Layover in Dubai

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like any city that has grown up fast and lives at top speed, yet still conceals a core of slower and more traditional culture, Dubai is not an easy place to get to know in a hurry. But during my visit there for a few weeks in the spring of 2008, many people were generous with their time, experience, and insight in helping me to at least make an attempt, and I would like to thank them.

At the top of the list is the courageous and irrepressible Sharla Musabih, founder of the City of Hope shelter for battered women. Ms. Musabih and her work are such irresistible forces that it was probably inevitable that she would inspire my portrayal of the fictional Yvette Halami, and her Beacon of Light shelter. Thanks also to City of Hope caseworker Yeshi Riske, for offering a wealth of anecdotes and information about the lives of imperiled women in Dubai.

Thanks also for the many observations on daily life—from both locals and expats—offered by Ahmed Al Attar, Zeyad Al Majed, Doug Cousino, Dhruv Dhawan, Elizabeth Drachman, Nancy Mahmoud, and several others.

For insights into Dubai’s legal system, I’d like to thank Jack Greenwald and John Dragonetti, who also shared their observations on the sleepier way of life in pre-boom Dubai. The fascinating Dubai Museum also helped me shape portraits of the past. But I owe a special thank-you in this department to the invaluable Telling Tales (Dubai: Explorer Publishing, 2005), a fine collection of Dubai oral histories from all walks of life, compiled by journalist Julia Wheeler and photographer Paul Thuysbaert.

Building Towers, Cheating Workers, the exhaustive Human Rights Watch report on living conditions in Dubai’s camps for construction workers, was quite helpful, as were the interviews I was able to conduct with workers living in the Al Qusais and Sonapur labor camps—that is, until I was chased out of both areas by image-conscious security personnel.

Thanks to the affable and interesting Bill Trundley, vice president of Corporate Security and Investigations for GlaxoSmithKline, for patiently explaining the duties and challenges of a security chief for a major pharmaceutical firm.

And thanks as well to Bert Tatham, the Canadian aid worker unjustly imprisoned in Dubai for several months in 2007, for offering his descriptions and observations on the sometimes harrowing living conditions inside the Dubai Central Jail in Al Aweer.

Last but not least, thanks to friend and colleague Sandy Banisky for advising me on how to best equip Nanette Weaver for battle, cosmetically speaking.