‘You don’t see hitchhikers any more” is a common refrain in much of the developed world.Usually the person making the observation will then recount youthful tales of hitchhiking across continents for which the rose-tinted glow of nostalgia tends to omit the hours they spent stuck in the rain between rides.
This is inevitably followed by a wish to return the favour by picking up hitchhikers, but lamenting their apparent disappearance, the reasons for which are attributed to everything from the availability of cheap cars through to the prevalence of serial-killing psychopaths.
But it’s always slightly odd to hear this familiar refrain from those living in the UAE because anyone who drives through rural areas on any given Friday will know that hitchhiking remains a common form of transport.
This is the only day that farm labourers have off each week and they often travel to the nearest town to attend Friday prayers, buy a few provisions and just to have a change of scenery. Most of the time there is no public transport, so you’ll find them standing beside desolate stretches of highway trying to hitch a ride.
I always try to pick them up when I have room.
Part of this is motivated by wanting to make what are difficult lives a little easier and another is because it offers a rare chance to subvert the way the 200 or so nationalities of people of the UAE tend to live in parallel with each other rather than in contact. Another reason is because unlike many parts of the world, men picking up a hitchhiker here carries no risk worse than having to endure a stilted discussion in whatever fragments of language we have in common.
And of course I need to repay the enormous debt of kindness of drivers on all seven continents who have picked me up when I’d been the one with my thumb out.
One recent Friday galvanised this for me in a way that exemplifies many of the reasons why I like living in the UAE.
This was in the final weeks of Ramadan and I’d been invited to an iftar deep in the dunes of Al Badayer to raise funds for charity. When dusk was called and the fast ended, I hung back from the table heaving with food because, unlike most of those around me, as a non-Muslim I hadn’t been fasting and refraining from drinking for the past 14 hours in the enervating heat of midsummer.
“No, you’re our guest,” one of the hosts said, pushing me forward. “You’re the priority.”
A few hours after this humbling moment, we dunebashed back out to the main road and my friends drove towards Dubai while I headed back to Abu Dhabi.
In Ramadan, many of the farm labourers who head to town each week stay on to have iftar at the main mosque but they then face the invidious task of hitching back to their farms in the dark.
I picked up the first two Bangladeshi hitchhikers outside Madam then stopped to pick up their colleague, who’d begun walking the 20km or so towards their farm outside Shwaib. It was difficult hitchhiking, they explained, and many Fridays they ended up walking all the way back.
Within a few kilometres of dropping them off, I found two more – a Nepali and a Pakistani – and took them to the Al Ain-Dubai road. Then another from Al Hayer to Nahel and one more from Sweihan to a farm about 8km out of town.
The eighth hitchhiker was a Pashtun man at the Adnoc near Zayed Military City and was heading to his labour camp on Saadiyat island, a distance of probably more than 50km. On foot, he had no chance of getting back before suhour, which would have prevented him eating and drinking before the working day began.
I dropped him off in Abu Dhabi at the bus stop outside Carrefour on Airport Road from which I knew Saadiyat buses left, gave him the fare and suggested he take the bus.
I went in to pick up a few groceries then came out expecting to see him still waiting and was ready to drive him to Saadiyat island as a way of repaying a tiny fraction of the kindnesses I had encountered from my iftar colleagues and from previous hitchhiking experiences.
He was nowhere to be seen. I still don’t know if he caught a bus or set off on foot but even after collecting eight hitchhikers I was still far from even beginning to pay off the karmic debt I owe by paying it forward to some of the least affluent of those with whom I share life in the UAE.
jhenzell@thenational.ae
