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How Much Tuition is Ten Toes?

This post first ran in the World Mom’s Blog, where you will find a writers from all over the world chronicling their experiences.

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There’s a conversation that happens in expat-land that sounds a bit like what prisoners in a jail yard might say to one another: “what brought you here?how long have you been here? when are you leaving?”

Sometimes people answer these questions with slumped shoulders and a shake of the head, which usually means that a) they’ve been here in Abu Dhabi for far too long and aren’t leaving any time soon; or b) they just got here and still haven’t figured out the basics, like getting the vegetables weighed in the produce section before they get in the checkout line.

The most cheerful answer I’ve gotten thus far to these questions has been from a woman named Janice, who is here from the Philippines.  Her good cheer surprised me because at the time of our conversation, she was energetically applying a pumice to my heels.

Now, as feet go, mine aren’t hideous but they are feet and I’ve been using them for more than forty years, so they’re not exactly pink and baby-soft, either.

Janice was mid-way through my lovely pedicure when we started our “how long have you been here” conversation, so her answers were punctuated with “rinse please madam,” and “file or clip, madam?” (One of things I’m not yet used to, after almost nine months here, is being called “madam” by anyone in any kind of service job.)

Janice has been in Abu Dhabi for six years, working in this same salon, sending money home the entire time.  I say something inane, like “that’s a lot of feet.”  She smiles and says “is okay, madam, I am sending my brothers to college, madam, and the tuition….”  She rolls her eyes as if to suggest that it’s a lot, switches her attention to my other foot, pushes at the nails.

“But I am lucky, madam, because my brother, he is a scholar and get a discount, so that instead of 30,000 pesos, tuition it is only 15,000, and my other brother, he take a test and get a discount now of 25%, so is only 15,000 also. I send home 300 dirhams a month, ma’am, is not bad.”

My pedicure will cost me about 65 dirhams (a little less than $20).

The Manhattan cynic in my soul wonders if Janice is telling me this story to beef up her tip. I immediately swat the cynic with my mental handbag. No one could lie this cheerfully while rubbing someone else’s feet.

“No, ma’am I finish only the tenth grade,” she says, scraping at a nasty tough bit near my toe. “My parents, they say they are lucky because I do not think of myself only, I do not get married like my cousins do, at 16.”  She laughs a little. Do I imagine she sounds happy to have escaped marriage at 16, children at 17?

“But boys, is important. To work construction, like my older brother, is too hard work, dangerous. He does not complain, but we know.”  She inspects my toes for flaws, clips an errant hangnail. “My brothers, they will be men with families to take care of, and is better if they not work construction. One brother, he is training for the customs inspector, for the airlines. Is a good job. The other brother, he just starts, so, we do not know what he will be. Every month, is something else!” She giggles, rubs delicately scented lotion into my feet.

Kneading my calf muscles, she sighs. “But madam, I visit last month, first time in one year, and I saw all my nieces and nephews, I have 15 of them, madam. Some are just babies…and there are no babies here, madam.”

With deft fingers, she starts to apply the polish to my toes. I’ve chosen a pale pink, almost invisible. She looks up at me for a minute, then bends her head to my toes. “When I came back here, I was alone in the house, and I was all day crying because I miss them.  I am homesick, madam, I think to myself.”

She sits back and admires her work. My feet look and feel wonderful.  I thank her, and say “I hope your brothers work as hard in college as you’re working for them.”  She looks slightly shocked.

“I am lucky, madam. My brothers, they are good boys. They study hard. I want them to have a better life.” She slides my flip-flops onto my feet and guides me to the drying lamps.

Her brothers had better do more than study hard. They’d better graduate at the top of their class, get great jobs, buy their sister a huge house overlooking the sea, and consider spending all their free time rubbing her feet.

As for me and my pampered toes? We slunk out of the salon, uncomfortably aware of our own privilege and unsure whether, if we were to swap positions with Janice, we would be able to be so cheerful about spending our days bent over other people’s feet.

Read full story · Comments { 30 } on May 8, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, expat, Feminism, Politics, UAE

a mall of contradictions

So I was at the mall.

I’m at the mall because “everything” is at the mall: grocery stores, bookstores (or at least stores that sell book-related products), the Walgreens-equivalent stores. These malls are vast echoey spaces designed to entertain: each mall has big toddler play areas; there are ice rinks, bowling alleys, fountains galore. In Dubai, there is a mall with a huge aquarium in it, and another designed around a series of canals, ala Venice.

The malls depress me, not only because I have to drive there but also because they are filled with chain stores, usually fair-conditioned to meat-locker levels, and because they celebrate consumerism as the pinnacle of civilization. (Now, granted, malls everywhere depress me, and for the same reasons; the Gulf doesn’t have the corner on garish displays of consumer culture. Mall of America anyone?)

