The Wedding

I've been thinking about how I want to address this, and if I want to address this in a blog post for the past few days.  I've decided that if I didn't talk about it here I wouldn't be being truthful, open, and honest about my time here and I would just be trying to cherry-pick experiences to give people some rosy view of what it's like.

I've been processing the incidents and I'm kind of torn about how to feel about them.  First I will lay out the events as I perceive them to have happened, then I'll dissect them and talk about them and why I'm ambivalent.

Bobbi was invited to a wedding by one of her students.  The student's sister was getting married and, apparently in such a small town as Liwa weddings are big community events and everyone gets invited.  The girl even posted an invitation on the message board of her school.  Bobbi asked if I would be allowed to come as well, since we know that the sexes are often segregated and we don't know how a traditional, rural, Muslim wedding works.  She was told that I could come to the wedding, but that I would have to go on the men's side and Bobbi would have to go on the women's side.  When Bobbi told me about this I was both excited and nervous.  I was excited to get to see a part of the culture that I presume most visiting westerners do not get to see, but I was nervous because I knew that I would be in a room with a bunch of men whom I did not know and I knew that I was completely unaware of the wedding protocol.  I've been to enough American weddings, both Christian and secular to have a pretty good feel for how things are going to go, I even went to a Catholic wedding once and I was able to muddle my way through the standing, sitting and kneeling, but I have never been to a Muslim wedding.

Bobbi's student told her that the festivities would begin at 8 pm, so we arrived a little early to scope things out.  We found out that there weren't really men's and women's sides, it was actually a men's building and a women's building separated by a wall, each with their own parking lot.  I dropped Bobbi off at the women's building and continued on to the men's.  When I parked and began walking in I saw a small group of men standing by the entrance and I did my best smile and nod while I was practicing saying "my wife is a teacher at Khanoor school" in Arabic and wishing that I could remember her student's name so they didn't think that I was a random weirdo who just showed up at weddings for no good reason.  When I got to the door I looked in and the hall was empty.  A few chairs lined up on the far end and a security guard standing by the door and a man seemingly giving directions to the men outside.  I asked the director if this is where the wedding was and he said that it was, but that the men's part was over.

I walked back to my car and texted Bobbi that the men's part was over and asked if she knew where they were going to wait for the women to finish.  I was hoping they were going to a cafe or a shisha place and that I could still meet up with them there and have something to do for the next few hours since the bride wasn't supposed to show up until at least 10.  Eventually Bobbi was able to ask someone and was told that the men were done and had gone home.  I was very disappointed to have missed it and a little frustrated, but I didn't want Bobbi to miss out on the experience and I knew that her only source of information was a 17-year-old girl who was just learning English, so there were bound to be miscommunications.  I sent Bobbi a text telling her to have fun, dance, enjoy the wedding, that I could wait for her.

I sat in the car in the parking lot of the men's building for a while, checking Facebook and playing games on my phone, then I heard them closing the gate to that building, so I left.  I drove around for a while, since I had never been to that area I wanted to check it out, but it was dark, so I couldn't see much and decided to head back.  Right next to the wedding hall there was a gas station with a car wash, so I decided to wash the sand off the car and get myself some snacks and something to drink.  I drove back to the wedding hall after all that and parked outside the women's building to wait for Bobbi.  I sat there for a long while eating my snacks and playing on my phone.  There was a group of boys playing around outside the building, running in and out of it, running around the parking lot, sword fighting each other with sticks, etc.  Apparently they didn't know I was there until one of them came to the car and decided to check out his keffiyeh in my passenger side view mirror.  When he did that he noticed me sitting there and was startled.  The group of boys came around to the driver's side and one of them motioned me to roll down my window, then leaned his forearm along my door and said something to me in Arabic that I didn't understand, so I told him, "I'm sorry, but I don't understand."  Watching the shock spread across his face was almost comical, his eyes widened and he backed away slowly.  That moment another of the kids in the group leaned over in front of my window and yelled, "Fuck you!"

