Ramadan Mubarak - pulling a fast one

5.12am

You are probably wondering, dear reader, why I am posting at this time of the morning, apart from in homage to Renee Artois (very old British TV reference for those who have no idea what I am talking about).

Well, I will be celebrating six years in Dubai in September, and I have yet to take part in the rigours of Ramadan in any meaningful way.

So this year, I am following the path of a hundred other journalists who have turned around in the broiling heat of the UAE summer and realised they are fresh out of things to write about, and for one day only, I am going to attempt fasting during the daylight hours. This is why I am up before the sun chowing down on my usual breakfast of yoghurt, fruit and tea plus an extra side order of Camembert sandwiches. No, Camembert is not a traditional pre fast snack, but it's what I had to hand this early. It turns out the pictured beverage is something of an institution for breaking your fast in the UAE (of which more later), so I thought, "when not in Rome, indulge in the idiosyncrasies of the locals". Ie, I'll be having some of that later. I realise the original version of that saying is somewhat catchier, but it is very early. I was going to try to scarf down some for the pre-dawn meal, but reader, I just couldn't.

Anyway, I shall be keeping you updated on how I am doing throughout the day. Lucky you. I will probably be doing very badly as I'm the kind of person who turns into a psychotic fiend if I am separated from my food supply for more than two hours.

Wish me luck.

******

9.40am

I've chosen a day when Desert Baby is at nursery because she is a girl after my own heart, ie, needs plenty of snacks and reviving treats on a half hourly basis, so I thought best stay away from that temptation.

I also have two freelance jobs on so I'll have plenty to distract me from food daydreams. I'll tell you what, though, it isn't half hard to sit down at a desk and start writing without a cup of tea. I think thirst is going to be the biggest challenge throughout the day. There will be highs of 39C today, which for a Dubai summer isn't that bad, but that's still hot enough for you to want to gulp a glass of water when you get indoors after any time at all spent outside. So I think the dashes from house to car, car to nursery and back again will be my only trips outside today.

10.25am

I really want a cup of tea. I mean really want one.

10.37am

A thought just occurred to me - what to people who are fasting do to break up the day? I'm accustomed to a point in the day when I stop working (staring blankly at a screen) get up, move around, prepare lunch (intend to have salad, usually something in a sandwich). I am realising how much I use tea, coffee and water as a procrastination device. I reckon I would normally have had three glasses of water and be on my third or fourth coffee or tea by now. As it is, that one at 5.10am is starting to feel like a loooooooooooong time ago.

12.35pm

I am officially fed up now. Can't imagine doing this for 30 days. Also, I am realising how I get a lot of my body heat from eating and drinking, particularly the large quantity of hot drinks I usually have during the day. I've had to shut of the air conditioning, something that happens not that often during a Dubai summer.

1.18pm

Only six hours to go. So I'm well past the half way point. My eyes feel puffy. What's that about?

1.29pm

I think I'm reaching the hysterical stage now. I was just remembering the 24 Hour Famine thing we used to do at school to raise money for people in areas of the world where there were food shortages. I seem to remember we were allowed water, were we not, or it would have had health implications. That was ONE DAY. I honestly can't imagine doing this for 30 days.

1.31pm

I just tortured myself by watching of video of how to make Upside Down Banana Cake on facebook. Why do I do these things to myself?

1.43pm

I have to go and pick up Desert Baby now, who will hopefully distract me from my plight. Here is some musings about Vimto and its place as an Iftar staple in the Gulf:

Vimto has a key role in the tradition of breaking your fast at Iftar in the UAE and the Gulf. Either that or the PR company in charge of promoting it has done one heck of a job pushing it this year, as the newspapers are full of articles about the rise of the sticky syrup and it's prominently displayed in every supermarket. 

I’ve read references to it “bringing you back to life” at the end of a long day of fasting (a little under 14 hours at the moment according to the UAE sunrise and sunset times) and it’s perhaps not surprising when there’s 13g of sugar per 100ml. Yikes, diabetes in a bottle.