Unlike Mall of America, though, the malls here offer a fashion parade of abaya style. I am fascinated by abayas, which is the word used here for the long black robe worn by Muslim women. The scarf covering the face is the niqab; the scarf that covers the hair and neck is the shayla, or, sometimes, the hijaab (but, confusingly, hijaab is also the word used to mean “modest,” and is thus sometimes the word used in a blanket fashion – yes, there’s a pun there somewhere – to mean “covering”).

Abayas in their plainest form are simply long black robes that sweep the floor.  Some women take hijaab to the utmost, adding black gloves and a full face veil, so that they are completely covered. I call this look the full beekeeper.  But – and this is where it gets complicated – I see women with abayas that look like a bedazzler has run amok.  Abayas with Swarovski crystals along the shoulders and down the back, like some kind of sparkly Hells’ Angels design; abayas with Louis Vuitton trim; abayas with spangled head scarves and peacock embroidery along the hemlines – abayas, in short, that are anything but “modest.”

I can imagine that for some women, a decorated abaya is a way to both follow “the rules,” and yet also assert personality – and status, because a custom abaya can cost thousands and thousands of dollars.

Abayas seem to me an embodiment of the complexity involved in being a modern woman in conservative Muslim country, and in the malls, easily half the women are wearing abayas – frequently abayas that I think of as “performance abayas:” abayas that are meant to be seen.

Here are three women wearing fairly subtle abayas:

Relatively modest.

There is another level of complexity, though, and it involves what’s under the abaya. The malls are full of shoe stores, and the shoe stores are full of women in abayas (some modest, some blazing with bling) – shoe love, it seems, is a universal female trait that crosses all national and ethnic boundaries.  I took pictures in three different stores of the shoes on display:

and these:

or perhaps these (note matching handbag):

I swear, if a hooker went to the prom, these would be her shoes.  Hijaab these definitely ain’t.

Wearing any kind of uniform forces secret, or semi-secret expressions of self to emerge. I just find it odd that hot pink, rhinestone studded platforms would be anyone’s form of expression, other than maybe Gwen Stefani or Madonna. But if we judge by good old-fashioned capitalism, these stores are stocking what their customers are buying…so someone is trip-trapping along in sparkly gold platform sling-backs under her modest black robe.

And I’m thinking that maybe I’ve already been here for too long because you know what? I think those pastel patent leather platform sandals are kind of cute, in a Japanese school-girl anime sort of way.  Just the thing for a day at the mall.

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What’s that you say? You don’t want to go to the mall, you just want to get away from it all? Here are a few suggestions from none other than The Bloggess, Scary Mommy, The Momalog, WanderMom…and me! (And hell yes, being on a list with these writers sort of made my week…maybe my month!) Click here for the article from Travel and Leisure Online, a great source for travel ideas all over the world.

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And if you are at the mall and you’re waiting for your kids to stop staring at the games in Electro-Land, then you should be spending your time reading yeahwrite – some of the best writing on the interwebs.  Read around, click around, then come back on Wednesday and spread some voting love. I’m using this great silver badge this week because it goes with the shoes. You know you want a pair. Just think what the other parents will think at the Saturday morning Little League games when you stroll up in your 10 inch sparkly platforms.

 

Read full story · Comments { 34 } on April 23, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, expat, Feminism, pop culture, shopping, UAE, What's It Like?

Monday Listicles: things i said i would NEVER do

Somewhere in the U.S., it’s still Monday even though here I’ve just put the kids on the bus to Neckerchief Academy for their Tuesday. For yesterday’s listicle--which I’m going to pretend is today’s prompt–Greta gave us a prompt that is basically an exercise in eating humble pie: a list of ten things we said we’d never do…and then did.  I did this list the easy way: I thought about being a parent and how often being a parent seems to result in eating one’s own words with remarkable frequency. Or maybe that’s just me.  Maybe the rest of you don’t have this problem.  Sigh.

1. “because I said so, that’s why.” Yes. That was me. And more than once. The phrase of parental last resort–and it’s not a resort that I’d like to visit as often as I seem to be doing.

2. There was a time, back in the day, when I thought team sports were the exclusive realm of the Great Santini and his offspring. I didn’t play a team sport growing up (me and hand-eye coordination were strangers for a long, long time); I don’t follow a particular team; I don’t get the whole “team” thing. Mostly I just don’t play well with others, is what it boils down to.  But then Liam fell in love with soccer and there I was…standing on the sidelines in the freezing cold, driving all over New York to games, and here in Abu Dhabi, I’m back in the shlep-wagon, out to soccer school, over to practice…And you know what? Being on a soccer team (and having the great coaches he had in NYC–thank you, Sean and Marcus) — it’s the best thing that could’ve ever happened to him.  Of course, my weekends are shot to hell, but hey, who needs a weekend away, right? Rah rah rah go team.