I can only imagine that I must have made the same kind of shocked face as the original kid, and I rolled the window back up.  The kids ran around to the other side of the car and beat on my passenger side window, the same kid yelled through the window, "Fuck you!  I fuck your mother!"  I tried to just ignore them as this one kept yelling and flipping me off, gesturing for me to leave, telling me "get out."  They were still swarming around my car, though, and one kid in the group reached over and pulled open my car door, so I got out and they ran back into the women's building.  I walked around to the back of my car and leaned up against the bumper and crossed my arms across my chest.  Then the boys began peeking out of the building, sometimes coming out onto the little terrace in front of the building and yelling and flipping me off some more.  I just stood there and looked at them and didn't say anything.  Then they began throwing things at me.  I don't know if they were actually trying to hit me or not; it may just be that they come from a culture where children don't play baseball, so their throwing skills were horrible.  Nothing actually hit me, but they threw what looked like a cut off broomstick, a shard of wood about the size of my palm, a few rocks and a broken light socket.  The one young kid who kept showing off his vulgar English skills came out of the door by himself once and hiked up his kandura, showing his whitie-tighties and began humping the air.  That was totally ridiculous!  It reminded me of this YouTube video, but it did answer a question for me, though, Bobbi and I had both been wondering what the guys wear under the kanduras, but that's not really something that you can ask someone you don't know.

After the second round of throwing stuff at me I walked over to the door of the hall and was stopped by a slightly older boy who, very politely, actually, told me, "You can't go in, it's only for girls."  I told him to make sure the kids stay inside and he asked why.  I gave him a rough outline of what had happened and he said he was the older brother and would take care of it.  I texted Bobbi and told her what was going on and that we needed to leave.  It was 10:15 and the bride still hadn't showed up, and I told her that we couldn't wait.  I was feeling offended and, frankly pissed off, and was reaching my breaking point.  I put up with it as long as I could, and I had reached my limit.  Bobbi came out and we left, and that was the end of that.

So, here's my two cents.  On one hand I feel indignantly offended at having been treated like that, no one should be treated with such a dearth of human respect.  There is no excuse for that kind of behavior.  On the other hand, I understand that these kids were probably just mimicking their fathers' attitudes toward foreigners.  This country began to modernize less than 50 years ago and they have grown a huge amount in the past few decades.  This has led to a backlash where people who still remember how their country used to be are doing what they can to preserve their national heritage and their history because they see the western influence taking over.  There has been a shift where more and more women are beginning to wear the full-coverage hijab, so not even their eyes show, trying to go to the opposite extreme of the western influence.  Another factor is that one way the government has been able to build and modernize their country so quickly is by bringing in cheap labor from other countries like India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and bringing in skilled labor from European countries, America and Australia.  This had lead to Emiratis being a minority in their own country by a huge margin.  I have seen enough racism in my own country based on the perception that foreign nationals are "taking over" to recognize this feeling.  So, I'm feeling pretty sure that for these kids I was just a representation of the frustration their fathers feel about the difficulties native Emiratis have about getting work and supporting their families.

Honestly, I'm still a little conflicted about how to feel about it.  I knew when I was preparing to come here that there might be some negative sentiments from some of the Emiratis toward me as a foreigner in their already over-run country, but knowing that and experiencing that are two very different things.  I feel like Bobbi and I are some of the few foreigners here who actually came to learn more about the country and the language and the culture, but even with that desire, it's hard.  The default language of commerce here is English now, but not because it's the native language of the majority.  I'd say that only a small minority of people here are native English speakers.  I have tried to speak Arabic to several people who have stopped me and in heavily accented English told me they don't speak Arabic.  Out of the few people who I've had the opportunity to speak to in Arabic most of them see a white westerner and expect English, so when I start in Arabic they just assume that they're not understanding my English and get really confused.  It is kind of funny to watch it dawn on them that I'm addressing them in Arabic, though!  They get an almost shocked look on their face and a huge smile!

But getting back to my original point, being an American I can't even imagine what kind of virulent and violent repercussions would occur if our national heritage was so compromised that even our language was no longer being used in most places.  America is a nation of immigrants, but they come there to become American, because they believe in the American dream to a degree most natural-born Americans don't anymore.  The overwhelmingly vast majority of them learn English at the very least.  We may have Spanish labels on products, but there is no way to compare that to how much English has affected the culture here.  So, even though I think that Bobbi and I are a couple of the "good guys" who are here for reasons that go well beyond an awesome paycheck and travel opportunities, and even though I still am a little disgruntled with the treatment I received, I can kind of understand it.  It was probably kids who have not yet developed adult rationality reacting to their parents' frustration in a way that the parents themselves most likely never would have, because as frustrating as the situation may be I have found most of the people I encounter here to be very friendly and helpful and kind.  I have let this bad experience negatively impact my time here for a few days, and I'm making a choice to get over it and spend my energy connecting with the local people and discovering their culture instead of ruminating over some children's foolishness.