Day 310 - Other Travels in the Region

road map of the United Arab Emirates showing
the triangle of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Al Ain

The roads connecting three cities in the United Arab Emirates form an equilateral triangle. Sixty miles separated Abu Dhabi from Dubai, Dubai from Al Ain, and Al Ain from Abu Dhabi. We traveled that triangle often.

Our first trip to Dubai was in the fall, just after all the family members of expatriate workers, who abandonded the peninsula for the summer, returned. Also, coincidentally right after a number of roads had been added or rerouted within and around Dubai. We got lost on our way to the souq in Sharjah, one of the smaller emirates of the seven that constitute the United Arab Emirates, and even the traffic police couldn't tell us which way to go. Sharjah was adjacent to Dubai and had one of the most modern souqs in the country. It was also the home of Pinky's a set of three warehouses where the owner stored items he imported from India for his shop which had been in the downtown Dubai souq. When the owner of Pinky's learned several years earlier that the old souq was going to be replaced by a modern souq, he closed up his shop in anticipation of the old souq being destroyed, but that still hadn't happened. But the three warehouses gave him so much more room, he never looked for new space. Instead, he welcomed shoppers to the warehouses which were so crowded with stuff that just walking into them was an adventure. There were treasurers to be found everywhere.

by  J I G I S H A
 a.k.a Nitin Badhwar

We often headed out on the weekend for breakfast either in Dubai or Al Ain. The Jumeirah Beach Hotel opened in 1997 and offered a spectacular location for Friday (Gulf Sunday) brunch with its view of the Burj Al Arab, a companion hotel located off the coast on a man-made island.

Al Ain was an oasis city, the original home of the then leader of the U.A.E., Sheikh Zayid bin Sultan Al Nahyan. Flowers, especially roses, lined the roads of Al Ain, making it a garden in the desert. Lucent had a hotel suite permanently rented there for its staff when work needed to be done in that area. More than once, I went with Alex and while he worked, I spent the time around the pool at the hotel.

by  fchmksfkcb  Al Ain was right on the border with Oman. The Omani city of Buraimi sat across the border, and together with Al Ain formed international twin cities. We often crossed into Oman at Buraimi on our way to the Al Suwadi Beach Hotel on the coast of Oman, just outside Muscat, where we spent more than one Eid holiday during our three years in Abu Dhabi. The two Eid holidays begin when the religious leaders of the country see the new moon or otherwise determine when the holiday begins. Most countries on the Arabian peninsula follow whatever the religious leaders in Saudi Arabia declare. Our friends told us that Oman, however, did not. Oman had its own designated religious leaders who declared when the holidays began. Their religious leaders always seemed not to see the signs until the day after the leaders in Saudi Arabia. But since so many people traveled internationally to be together with family for these important holidays, the Omani government gave employees the day before the holidays began off. A neat trick, right? We also spent time in Muscat with friends. A couple we met through Doha Players, Alf and Gina, had moved to Oman from Doha. And my friend Gloria, the ambassador's secretary in Doha, was also on assignment with the embassy in Muscat. Our travels to Oman were the only trips where we couldn't get unleaded gasoline for our car. We filled the tank in Al Ain and hoped we wouldn't run out before returning to the U.A.E. If we ran dangerously low, we would add a few gallons, but never fill it. by  rapidtravelchai  There were pockets of Oman completely surrounded by the emirate of Dubai as well. There were no border crossing booths at the edges of these pockets, but no one could mistake that we were in Oman. The Sultan of Oman was insistent that the streets not just be clean, they sparkled. The rocks and bricks lining the roads appeared to have been shellacked or washed just moments before we passed them. We also traveled in 1998 from Abu Dhabi to Doha. Doha had been an important period in our lives since Alex and I met there. Several people we knew in Doha were in Abu Dhabi with us - the deputy chief of mission and his wife, one of the information program officers, Allan and Janis, and Ian and Julie. Allan worked with Alex at Etisalat. Ian worked with Alex at Lucent. We met others who had also previously been in Doha including Don who also worked at Etisalat. And one evening at a representational event at the ambassador's residence, a couple who were talking with the head of the consular section, Charlie, overheard one of us mention that we had previously been in Doha and they asked to be introduced to us. They also had been in Doha and had equally good memories of their time there. There was something magical about Doha that drew us back. by  vobios  In 1998 the embassy was still in the same building I knew although a number of temporary buildings had been added along the edge of the compound where all the administrative functions were now housed. The main building had been turned into a controlled access area which required everyone to be escorted within. We never went in. But we thoroughly enjoyed walking through the places we enjoyed so much when we lived there - the Center, the Caravan restaurant, the Sheraton Hotel, and the ring roads. We also went to the mall which had opened since we left Doha. In contrast to the elaborate and exotic and over-the-top malls in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the mall in Doha could have been in any midwestern U.S. town, just one more reason that we enjoyed living in Doha. It was a small town, just like the small towns we had grown up in, with just enough exotic foreignness to make living there an adventure.

Day 309 - Preview Of Yemen

by  ~W~ 

When it was time for me to bid on my next job, the important criteria were first, that the job be in the middle east, as close to Abu Dhabi as possible, and second, that the job involve Arabic language training because I would need Arabic in order to be a credible candidate for a different job back in the U.A.E. later. The latter was important because we believed Alex would be able to continue working for Lucent until he was ready to retire. It didn't turn out that way, but we couldn't know that in advance. It was the plan. Plans change.

According to our plan, if we wanted to continue living together, I would have to bid successfully on a job at the same or higher grade in either Abu Dhabi or Dubai after my next job. Since I was leaving the most senior level position in the administrative function, I would have to bid on a job outside my specialty as head of the consular, economic, or political sections or even as deputy chief of mission in Abu Dhabi or consul general in Dubai. The latter four positions required Arabic language competency and there was no way I would be a credible candidate for the jobs if I didn't already have the language. The Department didn't send out-of-specialty bidders for senior jobs to language training because there were too many uncertainties and too much time involved. Since it had been years since I had done any consular work, I wouldn't be a credible candidate for the head of the consular section whether or not I had Arabic language competency.

