Abu Baby

iola and mom at the arboretum

2012-05-07T19:48:02Z

april 13th, 2012 at the national arboretum with mom and eunice mahler

an attempt at making sense of the gender dimensions of the oil and gas industries

2012-05-07T16:58:29Z

I've been thinking about gender and oil for a year now. Thinking, asking, listening, reading. Everything I hear: Wendell Berry's lecture, the Catholic Church, Kony 2012, the Hunger Games, our rooster crowing in the morning, psychological studies distinguishing between power and status, studies on corporate management, the Arab Spring, environmental impacts (the BP spill in the gulf, the Keystone pipeline), my aunt's book on running for president in 1984, our interviews in Peru, Azerbaijan, Uganda, Papua New Guinea and Mozambique; I hear it all with an ear for gender. And before all that I was already thinking: my life as a woman, the election of Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, my daughter and her celebration of femininity, my daughter's conservative Pakistani babysitters, Abu Dhabi's cultural defensiveness and the double bind that their women find themselves in, my cousin in India and her pathway to independence and to my aunt, my aunt and her pathway to India, my mother, who was a German immigrant born in Japan, and my parents' marriage. I think of the intersectionality of identities, of women who are solidly patriarchal and men who are matriarchal and how they grew to those positions or were born into them. I think I'm lucky, to be raised with two sisters in America, in San Francisco, in a time when women's roles are only expanding, while men's roles are staying the same. Also, I think I'm lucky because I never feel even a twinge of guilt to identify myself as a woman.

After a year of thinking so deeply about gender, I'm really pretty passionate about it. The thing I'm passionate about is fairness, really, not gender, though I love celebrations of diversity. Fairness in all its forms, including at the intersections of race, class, disability, sexuality and gender. So the thing I realized is this: The cultures are all pretty different in the world, but the unfairness is really similar. I didn't realize quite how unfair it really is to be a women in most every culture in the world including this one.

Just as I figured that all humans who want to have great-grandchildren are, in their hearts of hearts, environmentalists, I also figured that all humans who have mothers, wives, daughters, heck even sisters, in their secret hearts are feminists. I see now, after asking a lot of pretty macho men their thoughts on this subject, that they often do have feminist leanings, even those you don't expect to, but it's not enough. Men benefit from sexism, and even if a majority of them think it is wrong and unfair, it's a psychological awkwardness that sticks. There are so many things going on. We women are biologically blessed and handicapped with the responsibility of nurturing new lives, and need to be financially supported while we do that. We only have a certain few fertile years, so there may be choices and opportunity costs that men don't face. We sometimes collaborate in our own oppression by internalizing the validation of what it means to be a good woman. We have masculine leadership stereotypes. We often have power without status and then get a reputation for bitchiness. Men get testy and weird about about controlling their feelings of sexuality, and place the blame for their hormones on women. In the most cynical view, men are culturally groomed to feel entitled to the servitude and possession of women.

Those who explicitly advocate for an unequal treatment of women and girls in legal, political, family and/or employment contexts are operating from a position of pretty strong cultures of gendered stereotypes, or the strong desire for simplicity; to be enveloped in a non-thinking, caring, benevolent world. But the truth is that without a strong framework of equal law and education, and access to lawyers and independent courts, girls are targeted by men from a young age without a way to advocate on their own behalf, and as adults they are triply vulnerable to abandonment without a way to support themselves or hold on to and support their own children. I suppose if you could anticipate all the ways in which this world is not benevolent toward women, you could create a framework to protect women; it does not have to follow the litigative model of the west, though that's the one I know. But frankly, I don't believe anyone can anticipate all the problems and risks of the modern world. We need to give women the tools to speak and complain and monitor and enforce and budget and advocate on behalf of their own futures. Ideally this modern world includes the choice for non-modernity.

I know there's something nice about stereotypes. My daughter is grasping at stereotypes as eagerly as she can: those are boy shoes, girls don't wrestle. What are the rules of behavior for a human? A little human? A little girl human? For people forming their identities, for instance when they are three years old, this is a useful and comforting exercise.

What does this all have to do with oil? A lot. The discovery of oil in a country, and the resulting windfall of wealth, exacerbates whatever inequalities are already there. Sometimes that's a lot and sometimes it's not, depending on those structural protections. When oil reserves are discovered in a country, it's a good time to back up and try to tackle fundamental issues of unfairness and civil protections in sovereign law.

There's a lot of money in the petrochemical industries, and local benefits, also known as corporate social responsibility, are traditionally distributed in order to maintain a 'social license to operate' within a country, but, more importantly, within the community of people who live closest to operations. In some contexts, this community is situated right up against the company's drilling wells, storage tanks, and pipelines. In other cases the communities are more abstract: in Abu Dhabi, the western region is a desert of salt flats called Sabkha, and the only people who live nearby are in a quiet company town or in dusty labor camps. In Camisea, the Amazonian tribe lives right next to the gas plant and so has a fair amount of trade and contact with the employees of the plant. In Baku, the nearest town is about two kilometers away from the processing plant, so they smell and hear production but don't interact with the employees every day.

Community investment takes many forms, and there are many opportunities for the gendered favoring of men in the company's search for candidates on which to bestow 'benefits'. For one thing, men have benefited from preferential treatment already anyway and are now in positions of formal authority, and for another, even if the company might want to be scrupulously fair in its doling out of gifts, they also don't want to cause problems by upsetting cultural norms; the whole point is to make people in power at that location like them. So their student scholarships, compensation for taking or leasing land, microcredit for small business entrepreneurs, training and capacity building programs, utilities, roads, supply chain contracting, and most lucrative of all, employment, goes to whoever is most well positioned to receive it. In a better world, all aspects of benefits distribution should have the same oversight that, say, the real estate industry and banks in the west have when they provide loans or advertise properties. And that's taken a lot of iteration and reaction to historical abuse (redlining, blockbusting, steering). I'm all for meritocracy, hiring labor for suitability or personality to the job, and rewarding things that work by providing big incentives. That's fine. But there's a couple market failures happening in these situations. Information isn't perfect or symmetrical either between genders or between community and the company, one. Two: a bunch of non-competitive market issues, eg men have a monopoly on the social acceptability of lewd behavior. That's actually super annoying, because reputations are the highest form of social capital, and some work environments cause reputational harm to women just by exposure. There's a lot of other non-competitive market issues, not to mention principal-agent problems: ethical cultures that are relaxed on issues of corruption, conflict of interest, or on issues of bias with regard to gender, class/caste, sexual orientation, family status and/or disability.

