Of course its about ego!

I read a couple of other blogs to keep me in contact with friends as well as in the professional loop. Ewan McIntosh's blog is one of these. I was looking at his clustermap and noticed they he is working owards the half million hits mark on his page. I checked out mine today and see I have 991. Whoo hoo!! I'm just about to crack 1000 visits to beached shashimi. I can feel an academy awards speech coming on. I want to thank my Mum and Dad from continually hitting the refresh button :-).

So I'm pleased that people have found my little snippets of news and experiences of interest. I'm personally counting down the days to being home.

The nature of the work I'm doing here is rewarding on a different level. As we work through fitting out apartments we are touching base with a lot of people new to the Middle East. They have had a few extra challenges than we did. The mobile phones have a glitch which doesn't allow people to ring in from home. Land lines or Internet access haven't been installed into the apartments yet ( it a long process of someone sitting in the Internet providers offices to get them connected. We're playing rock paper scissors to see who will be there fro the next couple of days rather than installing ovens!) . TV's aren't hooked up (some are getting there now). So these people, many have come by themselves, are here alone and we are a connection for them. So it is just as important to spend time talking with them as it is hanging their curtains or installing their washing machines. It's a wonderful observation in the varying levels of resilience people have in dealing with the situation. One of the other challenges is to ensure we don't get in the way of team and community building as we will be gone in the next few weeks and so it is important that we encourage them to connect with each other rather than us. This is interesting as we may come across as being a little snobby in some social settings. A couple of times groups have come into the restaurant bar we use at the hotel and we have purposefully stayed in our little corner rather than joining them. It is very easy to become the centre of conversation as we have a little more experience in Middle Eastern living and they also think we know a lot of information about stuff here in Al Ain (we only arrived three days before them) so our presence alters the dynamic.

It's all adding to the experience