Some Thoughts about Work and Life in the US and the UAE

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(ORLANDO, FL) -- Two weeks into vacation, I'm back into the American way of life, and I don't think about the United Arab Emirates (UAE) unless an email from someone there reminds me. The month I'm spending here is providing a variety of experiences. I flew straight to Denver from Abu Dhabi, not quite a nonstop - 14 hours to JFK on Etihad Airlines, 3 hours at the airport, and 4 hours to Denver on Delta, leaving Abu Dhabi at 10 am and reaching Denver at 10 pm the same day.

It was my first time in Denver to attend the annual convention of AEJMC, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Downtown Denver is exactly what Abu Dhabi and Dubai are not, a city made for pedestrians where cars come second. The centerpiece of the downtown is the 16th Street Mall, wide and about two miles long, made for walking, with trees and plants in the center, and an environmentally friendly bus service running in both directions every few minutes. The bus is free and allows getting on and off as many times as one likes.

Cars cross the Mall at lights on one-way streets. Drivers wait patiently for people to get to the other side and stop when someone is about to cross. This happens without benefit of police or cameras because people know they have the right of way, and drivers know they have to be patient. I don't think I heard a single car horn during five days in Denver.

After the seriousness of conference sessions on media, my next stop was Las Vegas, another city where I had never been. If I had seen Las Vegas before coming to the UAE five years ago, I wouldn't have recognized it as the model for a good deal of architecture and urban development in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Now, much about the buildings seemed familiar, and finding a pyramid (Luxor Hotel) next to a castle (Excalibur Hotel) seemed quite normal. City Center where I stayed and which I wrote about already is an Emirates-sized project, hotels, residences, retail, and hospitality over 67 acres of glittering glass structures, reflecting sun, moon, and artificial lights 24 hours a day. In fact, City Center is owned by MGM International Resorts and Infinity World Development Corporation, a subsidiary of Dubai World

One day having lunch in the Café Bellagio at the Bellagio Hotel, I experienced one of those moments that lights up into a clarifying perception. I was listening to conversations around me, enjoying hearing American spoken by Americans all around. At the next table a middle aged couple were discussing a recent vacation in California with the waitress, herself middle aged. As the couple talked about the hotel where they stayed, the waitress said, "My husband and I were there two years ago." At that point I tuned out because her words struck me.

It's inconceivable that one could hear something like that in the UAE. No waitress or waiter at a restaurant even in the Emirates Palace could dream of vacationing at the same place as the guests at that restaurant. The economic lines in the UAE are so distinct that the people who serve cannot live the same way as the people they are serving.

Recently a young woman from the US came to Abu Dhabi to work as a personal trainer. She earned enough doing that as long as she was living with family. However, when she started looking for a place to live - as an American single person would expect to do anywhere - she saw that her salary wasn't enough to pay for the kind of apartment she expected. Living in one room or sharing with a stranger wasn't what she ready to do, and she returned to the US a few months later.

On the other hand, I know several women, none of them Americans or Europeans, who teach yoga or style hair or perform other personal services. They too do not live as the American woman wanted to live, but they accept the situation. For them as for probably the vast majority of expatriates who do not hold the top jobs in the UAE, living in the country isn't about lifestyle; it's about saving as much as possible from what they earn - and sending it to family in their home country.

Here in Orlando I attended a brunch yesterday that featured a lecture and demonstration of jazz. The speaker and musician Carol Stein was amazing and engrossing as speaker, singer, and pianist. She finished by singing Over the Rainbow like Judy Garland, then playing it on the piano in the style first of Rachmaninoff and then Beethoven. Next to me sat an older gentleman who turned out to be a retired internist, a Filipino immigrant who has lived in the US for many years.

Meeting him was the reverse of the experience I have had in the UAE with Indians. In the US I had known Indian doctors and software engineers as well as leading venture capitalists. The illiterate Indians, construction laborers and gardeners, were a new category for me. Similarly, in the UAE I know Filipino maids and manicurists. The most educated Filipino I have met there is a graphic designer. Probably because we have so many uneducated legal and illegal immigrants from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the US limits immigration from other countries to the already educated like the Filipino doctor or the students who come to be educated. 

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