Normally, companies don't go out of their way to be absolutely fair. It behooves them to be as opaque about numbers as possible, in order to avoid conflict and keep a free hand, and anyway they are not operating in litigative societies with independent courts or, usually, media, so they can do whatever they please as long as it passes the standards from their own headquarters in London, Cape Town, Toronto, Houston, or Beijing if they are a private multinational company, or their own government if they are a state-run or local company, which risks even more in the way of conflict of interest but also provides a bigger pay-off for the use of extractive rents for economic development. Anyway, that was all very boring and thanks for sticking with me. I promise a photo of iola next time.

talking to women from umid, azerbaijan, october 2011, photo by lauren lancaster

photos from dad's camera

2010-09-08T05:29:00Z

that's just a small selection... i liked these.

missing someone close to you who has recently passed away

2010-09-07T07:57:00Z

feels like working on a really difficult math problem. You feel totally preoccupied with it, yet you look for distraction and really welcome all the warmth and love of other people that converge to support and share and celebrate a great life. At that level you can laugh and talk but meanwhile your brain is working away at a lower level, trying and figure out the problem. Every now and then, you realize there's no solution to the problem no matter how many times you run through the whole equation, all the last details and moments. But that realization doesn't always surface as grief. Then because your brain is working at these different levels on really tough stuff, you feel really tired of people and welcome being alone so you can think better, The way I act now reminds me of how dad often was, and I wonder if it was his brain trying to figure out the absence of his family. We grew up more than a decade after the suicide of his closest little sister, plane crash with his parents and brother's family, then car crash with his first wife, and but maybe it takes that long for things like that, a whole lifetime of working on problems without solutions, puttering around for answers.

Just thinking about this process. I downloaded all of the photos on dad's computer from the past 2+ years tonight. He was terrible about looking backward; preferred never to look at a picture he had taken. There are some good ones, and I'll post a few of them here tomorrow.

My Dad

2010-08-27T08:46:00Z

In May, my family learned that my dad had pancreatic cancer. John and I decided right away to move back to America. We came home for a ten day visit in late May and early June, then went back to Abu Dhabi to pack up our house and lives and bring them back home.

Iola and I have been in California since July 15th, spending time, cooking, going for walks and playing with grandparents. Dad decided against surgery, instead following alternative treatments with all the rigor of his normal way of being, investigating every healthy avenue, buying hundreds of books, getting google updates daily, talking with experts in Chinese medicine, acupuncture, Gerson therapy, and admitting himself to the San Diego Clinic in Tijuana for their 8-week treatment schedule.

He died Wednesday morning, the 24th of August. It seems too soon, just four months after hearing the first news. This last Sunday evening we all had dinner together -- John has been here, working from California for the past three weeks -- and went for a walk when the day cooled down. My dad and John swung iola between them. Mom wasn't feeling well so the tables were turned, with dad bringing her water and researching cures for her on the internet. He was rakishly disheveled all day (we wondered, does mom usually comb his hair?), made a joke about how terrible the vegetable juice that Julia made for him tasted, decided not to take his pills, looking at them thoughtfully and saying "I don't see the point," which sounded ominous, but then in the next breath observed that his insulin requirements had gone down by a factor of ten, from 30 to 3 doses, and that must mean his pancreas function was improving. He was always optimistic and resilient.

He had a couple of seizures that night, though we didn't know that's what they were. The first one was at 3am, when he got up with mom to get a glass of water and then collapsed on the floor. John, mom and I helped him get up and back in bed. It seemed to me like maybe he'd been sleepwalking, and was still asleep, only drowsily pulling himself out of it to answer our questions. That was how I rationalized it. At 6am there was another one in bed, but by the time I got to his side he was snoring innocently. The third was during his morning routine on Monday at about 9am. We couldn't get him up and called 911. He was unresponsive, so the paramedics brought him to the hospital, but I still was only vaguely worried; he just seemed incredibly sleepy. I couldn't figure out what to do with iola, but Adriana pulled me along to her friend's house and the kids played there. I was fuzzily thinking I could get some errands done, but once alone in the car I called Julia, who had already gotten to the emergency ward, and her voice sounded funny and she hung up mid-sentence, which cleared my mind. I sped to the hospital. Dad seemed to be still asleep, under layers of consciousness, but mom said that he answered his name and birthday when the nurses asked him. That was the last he spoke, though there were tiny gestures and expressions throughout the next two days. Julia and mom told me the results of the CT scan: a tumor mass near his brain stem, and hemorrhaging. I called Adriana and she left the girls too, and came immediately, followed by Sande Marshall. Dad was given medication for anxiety, seizures, and pain. He was moved to a different ward with a bigger room, and from then on it was never empty. The nurses let us bring the babies in, and those babies don't know how to be sad. I think they cheered him up. Pete, Jon and my John came when they weren't working. Dad's sister Sue came Monday night, and stayed overnight at Barry and Janet's studio. Patrice and Kurt also came that night and stayed at a hotel. John slept in the hospital when mom needed a break. My brother David Platford and his mother Nancy came in the morning, and David stayed on while Nancy went back to the Bay Area. On Tuesday our cousin Sam Dakin arrived, and Nina Moore also stopped by.

In the afternoon on Tuesday, Dad was brought home in a medical taxi and slept in his bed with everyone around, coming in and out of the room, iola and Gwennie playing, Julia Landis reading to him (Outliers), my brother David Platford also there. Their good friends and neighbors Barry and Janet visited. My sister Julia figured out a rotation schedule to give him medication every 1.5 hours. I had the 12:15am and 1:45am shifts. I went to bed with iola at 9pm and then woke at midnight and stayed awake till 2am, feeling like he was just hovering at the edge of life, his breath deep and rattling.

