It is not hard for most of people who are living here, except for the locals, to admit that they are here ONLY for money. Dubai is not that great modern city as we all imagine, they succeeded to
picture it in our minds as they want it to be in twenty years from now, since it is still under constructions. What we imagine is Dubai in the architectures plans, Dubai in its rulers’ dreams, not
Dubai, the real city, where I am living. What they show, indeed, is the stereotypical image, not the clean reflection of what this city is. It is just the same as when they show camels, Sahara,
henna, and veiled women walking between the narrow walls of old neighborhoods of Fes, when they want to advertise Morocco; for sure it does work to attract tourists, but those are often deceived
since they expect to see those women in the airport, and ironically sometimes they don’t even expect any airport, for they wish the plane to land in a desert and imagine they would be transported
to the hotel or to “tents” by camels!!!
Yes it is comparing to Morocco a developed city with some towers and few big highways, but there is no life in here; you can notice that send is between buildings, in the balconies and in the air,
it is still a desert with an unbearable weather no matter how conditioned it might be. People spend their time between their companies, houses, moles and pubs, no streets to walk in, no nature to
enjoy and no “Swika” to get lost into, between the crowds of people “just like me”. Every thing is so artificial and superficial, shapes of buildings matter more than what the buildings are built
for, they keep making towers higher for no reason but to sale a false image to an audience more attracted to “Lasvegas lights” than sunlight, to a fake audience, just “like me”.
And here I am between workers from all over the world chasing money, and spending it in the shops of the same people we are working for. As their money multiples and their accounts get huge, and
companies more expended, there are more and more opportunities for foreigners seeking jobs to join the network of an indirect slavery.
Working as cabin crew is the strangest job that can ever exist; this big aura surrounding it hides a very miserable reality. People get excited, amazed, curious, and sometimes disgusted whenever I
tell them I am cabin crew, as this job pictures all the desirable features of a happy seducing and forbidden life, mixing beauty, money, and liberty to cross all political frontiers, with an
unconditioned and unlimited freedom, and all what can follow, from unacceptable crazy behaviors, to unforgivable mistakes, to the most joyful sins of youth, and sometimes some cabin crew make
peoples’ expectations so true!!!
However, this money we earn every month, and all the “so called” facilities, and which make my life more difficult, that the company offers are less than what a cabin crew deserves! It is an
extremely difficult job that requires a huge ability of patience at all time during the flight, under all circumstances, it demands a special skill of accepting the passengers and the crew
different and changing moods and behaviors, needs an infinite power to bear the load of work and tasks we have to accomplish in the shortest time possible, not to rest, but to take another task on
wait, and recommends a high quality of self esteem that helps saving our integrity under the pressure of the chain of orders that the SFS or the senior shout at us all the time; plus a great
physical energy to be able to serve, clean, walk to the galley and come back, get down and up hundreds of times without loosing the glamour of our beautiful smiling faces, because “we represent the
company”, and we are the ones responsible of selling its image as fake as possible. That’s why I decided before even joining to quit in the nearest available possible opportunity. Because for some
reason, that I still ignore, I know I deserve better.
During the training period that lasted for six weeks, I did not get along with anyone, but a very funny Spanish girl, Isabel, that have been in Morocco for more than six years, and who speaks a
very fluent French, and knows a lot of Moroccan slang, that I often use when I am angry whether people do understand them or not.
I was the only Arab and Muslim Girl in my group, and in a strange way, I developed a quick resistance of ideas and responses for every little thing, that could or might touch, in any possible way,
anything that has any possible relation with the Arab Muslim world, when I was, just two months ago, very close to initiate a revolution in Morocco.
My class mates who were “ironically” AGAIN all girls, except two young men one of whom does desperately wish to be a girl too, were, in my opinion, all fake, false, hypocrite, ugly, and disgusting.
I tried to move to the other group but it was too late, since it took me four weeks to discover that the problem was in the whole group and not in me. There was in my group a very ugly Indian girl,
pretending to be British “just because she was born there”. The only beautiful thing god gave her which is her eyes and which she knows so well how to highlight with make up –as she knew so well
how to make up strange stories to hide the lack of confidence she felt inside, and twist people’s eyes and attention from her superficiality and ignorance- were so Indian that everyone who meet her
wish to laugh so hard every time she says with her London accent: “I am British”! She was so mean and nasty that I sometimes imagined my self in an American show called “Public Highschool”. And
after the training finished, her best friend who happened to be my flat mate for four weeks, and who moved finally after transmitting me all the negative waves of insecurity her friends was
constantly passing to her, and Isabel who is unfortunately the Indian girl flat mate, finally discovered how immoral, unpleasant, and wicked this girl is; they took up the “ I accept you as you
are” face, and put another one just convenient for the situation, they even made some assumptions on what she must have been before coming here, and I was not that disappointed.
This group, which was a very ugly mixture of Asian boring fake girls with two European girls, one Canadian two Brazilian strange girls, one distant girl from Mauricio, and a girl from an unknown
island with a very strange smile, who laughs for anything and everything in a sarcastic bizarre way, and I, just did teach me what does mean the famous word “RACISM”….and I discovered, for the
first time how mush racist I am.
Racist, especially towards the European Suisse kiwi Australian girl that she pretends to be, and who was acknowledged by her respect towards all people and her helping nice tune of the voice, that
I hated the fake side in it, and the Supreme white Christian Canadian “native English speaker” girl, who was, by pure coincidence the leader of the group!!!!!!
