MY STORY WITH FUJAIRAH

It was weird, chaotic, erratic, and scary. I came to Fujairah in 1986 via Dubai.

And this is where it is, beautifully located by the Arabic Sea.

A journey in 2015 lead me on the path of my past with rather ambivalent feelings.

This chapter of my life is a really bizarre one. I had found myself in a kind of transition state searching for new paths in life that gave me the possibility to escape medicine. In this rather erratic situation I grabbed even the most unrealistic options to get out of my old life.

I came to Fujairah via Dubai with my ex-husband from Denmark and his friend from Beirut. All the three of us wanted to escape the civil war in Lebanon. I had been working there in the Palestinian refugee camps.

CROSSING THE DESERT

In 1986 the road from Dubai to Fujairah was a one lane windy path through the desert and the mountains. Today four lanes cut through the mountains lead you to the Arabic Sea.

My story with Fujairah was weird

In 1986 I arrived in Fujairah after a short stay in Dubai. Dubai was still tiny then, but for me it appeared already as a vibrant commercial center. In the beginning of my stay we had rented an apartment at the al Ghurair shopping center, breath-taking for me with a shopping mall, swimming pool, fitness center, in the 80ies a very new thing. From Europe I did not know such facilities. But the place turned out to be too expensive for me, especially with a very vague future ahead of me. This is why we moved to Fujairah. As a physician I was able to get a loan from the bank in Austria, but having no steady income the money was spend fast.

Looking back today this part of my past is the stuff film scripts are usually made of. It may seem as unreal to you as to me today.

THE BADIYA MOSQUE

A peaceful quiet place that kept all the timbre of the old days, mystical in the soft evening light.

If one wanted to tell a fairytale
it may sound approximately like this:

Once upon a time a young woman who had lost her path in life met 4 older men, a livestock holder from Lebanon, a Greek owner of a shipping company, a pharmacist from Lebanon and her husband in those days, a humanitarian aid worker from Denmark. In the background was a shadow man as local sponsor. This happened to be in the Middle East in the smallest of the Emirates, Fujairah, deep moslem countryside during that time.
The four men founded a company with the goal to introduce themselves to the Ruler of Fujairah as brokers for the construction of an oil refinery in Fujairah.

The commission money from this deal was meant to give all participants some decent money to start a new life, what a misjudgment of the situation, they all would find out later. For the livestock holder and shipping company owner it didn’t matter. For them it was an adventure. Being rich already losing was not an issue for them. This was not the case for the Danish husband of the young women back then, his friend the pharmacist from Beirut and and herself, a kind of attached creaturewife never officially part of the enterprise, for a woman in this place unthinkable at this time. But it was the women who spent all the money of her loan to invite mysterious dealers who applied for this huge contract of building the refinery.

In this building was our office, this was 1986. It was called Fujairah Trade Center, and among the clay houses by far the highest building in the little town, still a fairly empty deserted place notmuch business going on. Today the building feels small, tucked in between the prestige building of the Emirate.

Sexual misconduct she had to face almost every day, a tightrope walk not to insult the men’s self-esteem

Of course, a woman was not meant to have a share in a company in the mindset of these men. She was taking over secretarial work and tried to discretely structure the four men and their pompous way of being. She had to find a way to handle the lads without insulting them, and so, losing the option to secure her daily living. For weeks which felt to her like months or years nothing happened. Empty promises instilling hope in the guys popped up every other day. All this resembled more a money-burning machine instead of a money-making process.

All were played along the way. The boys didn’t realize, only too late.

Before the oil refinery in Fujairah got a go from Abu Dhabi, the Strait of Hormuz was essential for Abu Dhabi's for oil shipping into the world. Currently the tiny poor Fujairah is in a process of immense change.

The traces of the old days are still visible like the first and only Hotel, the Hilton International, where I used to kill a lot of my time or the Lebanese restaurant Farroush on the opposite side of the street and last but not least the building where I had the first office in my life not being an employee anymore.

This refinery was never built. The characters of the story split wordlessly and never met again. The woman was close to broke and had to accept a job in a hospital in the Emirates. Her Danish husband returned back to Lebanon to pick up humanitarian aid work again. The pharmacist stayed in Fujairah and dealt with whatever he could get to sell to nourish his family. The sponsor and the two rich guys simply disappeared.

The old one-story clay houses are almost all gone. Hotels along the beautiful coast of the Arabic Sea grow like mushrooms. The amount of mosques quadrupled at least. The Fujairah commercial center where we had our office is still there, but it is the smallest among many high buildings now while it was the highest and the only high building in Fujairah in the mid eighties.

The political situation how I understood it later was not made for a refinery in Fujairah in the 1980ties. Neither Abu Dhabi nor Oman would have accepted this project. Nevertheless the refinery project was launched once and again by the ruling Sharqi family attracting a colorful bunch of adventurers and losers like us who put all their hopes into empty promises.

In 2006 the Ruler of Abu Dhabi cleared the way for building the oil refinery and port Fujairah waited for decades. Today the little Emirate thrives on this huge oil plant. The place I knew in 1986 almost disappears.

ONLY FEW OLD HOUSES ARE LEFT

These places breathe the deep rift that is going to open between the poor and the rich. Sadness surounds them.

Thousands of tons of stone are removed from the tender rough mountains. Injuries are inflicted to the landscape that you may hear crying, if you listen closely.

»The Emirates changed their attitude towards the foreign«

Since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz from their side due to the ongoing war in Iraq and the other spots of unrest along the Golf, the Strait of Hormuz turned into a bottleneck. The Strait is so narrow that there don’t exist international waters. All oil tankers have to pass the territorial waters of Oman. If the Omanis decide to close the Strait, the flow of Abu Dhabi’s crude oil is blocked. The solution to this problem was the refinery in Fujairah which is located directly at the Arabic sea, so no need to pass the Strait of Hormuz anymore.