Adriana came in at 7am for her shift, and was concerned at the sound of his breath. I felt relieved to hear that he was still breathing, and went back to sleep. At about quarter to nine iola started stirring, so I got up with her and was being sort of slow when John said "Rose, you need to get in there now." We rushed in and Dad was still. Mom was already there. We stayed with him, and for about ten minutes I could have sworn I saw tiny tiny movements of breath, but I was hallucinating, because even now when I go in to see him, two days later, and stare at his chest, I can see him breathing.

We cried and took a deep breath and went outside. We were all quiet but also I felt a sense of relief; the last few days had been so full of empathy for him going through this biggest trial of his life. Is he scared? In pain? Is he thirsty? Should I not drink this in front of him? Did he hear me say that? Does he need to go to the bathroom? When the answer was may well have been yes, yes, yep, yes, yes, yes. And so the fact of missing him hasn't sunk in, quite, because I am still feeling the weight of pain and fear lift away. In this way, again, it reminds me of childbirth.

We'd been trying to figure out a way to bury Dad at Leonard Lake, and had enlisted the help of a local lawyer and a county supervisor to figure it out. In the end, it would have taken about two months of bureaucratic leg work or else more renegade spirit than we had. The county supervisor "guaranteed" that we would not be prosecuted: "First of all, they will never know, secondly they won't care" is what he said -- the kind of thing that makes me love Mendocino county. The lawyer also encouraged us to go ahead and do it, saying we only needed to somehow trick the doctor into signing the death certificate and giving it directly to us, instead of to the mortuary. Mortuaries really have a monopoly on the process, though I'm not complaining, in general.

Meanwhile, my dad's little sister Mira was on her way from India. She was waiting for her plane when dad took his last breath, and it seemed like the right thing to do to keep his body at home for her to say goodbye in person. So I called a company in Sonoma called Final Passages that helps with home funerals. The woman was matter-of-fact and helpful, though I can barely remember the call; it was in that first hour after dad's death. She said she would call me back in two hours and that in the meantime I should clean the body, anoint with essential oils, buy 30 pounds of dry ice in slabs 1.5 inches thick, dress him, light candles, arrange flowers, have pictures. So that is what we did. We used eucalyptus oil to remind him of the Presidio and we arranged his study to be the funeral room, so that he would be near his books: The Rise of the Fourth Reich, the Secret History of American Empire, The Power of Magic, America's Secret Establishment on one side and then a huge stack of computer operating manuals on another, with books on health above that. He seemed comfortable there, and, like I said before, I still think he is breathing. Though iola knows better: this morning she asked "where's Grampy?" so I took her in to see him and she looked at his face, then said matter-of-factly: "Grampy not there." Wherever he is, it is close to our hearts.

Mira is here now, sleeping in the sun room. She has said goodbye to her brother. Dad's body will be picked up tomorrow and cremated, and we will bury the ashes at Leonard Lake at Thanksgiving, in an urn made by Adriana.

rose-tinted glasses

2010-06-23T19:30:00Z

just thinking, in the middle of everything -- selling cars, furniture, saying goodbyes, parenting iola, writing -- about this: it's not BP's fault. Is it? If I were driving a car, while doing my job -- admittedly not a progressive job, and admittedly I should have been riding a bicycle -- and it exploded, killing my beloved passengers and innocent bystanders for miles around I would yes feel guilty and sad for the rest of my life but, no, it would not have been my fault. Previous to this, BP was considered to be foremost in the field (ok, an ugly field, but we all -- literally -- drive it) for corporate social and environmental responsibility. They are committing $20 million dollars to the clean-up, that is 10 times the amount Exxon paid for Valdez, without the slightest hesitation. I think maybe they should still be considered pretty responsible.

Humanity has an enormous problem on its hands. Not just this spill, not just the health of the entire oceans' ecosystems, not just climate change; it's all related. And I think we can tackle it. We're too kind and smart to not be able to.

I was minding my own business

2010-05-03T19:21:00Z

Driving along from one appointment to another -- why didn't the South African like that nice bright one-bedroom? -- I took a wrong turn, or actually forgot to take the right turn. This was in Khalifa City A today, about 2pm. Khalifa City isn't really like a city, it's like a bunch of big boxes, some gaudier than others, and tall walls around them, and long stretches of empty sandy road in between. It was really windy and the sand was blowing. I was early for my meeting, and wasn't sure how to spend the next hour, and had almost decided to go find the Sas Al Nakhl compound so that I would be able to find it tomorrow with my client. But coming up on the right side of the road was this kid flagging down cars. There's not a whole lot of traffic out there, and almost no one with a mind to pick up hitchikers, till I came along. He may have been there for hours, kilometers from the town "center," miles from nowhere. I rolled down the passenger window and asked where he was going. "Sister!" He started babbling in a mix of arabic and hindi about Mohamed Bin Zayed City, his driver, his work. I said, "ok, I'm going to MBZ, get in."

Now MBZ is another half finished "city" with long stretches of empty road, and it's about 15 miles from Khalifa City, and neither of us really knew the way. We made it to MBZ ok, but once there drove around and around, consulting with laborers by the side of the road about how to get to someplace called ICAD, by the MPCC. We finally found it, I dropped him off, and then headed back to Khalifa City and my next meeting. The whole thing took an hour.

But that's not the main thing. The main thing is a reflection on helplessness. I've noticed before and again today that when I'm around really helpless people I start to feel this creepy mean feeling. It's like their weakness calls forth some sort of darth vader gruffness. This young man, a 20 year old kid, left his home in Bangladesh four years ago to make a life in the UAE. He earns 400 dirhams per month ($108). That's not enough to pay for his visa, himself, and still send money home, so he carries a debt. It is hard to be dignified in these circumstances. He has crabs, and couldn't help from scratching. He had all the body language of an abused animal, a whining muttering voice, skittering eye contact, and after ten minutes in the car together he asked for money and mentioned that he has never been in love, while looking at my chest. Three blatantly inappropriate things to do while accepting a favor from a stranger. In the next ten minutes he mentioned that his life has been wasted. Meanwhile I was impatient with driving him around. He couldn't read the signs, so when I would point and say, "which way?" he just looked confused. He could feel my resentment and started talking about how he was bothering me, causing me all this trouble, and then praise my good character, and that annoyed me more. "It's nothing," I said trying to be gentle, to let go of stupid darth vader. I didn't want to encourage conversation, and I was glad to say goodbye. I couldn't shake his hand fast enough! Now in the retrospective of things, I wish I'd given him some money for his visa debt, and I'm glad I picked him up. Who knows how long, or how much of his 400 dirhams, he would have had to spend to get home.

