Long Summer's Gone

Been getting mini-bum saunas since returning to Dubai two weeks ago, at the ladies room at work. Water from the rooftop tank is so hot from the desert sun that as you sit your dainty derriere onto the commode, it's like trying to get into a bath that's still too hot. To be away from Dubai for two months, and then to come back during the holy month of Ramadan, when it's 115 degrees and humid, where you can't drink water in public during fasting hours until the holy month is over, can be a little shocking, if not draining.

We've lived here 2 years now and to certain things we've become accustomed, some of them shamefully so. Inexpensive help at home, for one. Having a smiley live-in nanny / cook / housekeeper (especially one that irons) is something I will never recover from once back on the normal part of the planet. Thank you Chamri! British English vernacular for another, as I sit here on a holiday recovering from 'the dreaded lurgy' I caught in Turkey, while my kids 'natter on' about the new neighbors. And then there are the gorgeous hotel bars on the Gulf, with their impeccably coiffed east-Asian staff, and cocktails stirred to perfection.

But despite soaking it up as expats in the Gulf, there is a nagging guilt sometimes that I might be helping to sustain a largely immigrant culture where the workers are often subtly oppressed and in many cases outright neglected and abused. A story in the paper this week revealed 75 stranded Pakistani and Indian laborers whose company closed up shop and left them on the un-airconditioned premises during desert summer, with no passports, money or food. The local mosque and Indian embassy came forward with aid, but only after these guys suffered several miserable days without safe drinking water or a cool place to rest.

And then there is the delicate issue of other nannies we know in the community, some of them working for families who delay and withhold their pay, keep their passports, work them night and day, and provide merely a cot in the pantry as accommodation. Is living in a country where these things are commonplace a tacit approval of the prevailing cultural norms? The shameful thing about it is that when these issues are right in front of my face, I have the mind to say to myself "What on Earth am I doing here?" But then my own reality takes over, and my gaze shifts over to my kids, their expensive school shoes, our next holiday plans, the working conditions at the women's college where I work, and all of the abuse, neglect and human rights issues recede into near non-existence.