There were two possible administrative positions in the region that were language-designated which meant I could get the language training before going there - in Damascus and Sanaa. The Damascus job was a higher grade and Damascus was just that much further away that it would be more difficult to get away to the U.A.E. to spend time with Alex, putting two strikes against Damascus. Whether I wanted to go to Yemen or not (and I didn't), the job in Sanaa was the only one that both met the criteria and I had any hope of being assigned to.

And that is what happened - I was assigned to Sanaa via one year of Arabic language training in Washington. And Alex planned to remain in Abu Dhabi.

At one point, I considered requesting approval to study Arabic in Sanaa so that Alex and I wouldn't be separated by such a great distance. One of the State employees in Abu Dhabi had done that. But I realized my reason - that I wanted to be closer to my husband - would be seen as a personal reason and the Department never approves arrangements for an employee's personal benefit.

by  CharlesFred 

We decided to make a trip to Sanaa from Abu Dhabi to see what I was getting into. The administrative oifficer in Sanaa, Howard, made arrangements for us that an official visitor would have reason to expect, but we were unofficially there. He picked us up at the airport, put us up in one of the embassy's leased apartments, and brought us to the embassy to meet people as well as traveled with us outside of the capital to see some of the countryside. This was much more than we had a right to expect.

When we arrived at the airport, things looked chaotic. It was our first view of the traditional Yemeni dress with men wearing what would be described as dresses or skirts, scarves on their head, sports coats worn over the ceremonial knife, the jambia, worn around the waist, with rifles over their shoulders. It was an intimidating introduction.

Typical scene in Yemen cities in 1999

Once we got out of the airport and into a vehicle, all we could see was garbage. The roads were littered with trash. Not just paper, trash. The sides of the roads were full of trash. When we got into the city itself, it wasn't any better. Most houses had high walls around them, so we couldn't see what the grounds near the houses were like, but outside the walls, there was trash.

We hadn't gotten very far before Alex announced that he wasn't coming back. 

At the embassy, we met the ambassador, Barbara Bodine, and the deputy chief of mission, Margaret Scobey. We talked about the possibility of my coming to Yemen for my language training. That might have been a way for me to make the case - if the embassy requested that I attend one of the language schools in Sanaa instead of going back to Washington. But it also raised my suspicions that I would end up working at the embassy and not get in the amount of studying I needed to master the language - the primary goal for bidding on the Sanaa job.].

While meeting with the two of them, Alex announced that he didn't see that there would be anything for him to do in Sanaa.

Village outside of Sanaa

Howard took us to a village about a half-hour's drive from Sanaa to see the sights and do some shopping in the souq. This village was well known for the number of school-aged children who could converse - and bargain - in multiple languages. They spoke English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and probably Russian and a couple of other Slavic languages. The children would approach tourists, figure out which language the tourists spoke, and then lead the tourists down the narrow alleyways to the shopping area, providing commentary on the traditional architecture along the way. There wasn't much special in the souq, but the children provided entertainment worth the trip. Sadly, embassy staff members no longer can travel outside Sanaa without permission and armed escorts due to the deteriorating security situation in the region.

All along the way, there was garbage on the roads.

Alex in a village outside Sanaa

We went to dinner with the regional medical officer - the same medical officer who had Abu Dhabi as part of his regional responsibility - and his wife at a fish restaurant where the fish were swimming around in a tank, ensuring our meal would be fresh. The fish is baked in a clay oven right alongside the flat bread that is served with the fish. And we talked about the garbage that we just couldn't ignore. The RMO's wife said she had started going outside the walls of their house each day to sweep up the trash in front of the house. Initially she was greeted with stares from her neighbors. But one day she noticed another woman on her street outside the walls at the same time, also sweeping up the trash. There was hope.

Howard also took us to Sanaa's old city, the UNESCO heritage site the gates of which are one of the most recognizable of Yemen's views. As we made our way through the very narrow and twisting alleys, we popped into several of the shops where Howard introduced us to the shopkeepers. We weren't interested in buyng anything yet, but at one point Alex did announce to a shopkeeper that he would be interested in looking at one of the items later, when we returned to Sanaa.

We still couldn't ignore the trash. But we began to see beyond it to the adventures we had to look forward to.

Day 308 - Interns

Each summer we had college students who came to Abu Dhabi to work as interns. Most of the interns were assigned to the political or economic sections because that is where the substantive, i.e., really important, work was done. And the interns who arrived with strong international relations and political science backgrounds did well during their stays. They got exposed to diplomatic life, got a taste of what working at an embassy was like, and had lots of fodder for resumes or job interviews. Many of their assignments were more like research papers which the interns wrote up as telegrams that could not be sent without being rewritten because they were always too long. Still, the interns were assigned to those sections.

But the administrative and consular sections could easily assign tasks to the interns that needed to be done. If only those who assigned interns thought our work was important.

Sean, his wife, another guest, and Sandra
at their wedding reception

The summer we arrived, only one of the interns, Sean, was still in the country. He had been assigned to transfer all the paper biographic files into a database. When he was done, he invited all the Americans to a demonstration of the database. In spite of the fact that all his work was done for those in the political and economic sections, the only person who came for his briefing was me. I think that is why he kept in touch with me, even inviting me to his wedding four years later.

The second summer, there was one intern who didn't adjust very well. I saw him most days at lunch where he sat alone at a table, rocking back and forth in his chair, looking very uncomfortable. A second intern, a woman, was assigned to a house we weren't planning to keep in our housing pool, but it was located within walking distance of embassy and the lease hadn't expired yet. None of the other embassy employees lived near that house, so her neighbors sort of adopted her when they realized she was living in the house alone, something they couldn't imagine for themselves. They invited her to their home for meals, brought food to her house when she couldn't join them, and took her shopping for clothes they felt were more appropriate for her to walk to and from work in. I think she had one of the most successful internships as it was meaningful both professionally and personally.

