I moved to the UAE from Melbourne in my late twenties, for a job that was supposed to last two years. My husband – whom I only met two years ago – came from Italy around the same time, with more or less the same story. We each left our families, built careers, made friends and then found each other. This is, I've come to realise, a very UAE story. The country has a way of becoming home before you've noticed the decision being made.
The UAE is specifically engineered for that feeling. It extends a frictionless welcome, gets out of the way, and asks almost nothing back from you. For most of our time here, we've taken that for granted. The most common trope about residents here is that we are “transient”. Which is why perhaps the most surprising thing about the past fortnight has been how quickly "the country I live in" became "my country".
A small number of our friends have left since the attacks from Iran began, and with entirely legitimate reasons: a friend four months pregnant with twins and her husband overseas, and others with young children or ill parents. But most of our friends have stayed. This is a country built in large part from people from somewhere else, with no shared history. And yet this week, we behaved like a community with deep roots.
I am a proud Australian, and my husband is a proud Italian. We are grateful to the countries that raised us. Without them we wouldn't be a faux hipster obsessed with Aesop, or a stubborn European who can't admit that Melbourne coffee is better than Italian. Our countries made us who we are. The UAE has embraced the values our motherlands gave us and invited us to help build something new with them.
Both of us have had incredible professional opportunities and real trust put in us. In our small way, we've each contributed to what the UAE is trying to build. The UAE is made up of millions of stories like us, of people bound by a country whose ambition is based on the idea that three things can be the same project: build yourself, build the nation and be useful to the world.
That ambition becomes background noise after a while. And like all background noise, you only notice it when it stops. The airlines are a good example. The disruption to Emirates and Etihad wasn't just an inconvenience for tourists visiting the UAE. Dubai is the world's busiest international airport, and Emirates flies to more countries than any other airline on earth. For hundreds of millions of people across South Asia, East Africa and beyond, UAE airlines are the only viable connection to the rest of the world, with routes nobody else will fly, connections nobody else has built.
Of course, it's been disappointing, therefore, to see some of the international commentary reach not for concern but for irony – about the apparent absurdity of conflict interrupting a place often associated by others with convenience and luxury. Why are disruption and fear in this part of the world inherently more absurd or less worthy of dignity than it would be elsewhere?
In some ways, that's the bias all of us here have had to navigate for years. The moment I moved here, people asked whether I felt “safe to be a woman”. I never quite know how to explain that I leave my door unlocked, that I walk home late without a second thought. That this country has done more to actively build tolerance – and stake its own reputation on it – than many places twice its age. Those stories don’t travel as far as the superficial ones.
Some of this is predictable bias against Arab and Muslim societies. I'll admit that it stings sometimes knowing that an Australian expat in London or New York wouldn't face the same questions. But some of it is simply that, unless you've lived here, it's hard to explain that life is genuinely good – that there is a real community, real ambition, serious people doing serious things.
This conflict has been frightening in ways most of us are still processing. But my husband and I are staying. We came here a decade ago from opposite ends of the world and built real lives here without knowing the other existed. The UAE gave us all of it – and then, for good measure, gave us each other.
We are proud of the motherlands that raised us. And now, more than ever, we are proud to call this one our home.
