Thursday, May 8, 2008
Hiatus in Writing - Update on UAE Project
So I've been to the United Arab Emirates and back since I last wrote. I survived the roundabouts in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Al Ain (I got an "are you okay" note from my brother after a 200-car pile-up happened between Dubai and Abu Dhabi on March ).
At the Al Ain Hilton and at the Al Shaheen camp outside of Al Ain, I enjoyed the comraderie of colleagues from around the world -- Jordan, South Africa, Scotland, England, Australia, and Sudan. We spent our first week shadowing the male facilitators at an all-male leadership assessment camp (where participants from the highest levels of government resided at the camp and participated in experiential or action learning assignments designed to test their leadership skills).
To put the work in context, the UAE's visionary president, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed mandated a comprehensive leadership development program for over 700 of the UAE's civil service leaders to achieve his goal of becoming one of the top 5 most respected and effective governments in the world by the year 2012. To do this, the Sheikh's policy agenda emphasizes:
"(P)rogrammes to develop an open economy, based on sustainable knowledge, that can compete internationally and with distinction, providing the best services in education, health and developed infrastructure within a legislative environment distinguished by efficiency and transparency."
Our job as the first group of female facilitators was to learn almost a dozen games (rules, penalties, equipment, etc.), the leadership assessment model (12 competencies against which each candidate would be assessed), the literal lay of the land (where each game was located across a broad expanse of red-gold sand dunes), and the report-writing process (how to integrate live observations with data from each candidate's psychometric tests). Simple, eh?
Well, there was a catch. After running with many men's camps since the fall of 2007, the camp had to instantly turn into an all-female camp -- so that 40 female leaders could fully participate in the camp's activities and without wearing their abayas, the long flowing black robe that Emerati women wear over their clothes in public.
This meant that the logistics manager had to disappear (he was responsible for the walkie talkies, the water trucks that replenished the camp, the pick-up truck that transports hypertensive or otherwise medically-sensitive participants to the dunes, and so forth).
The IT manager also had to disappear and operate remotely from the Hilton. Even the male chef had to vacate camp for the week and arrange to have food sent in.
Female Filipino security guards were stationed as sentries at the camp's gate, ensuring no strangers and certainly no men had access to the camp, which although rather remote was nevertheless secured by several guards at all times.
The prank nature played on me was delivering a dreadful bug from one of my newest friends, Mira El Tal, a very cool and bright half-American/half-Jordanian woman from Dubai. Incidentally, in the UAE, antibiotics are passed out like candy at pharmacies, and with the ever-changing constellation of ex-patriates coming and going from all parts of the world, new superbugs were brewing all the time. Everyone seemed to have stories of getting a kind of crud when they first came to the UAE. And I thought I had a rock solid immune system.
Sigh. I lost my voice the day before the women's camp was to begin. Bad timing to say the least. A bus load of Emerati women arrived on that hot Sunday of March 16th, and my voice croaked and I coughed (and I worried about making a wretched first impression). I'll never forget one of the younger candidates, who worked in an Organizational Development role, later winking at me and saying that I sounded "sexy."
It's funny thinking back to my fist week in the UAE, seeing women in their abayas on the street, where they looked so unavailable. The Emerati women who lead important parts of the UAE's government services were anything but shy or unavailable.
Most spoke impeccable English and forgave us readily for our few words of Arabic. And, to a woman, they were determined to throw themselves into the challenges of the week wholeheartedly, to take on the performance of over 400 men who preceded them at the camp.
We had our amusing little challenges during the week, but all worked out without any Murphy's Law moments. Well, maybe the pickup truck getting stuck in the sand was one of those moments, but facilitators, Mary Lou Rushforth and L'Re Vanrooyen, and some camp staff freed the truck from the sand and let out the air in the tires to proper sand dune driving levels, and the situation never made it all the way to red alert (read: call the guys in). Well done, ladies!
Throughout the week, in which the temperature had climbed and the wind had become ever more still, the Emerati candidates were in good spirits, saying things like, "When will we ever have another opportunity quite like this? This is an historic experience for us." Indeed, it was the first time many of them had ever met, with women from family services on teams with women from architecture and engineering services divisions. It was certainly the first time many had ever roughed it or shared a room with several strangers in a trailer, far from custoary levels of service these women enjoy.
At the end of the week, I remember finding myself walking alongside a woman with a particularly wonderful profile and commanding presence. I asked what part of the Government she was from. She said, "Presidential Affairs." I said, "Oh, you're involved in the world of politics!" She smiled in a engaging way and said, "Yes, I tell these women that 'I am the Government.'" I liked her and wished we could have spent more time talking, but the week was ending, and the women were boarding the bus headed back to Abu Dhabi.
We waved at them and debriefed and, like that, it was all over. One last shower back at the Hilton and we could turn in our uniforms and chill out for the afternoon with nary a report to be written before dinner. It was a whirlwind adventure, one that I will never forget, and one that also marked an early spring after a long (and hard) winter for me!
# posted by Cindy Marteney @ 5:54 PM 
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