Saeed, the Driver

This is a picture of Saeed our driver who takes us out to the base where we work. I’ve been driven by a number of drivers in the nearly two years since I’ve been here and I regard them as my cultural tutors. I love to sit in the front of the van and get to know them and find out what I can about their lives and their culture. If you are a follower of my blogs (like I have masses who read what I write here) you may recall a posting about Samir who lost his job driving for Al Gazhal and I how much I hated to lose him.

Before Saeed was hired, his brother Salem (which is pronounced almost exactly like solemn) was our driver. I liked Salem too except for the fact that he kept falling asleep while driving. The speed limit on the road to the Sweihan base is 120 kilometers an hour. It is a rather boring drive, I’ll grant you that, but he would regularly drift off to sleep and the van would start to swerve until a happy motorist would announce it to him with a blast of the horn and a few friendly gestures.

Salem had a string of complaints to HR about it over the nearly two years he had been driving. But, for whatever reason, HR didn’t do much about it. You know how it is with these teachers, they just complain about everything. They seemed to think that Salem was such a nice guy or something. And he was. But he was going to get us all killed eventually. He denied that he was falling asleep, “O, it was a gust of wind, or a teacher asked me for something and I was distracted.” He started wearing shades and turning his rear view mirror to the side so the teachers couldn’t see his eyes. But while I was sitting next to him one day I felt the van swerve and I looked over at him and there he was with his eyes completely closed, totally asleep. “Hey, Dude! I think you better wake up there” I said calmly. He startled out of his sleep and corrected his driving. Soon after that Maureen, our lead teacher at the base, collected all the complaints she could find on him and went to HR about it. Salem was given a warning and a few strategies for staying awake. These strategies obviouly didn’t work since he fell asleep with Maureen sitting right there in the passenger seat next to him this last time. After that we were told that Salem would be fired. The problem was, no other driver had a pass to the base so we had to stick with him for a few more weeks until his brother was given clearance. But, in case you were worried for Salem, as I was. He wasn’t fired after all. HR decided to give him another assignment driving on shorter routes. I assume that means he is driving people who are not such complainers.

Anyway, Saeed, Salem’s brother, doesn’t fall asleep. His English skills are very good and he seems interested in talking to people. He told me early on that he really wanted to practice his English so he liked talking with me and has asked me to correct him when he doesn’t say something right. He is from India, but his family is not of Indian descent. He is Yemeni Arab. His grandfather left Yemen in the early part of the twentieth century because at that time, Saeed says the economy was especially bad. Saeed says that his grandfather went to work as a secretary of the treasury for a king in the area where his family still lives today, though there hasn’t been a king there since sometime in the 1940’s.

His grandfather had to leave his land behind in Yeman when he left for India. Saeed says that his father went back to reclaim that land many years later, but when he got there he found that the government had given it away. Saeed explained, “The government people ask him, why you not take care of your property? Why you leave it all these years?”

I told him that people who abandon their houses in the US can lose them too if someone else takes care of the property and puts a lean on the house and is willing to pay the back taxes. But for Saeed’s family, I suspect that the loss of property for his father represented a loss of a dream of returning to Yemen and to a possible income and life there. If the land had still been there for them, Saeed might have been raised in Yemen and his life would have been very different.

Saeed has a fiancée back in India. It is an arranged marriage that their fathers formed for them when he was little. I had a lot of questions for him about that. “So do you love her?” He tried to explain to me that this is just how it is done. This was expected of him. That is how it has always been done. I explained to him that in Western countries we marry who we want and we marry for love. He knew that of course and I had said it, I guess, just to point out the contrast, or just to see what he would think. I asked him, when he married her, would she come here to the UAE to live with him. He said that she would not be coming to the UAE, that he would see her when he went on leave every year.

“So, she will have children I guess, and you will be in the UAE--and she will work?”
Saeed said no, she wouldn’t, that it was considered a great shame for her to have to work. A husband is expected to provide for her.

I tried to sum this all up: “So you will marry her, not because you love her, but because your fathers arranged it, and you will only get to see her once a year, and you will send money home to support her?” (I don’t know what Saeed actually makes, but I doubt that it is even two hundred dollars a month).

Saeed smiled while driving, “Yes. What is it like for you?”

Well at the moment, my life isn’t so different from Saeed’s, when it comes to sending money home and not getting to see my family, I just make more money and have a few more options. “Well,” I said, “we choose our own husbands and wives and we do it for love. Our women are expected to work now, but forty or fifty years ago, it was a little more like your culture in that we expected the husband to provide for his wife and family. But the world has changed in America quite a bit since then. Husbands couldn’t afford to be a sole provider anymore and their wives had to work. Some women wanted to work because it gave them freedom, but some expected to be supported and were very angry about having to work. Many men did feel shame for a while, but now it is normal. It was not an easy adjustment, but we did change. It is no longer shameful that a wife works. It is expected now.
Saeed nodded, thinking. I said to him, “the whole world is changing, Saeed. Cultures change, economics change, people change.” Saeed just kept thinking.