Anyway, this is part of a pattern. I started to feel this way with our Cameroonian neighbors, the ones who lived in our basement for free for six months. They were so desperate, and so alone, and it annoyed me. Annoyed me! I'm ashamed of it. Or really clingy people that need more than anything to be loved, but it's such a burden to feel that need; I want nothing more than to surreptitiously push them away.

What a jerk I am. I never felt that -- what is it, compassion fatigue of some sort -- with iola, and no one has been more helpless or needy in my life. But it's completely different. She's so bossy. She doesn't whine for love -- she rages for it. Expects, demands, commands it. I hope she'll have a deep well of compassion to go with all that power... she'll need it. There's a lot of hunger, debt and loneliness out there.

it's 5am in abu dhabi

2010-04-28T01:00:00Z

but I just wanted to record the day of contrasts yesterday. Going around to villas with pools with an investment advisor for Mubadla, a Lebanese guy with a housing budget of Dhs. 300,000 per year (USD 81k) in the morning, and then meeting a construction engineer looking for an apartment to share with four families, squeezing 24 people into 4 bedrooms in the evening. And this was skilled labor -- engineers and contractors working on Reem Island. Rental prices are coming down fast, but it's still ridiculous.
My job is tiring. I've never worked so hard in my life since I had a newborn. I was warned against frustrating "time-wasters" and figured my colleagues meant people like me -- slow to decide on a place to live -- but actually they meant the guy I was supposed to meet today. Called me at noon looking for a villa in Khalifa City. I said I could meet him in an hour. Went to our designated meeting spot, the police station, and he said he was two minutes away. Called back and said he was there, at the police station. Where? Because I didn't see him in the parking lot. Said he would call back. Ten mins later he called and said he was at Ittihad Bank, couldn't find the police station. I said I would meet him at Ittihad. Went there, called. Said he was two minutes away. Waited ten minutes, called back. Said he had to get back to work and didn't have time to meet. I took a deep breath. Drove half an hour back to Abu Dhabi.

This is only interesting to me... the detailed narrative of minor frustrations.

Iola spent all evening painting watercolors. We are going to do an art project together soon. John is finishing his wayfinding piece, which will be in print on Friday after nearly two years of reporting.

We are buying another car, so John can pick up iola when I have to work late or early. The process has not been so terrible. A little 2003 VW Polo from a friend who is moving to DC. Tomorrow, insha'allah, we will be a two car family, or maybe three if you count the one Brooke is babysitting for us in Santa Cruz. It's a day I vowed would never come, but here I am longing for it. I might even be able to think about nursery school and a new era of parent equality.

beach and god

2010-04-24T18:45:00Z

Last night, while standing next to my naked almost-two year old playing on the beach at the edge of the Persian Gulf, a six year old named Jenna -- Heaven -- approached me to give pointers on Islam and parenting. She was followed adventurously by a little brother, Mohammed.
"Are you Muslim?" Jenna asked and without waiting for an answer continued, "Do you love Allah?"
"No, I'm Christian, but yes I love Allah." That stumped the little girl only momentarily, because she had yet to get to her point. "Allah would be happier if you had clothes on the baby," she revealed, twisting her hair and pointing at her own clothes. Her mother was sitting in the sand twenty feet away, fully covered, and I wondered what conversation had motivated the girl to share her theology. "No, it's ok, the baby is happy and Allah doesn't mind. I didn't bring extra clothes, and they would get wet."
"Do you pray?" she continued, trying to plumb the depth of my knowledge of Allah.
"Not every day, only once a week at church," I said.
Jenna shook her head gravely. "You must pray every day. Don't go anywhere to pray. Men should go to the mosque but girls can pray at home. If you love Allah and pray, you will go to heaven."
And we left it at that, an interfaith dialogue on religion and the merits of clothing, but no hard feelings on either side. I let the baby play, naked, until I felt the time turning heavy. I picked up little Iola Therese and started tromping through the sand back to the restaurant where John sat waiting for the check. Babies can be naked, I kept telling herself. I remember playing naked on the street in front of my childhood home as a three-year old, but perhaps the reason I remember is because someone remarked that it was not appropriate for a little girl. Keeping babies from going naked is related to a fear of lurking pedophiles, and keeping women covered from head to toe is related to a fear of tempting lust. But why bother, if you have other measures in place to stop them? No one will lay a hand on my baby while I stand within inches of her, and no one would lay an eye on Pashto women even if they were uncovered, for fear of the wrath of brothers and fathers. I start to get worked up thinking about this, when middle-aged women who have had nine children completely veil themselves and then, for good measure, turn their back on my husband, while I am sitting there next to him. I think of this as a direct insult to me. My husband only has eyes for me. Why would he look at anyone else, and why are you implying that he would?
Oh well, this is why conversations with six-year old girls are easier than conversations with their mothers.

some writings

2010-02-18T17:49:00Z

There's two things I'm really proud of in this week's Review. I'm going to copy and paste the first paragraph here, but it's worth looking at the photos online and reading the whole thing. The first is John's story about remittances, which he worked really hard on. He wrote it before we went to Cambodia, took a break to do the Cambodia reporting, and then came back and stayed up many nights editing and finishing. I'm proud of it because I didn't kill him. The second is about a concert Martha, Lauren and I went to on Monday in Dubai. I loved the concert, and then writing it... I don't know how to explain it, somehow it made me feel like I was helping to put these subaltern labourers' voices on the map. Of course the people who organized the concert really did, but then none of the press coverage mentioned these guys' names, or bothered to interview them. I loved interviewing them. It made me want to be a journalist. Of course I love Bollywood songs, too.