Just the idea of expecting the other to be like you, and the felling of surprise your face discreetly exhibit for every thing “strange”, and the way you speak about your culture, country, language
and religion trying to picture them as the best, and the burning need to convince the other how right you are and make him/her admit it, is racism. The national identity with all what follows is
racism. And I felt, every time I was racist, a very strange joy and delight trying to save my Morocco from criticism before people even know where this country is, I felt Faithful.
As I was looking to a palm through my window, I started thinking about the double life I am living, and how many things I am hiding from how many persons in my life. There are always persons I
should not know, and things I should not do, and I discovered my freedom through those persons and things. I did create my own world from the forbidden of my society and the “not allowed” in my
family, and satisfying my self was just doing what I wanted to do without causing any problems. As long as what I do was and still is a secret, no one can be hurt, and I can still be free, and
every one is, surprisingly, still happy.
Then I realized that I might not be the only one undergoing this complex living, for we are all humans made from the same combination of good and evil, assuming that being good is to be flat, and
to be bad is by being deep and having own secrets. In deed I couldn’t figure out what my sisters, parents, or friend might be doing or might have done in their hidden lives, or may be I did not
dare think about it, because it is somehow scary and could hurt so deeply when discovered, for most of the times we do the wrong things with the wrong persons, those who are so close that we do
never suspect…it is just human nature, as we live in three dimensions, we can never be that flat.
However, while I was looking at the view from my balcony, and trying to discover the three dimensional world we are living in, through the Pakistani shops and people passing by, I took a look at
the palm, and noticed that its body does look flat; however, I did see it at first as round. Just then, I realized that there is a fourth dimension that controls all; I knew that the body of the
palm is round for I was close to that palm before and did touch it and discovered its roundness. Our knowledge of things surrounding us gives dimensions more than how things look like. Our mind
shapes all. We can live a double life without being practical, just the fact of doing or saying something and thinking another one is the extreme double life that can ever exist. It is as simple as
we say it “hypocrisy”, which makes the human soul so dirty and more dangerous, because it can never be discovered, for it is hidden and protected in the theoretical world, in that persons mind.
Arab and especially Muslim people are still clear and clean from inside even with their hidden lives. Our fear of being discovered and the fear of the public shows, reality TVs and the inexistence
of paparazzi say it all. When we admit we are wrong and have the intention to end it one day and clean our history by asking forgiveness and mercy from god, and pleading god to erase the sins we
did towards other people, we are just still pure and still “Good” people. Our Arab world is a multifaceted silent world, and I am so convinced, and solemnly believe that it is the best way to be,
since we can never be perfect. Advertising mistakes, confessing in public, and judging others are the features of a puritan society we better never get close to. Hiding mistakes is a way to admit
how wrong we are, and an act that leads to a change more acceptable by society; it is a way to correct our selves and a punishment in itself, since when we do something “bad”, we feel not worthy
enough to be part of honest real people, not part of society, and we hide it, it is a rejections of own self, and a permanent psychological suffering. Thus making the values of a society the main
ruler and the judge, does not prevent the bad to happen, but does in fact prevent society from that “bad, it does protect ourselves from accepting the wrong and living happy with it.
Liberal people are the enemies of Islam, and all religions that set ‘rules’, the enemies of traditions, of values, of principles, and of any establishment whether theoretical or practical that
impose logic for the well being of a community, for their aim is to highlight human mistakes, threaten people with those mistakes till they admit them, and make them appear as norms, and then give
them power to rule over the values of nature. They simply turn the measures of a healthy society upside down. Being conservative does not mean being correct, or somehow perfect, but it means to
consider the right as right and try to perform it in the community towards people, and to regard wrong as wrong and try to prevent its happening as much as possible.
The Indian girl, I was obliged to bear for those long passing six months, is just the embodiment of the evil that does not hide, which makes it easy to fight. However, those fake girls which formed
the majority of the group I was studying in, are just the result of a hypocrite mind fearing to revolt against fake values that oblige people to be nice towards each other, and act as they accept
others with their differences, when they hide the dislike of what is strange, and the surprise of the oddity of the different origins confronting them. Concerning me, I consider rejecting what is
not mine and what I am not used to as to be the normal reactions of a normal human being facing something different.
The girls of my group are the victims of globalization that aims to make everything look the same, and delete the differences of language cultures and traditions which made the beauty of the world.
When traveling to different destinations with the airline, I expected just as those tourists who trust advertisements that in every different country there is different new culture with different
new ways of thinking, and I was exited to discover the new clothes traditions and languages of people from all over the world, and feel the surprise of the “strange”, and the wonder of the “not
familiar” and the “unusual”. But I was just deceived for everywhere is America, in different levels. Developed European countries are a sophisticated, educated, and a more socialist and formal
America, as European people are very mannered, instructed, and aristocrats, bourgeoisie for them is more likely another way of being than another social class, and hierarchy works only with
immigrants. However Asian people are Americans looking like themselves, for they can never change their Asian faces, they’d rather be a very technically sophisticated America than compete with it,
they have always been and still are, no matter what he did not do, Michael Jackson’s number one fans. While Africa is a some kind of an American ghetto….Still, globalization could not and can never
erase it all, for geography, weather, colors, smells, types of food, nature, and race are the source of the creation of human kinds, and those can never be unified, no matter how hard they try to
make of English the mother thong of the whole world. Those girls were just acting to be like each other, and pretending to know and admit each other, when just how their eyes look like, and the
difference between their noses’ shapes made me surprise for whole weeks, for it is my first time far from people who look “just like me”. The girls were trying to be at the expectations of
globalization, when performing “racism”, for me, was just the best thing to do.
Written by: Lady Mayssa