The third summer there were several interns, but one, Meredith, was special. I don't recall which section she worked in - it wasn't the administrative section because we were always the last to be considered. But we ended up spending a lot of time with her anyway.  

Sandra, Alex and Meredith at Alex's bar

Half way through her internship, we needed the apartment we had assigned to her for a TDY employee the bosses decided shouldn't be put into a hotel room. But we didn't want Meredith to have to stay in a hotel either. So we offered our second bedroom to her. That way she could get to and from work with me and I knew she would eat right - or as right as Alex and I ate.

When Meredith moved in, she told us that the newest of our cats, RF, was one she had hoped to take back to the U.S. with her. She had brought him home to her first apartment, but when she told her parents she was planning to bring home a cat, they weren't pleased. So she brought him back to the vet's office where I found him a couple of days later.

Meredith in the desert

Alex took Meredith and me out into the desert so she could see the dunes and oases. In spite of the number of people who had four-wheel-drive vehicles, almost no one from the embassy had been out into those off-road locations. Alex had to drive into the desert every day, so he was willing to take us. 

We left Abu Dhabi shortly after Meredith. I spent the next ten months in Arabic language classes and Meredith lived in Manassas, one of the beyond-the-beltway cities. During that year, Meredith and I had dinner together a few times. She was studying Arabic so I invited her to the iftar event I organized for the students in the Arabic program. And when it was time for me to go to Yemen, we asked Meredith to house sit for us because I would only be away from DC for a year, not long enough to arrange for someone to rent our house. It also meant I didn't have to pack up everything.

When I returned from Yemen, I didn't see Meredith often. But I did run into her several years later in the departure lounge of the airport in Port au Prince, Haiti. I had been in Haiti for a week doing volunteer work with a school run by a Lutheran organization and Meredith had completed a business trip for the USAID contractor that she worked for.

It is a small world.

Day 307 - I Just Need Your Signature

by  ben g 

It wasn't just in Abu Dhabi that I heard that phrase as a paper was handed over by someone who obviously expected me to sign it without looking at it first. But it happened more often there. Initially I decided it was another example of the difference between military regs that spelled out the steps that must be taken vs. the civilian regs that spelled out what should be done.

It happened a lot in Barbados, too, but then the requests came from first tour officers in the consular section who hadn't been acquainted with the full range of government regulations yet.  I know the consular training drilled in the responsibility that only a consular officer has to decide whether an applicant is eligible for a non-immigrant visa, but perhaps the training overstated how only a consular officer has this level of personal and professional responsibility. I am sure no consular officer would accept a form shoved under his or her nose by an applicant with the statement, "I just need your signature." After all, evaluation and deliberation by the consular officer is required.

Yet, when the form was a request for a petty cash reimbursement, no one seemed to think my signature required any review, evaluation, or deliberation.

But things got a mite more complicated in Abu Dhabi.  My first year there, 1996, was the year that ICASS, or International Cooperative Administrative Support System, was introduced. ICASS was the successor to FAAS, or Foreign Affairs Administrative Support, which was the successor to SAS, or Shared Adminstrative Support. Each of those systems was an attempt to come up with a fair way for all the agencies at posts to get services from State and pay their fair share of the costs to State. Each version started out as a good and fair system, but over time the lines between what we State adminstrative staff must provide and what the agencies expected got blurred. And because the calculations for determining each agency's costs were based on workload counts during a predictable period of time, some agencies would make sure no requests for sevices were submitted those weeks or months to keep their costs low.

Even that manipulation of the calculations wasn't the worst aspect of FAAS, the system in place when I began with State. The worst aspect of the system was that the final decisions about the distribution of costs were made during annual conferences held in Washington where State compromised with other agencies when those agencies' representatives were more persuasive than State's reps. The bottom line was that we did the work overseas, we had to justify with every agency head at the embassy every workload number that went into the report sent back to Washington - always a contentious scenario - and in the end, neither we nor the agency reps knew what the final dollar contributions were.

 by  isafmedia 
Image of a Council with military and
civilian representatives

ICASS was intended to solve some of these problems. First, all the agencies at post had to form their own ICASS council which would make decisions about what services were required and what the performance standards for those services should be. Each agency at post would then determine what level of those services they needed - 100%, 60%, or 30%. All workload counts for each service were to be agreed upon up front. And no side deals would be allowed. It was the side deals that spelled the death of FAAS because they were the reason so many compromises had to be made in Washington.

My predecessor in Abu Dhabi predicted ICASS would be a catastrophe with the military agencies dictating everything. His prediction was based on the numbers - 9 military agencies vs 7 civilians agencies. Each agency got one vote in the ICASS Council and the head of the largest of the military agencies was elected to serve as ICASS Council Chair. But my predecessor's predictions were not realized. It was rocky to get ICASS set up, but it was far from catastrophic.

So what does all of this have to do with that statement, "I just need your signature"? ICASS changed the rules. That's what.

Before ICASS, there was little clarity concerning just what we in the administrative section could and could not do for our other agency colleagues. It is likely that getting that signature took longer than the requester thought was necessary because the signer had to do some research to be sure the signature was proper. It is very likely that signatures were provided when they shouldn't have been - not for any devious reasons, just because the situation wasn't clear. Those military regs sometimes gave them impression that once steps 1 through 5 were completed, the signature, step 6, was automatic. But civilian regs allowed for some variations which left that final signature as the one that affirmed all the steps up to that point were proper. 

My bottom line: if you just need my signature, I just need the time necessary to review the paperwork to be sure it is complete and proper.

With the introduction of ICASS, we had to create a document that spelled out each of the services we would provide, within what timeframes, based on being provided correct and complete information needed for that step. And then we would only be able to provide those services to employees of an agency that had subscribed to that cost center at the level that included that service. I needed a flow chart to figure out when I could sign the form and - and this was the biggest difference - when I couldn't because the agency had not subscribed to the service.

Most people were not used to being told we couldn't do what they asked. And we had to get used to explaining - sometimes in excruciating detail - why we couldn't.