Bringing it all back home
February 19, 2010, John Gravois
Down the glass-fronted row of exchange houses along Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Street – the city’s unofficial remittance district, where hundreds of security cameras monitor a long, intermittent border-fence of plexiglas teller windows – Maridel Estrelles walked briskly one recent afternoon carrying a glossy faux-leather handbag and, as usual, a wallet full of other people’s money. Trying to keep pace alongside her was a young Bangladeshi man in a spread-collared shirt named Zilani, who carried a small, scuffed laptop folio with flimsy turquoise piping. They were rushing to catch a taxi to the Musaffah Industrial District, 30 minutes away, hoping to arrive there ahead of the clattering buses bound home for the labour camps at sundown.

Whistle while you work: An unlaboured concert in Dubai
February 19, 2010, Rose Dakin
The other night, Mukesh Manilal Patel stood in front of a jam-packed room and opened his mouth to sing. “Hera, hera”, he started, hushing the raucous crowd as his voice filled the space: up to the tall industrial ceilings, across the floors strewn with giant bean bags and down the shelves full of art supplies along the walls. It was standing-room only at the JamJar art gallery, and home-made cupcakes were Dh10 each. The winners of Western Union’s inter-labour camp “Camp ka Champ” singing competition had come to make an appearance in the heart of Dubai’s Al Quoz hub for the aspiring creative class.

Abu Dhabi in winter

2010-01-18T09:23:00Z

Happy New Year everyone!

We've had a lot of visitors coming through, which is great for Iola and us too. It started with John's sister Melanie, who came for Christmas. We went to Jordan with her. Iola started calling her Titi. She left on New Year's Eve's afternoon, which we celebrated after dropping her off at the airport in Dubai on her way to Paris. We drove back to Abu Dhabi and invited a couple from downstairs to hang out on our patio.

Colin Wambsgans came on New Year's day, and was here for twelve days on his winter break from CalArts-composing-grad-school. He'd been really excited about going to Yemen, but the US and British embassies there closed down because of the bomber connections, and it didn't seem like a good time to go, what with the ongoing war going on in the north and south of Sanaa too. I was secretly relieved about the embassies. I'd been nervous about bringing Iola. I probably would have stayed inside the whole time, looking at the city -- purportedly the most beautiful in the world -- through hotel windows. Instead John and Colin went to a Yemeni restaurant, and loved it. We did go to the Mussandam peninsula in Oman, though, and camped on a beautiful little beach right by an ancient Omani cemetery. We went swimming in the morning, the water was perfect and there were little tropical fish everywhere, and we hiked up a cliff and looked down onto sea turtles. We drove to Khasab and explored a fort museum, and took a boat out for two hours to see the archipelago from the water. It was a lot of driving for just one night, but still great to get out and see it again. It had been a year since John, Iola and I went with Lauren and her Portuguese friend. That time we camped on top of the cliff, not realizing our little car could make it down to the beach. You have to do everything at least once here, before doing it right the next time. On our way back to Abu Dhabi we tried to stop at the Burj Dubai/Khalifa, but it was too frustrating. You have to enter from the Dubai Mall, the biggest mall in the world, which is a terrifying place. Last time we went to that mall John and I lost each other, and Iola was three months old, and neither of us had our phones, and I couldn't remember where the car was parked. I sat outside a restroom and cried for forty minutes until he found us. He'd been frantically running around to multiple restrooms looking for us. Maybe the Dubai Mall will require three times before we get it right.

We had a couple days to ourselves and then my friend Maggie Cummings came with her fiance Matt from Boston on their way to India. They only stayed for two days and were really interested in markets and old stuff, so we went to the fish market at Meena and the old souq and museum in Dubai. We also stopped in time for the tour of the grand mosque, which gets more beautiful every day. Now they are gone; I dropped them off at the airport this morning.

We are breathlessly waiting for Nathan and Kelly to come day after tomorrow with their baby Loretta. We haven't met Loretta yet, despite being so close for so many months. We want to go camping with them too, maybe to Wadi Bih, but we have to rent a bigger car to fit the babyseats and all of us. Right after we drop them off, John, Iola and I are heading to Cambodia. John is doing a story on the resettlement of Phnom Penh after the fall of the Khmer Rouge for the Review, dusting off some old notes from when he lived there, and I'll write something on traveling with Iola. We're staying with Brian Calvert, who we lived with in DC and haven't seen in two years. We'll be back on the 31st of January, and then... John and Martha arrive on February 2nd! They will stay until the first week of March.

In the background of all this, we took on a roommate to reduce our rent. Mohamed is a New Yorker-Egyptian, we really like him, he works a lot and Iola calls him Hamed. He's 22 and comes from a big family so he jokes with her a lot. I don't know how long he'll stay with us; but it's nice for now.

Swing at the end of the day

2009-11-25T20:39:00Z

It's been a really arduous week for Iola. Thank goodness she can unwind on her new swing!

Arduous because it was my first week of "work." I can't call it work without quotation marks until I get paid, which is not forseeable. I told my "boss" that I don't mind working for free to learn the ropes of the import-export world of Abu Dhabi, but I sure didn't come all the way here to lose money, which is exactly what happened this week, since childcare isn't free anymore. At least the hours are flexible.

Hence Iola's stress. She's learning Pashto from her wonderful babysitter, but so far that learning has only been exhibited in a shrinking of her english vocabulary. While we were in America she spoke about 20 words fairly commonly, and now they have condensed to four: mama, daddy, ball, wee! But mostly mama. Meanwhile her other tools of expressiveness have expanded; when she wants to go for a walk she brings her shoes and points at her backpack and won't take no for an answer.

My "boss" has a lot of colorful stories about Abu Dhabi; he's been here for 35 years. One time, he took a bunch of money out of the bank and put it in an envelope and stuck it in his briefcase. During the course of the day he put it on his desk, where it was forgotten when he left for home. That night he got a call from the airport saying one of his staff members was trying to leave the country. The guy was apprehended with the money and charged with theft.

It turns out that when you are the sponsor for anyone's employment visa, you are notified by SMS or a call when they pass through immigration. Then you have half an hour to figure out why they are leaving the country and can request airport authorities to stop them before they board the plane. Sponsors have a lot of power. This was very interesting to me; I hadn't thought through or heard that detail before.

It is the Haj Eid tomorrow, as well as Thanksgiving, so all the grocery stores are low on supplies. We are celebrating on Friday.

I have a video of this swinging evening at vimeo.

