ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates: Marwa Abdel Aziz Fathi giggled
self-consciously as she looked down at the new wing-shaped brooch on
the left breast pocket of her crisp gray uniform, then around the room
at the dozens of other Etihad flight attendants all chatting and
eating canapés around her.
It was graduation day at Etihad Training Academy, where the national
airline of the United Arab Emirates holds a seven-week training course
for new flight attendants. Downstairs are the cavernous classrooms
where Fathi and other trainees rehearsed meal service plans in
life-size mockups of planes and trained in the swimming pool, where
they learned how to evacuate passengers in the event of an emergency
landing over water.
Despite her obvious pride, Fathi, a 22-year-old from Egypt, was amazed
to find herself here.
"I never in my life thought I'd work abroad," said Fathi, who was a
university student in Cairo when she began noticing newspaper
advertisements recruiting young Egyptians to work at airlines based in
the Gulf. "My family thought I was crazy. But then some families don't
let you leave at all."
A decade ago, unmarried Arab women like Fathi, working outside their
home countries, were rare. But just as young men from poor Arab
nations flocked to the oil-rich Gulf states for jobs, more young women
are doing so, sociologists say, though no official statistics are kept
on how many.
Flight attendants have become the public face of the new mobility for
some young Arab women, just as they were the face of new freedoms for
women in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. They have become a
subject of social anxiety and fascination in much the same way.
The dormitory here where the Etihad flight attendants live after
training looks much like the city's many 1970s-style office blocks,
its windows iridescent like gasoline on a puddle. But there are three
security guards on the ground floor, a logbook for sign-ins and strict
rules. Anyone who tries to sneak a man back to one of the simply
furnished two-bedroom suites that the women share may be dismissed,
even deported.
In the midst of an Islamic revival across the Arab world that is
largely being led by young people, gulf states like Abu Dhabi — which
offer freedoms and opportunities nearly unimaginable elsewhere in the
Middle East — have become an unlikely place of refuge for some young
Arab women. And many say that the experience of living independently
and working hard for high salaries has forever changed their ambitions
and their beliefs about themselves, though it can also lead to a
painful sense of alienation from their home countries and their
families.
At almost any hour of the day or night, there are a dozen or more
young women with identical rolling suitcases waiting in the lobby of
their dormitory to be picked up for work on Etihad flights. Though
several are still drowsily applying makeup — and the more
steady-handed have perfected a back-of-the-bus toilette that takes
exactly the length of their usual ride to Abu Dhabi International
Airport — they are uniformly well ironed and blow-dried. Those with
longer hair wear black hair-ties wrapped around meticulously
hair-netted ponytails. They wear jaunty little caps with attached
gauzy scarves that hint at hijab, the head coverings worn by many
Muslim women. Like college students during exams, all of them gripe
good-naturedly about how little they have slept.
There are exclamations of congratulation and commiseration as the
women learn friends' assignments. Most coveted are long-haul routes to
places like Toronto and Sydney, Australia, where layovers may last
many days, hotels are comfortable and per diem allowances from the
airline to cover food and incidentals are generous. Short-haul flights
to places like Khartoum, Sudan, are dreaded: more than four hours of
work, followed by refueling, a new load of passengers, an exhausting
late-night return flight to Abu Dhabi and the shuttle bus back to the
dormitory tower with its vigilant guards.
Upstairs, scrubbed of their thick, professional makeup, most of the
women look a decade younger. They seem to subsist on snack food: toast
made, Arabic-style, by waving flaps of pita over an open flame;
slivers of cheap, oversalted Bulgarian cheese; the Lebanese
date-filled cookies called ajweh; pillowy rolls from a local Cinnabon
outlet that one young Syrian flight attendant proclaimed herself
addicted to (an expression she used with self-conscious delight, a
badge of newfound worldliness).
They watch bootlegged DVDs — "Desperate Housewives," "Sex and the
City" — bought on layovers in Bangladesh and Indonesia. They drift
along the tiled floors between their rooms in velour sweatpants and
fuzzy slippers, and they keep their voices low: someone is always
trying to catch a wink of sleep before her flight.
Lonely Existence
It is a hushed, lonely and fluorescent-lighted existence, and it is
leavened mostly by nights out dancing. Despite the increasing numbers
of women moving to the gulf countries, the labor migration patterns of
the last 20 years have left the Emirates with a male-female ratio that
is more skewed than anywhere else in the world; in the 15-to-64 age
group, there are more than 2.7 men for every woman.
