Like You'll Never See Me Again

Going back to the post about taking things for granted ... here is a song that means alot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-WZG-y2e9k


If I had no more time
No more time left to be here
Would you cherish what we had?
Was it everything that you were looking for?
If I couldn’t feel your touch
And no longer were you with me
I’d be wishing you were here
To be everything that I’d be looking for
I don’t wanna forget the present is a gift
And I don’t wanna take for granted the time you may have here with me
‘Cause Lord only knows another day is not really guaranteed

So every time you hold me
Hold me like this is the last time
Every time you kiss me
Kiss me like you’ll never see me again
Every time you touch me
Touch me like this is the last time
Promise that you’ll love me
Love me like you’ll never see me again

How many really know what love is?
Millions never will
Do you know until you lose it

That it’s everything that we are looking for
When I wake up in the morning
You’re beside me
I’m so thankful that I found
Everything that I been looking for

I don’t wanna forget the present is a gift
And I don’t wanna take for granted the time you may have here with me
‘Cause Lord only knows another day is not really guaranteed

Fresh & Clean

It has been over 2 months since I wrote, I didn’t realize that until I got a message on facebook from a person I have never met in my life letting me know that for some reason what I had written once upon a time made sense to her.

A lot has happened in these 2 months. I have left AIESEC and the UAE and I am back home. I have found love and intend to grab on and not let go. I am doing nothing at home and that’s it.

Last two months were crazy; it felt like the world was a washing machine. Everything happened so fast, I felt horrible and amazing at the same time. Some of the worst days and best days of my life were in those 2 months. They went by so fast that I could not absorb everything at that time. Now that I am back home, I sit and think of those days and try to absorb them but not regret them.

For some reason I liked the washing machine ride.

For some reason I feel fresh

For some reason I feel like I have started a new chapter in my life

For some reason I am feeling happy right now

Life is Beautiful

Sometimes I wish I was an animal. I wish I had no feelings and emotions. I didn’t care what happens to others; didn’t care where I was going or what I was doing. My only worry was to survive. Didn’t worry about respect, religion, work, friendship, family, education, money, marriage, health, happiness, self-satisfaction, love, trust, kindness, death…

It’s very sad how people try to take advantage of others. It’s very sad that people only see the material things you have and forget who you really are. It’s very sad that humans are become more selfish every day. It’s a very sad world…

But I see some people struggling to survive; when I see people not giving up and fighting evil, it brightens my day. That is when I remind myself that Life is Beautiful.

A New Beginning ?

I have been lazing off and taking things easy since last week. The long weekend due to the National Day here was a bonus as well. Not doing much felt so good. Am I becoming lazy or is this something normal?

It has been exactly 44 days that I am here and I have already changed so much. To the better? Who knows? This weekend I had time to sit and reflect on where I was and where I am and how I am living my life; for some reason I felt I was not being true to myself; but is that really how I feel? Or are they how someone made me feel.

I was thinking of how out going, loud, hyper, liberal, active and crazy I was and now how quiet (at least compared to before), conservative, lazy and boring I have become.

Am I being true to myself? Or maybe it was meant for me to be here for this side of me to take over?

People still think I’m crazy for taking the decision to come to Abu Dhabi. Am I? or is it them who are too caught up in the world to understand why I’m here?

Here is a picture of maybe my new beginning…

Weddings

I have been in the UAE for a little more than a month now and have already been to three different weddings. There is a lot of difference between the weddings here and in Bahrain. The weddings here are filled with food; since the time we arrive till we leave we eat. When you first take a seat, there are appetizers on the table; appetizers consisting of hummus, moutable, spring rolls, samboosa, salad, sweets … At the same time you have women walking around serving western coffee, Arabic coffee, juices, tea, hot milk with herbs, sweets, chocolates, perfumes …

Dinner is served around 10 pm; this includes different types of rice, harees, grills, salad and much more. After dinner the bride enters (usually alone) and walks around showing off her hair-do, make-up and gown (more of a fashion show than a bride walking to her seat). After she takes her seat, friends and close family go to her and congratulate her and take pictures. While this is happening, guess what is going around??? Dessert !!! Consisting of more than four to five different types of sweets.

One thing that is very different from Bahrain is that there is almost no dancing at the weddings. The women just sit around and chat and no one dances. Very rarely would you find a girl who is a direct family member dance.

So the first wedding I went to, I was very into the songs and had a huge urge to dance and so I got up and danced. It was a very stupid thing of me to do since I knew no one at the wedding and was just invited last minute to just see what Emirati weddings were like. Good thing I thought that no one knew me so it didn’t matter; next day at the college a girl comes up to me and tells me I look familiar. Turned out she was at the wedding and she made that clear by telling me that she saw me dance!!