Breastfeeding certificate

2009-11-08T19:16:00Z

Jet lag is hard. It seems like it gets harder, too, as iola gets older. She is more tightly tied to daylight rhythms, so the 12 hour change between California and Abu Dhabi creates a strong biological lag. I read a couple months back that there are hundreds of biological processes that operate on a diurnal schedule, some are quick to adjust and others take up to ten days. We are on day four now, and it has been the first semi-normal sleep day. It's harder here, too, because we don't have the external rhythms of a tight community to keep us going, so sometimes a seven hour nap seems like the perfect way to spend the day. I tried to plan things for our days, but I kept accidentally sleeping through them.

Until this afternoon, when we went to a "Breastfeeding Tea." We walked from our apartment to OnetoOne hotel, where they'd set up tables in the garden and had sandwiches and tea for hundreds of breastfeeding moms and their babies. We got there just before it ended, due to napping. As soon as we arrived I spied the woman who had been our lactation consultant the day we were discharged from the Corniche hospital 15 months ago to the day. She spied me and John too, and said she remembered us, and I totally believe her, though there are 900 births per month at the Corniche. John was the only man in attendance but she said it was ok, so he helped himself to four sandwiches. She said she wanted to make us a breastfeeding certificate, and was being followed around by other moms eager for their certificates, and when she turned to fill theirs out I cracked jokes with John about adding the certificate to my resume, under "awards and certficates." Eventually she filled mine out, and I took it and chatted with her and another midwife that I remembered from my many visits to the Corniche. Pretty soon iola wanted to leave, so we started walking back home, cracking more jokes about the certificate, which I was carefully holding. As we were walking I opened it to read it and suddenly started bawling. So much for all my jokes. It's nice to have a certificate for something that has been a lot of work. I'm grateful to the Corniche for making it. Here it is, everyone:

california files

2009-07-18T07:08:00Z

I'm sorry to have taken such a long break from writing. The break started because I wanted to say something thoughtful and summing up about censorship and Kelly's NPR piece about press freedom in the UAE. Then the stakes were high and my thoughts didn't sum. And I started putting more updates on facebook, nothing of substance, but it took the urgency out of my need to share iola's brilliant accomplishments. And I started traveling.

I've been in California for six weeks now, not counting two days in DC and three days in Altoona PA for a story on the DelGrosso sauce family business. And one hour on a Philadelphia pilgrimage to the Liberty Bell to read the first amendment engraved on an iron plaque: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Simple enough to make a person cry. It's beautiful, and unusual.

John's story on NYU Abu Dhabi came out on Friday. Since I started this freedom vein of thought, I should say that he was happy with the editing process. It is part one of a two part series. It is an uncensored labor of love. Of writing, truth, and balance. Read it.

Six weeks of home. And two more in front of me. They've been good for iola and me and John for the three weeks that he was here with us. Iola said her first word a couple weeks after arriving: Echo. The name of her honorary grandma Sande's dog. At first she pronounced it Eh with an intake of breath Goh exhale. She would practice in a whisper under her breath and then say it out loud whenever any dog came in view. She doesn't yet say mama or dada, but how does a first child know what to call her parents? No one else calls me that, and I rarely refer to myself in the third person, so I am still the unnamed ever present love of her life. A name would be useful.

Yesterday at the DelGrosso amusement park in Tipton PA she started saying Wow. Practicing and practicing, then Uh Oh. Before that she had also noticed things with Oooooh.

I would like to write more about the actual days; the people who visited, John's appendicitis, my family. I had it all written out in my head as I was driving home in the dark tonight. But it was a long day and I'm tired. I left Altoona a 6am and arrived in Ukiah at 10:30 pm. It could have been worse! I got the standby that saved me and iola six more hours of waiting around like vagabonds in the airport. I'll post another one soon.

Oh, and she took two steps in DC. Inspired by three-year old Henry and his little friends. Since then, she's been more cautious.

Perspective from Zahraa

2009-05-01T15:14:00Z

The other night I interviewed an Iraqi woman for a section of the Saturday paper called "home and away." It's an as-told-to thing, asking expats in Abu Dhabi about their conception of home: where they have lived; what home means to them; if they still have homes in their home countries; if their perspective of home has changed through moving. I've done a few of these, and they are such nice conversations about travel, art, cooking, the sea (everyone mentions the sea), relationships, and finding people of similar brainwaves in the places that they end up. This woman left Baghdad in 2006 and moved to Jordan for two years and then came here. So you can imagine, a bit, how war has shaped her conception of home. My interview with her increased the drama quotient by so much that I almost felt silly sending it into the editors. I can't quote it because it's not published yet, but it was so wonderful speaking with her and getting a sense of perspective on the beauty of Abu Dhabi right at a time when I was feeling sinister undertones living in a country without free speech laws. Abu Dhabi is an oasis. It is other things as well, I don't mean to diminish the road ahead, or the bumps behind. But there's a start: The National finally wrote up a piece on the torture video, which I applaud. It is written by "staff," and is conservative and protective in its language, and that is fine. It has been a year. I remind myself: A year. There is a lot of broken trust to build.

The evening I interviewed Zahraa, I noticed a restaurant in the ground floor of her building that looked like a healthfoody California place, so I stopped and looked at the menu. Whole wheat pancakes with orange syrup! Poached eggs! I decided we had to try it this weekend. So we walked there this morning. It was tragic. The pancakes were the size of two bites, the thickness of a crepe, and the leatheriness of a shoe. The orange syrup was orange juice thickened with corn starch. Our hopes were dashed. It turned out to be a restaurant for diabetics and heart patients, run by a hospital. But we had a nice walk getting there and while we were there iola took her very first abstract photo, entitled rose's legs:

She was the only one who enjoyed her meal of honeydew melon, after playing in the empty (of course!) BiteRite cafe. At least it was cheap. I came home and made a grilled cheese sandwich.

Also, this is a cute one that'll make you hungry for watermelon.

sigh

2009-04-25T18:27:00Z

So much bad news about the UAE.

So much good news about Iola.

I landed in Abu Dhabi on May 19th, 2008. In three weeks, we'll be evaluating our year, and reevaluating the decision to stay.

