to let me know if I look like I am about to do something really awful. But generally everyone is far too polite to mention it. (Ahmed from Sudan finally got up the courage to ask me to speak more slowly after about 6 weeks of chatting with him, because he was having difficulty understanding me!) They are all very forgiving of ignorant Western ways. Abu Dhabi Emirate has 193 different nationalities living in it, and only 20% are Nationals (according to Dr Refai who prepared some tables for public release last week). It is a very multi-cultural society. As far as I can tell at the moment, most people who come here to work seem to be Muslim. For instance, a lot of the Indian people here seem to be Muslim rather than Hindu. Engineer Sajad, who supervised the replacement of my kitchen sink after it fell out of the polished marble benchtop full of washing up water and cutlery into the cupboard below, told me: "There is many problem with Muslim and Hindu people in India. Here is much better country." He told me that the number of construction jobs is reducing in Abu Dhabi, but he will not go home after he finishes the complex next door to mine (called Al Jeemi) but he will find another job because he likes it here so much.
At work we are desperately trying to get the Census together so we can find out accurately, exactly what religions and nationalities really are here.
Some of the people I've talked to really don't want to be here and just want to go home back to their villages. So far its only been taxi drivers. It's a horrible job. They work really long shifts (sometimes 12 hours straight) on very dangerous roads - everyone drives at least 20kph faster than the speed limit because you don't get any camera fines till you reach that speed! So many people are driving at 80kph through town, and 140-160kph on the highways out of town. One taxi driver told me he particularly did not like driving Nationals because they were always in a hurry and telling him to drive faster and faster, but he had to pay the speeding fines out of his salary and commission so he didn't want to. But the taxi company told them they must always put the customer first! Poor thing - what a dilemma. One driver told me that virtually all the young men in his village in Pakistan were here driving taxis, or working as drivers for Arab families. He said he would much rather leave the money earning to his big brother who had been here 15 years, but his mother told him he had to come here and earn some money. And last time he went home she said: Don't come back without any savings again! (He laughed when he said it, so I assume it was all in good humour!) I can just imagine his village in Pakistan, bereft of young men, with all the wives and mothers and children waiting for their husbands, sons and fathers, to arrive home for a visit a couple of times a year bringing cash so they can eat in between times.
No comments:
Post a Comment