3. “do you know how many starving children there are in the world who would eat that?” I have a very clear memory, when my mother would say that to me, of saying back to her “well why don’t you mail my food to the kids in Biafra then, hmm?”  Funny, she didn’t seem to appreciate that idea. I remember also thinking to myself “I will never, ever say such a stupid thing to my kids.”  Yeah. Well. Um. What can I say. It’s true, dammit. So eat your carrots!

4. In graduate school, I spent a lot of time thinking about feminism, poststructuralism, gender theory, and other stuff that now makes my early-middle-aged brain hurt to even contemplate. At the time, however, my friends and I sat around talking learnedly about how gender differences were really just socially constructed ideologies that could be done away with if parents would just be a little more, you know, thoughtful.  I believed my own words until the first time my little boy picked up a stick and said “pwang pwang pwang…”  I’m still a feminist but now I’m a feminist who has to accept that she has sons who will, for reasons known only to their DNA, step over or around the socks on the floor, leave the toilet seat down, and look at her blankly when she says “why did you knock that over?” Let me be clear–they are made to put the socks in the laundry, wipe off the toilet seat, pick up the thing they knocked down. But I’m fighting against genetics, here, people, which means that, yes, I’ve been that person who smiles and shrugs and says “well (nervous giggle), you know, boys…” Ugh.

5. Related to 4: when my boys were toddlers, I’d watch their adorable chubby selves playing “bakery” in the sandbox and look in horror at those ill-bred “big boys” playing chase and I’m-gonna-shoot-you-with-my-triblatteringlaserpistolgrappler.  I’d be all smug and judgey and decide that the mothers of these boys had utterly failed. I mean really, what mother would let her children play such a violent game? Um…hi. That would be me. And I’ve even said “run around and chase with your friends,” because I recognize that children are like puppies. They need to be exercised regularly or they’ll just wreck the furniture. .

6. MY children will never be like those OTHER children who walk around surgically attached to their screens. Cue hysterical laughter here. Computers, e-readers, DSi, iPod touch…the electronics in this family could stock an Apple store. I think we manage their computer time pretty well but the sad fact is that when screens are up, bickering is down.

7.  You know how when you were little and your mom would spit a bit on her shirttail or (worse) her fingers and smootch at your cheek to get off the remnants of your last meal? And remember how you thought “god that is gross!” Remember how you thought, nah, you’d never do such a thing? Yep. I thought so too. And then just yesterday, I grabbed Caleb’s arm just before he got on the school bus and swiped–with my shirt and some spit–at the glob of jam on his cheek. He said “MOM THAT’S DISGUSTING” and squirmed away.

8. I never thought I would have sons.  How’s that for hubris? I always wanted to have children but in my mind’s eye, it was always me and charlottedoralucyameliaruby reading Little House on the Prairie and playing dress-up and then later, when they were grownups, my daughters and I would hang out and have long conversations about Life and Shoes and Relationships. They’d tell me what to wear so I didn’t look too dowdy and we’d be the best of friends.  But noooo, the gods have a larky sense of humor and so I am the mother of boys, which means I don’t sit on the beach and flip through magazines. No, it’s SWIM and DIG and PLAY BALL WITH ME and DIG and SWIM.  And when I’m an old woman living alone with a hundred cats, the boys will buy me the valu-pak of Depends and the high-grade cat food, and congratulate themselves on being good sons.

9. I would never make separate meals for my picky eaters. If they don’t want to eat what I cook, then they’ll go hungry. HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHA My children’s eating habits keep me in a state of perpetual humility. I have failed here and here and here and will probably fail again at dinner tonight.

10. God. Some people just can’t shut up about their damn kids. That’s what I thought. And then I started a blog.

 

Double-dipping this week: this post also links to the wonderful lovelinks site–it’s like Cheers bar for small bloggers (or micro bloggers, in my case). It’s where everyone knows our (screen) name and they’re always glad we came, where everybody can see that all our troubles are the same…and now everyone knows that I’m old enough to remember that show when it wasn’t in reruns! Click on the button below to find some great reading–and then come back on Thursday to vote for your favorites. I won’t even be mad if you don’t vote for me!

Read full story · Comments { 19 } on January 17, 2012 in Children, expat, family, Feminism, food, Gender, Kids, Monday Listicle, Parenting, sports