I have lots of opinions about the bad news. Also about Iola. She is getting so much smarter. Yesterday, for instance, I offered her a potato wedge, which I was eating with ketchup. She took it, looked at the ketchup, looked at the potato, and then rubbed it in the ketchup. I can't say dipped, exactly, because she got a lot on her fingers. She wasn't too impressed, but she tried it twice, so it couldn't have been that bad. It made me wonder what other things she has been imitating, besides banging on the xylophone, trying to stand up, grabbing the mouse and obsessing over the keyboard and cell phone. Does she think she sounds exactly like us when she talks?

The slave society, torture video stuff...
Johann Hari wrote a piece in The Independent that had good reporting but faulty conclusions. He wrote that Dubai has been built by slaves. There are too many people who choose to come here without being duped to call it a slave society. That's my opinion. There are those who have been lied to by recruiters about the salary or the type of job, and those recruiters are human traffickers. Part of me thinks this: there are millions of South Asians and Filipinos here. Those wishing to get a job in the Gulf should do their due diligence about the job, ask friends of friends for contacts and the low-down, and not go into debt to put their lives in the hands of sketchy people. They are desperate and without resources to ask questions, so it is cold-hearted of me to place the burden of responsibility on them. Primary responsibility lies within the source country. Recruiters are operating in India or Pakistan or the Philipines, enslaving their citizens, and should be apprehended as criminals. There should be coding and permits and hotlines and inspections, and potential laborers should go through licensed recruiters. The UAE government should cooperate with data sharing and criminal prosecution for illegalities that occur, but mostly it happens in deceiving people before they arrive. Lastly, the UAE construction companies need to address their supply chain labor issues. If they cared about responsibility, they would. But they won't care about it until it is exposed as an outrage, because that's the way companies work, and that's why a free press is great.

Which leads me to the torture video. The story is that a grain delivery man was tortured by someone in the royal family. The real story, though, is that there were police in uniform* involved, and that the UAE government performed a review and found that "all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department." Which sounds ridiculous, though I don't know the laws. I wonder, will this make people within the UAE government realize why the media glare is important - to keep irregular members of the family from creating havoc, and a government from sounding ridiculous? People, corporations, and governments are all more likely to behave when they think someone is watching. For me the pressing question is this: is it realistic to believe that a free press as an institution can be built slowly over time? There is so much defensiveness about the Western press being critical and even racist of the UAE, that I'm not sure the positive externalities of a free press is registering. Most people here don't realize western press is also critical of the west itself. Critical of everything, biting, nagging: doing its job. Holding people accountable.

The National has been silent. One year is not long enough to build a free press in Abu Dhabi.

*maybe not police, instead security guards? Conflicting reports. There are some interesting comments on this on the UAE Community Blog, especially by khulood: "admitting shortcomings is the first step to greatness, and believe me, we ARE on our way." So that's hopeful.

Back to Iola:

I took these yesterday in Khalidiya Park. Couple minutes after the climbing practice video.

normal day

2009-04-16T15:57:00Z

Sometimes people ask me how I spend a normal day. I just had a normal day! And I feel like writing, so I'll tell you all about it.

I woke up at 5:45 annoyed at iola for squirming in bed. I picked her up and plopped her in the crib in the other room, expecting her to scream while I grumpily buried my head in the pillow. She went right to sleep, and I was so surprised it took me a minute to relax. I woke up again at 7:30 to her cry, and pushed John out of the bed to get her. He said he had to take a shower and get ready to go to Dubai for a labor camp tour, so I told him to let her crawl around in the hall while he shower, because I needed more sleep. I gave up a couple minutes later... ok, I have to pick up the pace of this day-story. Forgot breakfast while I checked Facebook, got a message from Lauren saying she was going to Dubai, arranged for John and Lauren to carpool, and they were out the door by 9:15. Tried to feed iola some instant-rice-and-veggie thing, which she smeared in her eye. Sat iola on her changing table to help me hang up her diapers from the wash, and then put her in the crib. Still working on sleeping in the crib without nursing to sleep, she protested, screamed for 20 minutes and then fell asleep. But woke 20 minutes later. I tried to get her to go back to sleep by nursing, but she was too delighted with the turn of events, and decided to practice climbing. Gave up, and went to see if I could get her to play by herself while I finished (started) my running column. In that underslept clingy mood, she wouldn't let me put her down. We walked around the apartment looking at things. Called Saira, said we're coming over. Took the stairs down, though my calves hurt from my BodyStep class the other day, found the car in front of the sabzi-wala, strapped her in, and took 15th to Airport to Saada. Saira was alone in the house, and iola was delighted to see her too, so I got 1.5 hours of work done. Yay! No internet, even better. Iola started rubbing her eyes again so I nursed her on the bed then put her back in the carseat and drove down Airport to Electra street, parked in the shade behind Cassels hotel-apartments while she slept. Opened the doors and took out my book Lost History to let iola finish her nap, but then I got sleepy and felt weird about falling asleep with all the doors and windows open, so I closed everything, turned the car on, and let the AC run, leaned back and fell asleep (tinted windows). Slept about 20 minutes, she woke up, I woke up, strapped her in the sling, started walking around the block. I'm writing my next neighborhood piece on it. Went in to Cassels, then to a Pakistani restaurant called Sarawan, then the Bangladeshi square behind the Anarkali Plaza. Decided to have lunch at Al Wassal restaurant, because it looked the most... the most... hung-out-at. Looked like guys had been there for hours, just sittin' around. Staring at me as I walked up. That's what I love about iola, she's a great unselfconscious being to hide behind. I went up the rickety stairs to the only empty seating, ordered fish. The options were fish and chicken. I had her on my lap, she mouthed some rice, I asked for yogurt, she had some of that, I got about five bites myself. The food was not bad, but I don't know, I was looking for something special, the ONE place Bangladeshi people go. I think I found it, since that is the epicenter of Bangladeshis in Abu Dhabi, but the lesson here may be that Bangladeshis in Abu Dhabi don't have a lot of money. They have other priorities, too, sending it all home. Got a sooji sweet to eat while walking, since I didn't really fill up, and walked. Went to some textile stores, looped around and went to the Marks and Spencers building, took the escalators up, checked out the My Playground and Kinderzone (fed her on a kinderzone couch), which will be useful places once the scorching heat sets in. Went in to a fancy abaya shop and an early learning center and tried to talk to the Syrian employee, who was very nice and helpful once he figured out what I was asking (what kind of customers come here? why do they come to this one, and not the Khalidiya one?). He gave iola a balloon, so we went out to the rotunda and I sat there on the marble benches and let her play on the floor chasing the balloon. It's a clean floor. The floor polisher came while we were sitting there to polish it AGAIN. A lady and her baby came up and I motioned for them to sit next to me. Also an 8-month girl, jessy with a soft j, Syrian. Iola, thrilled to have someone to paw, tried to pinch her. They talked to each other, back and forth, slower than adult dialogue and less eye contact but definitely call and response. About 4pm she got tired again so we said bye and went back to the car, stopping at a different Pakistani restaurant to get some sweets, and drove home. Stopped in our block area to get a fresh-squeezed apple juice, which I inhaled, parked in the shade of our one tree (ficus) and opened the doors again, waited for her to wake while I read, fell asleep again myself. She woke around 5, we went inside. Changed a diaper (not the first today, don't worry), read a book about bunnies, fed her a couple spoons of banana-carrot curry soup (smeared in her eye, again), gave her a bath, let her romp on the bed naked to practice more climbing, nursed her. Got a call from someone to look at the bed we are trying to sell, showed it to them, a Keralan family, not impressed, got another call from a British guy at the National, he bought it. Nursed her again, put her in the crib, lit a candle, and lay on the bed while she cried, standing up, imploring me to pick her up. I hardened my heart and pretended to be asleep, and 15 minutes later she was too. Got a couple calls from John in there, on his way home from Dubai. She was asleep by 7:30. It's 9pm now. He's not home yet... must be traffic. Thursday night, it's the weekend tomorrow. Tonight Lauren is having a barbecue, but I don't have a babysitter, and I still haven't finished that running column. Started it, though, thanks to Saira. John can go bring me back a burger. That's a normal day. With ALOT of comma splices.