Here is an example. One agency did not subscribe to leasing and residential maintenance services because they discovered they could save money at post (but not for the agency overall) by providing their staff with a Living Quarters Allowance (LQA) instead of leasing residences. The cost for leases came out of their operating budget. LQA was an allowance paid out of the agency's Washington-based personnel budget. I argued that this savings would cause hardship for their 3 staff members because they would have to negotiate their own leases and work with the landlords directly to have repairs done. We, the administrative staff, would not be able to help them if the agency did not subscribe to those services.

Two of the first three of their staff members ended up leasing apartments in the same buillding where the embassy had other leases. So the landlord knew if something needed to be done, he would hear from the embassy. We made sure embassy staff members knew they had to bring their concerns to us first because sometimes what was a concern to the employee was a personal preference which we would not require the landlord to address.

So when one of the two members of the non-subscribing agency had a problem and brought it to the attention of the landlord, he ignored it, assuming that if it was important enough, the embassy would call.  But we couldn't.

ICASS is still around. In fact, I work for the Washington office of ICASS one day a week. It is a good system. I just happened to be in Abu Dhabi during the teething phase.

Day 306 - More Us Vs. Them

  by  id-iom 

In spite of my expectations that my assignment in Abu Dhabi had everything going for us, both personally and professionally, there were challenges. I experienced my most troublesome supervisory challenge in Abu Dhabi, but I did learn a good lesson from this same employee.

Let me put that lesson into perspective.

Part of the explanation is the military vs. civilian cultural differences and the lack of trust that resulted. When there is so little trust among colleagues, it is easy to slip into the frame of mind that assumes the worst of them. So those who felt they were not getting the service they deserved were quick to complain. If the service they weren't getting was the responsibility of someone who reported to me, I got the complaints. If the service they weren't getting was my responsibility, or if I didn't respond as expected or quickly enough, my boss, the deputy chief of mission, got the complaints. It was an uncomfortable situation many days.

One other factor was that a number of the people assigned in Abu Dhabi were in the business of gathering information from whatever sources could be found, analyzing it, and drawing conclusions from it. It was their job to do so since it wasn't likely that they were going to be able to sit down at a cocktail party and make small talk with those they were interested in learning more about. I understood that. But now and again the information gathered was an overheard statement by an employee in another office and the conclusions drawn were acted on as if they were true. And if there was a complaint rolled into those conclusions, someone would hear about it.

For example, because someone overheard me or someone else talking about the fact that both local employee salaries and American cost of living allowances are paid from the same fund (as were many other items, not just those two), the conclusion jumped to was that I had decided to use that fund to pay for local employee salary raises and not increases in COLA. And that, of course, invoved a complaint. Which went to my boss. Which resulted in a phone call asking me to come to his office to explain myself.

The irony in that example is that if our retail price survey submission resulted in an increase in our COLA, there was nothing I could do to prevent it from being implemented - it was done in Washington even though the money came from our budget. But the embassy had complete control over whether all, some, or none of the local employees' salary increase would be implemented. But I digress.

I got a little tired of being called into the boss' office and confronted with accusations of what others misunderstood. So I took the lesson from that employee with whom I had a challenging relationship to heart and would have liked a few others to learn it as well. That lesson was so simple. He asked me to ask the persons with complaints on the other side of my desk if they had already asked him about the problem. If they hadn't, he asked me not to listen to their complaints, but to send them to him for the discussion. Only if they had already asked him and not gotten a satisfactory answer did he want me to listen to their complaints.

While he was part of us civilians in Abu Dhabi, he had previously been in the army, so he probably understood the military culture better than I. On reflection, there may have been many other lessons I could have learned from him.

Day 305 - Us vs. Them

There always seems to be an Us vs. Them going on in life. In childhood, it was us cowboys vs. them Indians or us cops vs. them robbers. A few years later it was us Moorheadites vs. them Fargoans, then us Concordia Cobbers vs. them Moorhead State Dragons.

by  Randy Levine

  by  Randy Levine 

In Abu Dhabi at the embassy the Us vs. Them divide was between the military agencies and the civilian agencies. There were 16 agencies represented at the embassy, nine of them military. So we civilian agencies often felt beat around the head by the military agencies. We each had our versions of "the regulations." The funny thing was that each set of regulations started from the same laws, but the military agencies seemed to write regulations to provide step-by-step instructions for how things must be done, i.e., the regulations were to be followed to the letter, while the civilian agencies wrote regulations to provide guidelines for how things should be done, i.e., allowing some flexibility so long as actions followed the spirit of the regulations. And that led to some folks in the military concluding that we civilians were just a bunch of wishy-washy bureaucrats who couldn't make a decision and stick with it.

There was one aspect of being with the civilian agency of State, however, that the military really wanted - our diplomatic status. Those military members assigned to the embassy were not granted diplomatic status; instead they were granted administrative and technical status. We civilians with State were issued black diplomatic passports. Those in the military serving with the embassy were issued red official passports. Those of us with diplomatic status had duty-free importation privileges for the entire time we served in the country. Those with administrative and technical, or A&T, status could only import items duty free for the first six months. Those of us who had diplomatic status had diplomatic immunity. Those with A&T status had no immunity, but felt they should. Every time someone with a military connection ended up in a fight in a bar downtown that resulted in an arrest, we heard about how unfair it was that those of us with diplomatic immunity would not be arrested, while the military members were. But to my knowledge there were never any cases of someone with diplomatic immunity getting into a fight in a bar downtown to face the possibility of arrest. Sometimes it seemed as though the military thought diplomatic immunity was a magic wand that could be waved to erase all sorts of misbehavior.

We, the civilian agency reps, kept making the case that the relationship of military members - those under a commander in the field, not those working at the embassy - and the local government was a matter for a Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA. The basis for Diplomatic and A&T status is the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, not U.S. regulations or handbooks. So while the military saw us as wishy-washy bureaucrats on the one hand, they saw us as obstinate and stubborn, unwilling to compromise on the issue of privileges and immunities. It always came down to someone thinking it was us vs. them.