Etihad flight attendants are such popular additions to Abu Dhabi's
modest hotel bar scene that their presence is encouraged by frequent
"Ladies' Nights" and cabin-crew-only drink discounts. It is almost
impossible for an unveiled woman in her 20s to go to a mall or grocery
store in Abu Dhabi without being asked regularly, by grinning
strangers, if she is a stewardess.
One evening last fall, an Egyptian flight attendant for Etihad with
dyed blond hair and five-inch platform heels led a friend — a
23-year-old Tunisian woman wearing a sparkly white belt who said that
she had come to the Emirates hoping to find work as a seamstress — up
to the entrance of the Sax nightclub at the Royal Meridien Hotel.
Just inside, in the bar area, several young Emirates men in white
dishdashas were dancing jerkily to deafening club music.
lutching her friend by the elbow, the Egyptian woman indicated one of
the bouncers. "Isn't he just so yummy?" she shrieked. The bouncer, who
had plainly heard, ignored her, and the women filed past. Despite
appearances, explained the Egyptian flight attendant — who asked not
to be named because she was not authorized by Etihad to speak to the
news media — sex and dating are very fraught matters for most of the
young Arab women who come to work in the Emirates.
Some young women cope with their new lives away from home by becoming
almost nunlike, keeping to themselves and remaining very observant
Muslims, she said, while others quickly find themselves in the arms of
unsuitable men. "With the Arabic girls who come to work here, you get
two types," the Egyptian woman said. "They're either very closed up
and scared and they don't do anything, or else they're not really
thinking about flying — they're just here to get their freedom.
They're really naughty and crazy."
Treated Like a Heroine
Rania Abou Youssef, 26, a flight attendant for the Dubai-based
airline, Emirates, said that when she went home to Alexandria, Egypt,
her female cousins treated her like a heroine. "I've been doing this
for four years," she said, "and still they're always asking, 'Where
did you go and what was it like and where are the photographs?' "
Many of the young Arab women working in the Gulf take delight in their
status as pioneers, role models for their friends and younger female
relatives. Young women brought up in a culture that highly values
community, they have learned to see themselves as individuals.
For many families, allowing a daughter to work, much less to travel
overseas unaccompanied, may call her virtue into question and threaten
her marriage prospects. Yet this culture is changing, said Musa
Shteiwi, a sociologist at Jordan University in Amman. "We're noticing
more and more single women going to the gulf these days," he said.
"It's still not exactly common, but over the last four or five years
it's become quite an observable phenomenon."
Unemployment levels across the Arab world remain high. As the networks
of Arab expatriates in the gulf countries become stronger and as
cellphones and expanding Internet access make overseas communication
more affordable, some families have grown more comfortable with the
idea of allowing daughters to work here. Some gulf-based employers now
say they tailor recruitment procedures for young women with Arab
family values in mind. They may hire groups of women from a particular
town or region, for example, so the women can support one another once
in the gulf. "A lot of girls do this now because this has a reputation
for being very safe," said Enas Hassan, an Iraqi flight attendant for
Emirates. "The families have a sense of security. They know that if
their girls start flying they won't be thrown into the wide world
without protection."
A Feeling of Displacement
Yet not everyone can make peace with life in the United Arab Emirates,
the young flight attendants say. Even the landscape — block after
sterile block of hotels and office buildings with small shops and
takeout restaurants on their lower floors — can contribute to a
feeling of displacement. Nearly all year long, for most of the day,
the sunlight is bright white, so harsh that it obliterates all
contrast. Despite vigilant watering, even the palm trees on roadsides
look grayish and embattled.
Some of the young women tell stories of fellow flight attendants who
have simply slipped onto planes to their home countries and run away,
without giving notice to the airline.
The most successful Arab flight attendants, they say, are often those
whose circumstances have already placed them somehow at the margins of
their home societies: young immigrant women who are supporting their
families after the death of a male breadwinner, for example, and a
handful of young widows and divorced women who are eventually
permitted to work overseas after their prospects of remarriage have
dimmed.
Far more than other jobs they might find in the gulf, flying makes it
difficult for Muslim women to fulfill religious duties like praying
five times a day and fasting during Ramadan, the Egyptian attendant
noted. She said she hoped to wear the hijab one day, "just not yet." A
sense of disconnection from their religion can add to feelings of
alienation from conservative Muslim communities back home. Young women
whose work in the gulf supports an extended family often find, to
their surprise and chagrin, that work has made them unsuitable for
life within that family.
"A very good Syrian friend of mine decided to resign from the airline
and go back home," the Egyptian flight attendant said. "But she can't
tolerate living in a family house anymore. Her parents love her
brother and put him first, and she's never allowed out alone, even if
it's just to go and have a coffee."
"It becomes very difficult to go home again," she said.
Posted by: TJC
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