C
ULTURAL
HAMELEON living in a global village By Zoya Khan
sat outside of the grocery store (because grocery stores are in malls in Dubai) and watched people pass by me. I wasn’t interested in buying clothes or purses. I was simply interested in how all these people had come together under one roof and how they interacted with one another. I saw Filipinos working behind the counters of fast-food industries, trying to hand-gesture the English menu to a non-English speaking Kuwaiti. Sometimes I saw women wearing kangas from Tanzania standing next to women dressed in Western style clothing. Often times I saw women in abaya or thawbs and men in dishdashas as they socialized at the local Starbucks or Chili’s. As I sat on my bench, I would listen to the slew of languages that filled the air: Arabic, Russian, Nepalese, Austronesian and Tagalog. All these languages and cultures mixing in the air made me realize there were so many diverse types of people out there with such a unique sense of identity. I realized my identity became an amalgamation of these identities. I lived in a true Global Village. I do not have any hesitation or reservations in connecting with people from just about anywhere. I observed and learned a variety of culturally competent ways to communicate with people of different nationalities. For example, face-to-face
communication is vital and highly valued in Arab culture, but the manner in which you communicate is even more important. My friends often poke humor at my sudden and noticeable change in grammar and speech intonation when I am talking to my Indonesian housekeeper. Some have even commented that doing that is condescending to the other person. That is a reasonable consideration, however, my peers and I in Dubai unanimously agreed that the alteration of speech style and accent is the only way to be understood effectively. In fact, not altering my speech style would be considered condescending if I assumed that people could understand what I meant in my American accent. Words like “trolley” and “lift” seamlessly slipped into my vocabulary when speaking to an individual from the UK. Dubai’s foreign population taught me how to mold my form of communication to be able to interact with them. Dubai, a city that was only sand dunes and Bedouin tents 15 years earlier, is now a hub of nationalities and cultures existing side-by-side, simultaneously intermingling. Literally speaking, experiencing Dubai made me much more cognizant of the fact that the world is truly a very small place and people are not that different—motivated by the same hierarchy of needs.
Al Bayan | 21 | Winter