There is an interesting article about it here which reveals its roots in the temperance movement, which is perhaps why it would appeal to followers of a religion which eschews alcohol:

The version available in the UAE is made in Saudi Arabia and has been since 1927, so it was the purple stuff that fuelled the region long before the black stuff (oil).

I suspect the UK version is far less sweet due to boring little politically correct things like not wanting the nation to lose all their teeth before the age of 35. Either way, as a fan of the works of P G Wodehouse, I think it’s crying out for a 1930s style advertising campaign involving the word “vim” – a word which should never have fallen out of usage in my opinion.

7.10pm

I  made it, which meant it was time for this:

A glass of the aforementioned "Vim Tonic" and some dates. You eat a lot of dates in the Gulf, but these were definitely the tastiest I have had for a while, even though they were the bog standard Carrefour ones you serve yourself, rather than the endless varieties packaged in fancy boxes you can buy in the supermarkets at this time of year. I have to say, I can't say that I'll be buying Vimto regularly. Very odd tasting stuff if you ask me.

8.30pm

So, the last couple of hours of the fast were the worst, except for the early hours of temptation to just have one little cup of tea. After 5pm was when the dehydration headache, which I haven't quite managed to shake off yet, set in. Luckily for me, Him Indoors cooked a dinner of sausages which we ate in front of Peaky Blinders. I was subdued enough by the day's exertions to not get too irate with the annoying blonde girl police spy Grace, who is always banging on about making men cry with her singing, when she's really not that great at it.

I've read a bit during today about why fasting is the done thing during Ramadan. There are lots of reasons - some of them include feeling greater affinity with those who have less, feeling closer to God, etc.

I'm pretty sure there was no spiritual experience in Sand Witch Towers, just a greater level of grumpiness and a marked dip in productivity, but I will definitely have greater empathy for those who observe the fast for 30 days from now on. 

Peak Dubai

I'm starting this post in a bit of an emotional mood, having in the past week said goodbye to two ladies who've basically saved my sanity during the past year and a bit.

The first is a friend who I met at a baby yoga group. She spotted me managing to look both socially inadequate and weird while clutching a squalling Desert Baby, and clearly thought "that's the kind of lady I want my own baby to hang out with, I'll invite her and her baby to join my friends and I for lunch." We hit it off, due to having certain things in common - a rather "matter of fact" approach to parenting being one of them. And while I knew the day when she had to go back to the UK would come, and Dubai is a transient place and we must get used to these things, and so on ad infinitum, I am feeling distinctly Eeyeore-like about her departure.

....

*Brief pause while I wallow in self-pity*

The second was the lady who, over the past year, cleaned my house once per week and sometimes babysat for Desert Baby, so I had time to try to find work, speak to someone who knew other concepts beyond "milk", "nappy", and "no I shall not take a daytime nap no matter how exhausted I may be". This is a First World Problem of the highest order - losing one's' cleaner and babysitter when it's just so damn hard to get the staff these days, but, I am often reminded of a line from Kathryn Stockett's intensely readable novel The Help, when I think about her. It goes something along the lines of "good help is hard to find, it's like falling in love, it happens once in a lifetime". There was something about her that meant we just clicked. She's going home for not particularly happy reasons, and I felt decidedly wretched as I dropped her off at the Metro station for the last time earlier this week, not least because her experience reminded me of how miserable the lives of those in some of the poorer sections of UAE society can be.

I've talked about my British guilt about needing someone to help me around the house in this post, but honestly, the women I have met that do this kind of job in the UAE are way better women than me. Many of them do the dirty work in the homes of people like me who think they've got it hard because it's a bit too hot to go to the beach, or, they're out of money for a manicure that month. Domestic workers in the UAE often get paid less than 2,000dhs per month (around GBP377). Many get accommodation paid for as part of their job, but considering the high cost of living, it's not a lot.

And then there's the fact that many of them have left their own children in their home country to be cared for by family members. Received wisdom on this is that it's so much easier these days for them to "parent at a distance" thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and things like Skype, but I'm not sure that would be enough to stop me going insane with misery were I in that position.  I realise that with time, such arrangements must become easier to bare, but I can't imagine it.

