Karama & Culture

What a crazy week it has been! Other dorm students began arriving on the 14th of September, and the campus has gone from feeling completely deserted to busy and colorful in just a few days. I have already met tons of new people--I never thought I'd get to relive freshman year, but that's pretty much what I'm doing.

At Lewis & Clark, we have lots of foreign exchange students coming to study. It often seems as thought they hang out exclusively with each other, especially based on geographic regions and cultures. While I know that this isn't always the case, it just feels that way, and I often told myself that when I studied abroad I would branch out, trying to become friends with people of all different nationalities. But of course there is a reason why we associate with the people we do. We find comfort in shared experiences, shared values, shared language. And especially when you're in a different country, feeling like you're in a different world, comfort is what you need. I'm trying the best that I can to meet all the people I can who aren't American or European. I love that my roommate is a Syrian Christian living in Saudi Arabia, and her core group of friends are girls from Lebanon and Afghanistan. It's not easy to throw yourself straight into the mix of people with darker skin and hair than you, who don't easily speak your first language and you much less easily speak theirs. It's uncomfortable more often than not. But I didn't come to Dubai to feel comforted, I came here to be enriched, enlightened, fulfilled. And that's what I'm planning to do.

A few days ago a new friend, Julia (from America), and I went to a very tourist-oriented shopping center called Al Karama. It's where people go when they want to find fake watches, handbags, sunglasses, shoes, and the like. Mainly Indians, Pakistanis, and Iranians run the shops there, and it's a shady business. Men sit or stand outside their shops to say as you pass by, "Excuse me, madam, you want copy bags, copy watches? Genuine fake!" I love this phrase, "genuine fake." I've heard it in Dubai several times. I remembered that phrase when I visited the Bastakiya Quarter of Dubai, with its clear history as one of the oldest parts of Dubai, its architecture preserved to show tourists what it was like originally. But it's fake, now, too--it's been restored, air conditioning added, brand-new restrooms put in, and the wind towers closed up with plexiglass.

One thing I've found especially interesting as I've been meeting all of these new people are the notions of nationality or origin and what these mean to people. When you meet someone new in your first year of college in the U.S., often one of the first questions you ask is "Where are you from?" When I went to Lewis & Clark, the answer was obvious: I was born and raised for 18 years in Wichita, Kansas. That's where I was from. Pretty simple. Now that I'm in Dubai, people may ask me that question, and it's more complicated. First of all, it must be established that I'm from the U.S. For some people, that's enough. When a couple American friends and I visited a small supermarket in the Marina, the cashier, who was from Pakistan, told us, "America! It is an honor to have you in my store!" Others might ask, "What state?" Or more directly, "Oh, New York?" I like to keep things simple, so sometimes I might say I'm from Kansas, other times I say I'm from Oregon, or that I grew up in Kansas but go to school in Oregon. Neither of these states have much recognition abroad, so it doesn't get me very far. When I ask the same question, "Where are you from?" to someone else, their answer also often sounds simple, but it's often not so. If someone is "Iranian," it probably means that their parents came to Dubai thirty years ago, and they've never actually been to the country with which they identify. Similar story with younger Indians and Pakistanis whose parents live here but they have not spent much time in those countries. My roommate, interestingly, first identified herself as Syrian, but she has spent almost all of her life living in Saudi Arabia. I haven't yet met anyone who identifies as Emirati. UAE citizens are hard to come by, and citizenship is not just given to anyone. Even those who all they've ever known is UAE are not afforded citizenship. Dubai is a grand mixture of cultures, but I wouldn't call it a "melting pot." Different nationalities have so far maintained their identities here, unlike Americans whose ancestors might come from all different parts of the globe but ultimately identify as "American."