We also tried to convince the military members that if one of them was arrested for just doing his or her job - the basis for diplomatic immunity - we would take all possible steps to get that member released. Diplomatic immunity is not intended to excuse poor choices or poor judgement in a diplomat's personal life. It exists to protect diplomats who must meet with people the host government would prefer they not meet, actions that are in the nature of diplomatic work. Diplomatic immunity is not a get-out-of-jail-free card; the U.S. government will waive a diplomat's immunity if the grievance against him or her is for actions taken outside of official duties and/or is irresponsible and reprehensible, such as if a diplomat is involved in a death as a result of an accident while driving under the influence. Diplomatic immunity is not a magic wand.

There were times when the differences between military and civilian cultures seemed greater than the differences between American culture and the many different cultures our local staff represented. Maybe that's the Cultural Guide we should have tried to compile.

Day 304 - Cultural Forum of Abu Dhabi

Huda and Mackawee

Both Huda and Mackawee were from Yemen, the southern half of the now reunited Republic of Yemen. They had both lived in Abu Dhabi the majority of their adult lives. Mackawee came on his own as an adult for work.  Huda came to Abu Dhabi with her parents and brothers. By the time I met them, Huda's parents had both died, at least one of her brothers had left Abu Dhabi for the United States, and at least one brother was still in Abu Dhabi.

They hadn't been married long. I learned very shortly after arriving in Abu Dhabi that Mackawee had had a heart attack a few years before. At the time, he was not yet married, so going through the recovery without a close family member to care for him turned his thoughts to marriage. He had known Huda and her family for many years so he approached her father to propose marriage. Huda's mother had recently died. Huda told me one of her regrets was not having married while her mother was still alive. Instead of marriage, she had stayed with her parents, helping to care for them since her brothers had all married and moved out of the family home. She agreed to marry Mackawee and her father approved.

Huda and Mackawee had been married about five years when I met them. By then, Huda's father had also died. If she had not been married, she would have had to rely on her brothers for support. And something had come between them that kept her from relying on her brothers, something that would make it difficult for Huda if she had to turn to her family for support. Mackawee was ten years older than Huda and he was concerned that he needed to take steps to ensure that Huda would be able to live on her own in case something happened to him. He was convinced the future for Huda lay in the United States, not in Abu Dhabi or Yemen. So he approached me about the possibility to obtaining a special immigrant visa while he was still healthy enough to start over in the United States and before he had no choice as he was approaching Emirati mandatory retirement age. Huda had lived in the United States before, but she was hesitant about starting over.

I had no doubt that Mackawee would succeed, and I was certain Huda would also find life in the United States a positive experience. But she had reservations. I thought of a way that would help not only Huda become more comfortable with the prospect of moving to the U.S., but also provide a forum for professional development for others at the embassy.

Initially, we met on Mondays (Gulf Wednesday) during the lunch hour and we called ourselves For Women Only, not at all an unusual idea in the country where men and women were routinely separated for social events.

We began by working on resumes. I knew Huda would need to write a resume, and I also knew that several of the American wives who would be returning to the U.S. the following summer would benefit from updating their resumes to account for the foreign work experience they now had. I made the point that while there are bad times to have to write a resume - when the need for getting a new job happens suddenly or is immediate, for example - the best time to update a resume is when you don't need one. So we reviewed articles about effective resume writing, we wrote drafts for ourselves, and we then critiqued one another's to improve them.

We then moved into other aspects of job hunting, including how to dress for success, whether success at an interview or success on the job. I don't know where we found the rule of 7 plus or minus 2, but I have been following it ever since. That rule gives points as follows:

• 1 point for every piece of clothing that isn't the same fabric (i.e., the skirt or slacks and jacket that make up a suit are just one point because they are the same fabric).
• 1 extra point for each fabric that has a pattern.
• 1 point for shoes.
• 1 extra point if the toes are open.
• 1 point for hosiery.
• 1 extra point if the hosiery has a pattern.
• 1 point for each accessory (belt, scarf, necklace, earrings, broaches, rings, hats, handbags) that are not worn every day (i.e, a ring or watch that is always worn gets no points).

Sandra modeling 7 plus
or minus 2

Huda modeling 7 plus
or minus 2

The goal is 7 points, plus or minus 2, making the range of 5 to 9 acceptable. We also ran across an article somewhere with tips that included avoiding wearing white or floral patterns at work. That tip ended up in the embassy newsletter, unfortunately released on a day when the ambassador's secretary was wearing a white dress with a white sweater, white shoes, and white hosiery. I think she took offense.

After covering that topic, we held discussions about how to advance professionally. Throughout this phase, we continued to include only women. It was this group who organized the embassy iftar meal. After that event, some of the men at the embassy pointed out that they wanted to participate as well. So we changed our name from For Women Only to The Cultural Forum (or as some of the men called it FKAFWO (for Formerly Known As For Women Only, an homage to Prince).

Each Monday as the time for the sessions came closer, I began to wonder how we would maintain the momentum. Each week I thought perhaps this would be the final week we would meet. But at the end of each Monday's session, I walked away knowing we would continue for at least another week. More significantly, I saw that I was gaining energy from the discussions.

Because we changed our name, we also shifted our emphasis away from professional development (at least as an explicit goal) and more towards greater cultural awareness not only of the United Arab Emirates, but also of the many nationalities that the local staff represented. We learned from the Indian employees about the holidays of Holi (the festival of colors) and Diwali (the festival of lights).

  Image of Holi by  jeremy.nicoll 

Observations of Holi end up looking a lot like today's Color Runs. We were all just a bit too proper to go through anything as undignified as being sprayed with paint, but learning about the holiday which marked the beginning of spring was a natural progression to learning more about the Iranian holiday, Now Ruz, which also marked the beginning of spring. A number of local employees in both Abu Dhabi and Dubai celebrated their Iranian ethnic background, although their families may have been living on the southern side of the Gulf with two names for generations.

