Name and Shame

by Cindy

Growing up in America with American parents means that Jeff and I grew up in a Guilt/Innocence culture.  It is quite different than the Honor/Shame culture that we have in the UAE.  The worst thing you can do here is shame someone or shame their family name.  To shame someone into doing something is not to "guilt me into it" or "twist my arm" but something totally different.  To shame someone is to insult their name and the name of their family.  While you should never intentionally shame someone, the one thing about shaming is that it works.  And works well.

It all is a bit hard to explain and hard to convey how it permeates everything we do and see but I'll give you two recent examples from our newspaper:

This article talks about the people who have racked up the most traffic fines in the city.  We are talking one person with 12,740 offences which totals to $2.56 M in fees.  The government knows exactly who it is but it would be shameful to put their name or anything about them in the paper.  The paper has simply stated that the person is a VIP.  The other offenders are mentioned by the number of offenses and amount of their fines and specifically, "none of the people has been named."  In addition, they were all said to be "high-profile" and included figures from government institutions."  In America, someone from a government institution who had $2.56M in fines...their name and (a horrible) picture would be plastered across the front page and we would be expecting them to immediately pay up and step down from office.  Here, that would never happen as listing a name in the paper would bring shame to their family and that's simply not acceptable.

With that said, if you really want to push people here, you can 'name and shame' them.  If you take this approach, you had better do it very cautiously   I can't stress this enough.  While I personally support the notion, I was surprised to read this article in the paper where they threatened to 'name and shame.'  Someone was savvy enough to include an intermediate step of only posting a license plate number before actually posting a name.  The fact that no one has had a second offense shows just how bad it would be to bring shame to your name.

Triple Digit Weather

by Cindy

October 27 Update:  I have had to update the number of triple digit days in October - we had another one.

[Note: I have to start this blog with an explanation for our readers who are not familiar with Fahrenheit temperatures. Triple digits refers to anything equal to or greater than 100 F (37 C).]

Being from Texas, we often talk about how hot the summers can get.  After a few years in the UAE, however, a Texas summer is welcome relief from the heat of the UAE.  Lately I've been seeing posts on Facebook about the first snow in Colorado and the cooler, fall weather in parts of Texas.  I'm quite jealous because here in the UAE, it's still hot.  Triple digit hot. And the truth of the matter is that we have crazy humidity during the summer so it feels even hotter.  Here are some of the weather statistics for 2012:

The first day over 100 F was March 29th where we registered 104 F.  We had two days of triple digits in March.

April registered only three days of triple digits.

May registered 27 days of triple digits.  The four that didn't reach triple digits - 98 F, 92 F, 95 F and 96 F.

June registered 26 days of triple digits, the relief came in 98 F, 98 F, 94 F and 96 F.

All 31 days in July, all 31 days in August, and all 30 days in September reached triple digits.  It's October now and we still have triple digits.

I'll help you out and do the math for you:

Total days of Triple Digits:
2 in March
3 in April
27 in May
26 in June
31 in July
31 in Aug
30 Sept
10 in Oct
160  Total days of Triple Digits in 2012 - 43.8% of the year


Consecutive days of Triple Digits:
24 in June (beginning with June 7th)
31 July
31 Aug
30 Sept
9 October
126  Consecutive days of Triple Digits in 2012 - 34% of the year

The hottest day was July 27th at 119 F degrees. Second place is a tie at 117 F on June 22nd and August 5th.

Take 2

Well, here we are again.  Three years later.  In Dubai for our second 1001 nights [on our second three-year contract].

When we left three years ago, we had no idea what to expect.  We were moving halfway around the world to a place we had never even visited.

We've ended up loving it.  We've met people from dozens of different countries - and visited a lot of those countries ourselves.  We've got great jobs, great friends, and a great church.  We have a lot of time to spend with one another, and a lot of time to spend on vacation :).

When we received our contract offer this past year (to renew for another three years), we kind of looked at it, said, "Do we want to do this?", said "Yeah, sure", and that was it.  A day or two later, we were eating dinner and one of us - Cindy, I think - said, "Hey, should we have thought a little longer about that?  I mean it was a huge decision to move over here and we just spent less than 30 seconds deciding to stay."  So we talked, thought, visited with some friends, and tried to make it a hard decision.  But really, it was a slam-dunk.  We feel blessed to be here and we had a hard time thinking of reasons not to stay.

So here we are.  We'll try to get you all a story each week or so over the next year - about life on campus, vacations, the city, people, our church, or whatever comes to mind.  If you have questions, respond to this post on Facebook and let us know what you want us to talk about.  We'll be glad to fill you in.  Thanks for reading.

At DFW about to get on the plane for the next 1001 nights.

House Calls

Car batteries usually only last a year or two here (regardless of how good of a battery you buy).  The heat here is just so intense that batteries wear out quickly.  So Cindy and I were pretty excited when we returned to Sharjah from summer in the US - and found that our car battery still worked. 

Well, after two years of flawless service (and three weeks since we came home from our summer vacation), our car battery died an untimely death this past Friday morning.  We were headed to church, supposed to pick someone up, and were in a little bit of a hurry.  Oh well.  We called a cab, and while we missed our bible study class, we were on time for the service.

So, on Saturday, I needed to get a new battery put in.  A friend at church told me about a guy who makes house calls for such things.  You just ring him up, tell him what kind of car you have and where you're located, and he brings the battery to you.  He replaces it and takes the old one away.  PERFECT!  So I called the 'battery guy' up, and he arrived at my apartment about an hour later.  

You can see that he brought his tools and a buddy.  He's from Bangladesh and has been in the Emirates for about 10 years.  They had this taken care of in about 15 minutes.  Total cost - including battery, delivery, installation, and disposal of the old battery - 680 AED (about $185).  The list price for the battery from the dealership is $187 - and that's if I drive there to have it installed.  There are no "Pep Boys" or "Auto Zone"-type stores here - just the dealerships and then a few small repair places.  So I thought that 680 AED was a pretty good price - especially for a house call.