Expat Travel Mom

Written by my husband, who was home with the kids that week.

Expecting to Feel Like a Stranger

Since the day we arrived in the UAE, I've had a strange feeling. I expected to feel more like a foreigner than I actually did. I'm still not entirely sure why, it's obvious just by looking at us that we're not locals. My best guess is that people here mostly keep to themselves. Worth knowing: roughly 80% of the population here are expatriates, and most of those are of Arab descent from elsewhere in the Middle East. (Quick geography aside: Arabia technically refers to the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, while Persia is the territory north of the Gulf, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Here, "the Gulf" is called the Arabian Gulf, where most world maps label it the Persian Gulf. Sorry, I digress.) The reason only about 20% of the population is actually Emirati comes down to money, this country can hire out nearly any service imaginable, and much like America, people come here chasing opportunity. So far it seems like most of the immigrant workers keep their heads down, work to send money home, and stay to themselves.

A Long Wait at the Hospital

Fast forward to Sunday. My family and I had all been sick. I took our daughter to the hospital earlier in the week. On that first visit, I learned you essentially take a number and wait in a room until it appears on an LCD screen. Most public places here have separate Male, Female, and Family waiting areas. In pediatrics and the specialty clinic, it's only Female and Family, so that's where I waited with her. At any given time there might have been five or eight other people in a room that could easily seat thirty. Everyone waiting was genuinely kind. Nobody really starts a conversation outright, but once you make eye contact and the kids start innocently interacting, it breaks down some invisible walls. It was a comfortable place to wait, which mattered, because I was exhausted. I'd been running on fumes for days, just enough energy to get the kids to and from school and back.

Her turn came first, then we waited in the same area for mine. My ticket read 8010. On the screen: 8003, 8004, 8005... 8009, then a new sequence entirely. We waited. It's normal to see numbers slightly out of order, but after a while I couldn't find mine anywhere, so I asked and showed them my ticket. They assured me my turn was coming. We waited, and waited, and waited. After more than an hour and a half, I had a tired, sick, restless baby crying "Daddy, I want to go! Daddy, I want to go!" over and over, in the half-formed words only a parent can actually understand. My own throat was on fire, my voice down to a whisper. I tried explaining to hospital staff that I thought my number had been skipped. Again, they assured me I was next, and a nurse asked me to follow him down another hallway. "Wait here please. You will be next."

The Other Waiting Room

I saw a sign: "Male Waiting Area." Inside was a room the same size as the last one, but full, fifty or more men. And there I stood, a tired, crying, blond-haired baby girl in my arms, in front of a room that quietly turned to look at us. My guess is most of them were Arab, though not a single one Emirati. I tried not to stare back, but I'm an observer by nature. These men weren't looking at us the way the Emirati men and women in the other waiting room had, the ones who'd smile and try out a little broken English, "What's wrong, baby?", or find any excuse to touch her hair. I can't say for certain what those quiet, steady looks in this room actually meant, or if they meant anything at all. It didn't occur to me until later that I'd likely been redirected to a different waiting area, probably by mistake. In the moment, I was too tired and overwhelmed to think much about it at all, I just wanted to sit down and hold my daughter's crying head against my shoulder while we comforted each other.

A Hierarchy, Unspoken

There's no way to know for certain who was in that room, what nationalities, what they were actually thinking behind those quiet, watchful faces. But I do know one thing for sure: there were no Emiratis in that room, and there were no Westerners either. There is an unspoken hierarchy here, and Emiratis sit, unsurprisingly, at the very top of it. Out of respect to everyone else within it, I'll leave the rest of the ranking unsaid. An interesting position to suddenly find myself in, standing very near the top of that ladder in this country (something I'd genuinely never thought much about before). For the first time in my life, I understood what it felt like to be the outsider. They were probably all decent, genuine people. Nearly everyone I've interacted with here, especially the workers from across Asia, has been kind.

Confronting My Own Bias

Back in the US, we've spent close to a decade being fed a steady diet of fear about people from this part of the world wanting to do Americans harm. Those men never did a single thing to me. Their faith, Islam, a religion of peace, love, and care for those less fortunate, never did anything to me either. It's religious extremists who commit unprovoked harm in the name of their god, not the actual doctrine they claim to follow, but that's a separate point entirely.

All of this is to say: there's far too much intolerance in this world. Even back home right now, the same tired narrative fills the papers, and it drives me a little crazy. The best thing I can do is expose myself, and our kids, to exactly these kinds of situations while they're still young. The moments that push us outside our comfort zone are the very ones that expand it. We always wanted to raise our family outside the US specifically to expose them, and ourselves, to other cultures. If I still carry hints of prejudice passed down through generations without ever fully realizing it, then I hope this one afternoon, as an expat in a hospital waiting room, is what breaks that cycle for our kids, so they never make another person feel like a stranger in a strange land.

Update: what my husband was describing that day has an actual name, the kafala, or sponsorship, system, which ties a migrant worker's legal residency directly to their employer across most of the Gulf. It's been the structural backbone of labor migration here for decades, and it's also been widely criticized by human rights groups for the exact power imbalance he stumbled into that afternoon. His 80/20 population estimate was almost exactly right for 2010. That number has shrunk further since, Emiratis make up roughly 11% of the country's population today.