Diwali lights
by  KennardP 

Diwali is an autumn holiday that was a bit more obvious than Holi as the shops were festooned with colored lights that most of us would have referred to as Christmas lights for the weeks leading up to Diwali. Exchanging gifts is an important part of Diwali, so shopping for Diwali gifts looked a lot like Christmas shopping as well. At the embassy, in the year of The Cultural Forum, we brought candles in holders to set on each desk for part of the day, to observe the holiday in solidarity with the local employees from India and Sri Lanka.

The biggest project The Cultural Forum took on was to write a Cultural Guide to the United Arab Emirates, following the outline of the existing Cultural Guide to Saudi Arabia, that same guide that erroneously led me to expect to have nothing to do in Qatar and therefore advised that I bring every book I ever wanted to read, every movie I ever wanted to watch, and every game I enjoyed playing with me to fill in all those empty hours. We decided that any Cultural Guide of the United Arab Emirates had to describe not just the culture of the Emiratis, but also the cultures of all the expatriate workers in the country who make up 83% of the population. It was a noble project, unfortunately unfinished when I had to leave Abu Dhabi.

Day 303 - Ramadan - a Month of Thanksgivings

Huda and Mackawee

When Ramadan came around our first year in Abu Dhabi, I thought I knew what it was all about, having lived two plus years in Iran and then two in Qatar. I already knew that I hadn't learned much about the month in Iran, however, because the restaurants didn't all close during the day; they just pulled down the shades so that those fasting wouldn't have to see those who weren't as we ate. But in Qatar, all but the restaurants in the big hotels closed until sundown, which was announced by a canon being shot off along the corniche.

Even the Sheraton Hotel closed their ground floor restaurants during Ramadan, leaving only the roof-top restaurant open for breakfast and lunch. On Fridays (Gulf Sunday) one Ramadan, the Sheraton introduced brunch in the rooftop restaurant. When Ramadan ended, there were so many requests for Friday brunch that the Sheraton continued the tradition throughout the year, making it one of the best eating experiences in Doha.

In Abu Dhabi, the restaurants remained closed during the day during Ramadan, but it didn't seem like the dreary month I recalled in Doha. The local employees talked about Ramadan with more joy than I recalled in Qatar. Instead of focusing on all those hours when they couldn't eat, they celebrated the dishes that were most often served only during Ramadan. I began to think of Ramadan more as a month-long Thanksgiving celebration than a burden and inconvenience to have to get through.

Abu Dhabi iftar, official function-style

Our first Ramadan, we were invited to many evening iftar, or breaking of the fast, meals hosted by my contacts at the embassy. This was no different from my experiences in Qatar. But perhaps because the traditions were more familiar I learned more of what I hadn't known before, such as that the food that was prepared for these large fast-breaking meals was also distributed to those in the city who didn't have the means to provide such lavish meals for their families. With the wealth of the country being so well-known, it was a surprise for me to learn that not every Emirati was so self-sufficient. But everyone in the country had the opportunity to join in the evening meals of Ramadan.

But the main reason for the shift in my thinking came during our second Ramadan in Abu Dhabi. One afternoon, Huda, the wife of one of the local employees who worked for me, Mackawee, called me at work to tell me not to cook anything that evening because she planned to bring a typical Yemeni Ramadan meal for Alex and me. I was surprised and pleased, especially because I couldn't think of anything that I had done to deserve such treatment. I appreciated Mackawee but I don't think that I treated him with any more respect or regard than my predecessors. But Huda decided to share the joy of the holiday with us. She brought a number of typical Yemeni foods, explained what each was, and then left us to enjoy the meal so that she could spend the evening with her husband.

Setting up the iftar table

The following year, our last in Abu Dhabi, I brought up the idea of hosting an iftar at the embassy to a number of the women who worked there. We agreed it would be an excellent way to encourage more of a community feeling among the employees and their families, so we started by making a list of the foods we each thought of as typical Ramadan food. I was surprised to learn that what was typical on the Arabian peninsula wasn't necessarily typical in Jordan or Egypt or Lebanon, countries represented by some of the women who organized the meal. So coming up with the menu was not so simple. We agreed that the meal must begin with fruit juice and nuts, the items the most devout ate first to regain their strength after which they would pray and return for the rest of the meal. For the meal, we had lamb and rice and stuffed vegetables and salads and many other items I can no longer remember. For dessert, I contributed the other item I always thought of as typical of Ramadan, Oum Ali - an Egyptian dessert, the richest bread pudding in the world.

The Abu Dhabi Embassy iftar table

Most of us had to prepare the food at home and bring it back to the embassy to assemble the table. Just before sundown, the local employees began to return, with their families, and as we saw the gathering numbers, we had a moment of panic that we wouldn't have enough food. But we had more than enough. Once everyone who had returned to the embassy compound had eaten, we brought plates of food to those who never seemed to get away from their desks. And we brought plates to the Marine on duty as well as the Marines whose home was one of the adjacent buildings. And still there was food left over, so we brought plates to the police guards who were on duty outside the embassy compound walls.

The Abu Dhabi Embassy iftar table

As we cleaned up after the meal, I learned that several of the women who had helped with the meal had never before participated in hosting an iftar meal because while they were Arabs from Jordan, Lebanon, or Egypt, they were Christians. The entire event was more of an adventure than I had thought.

Two years later, I was in Yemen and the beginning of Ramadan coincided with Thanksgiving that year. Since the Muslim calendar is lunar, it is 11 or 12 days short of the solar calendar which moves Ramadan and all other Muslim holidays earlier in the solar calendar in successive years. The coincidence of Thanksgiving with what I had come to think of as a month of Thanksgivings prompted me to mention how we observed Ramadan in Abu Dhabi my last year. As soon as I mentioned it, my secretary Sumayya suggested the local employees should host a similar iftar meal in Yemen.  She brought the idea to the local employee association. They agreed. And within a week, we had plans for a Yemeni-American Iftar-Thanksgiving event on a Thursday (Gulf Saturday) evening. The local staff set up Bedouin-style tents on the grounds of the embassy compound and brought in big pillows to line the interior of the tents for casual lounging while we ate. The Americans brought foods we thought of as typical for Thanksgiving and the Yemenis brought food they typically ate for Ramadan.