Not long after this, we passed two workers. I couldn’t tell if they were Indian or Pakistani. They were picking up trash along the road on the base. It was about 110 degrees out and I knew that they had been, and would be, out there for hours and hours. “Now there’s a job.” I said.

“What you mean?” asked Saeed.

“Picking up trash on a hot day like this for hours and hours.” Then I added, “What do you suppose they make a month?”

Saeed said they most likely made somewhere between 100 and 150 US dollars a month. Such things make me upset. I know that the UAE has fixed a 48 hour work week, which is supposed to be for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. But I also know that workers are often forced to work much longer hours and employers often have legal ways to get around those laws.

At ADU, the cleaners, the Emirati DCS students told me, make about 100 US dollars a month. I have seen the same workers there in the morning and in the evening until around 9:00 at night. Mohammed, our shuttle driver to town drives every day. He is on a yearly leave right now, but it disturbs me to think that he has to work every day and never a day off. The security guards that used to be at the University (before the new security company won the bid for the new contract) worked very long hours and I don’t know if they ever had a day off. One of the cruelest things I have ever witnessed was seeing one of the guards, let me call him Noor, would sit in an armless chair in the empty hallway between the men’s side and the women’s side of the building to make sure that there was no gender mixing. He was there from morning to night, sitting. He was not allowed to read a book. He wasn’t allowed to do anything except sit for 14 hours a day, every day, in that empty hallway, in the florescent light and watch a few teachers passing by from one side to the other. I remember once the painters at ADU spent a week painting that hall. The fumes were very noxious. I was a painter once and I have to tell you that I have seldom worked with such strong fumes. Poor Noor had to sit in that hall with the doors closed and with no ventilation the whole time.
I don’t understand how managers can be so thoughtless, so inhumane, or so sadistic. It is often justified by the fact that the workers are making a great deal more money than what they could get back in Pakistan or India. Well, it is like George W. Bush used to say, they are willing to work those jobs that Americans won’t do and are grateful.

Being American, I grew up with a belief that all human beings are created equal, that anyone could become president, that no man is subservient to another. It is not so here. Indian and Pakistani workers are almost entirely powerless and have few rights. One of the teachers here tells a story about how she was in an accident where she was at fault. The only problem was that the person she hit was a Pakistani who was visibly frightened. When the police (all police are Emirati and are paid highly as civil servants) showed up she had to convince them that she was the one who was responsible for the accident. If she had not said so they would have hauled the Pakistani off to jail.

Don’t misunderstand me. I love the Emirati. They are a kind, gentle, hospitable and generous people. They are good people. But there is a strange disconnection that happens when it comes to “Labour.” When people see the pictures of the Burj Dubai, I think most people will be impressed by the money that built it, as well as be awed by looking at the tallest building in the world.. But when I look at it I see it as a monument to cheap labour. (Labour is the UK spelling.) In the nearby city of Musaffah are Labour Camps. This is where they house the Indian and Pakistani workers. Some of the buildings are in long rows like chicken coops. It is not a pretty place. I went there once to get a blood test for my residency visa. It is not too far from ADU. Being a westerner, I was sent to the front of the line and rushed through. It bothered and embarrassed me. My ticket number suggested that I had perhaps a hundred workers ahead of me.

The workers here are dirty, smelly, and always look unhappy, even though that may not be the case at all. Mostly they are curious when it comes to westerners. They dress in traditional workers clothing which look like tan or white shirts that come down to the knees and what look like matching pajama pants with sandals. Their heads are wrapped in scarves and they are often bearded. They look like they would be very handsome men if they were washed and dressed in clean ironed clothing and wore deodorant. Mostly it is that they have almost no money, and of what they do have, a good deal of it is sent home to care for wives and families that they never see, much like what Saeed will do, I suppose. It is this lack of money that, more or less, seals their unattractiveness. It does not matter that they may have a fine chin, or straight white teeth or big brown eyes, that they are tall and straight and a have a thick head of hair. They are invisible at best; they are nameless faces lost in those crowded labour camps or that you see in bus windows on the highway while they are being shipped off to work on villas or skyscrapers; building monuments to and for men of great wealth like the pharaohs of Egypt long ago.

It bothers me that so many people in this world live this way. Or to think that many more are even far worse off that these who are the lucky ones and have work and income. I cannot rescue them from this kind of a life. What I can do is to see them as people, as fellow human beings who are my equal, and treat them with dignity as I would wish to be treated.