Jane Bristol-Rhys is an assistant professor of anthropology at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi.
I came to Abu Dhabi in 2001. I love teaching my students at Zayed University - they are a great bunch of young women. I teach several courses on the Emirates - history, heritage and socio-cultural change. In one class right now we are using Freej to examine public discourse on social issues - and my nickname is, of course, Um Khammas. Students who have graduated are my friends and I have been "adopted" by an amazing family who make sure I am well taken care of, especially during Ramadan.
A wise friend described life as a road we build as we go along - we know where we've been but we don't know exactly where we're going next. I like that. I was born in Seattle in 1955 but my family moved to Kaduna in Nigeria in 1963. It was another world for a little American kid. Snakes slithered everywhere, giant monitor lizards dripped from the trees, we suddenly had a houseboy, a cook and a gardener and I had to learn to say "sweet" instead of candy. My mother found a ju-ju man to cast a spell to rid our compound of snakes, but we had 13 cats just in case the spell didn't work. My brother and I made a variety of flying objects soar out over the bush that intrigued the people in the villages close to our house.
Then we moved to Nairobi, where life was much grander. We golfed at the Muthaiga Club, went camping at Lake Naivasha - with the servants, mind you - and climbed Kilamanjaro. Those were great times filled with beautiful locations and fascinating people like the paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, and Daniel Arap Moi, who would be president of Kenya. There were parties filled with white Kenyans who looked very, very Raj. I refused to pack my suitcases when the day came to leave Nairobi because I was convinced that no other place would be as good.
My mother packed my suitcase and I next found myself in Cairo. "Um al dunya" is what Egyptians call Cairo - the mother of the universe - and I fell in love with it right away. I went through high school there, in Ma'adi, a little south of Cairo, and then on to the American University. As I look back on those years in Egypt, I realise that I experienced a great deal of modern Egyptian history - the deaths and funerals of Gamal Abd el Nasser, Umm Khulthum and Abdel Halim Hafiz, Sadat and the food riots in 1977. The Cairo I see today when I go home bears little resemblance to the city I grew up in but it is still very much home to me.
I returned to the States in 1979 and it was a bit of a shock to the system. I flooded my first apartment because it never occurred to me that Americans didn't have drains in the floor. My first job was working for the King Tut Exhibition when it came to the Seattle Art Museum. I did graduate studies at the University of Washington and returned to Cairo in 1983 for the research for my dissertation.
I put myself in one of the poorest areas of town, Gamaliyya, and another little village called Basateen and tried to figure out how these incredibly poor people were managing to survive in an Egypt that was becoming increasingly consumerist. It was hard to work in the midst of such poverty because I felt so utterly useless - nothing I would write would change their hard lives. I made as much of a difference as I could for the families who shared their lives with me, courtesy of Fulbright grant funds.
Perhaps because of that feeling of frustration, when I was awarded my doctorate, I left academia for a long time. I returned to the US and had a landscape design business, worked in property management, taught golf, drove limousines and lots of other things that drove my professor father somewhat crazy with anxiety and embarrassment.
One day I found myself agreeing to tutor students at a college nearby in upstate New York. I enjoyed the tutoring and so when the department head asked if I would teach western civilization, I said yes. Then I took more and more classes. I was teaching full-time and loving it. I especially loved teaching western civ because you cover so much - from prehistory to the Second World War I found it a real challenge to paint the broad strokes to show where ideas started and what happened to them along the way.
@email:rbehan@thenational.ae