No one went away hungry.

Day 300 - Etisalat vs Alex

image of boxing by R Schofield, via Flickr.com

While he had heard no complaints about his work, Alex just didn't fit Etisalat's expectations of an expatriate employee's personal life. In August, when we arrived, Alex told his bosses - he had two - that he would need two weeks off the following May to attend our son's graduation from college. We both thought they had agreed, but as the date of our departure approached, someone in the Human Resources section of the company pointed out that Alex hadn't worked long enough for him to have earned a return trip to the U.S. Alex pointed out that he didn't need Etisalat to pay for his ticket home. He just needed the time off.

We traveled back to Minnesota and Alex returned two weeks later, a week ahead of me. He learned on his return that some in the company were still annoyed that he left before he had been with the company a year.

A few months later, Alex was experiencing severe pains that we thought were his heart. The two nurses at the embassy contacted the regional medical officer in Yemen and got approval for Alex to travel to London to see a specialist. Medical evacuation orders were issued from Washington and Alex flew off to find out what ailed him. It turned out to be gallstones which were removed and he returned to Abu Dhabi. (It was during that trip that Violet learned to share the kitchen with Fudge and Marmelade when our neighbor Ron, who fed the cats while we were away, refused to walk up the two flights of stairs to put her dish out for her. When we returned to the house, we found all three cats sitting side by side inside the door, waiting for us.)

This time there was a bit more debate about his trip. This time Human Resources considered Alex to have been AWOL because Etisalat hadn't approved his trip to London for medical treatment. They claimed he shouldn't have left Abu Dhabi until they determined if he could be treated in Abu Dhabi. The issue again seemed to be that treatment overseas normally involved the company paying for the ticket, which Alex did not need.

Alex decided not to push his luck any further. He had been offered a job with Lucent Technologies within a day or two of arriving in Abu Dhabi, but at that point he felt responsible to follow through on Etisalat's offer. A year later, Lucent was still in business in Abu Dhabi but they could make no offer so long as he was working for Etisalat. That just left the need for a letter of resignation to Etisalat. Had someone else from the U.S. or U.K. resigned, Etisalat would have canceled the work permit and issued a one-way ticket back to the employee's home. But that also wouldn't work for Alex since he had three passports, a British passport in addition to his U.S. tourist and diplomatic passports.

Once Alex resigned, Lucent offered him the job that involved liaison with the Brit who had been given the job Alex had expected. A few months later, his father died and we traveled to England for the funeral. Alex's boss with Lucent did not hesitate to let him have the time off for the trip.

What a difference. What a relief.

Day 299 - Sleeping Policemen

Image of the Abu Dhabi corniche by Visit Abu Dhabi, via Flickr.com

Our house was just a block away from the corniche, the beautiful drive along the beach front of Abu Dhabi city. Every city in every country on the southern side of the Gulf that has two names had a coast-side road called the corniche, named after The Corniche leading from the south of France to Monaco. The name didn't really fit the Gulf roads since a corniche is a road at the top of a ledge that falls away quickly. The Lower Corniche, the road most often referred to as The Corniche and one of the three corniches leading into Monaco, just happens to fall away quickly to the Mediterranean Sea. The Gulf countries figured out that being next to the sea was a factor, so they used that as the basis for naming their roads by the sea. One thing the Abu Dhabi corniche had in common with The Corniche of southern France was that young men wanted to drive their sports cars very fast along it.

Image of Moyenne Corniche in the south of France
by unertlkm, via Flickr.com

While the Abu Dhabi corniche did not pose the danger of falling off the side of a cliff in a fiery crash, it did pose some significant dangers to the people frequenting the shops that lined the non-Gulf side of the road and the residents of nearby homes. Our house was located one block away, but it was a very significant one block. It was positioned at the end of the portion of the road that the sportscar loving drivers raced, and that meant they had to go around the block -  our block - to get back to the road for the return leg of the race. And many didn't slow down during that drive around the block.

In addition to all those cats, there were children living along our street. Small children. Children who could easily find their way into the streets when chasing after a ball or a kitten. And Alex decided something needed to be done.

Image of a sleeping policeman by | Kenneth |,
via Flickr.com

There were speed bumps, devices the Brits like Alex refer to as sleeping policemen, all over the United Arab Emirates - even on the highway between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Speed bumps were the only way to get drivers to slow down. It was a little disconcerting to be on a highway, driving at a reasonable highway speed, and then run into the speed bumps. But it was even more disconcerting to come across a car that had crashed at high speed - something we saw all too often. So those sleeping policemen were essential, even though annoying, on the highway.

And they were not just little bumps on the road. They were big enough to do some damage to a vehicle if the driver failed to slow down. There were even tales of an Emirati who bought a Lamborghini that he could never get off the island of Abu Dhabi because the speed bumps at the bridge were too high for his car to clear.

Most people hated all the speed bumps, even while recognizing that they were necessary so long as the drivers did not exercise self control on the roads. So the city of Abu Dhabi got lots of complaints about them, many attached to requests - written or spoken loudly - to remove them. So when Alex appeared at the traffic department to talk about sleeping policemen, they thought he was going to request one or more be removed. When he explained that he wanted two of them installed on our street, it caught them by surprise and they agreed.

Word got around the neighborhood that Alex was the one behind the installation of the sleeping policemen and we became the most popular people on the street. We met nearly every neighbor as they brought gifts - usually in the shape of bottles - to thank him for getting the speed bumps.

Even better, the sportscar loving drivers realized it wasn't fun to drive down our street any longer, so they started making their trip around the block to get back to the corniche a block sooner.

Day 298 - Herding Cats

Marmelade and the peacock
on the balcony

Violet was not our only cat in Abu Dhabi. It wasn't our desire to add more cats to our family. And Violet wasn't thrilled about sharing the space with other cats, either. But we really didn't have a choice. And it was all Violet's fault!

