Letters from Abu Dhabi - by Guestblogger Susan Macaulay

Susan Macaulay is a dynamic Canadian living in Dubai, whom I met while in Barcelona for the IABC EuroComm Conference earlier this year. Susan is a public speaking coach and also the founder of the social network for amazing women, aptly called Amazing Women Rock. I invited Susan to share her cross-cultural experiences for Fusion View.

Susan writes:

I got to the United Arab Emirates by accident. Like the castaways in the 1960s American sitcom “Gilligan’s Island,” my then-husband Bob and I set out on what was meant to be a little adventure in 1993, only to end up marooned on a desert island for the next 12 years. It was all terribly unplanned, but then I guess most adventures are.

Our collective travel experiences had been rather limited until then. I had wandered around New Zealand and Australia for a year and half in my early twenties. He had been to Hawaii and Mexico I think, and we had holidayed together in Europe for six weeks in 1990. But that was the extent of it.

Our move to the Middle East (from Canada), was driven mostly by boredom (his, with a routine job in Calgary), and thirst (mine, for adventures in exotic foreign lands). When a friend who worked for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company called to say there was an opening for a technical instructor, Bob jumped at the opportunity and I prayed he would ace the interview.

He went on a 10-day reccie to Abu Dhabi just before Christmas 1992, and was offered the job. We gave the move some thought over the yuletide holidays, got married on January 9, 1993 (after seven years of co-habitation), and he hopped on a plane a few days later – leaving me to hold the fort for six months in case things didn’t work out.

Fifteen years later, Bob and I are divorced, he’s based in eastern Canada (working 28-day shifts at a refinery in the Algerian desert), and I’m in Dubai making the most of one of the few places in the world where the economy is booming, and people are arriving in droves to stake their claim in a 21st-century Middle-Eastern version of the Klondike gold rush , which, by some accounts was started by a woman in 1896.

Unlike their 19th century counterparts, however, many of these latter-day prospectors are panning for property, instead of the nuggets of old. Scores of speculators who have bought into the Dubai real estate dream are banking on ‘happily ever after’ not turning into disaster, as it seems to have done the world over in the last year or so.

Whether the whole thing will implode (or explode), leaving investors holding the proverbial bag remains to be seen. Time, as they say, will tell.

Back in 1993, expatriates couldn’t own property in the UAE, Abu Dhabi and Dubai weren’t global household names, the Dubai World Trade Center (at 34 floors), was the tallest building in the country, and I couldn’t find work in my profession, because public relations was still unknown in the Emirates.

So I wrote. A lot. Mostly to friends and family “back home.” Mainly about my experiences as a successful career woman suddenly having to cope with being an expat wife.

A few weeks ago, I began republishing those Letters from Abu Dhabi (LADs as I called them then), on www.amazingwomenrock.com , a website I conceptualized, created, and finally launched in July, after three frustrating years of development.

It’s interesting, and a little ironic, to be posting those long-ago LADs on this internet creation of mine, which is as much my passion and joy today, as the LADs were a decade and a half ago. I could hardly have conceived of a website then. In fact, it would be years before we could even access the internet in the UAE.

(To steal the words from a 1970s cigarette ad targeted at women, I’ve “come a long way, baby.” So has the UAE. We’ve transformed ourselves in tandem, and at light speed, my adopted country and I.)

Even more interesting is that, alongside my LADs of the mid-1990s, I’m publishing a series of recollections by Gertrude Dyck, a Canadian nurse and missionary, who went to the UAE in 1962 (almost a decade before it was even a country), and who lived there for more than 40 years.

We are collaborating: two expat women of different ages, from different eras. The result is two sets of impressions about the same initially-foreign-to-both-of-us country, seen through totally different lenses, 30 years apart, and yet presented side-by-side (years after they were originally written), on the internet.

As I tap out this blog entry (sitting in an airport in Germany), for UK-based Yang-May (whom I met at a conference in Spain in February), Gertrude is reviewing the next installment of her story from a retirement home in western Canada. I wonder where you will be if and when you read the fruits of our joint labour?

All of this suggests something about culture change, I think, about how small our big world has become. Here we all are – you, me, Yang-May, Gertrude and who knows who else – continents apart, or perhaps unknowingly sitting next to each other in a café somewhere, paradoxically separated, and yet interconnected (by choice), through time, space, and experiences – some shared, some uniquely ours.

But I digress. Let me see. Where was I? Oh yeah, Abu Dhabi, 1993…