happy easter!

2009-04-12T20:22:00Z

Today we went to St. Joseph's Catholic church, which had services all day in about 17 languages, sometimes two at once. In the morning I stopped by to see when the English services would be and overheard the Arabic mass. Made me smile, somehow, to hear Allah invoked in a mass, to hear the Our Father in Arabic. All the English masses were being held outside to accommodate the thousands of people, literally thousands, at each service. We went at 6pm while the sun set, and a bit of rain came up. During Communion the next-door mosque's azhan sang out, interrupting Catholic prayers with Muslim prayers. Not seamlessly, but not prickly, either.

I've been working on stuff for the newspaper. I wrote about a couple neighborhoods, including ours. I interviewed an expat on his concept of home. (I also interviewed another for next weekend publication.) I wrote a feature on health clubs in Abu Dhabi. I'm still writing my weekly exercise column, though it is sorely flagging in spirits. I wrote about the doula class I took at Kate's house.

We are on day four of attempt number three of sleep training for iola. I am using a two-step approach, taking two weeks for each step. The signs are encouraging already, but it was terribly hard on everyone the first three evenings. Now, suddenly, she can go to sleep with only a couple whimpers. In the first step, she learned to fall asleep in her crib by herself, but I still comfort and nurse her as normal throughout the night, sometimes co-sleeping if she settles (the reason I am doing this is because she started wanting to play in bed with us while we wanted to sleep. And she's getting too big to lift in and out of the crib constantly. I don't mind a couple times a night; I mind every 45 minutes...). In the second step, well, I don't really know how the second step goes. But it may involve me ignoring her during the night while John goes in to comfort her... not sure. I have fallen strongly on both sides of the cry-it-out debate, absolutely convinced 1. it was horrible and then 2. it was fine. Perhaps that's because she's 8 months now, and has a sense of object permanence (we keep the door open so she can see us doing boring things down the hall, just in case she forgets about object permanence). Or perhaps it's because all three of us are sleep-deprived every day lately. I also did a bunch of reading up on it, and saw some studies that showed no psychological damage, and a huge improvement in sleep ability after "intervention." Who knew that sleeping is a skill to be learned? Some people are blessed with natural talent, but others (about 25 percent of babies, according to researchers) struggle with it, sometimes for years. And sleep problems as a three-year-old predict sleep problems as an adult, which is correlated with depression... so I wanted to deal with it now, not in two years.

I also wanted to write about my huge environmental breakthrough. I was unsure about whether using cloth diapers is better on the environment here, with all this energy-intensive desalinated water. I figured out a way to make sure: I pour iola's bath water into the washing machine after her bath! Voila. I bought an extremely low-tech washing machine with a glorified hose input because I knew I would never forgive myself for being lazy and drying my clothes in a machine when we live in a desert (and I knew I would, if I could). The little things we do to save our humanity. It only took 6 months to figure this out... and the washing machine is right next to the tub. It's not super hygenic, but... she's toughening up against the germs in the world.

getting ahead of herself

2009-04-10T21:21:00Z

the silly baby is trying to stand up with no hands! It's ridiculous. She grabs onto something, pulls herself up to standing, wobbles, and then very very carefully lets go with one hand, and then the other. And immediately falls on her butt. We just laugh at her, and then she laughs at us, but I feel a little concerned at how cavalier she's being. She's getting way ahead of her skills. She's not even very good at crawling; she does a normal hands and knees crawl, and then she switches to a hands and feet spider walk. I can't tell if she does it because she doesn't like the way the ground feels on her knees or if she thinks it's more advanced to be using her feet.

I went out to a movie tonight with a friend. The first time in a cinema since... the Dark Knight, or maybe WallE, anyway a long time. John stayed home and babysat. The mall was so crowded with Emirati teenagers, boys and girls both, I've never seen it so packed. But I don't go out much, like I said, so maybe it's like that all the time.

We went to the Khalidiya children's park today. John is crunching on the nyu story, so iola and I went alone.

Sandy mouth

2009-04-09T19:00:00Z

We went to the beach last weekend and Iola, sitting in the sand, gently lowered her face to the sand so that she could drink it.
It's just the way she lowers herself, very carefully, in the bath when she feels thirsty.
It made me think about sand, water, wind, waves, dunes.

The sea

A cresting wave

Sand rain

The geniuses