Glimpses of heaven and hell - Page 4

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Hilary McPhee

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Our friends' house is one of eight around a pool with a common garden in a compound rented to foreign nationals, most with young children. It is spacious and cool, with marble floors and rugs, and is filled with books and family treasures from Egypt and Europe. I can hear the music before I open the door.

The boys, just home from school and still in their English-style uniforms, are practising their performance for their father's birthday party this evening. Adam, in a green and yellow Australian cricket cap, is playing blues on his saxophone with great feeling. Jo, his young brother, in a Rugby League cap, accompanies him on the piano and makes jokes. They both move effortlessly, sometimes in mid-sentence, between Arabic, German and English, as do their parents. Nadia, the youngest, in her swimming costume, headphones on, is at the kitchen bench making an elaborate birthday card.

The gathering this night includes friends from journalism, finance, education and the law. Some are neighbours from the compound, which is shared by families from Mexico, the US, France, Russia, Germany, Malaysia and Iran. At least four languages are spoken at the table and I struggle, as always. Most have been in Dubai or other parts of the region for some time and clearly regard themselves as part of the place.

The talk at first is about the downturn. Everyone knows someone who has left or might have to, and there is concern, but the consensus here too is that Dubai will emerge stronger, with better institutions and some long-overdue clarification of legal systems. At present there are federal laws, local laws and Sharia – and much confusion. (The current Guidebook for New Residents gives lengthy practical advice on ‘what to do if you are nicked'.) And someone points out that one of the new universities is offering a degree in Luxury – whatever that might mean.

THE KORAN WAS PLAYING in the cab and the driver didn't look at me or answer when I first gave him directions. Not realising he was praying, I repeated the name of the mall I'd been told to visit. How long had he been in Dubai, I asked. Six years. He is permitted to go home to see his wife and three children in Islamabad every year. He manages to do so every second year. He lives in a room with a cousin and two Pakistani friends, so that he can send his family most of his meagre pay. Life is very hard, he says cheerfully, but heaven is waiting, God is good, I am a good man and my children are very clever, my wife is a good woman. My life is very very hard but God is good. I am happy that I am a good man and that I will go to heaven.

Without the consolations of religion, life must be hell. Two-thirds of Dubai's foreign-born residents are from India and Pakistan. Three hundred thousand of them live in labour camps between the great arcs of the freeways, hidden from sight. Only if you take a wrong turning as we did, and manage to get through a couple of checkpoints, can you see the camps. Our friend tells the armed guards she is lost. They go through the motions of leaning into the car but we are not turned back.

We drive through endless rows of metal huts with washing strung up between them. Some have old air-conditioning units; most have satellite dishes and benches out the front. Here live most of the indentured labourers who build and maintain Dubai, men who leave home on the promise of better wages and on payment of an upfront fee to an agent who takes their passports and sends them to labour in the UAE while their health and strength last. Once they have paid back their fares, they send home what they can to their impoverished families. Their life expectancy is less than forty-five years.

After the damaging report last year by Human Rights Watch, widespread bad publicity in the western media and some protests by immigrant workers themselves, the men were allowed to form a union. But nothing much has changed. Living conditions have improved a little, overflowing sewerage is ‘being rectified', and working during the hottest part of the day in summer is no longer enforceable. But too much still hinges on workers' compliance. Sending money back home is essential.

A large proportion of the GDPs of many of the poorer countries in the region, including Egypt, depends on these remittances from the Gulf; and governments, more often than not, are complicit in maintaining the status quo while trying to secure larger quotas for their workers. This is a world that works because there is no other way for the poor. It works because it is taken for granted by those who benefit most by it. It works because the hierarchies and inequities are ruthlessly maintained.

All imported labour in the UAE is regulated by laws that favour the employer. People can leave their jobs or cancel contracts only if their employer agrees. Domestic servants are utterly dependent on the kindness of their employer. Some treat their maids abominably. Others help them, pay hospital bills, teach their children to share the pool with the maid's kid. Most maids have left their families behind and send them money and gifts, but some husbands and children manage to arrive, living for a time in servants' tiny rooms, perhaps regarding themselves, as did the early immigrants to Australia and North America – also fleeing poverty and persecution – as having the opportunity of a new life for their children. Some may even be allowed to paddle in the sea.

DUBAI, BUILT ON THE twin pillars of high living and consumption, is a bellwether for much more than the global recession. The Muslim world is drawing on its own legacies and traditions and substantial moral underpinnings in its race for modernity – playing by its own rules as well as the rules of the globalised West – and therein lies its fascination. It is worth looking at, it seems to me, and worth remembering that many things get lost in translation.

A young Emirati blogger wrote recently, ‘Our export isn't oil, it's hope. Poor Egyptians or Libyans or Iranians or Pakistanis grow up saying, "I want to go to Dubai..." We are showing how to be a modern Muslim state, not an Islamist one.'