Can’t wait for January to go back home for Bahraini weddings!!!

An Eye-Opening Day

Yesterday I went see one of my extended cousins and it was the most eye-opening day in my entire life. I learnt about a lot of things that I didn’t know existed to this extent in this part of the world. My cousin invited me for brunch with her friends at her house; this was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss. So I went to work early and tried to wrap up what I had to do for the day. I got to her house around 11.30 am and there was food almost everywhere (which by the way I realized is the centre of attention in almost everything that goes around here but that just another posting). The women were sitting around talking about their children and lives; things that I could not really relate to but loved to hear and discuss about. We later on moved out to the park and this is where the conversation heated up.

My cousin is in her early forties and has 5 girls (oldest being 14 and the youngest somewhere around 5 I guess). Her husband married another woman without telling her after 12 years of marriage; this basically destroyed her and everything in her life. I was trying to comfort her and make her feel powerful by telling her that he (her husband) is not worth wasting her time thinking/worrying/crying over. But it was all in vain; she really wanted to but she would tell me it is impossible and if I was in her shoes, I believe it would be the same for me as well.

A little about her; she basically only graduated from high school and never continued her education. She got married and was taken to another city (being Abu Dhabi since she is originally from Dubai) by him and since then has in some ways not enjoyed her life to the max. She is very pretty and sexy but yet her husband went for an older and uglier prostitute (I came to that conclusion based on her description of the female; based on my previous encounter with some women since I got here). Her husband forced her to cover her face and rejected every request from her to finish her education. She was not allowed to work and will never be allowed as long as she is staying in his house. She wakes up early in the morning to get her girls ready for school and goes back to bed after she sends them off. She wakes up around noon if she doesn’t have friends over and basically tries to pastime by watching TV or cooking. She is not allowed to leave the house under any circumstances without telling her husband a couple of days in advance. She has to share her husband with his new wife; which also by the way means sharing the little income he gets. She doesn’t want to get a divorce because she basically won’t be able to live. She can’t work even if she wanted to since she has almost no qualification. She cannot stay at her parents’ home because she has 5 daughters and can’t drag them everywhere she goes. So the only option she has is to remain where she is and try to survive for the sake of her daughters.

After talking for hours, turns out she is not the only one. There are a lot of women who live like this (her sister being another culprit with her husband marrying 2 more and not just one). It’s not just about the husbands getting second wives only; there are women who after marriage have to leave everything else in their lives for the sake of their husbands. What I understood from them is that women do not have the power to say no to men. The government does not protect them and mostly stands in favor of the men. The whole time I was with them, I wanted to hit the men so hard so they couldn’t have erections anymore.

I felt very useless and felt that I had not done anything meaningful in my life. Questions kept running in my mind like; do we have these problems in Bahrain as well? Is it possible that we do and I never knew about them? Is it actually to this extreme? What percent of the women actually live like this? How can I help? What resources can I use to try and help these women? Why do the men do this to their wives? Why do they do this to their children? Can a father be that selfish?

There are a lot of thoughts and ideas that are running in my head at the moment. Mixed emotions at the same time.

Angry at how selfish people can be.

Frustrated because I don’t have any immediate solutions.

Sad because I feel sorry for the children and how they are being dragged in all this.

Happy that I got to know about this issue (better late than never).

Hopeful because maybe I can be of some help with some of the ideas I have that hopefully I will have time to work on them while I am here.

And much more…

This posting might be the worst to read since my sentences are either too long or too short and some of them probably make no sense at all. But I had to write about it and I had to write about it NOW.

And I thought I had problems!@#$&?%@%!?#@

Taking things for granted

This morning when I came to work someone came and reported that one of the students lost her father and brother and so she had to leave the college. Later on I realized one of the supervisors did not show up today and later they told me that her brother passed away last night. He was only 35 years old and single; he just got a heart attack and that was it for him. As the girls in the office were discussing when to visit her to give their condolences, one of the other girls got a call that her sister passed away. What are the odds of having all these deaths in one day?

The whole department is quiet and everyone has somehow gone into their own zone. In terms of what I am thinking is only about home. What if something happens to one of my close ones? Will they tell me immediately? What if a certain person I cared for dearly passed away without me telling that person how much I really cared for them?

Sometimes we take things for granted. Specially me; I was believe that thinks will make their way and will eventually work out. But what if I lost someone without saying sorry for all the trouble I gave them; without letting them know how much I love them and would be willing to do whatever they want as long as they are happy.

I guess I have a lot of phone calls to do and Emails to send today. Who knows when someone might leave us, or when I will leave myself.