Violet was a small long-haired adult female cat who wouldn't take "no" for an answer, but she was happy to hand that answer out.

For example, Violet got what she wanted by refusing what we offered. She wouldn't eat dry food, so we had to buy canned food. But she also wouldn't eat anything from a can that had been opened before. If the food was cold, she wouldn't eat it. I tried warming it up in the microwave, but that didn't fool her. Unless her food was freshly dispensed from a new can, she wouldn't have it. Since Fancy Feast didn't appear on the grocery store shelves very often in Abu Dhabi, we had to buy big cans of cat food from which Violet would eat one large spoonful, leaving us with leftover cat food - leftover smelly cat food - every day.

We tried just throwing the cans away with our trash. But if we didn't put the trash out just as it was being collected, the feral cats in the neighborhood would dig through the bags, spreading our garbage evereywhere. And whose fault was it? Violet's.

Next we decided we would use the leftover food to feed selected feral cats since they were going to get the food anyway. We noticed a beautiful gray cat that Alex named Mosby, for John S. Mosby, the Confederate cavalryman of the Civil War referred to as the Gray Ghost. Mosby used to follow us along the sidewalk as we walked to visit neighbors. He didn't seem all that wild, so we fed Mosby, until he disappeared.

There were so many feral cats in Abu Dhabi that the city made the rounds at night collecting them. The only cats they didn't collect were those wearing collars or those that had been collected previously by an organization that paid to have them neutered and then resettled them in colonies where they also fed them. To make those cats identifiable, a small nick was cut in the side of one of their ears. Mosby did not have a nick in either of his ears. So he disappeared. But we didn't know the importance of the nick in the ear at that point.

We saw a couple of kittens that also took to following us along the sidewalk. We thought they looked like good prospects for eating up the food Violet wouldn't eat. We began feeding them at the front of the house each morning, but it didn't take too long for the larger cats to begin attacking the kittens to get at the food. One morning we were awakened by cat fight noises at the front door. That was the clue that we were going to have to let the kittens into the house.

Now Violet had companions, though very much unwelcome ones.

Marmelade and Fudge

The two kittens were both males. One was an orange and white tabby and the other completely orange, with a misshapen tail. The orange and white kitten ended up with the name Fudge. The all orange one, Marmelade. While it was clear the two were on their own, Fudge didn't have the characteristic wildness of a feral cat. He settled down right away as a domestic cat. Marmelade on the other hand was not comfortable around people. Fudge would climb into my lap. Marmelade wouldn't let me get near him unless he was eating and I approached him from behind. Then I could grab him around his belly and move him somewhere else. But that didn't make him willing to put up with any human attention.

Marmelade also had his own jealousies over food. He used to position himself in front of both his and Fudge's food dishes so that Fudge would have to wait to eat, that is if Marmelade left anything for him. Sometimes I had to pick him up and move him into a bathroom where I could close the door to keep him in so Fudge could eat.

The day after Fudge and Marmelade moved in, we realized they had a sister. She was a calico with exactly the same face as the boys. She started hanging around our house, but we just couldn't let one more kitten move into our space. Instead, we started feeding her at the back door, just outside the kitchen.

And Violet? She wouldn't allow the boys near her food dish. When the boys moved in, she was still considerably larger than they were, so she was effective at blocking their access to their food. I tried putting her dish at the other side of the kitchen, but she just parked herself at the entrance to the kitchen and kept the boys out, so we resorted to putting Violet's food on the top floor of the house. That kept two floors between her and the boys. So at this point, we were putting one dish on the third floor, two in the kitchen, and one in the back yard.

The cats at nap time

Meanwhile, Missy had kittens, one male and one female. Two more dishes in the back yard at feeding time. The kittens got pretty independent, and then the female disappeared. Maybe she just wandered to a new area. We still didn't know about the organization that collected feral cats and had them neutered. We just knew she disappeared. The male cat, Eddy, stopped spending much time in the back of our house, although we saw him now and then.

With time, Marmelade warmed up to us and began hanging around with us, even more than Fudge. He used to jump up on the sofa and then push his body right up to mine, not leaving a space between us big enough to slip a piece of paper into. By then, all three of the cats spent the nights on our bed. Well, sort of. Violet still didn't want to see the boys, so she slept under the duvet. The boys slept wherever they wanted to.

A few months later, Missy had a second litter of kittens, four cats, two calicos and two tabbies. Eddy started coming around much more often after the kittens were born and often managed to suckle from Missy along side his siblings. Four more dishes in the back yard.

Missy in front with her kittens at dinner time,
with Fudge wearing his collar at the right

Fudge and Marmelade weren't happy staying indoors all of time, so we tried to keep collars on them. But they would work themselves out of them while they were outside. One night, Marmelade didn't come home. He didn't show up the next day either. The vet confirmed our worst fears - Marmelade got caught up in a feral cat sweep. That is when we learned about the nick in the ear being a mark that cats had been neutered. The vet didn't think we would want the nick in the ears of Fudge and Marmelade when he fixed them because they were our cats, not cats on the street. If only the boys had kept their collars on.

Once Missy's second batch of kittens were no longer nursing, we brought her to the vet for some fixing and this time we insisted her ear be nicked. The kittens might not need her much longer, but we didn't want her to disappear, too. The nick on Missy's ear was so small it was almost invisible.

One day after Marmelade's disappearance, I was at the vet's when I noticed a kitten that looked just like Fudge in a pen in the waiting room. He had been picked out by someone and then returned when the prospective owner realized she couldn't take him back to the U.S. with her. He just had to come home with me. Alex named him RF for Rocket Fuel because he ran around the house so fast. When I took him in to be neutered, I insisted that his ear be nicked so we wouldn't have to worry about losing him. But instead of the tiny nick like the one in Missy's ear, RF's ear looked like someone had taken a bite out of it. RF's arrival brought us back to three indoor cats and five - and sometimes six, when Eddy came around - outdoor cats.

And that's how we herded cats in Abu Dhabi.