The reason that so many of them do this, of course, is that if they want to improve their family's financial position and give hope of a better lives to their offspring, they have very little choice. There is an army of low paid workers in the UAE and the wider Gulf, not just in the domestic sector, but in hospitality, customer service and so on, without whom the super privileged lifestyles of some locals and expats would be unsustainable.

I recently talked to one lady from the Philippines, who has a job in a beauty salon. She told me that the minimum wage in the Philippines is 34dhs per day (GBP6.40). "This is why where ever you go, you will find lots of us working", she said. While in Sri Lanka, the latest info I could find suggests that the minimum wage is less than GBP2 per day, which probably makes getting several times that with accommodation thrown in seem fairly attractive. To be clear, some of them live out, which means a higher basic salary, but the cost of living must mean living on practically nothing in order to send the bulk of their salaries back to their home countries.

Another lady I met a while ago, also from the Philippines, was working in a coffee shop. She struck up conversation with me, and it became pretty obvious that she had done so because she was absolutely desperate to talk to someone who had recently had a baby. She had just left her little boy back home to be looked after by his grandparents, having taken the UAE's standard 100 days maternity leave - 45 days paid, the rest unpaid. While I may have taken Desert Baby to a freelance job meeting with me when she was aged just four and a half months, I can't imagine being back at work full time that early, even though it's officially the norm in this country and I know people who have done it.

I think this lady was fairly traumatised by it, as I probably would have been, as I was barely in a fit state to leave the house eight weeks after Desert Baby's birth, let alone ready to think about full time work. Leaving her behind while going to work in another country would have been, and still is, out of the question.

I chatted away to the lady about the healing cesarean scars, feeding, nappies, sleep - all the things that people like me had the luxury of nattering away about for hours at various coffee mornings and mummy meet ups, until duty called and she had to go back and serve coffee. And back she went to work, with colleagues who in all likelihood had kids of their own in their home countries and may also have understood what it was like to be working thousands of miles away from your newborn while still healing from giving birth.

I once tried to talk to my "helper" (for this is the preferred term for those of us who balk at the term "maid") about what it is like leaving your children to go and work in a foreign country. "What to do? Need money," was her succinct response. Point taken: Talking about it to someone who cannot imagine doing it was unlikely to make her feel good about the situation, so I backed off.

Life in the UAE has an interesting dual effect on your perspective when it comes to your standard of living which I am fairly sure I have alluded to in a post before. There is conspicuous consumption and wealth everywhere: Enormous shopping malls crammed with luxury stores of every description, more super expensive hotels than you can shake your Louis Vuitton luggage at, car parks groaning with super cars and the blingiest of four-wheel-drives, days spent lounging on the beaches and by the pools of aforesaid luxury hotels, embarrassingly excessive weekend brunches where you consume your weekly calorie allowance in one sitting while pouring unlimited glasses of champagne down your throat.

These rich fripperies and baubles become part of your every day life, along with being able to pick up the phone your local supermarket and have someone who earns less in a week than you do in half a day deliver cans of cola to your door within minutes, incredibly cheap petrol to fill up your four-wheel-drive's fuel tank for next to nothing and shopping for "real fake" sweatshop-made handbags in Karama.

But, if you are willing to look beyond the end of your nose before you stick it in the brunch trough, it doesn't half have the ability to make you appreciate your life compared with those of many in the UAE.

I remember when I first arrived, noticing, for example, gardeners sweating away in the heat to maintain the lush green lawns and foliage of the UAE's luxury hotels, and thinking, it's only the accident of my birth - that I happened to be born in the West while he was born into a poor family in a developing country, that means I am inside enjoying the air con and slurping a cool drink while he's out there. I wondered then, as I still do now, how people can apparently not notice such workers when the mercury tops 50C and go about their highly privileged lives as if they simply aren't there.

I suppose that after a while, the workers and their discomfort simply blend into the scenery for some people. Personally, I think, when that happens, you've reached "Peak Dubai" and it's probably time to cash in your chips and go home.