Why a Booktrail?
2000s – See the city of Abu Dhabi from someone who has been there and done that and found a lot more than she ever expected
Abu Dhabi Days and Dubai Nights
What you need to know before your trail
Jillian Schedneck takes up a position teaching English to a classroom of UAE students in Abu Dhabi. She’s young and has a idealistic view of what she’s about to do and what she can expect. But reality soon hits and she finds herself in a strange position teaching women who are only there as a distraction of something to do until they marry or duty calls in other ways.
These women and their futures fascinate Jill who can’t accept the differences between herself and women like her and her token students. so she tries to introduce them to a world they don’t know but one she feels can show them a different side to life.
Using literature as her guide, and writers such as Virginia Woolf, she poses questions about feminism. As she does so, its not just their lives she changes and enhances..
Travel Guide
“That first night in Abu Dhabi I dreamed of a woman wearing a dazzling black headscarf hurrying through a maze of clay-coloured alleyways.”
This new vivid world, where the morning call to prayer wakes her up and the strange impassioned plea causes her to momentarily regret her decision to come here, is Abu Dhabi
She speaks of her desire to travel and her decisions before coming to the Middle East which almost saw her got to Zimbabwe and other far flung places away from her home in Boston, USA
She speaks of her impressions of it before she left -’ the romance of the place’
“The rising metropolis bordering Saudi Arabi and the Persian Gulf was a luxury travel destination with all the trappings of Arabian life – Bedouins on camels, tents erected in the vast desert…..”
The reality is however very different and the school opens her eyes as well as those of the students she teaches and there she will see the great divides of island and the secular west. Added to this, a dream that she was destined to meet a man far away and her plane ticket bought itself.
But the school –
“Why don’t you work on your English homework or home to university?”
“I’m not let out except for class. If I want to go out, my mother will say, ‘Oh the maid can bring that for you,”
In 1977, UAE university opened with separate campuses for me and women…
It’s an eye opener in more ways than one.
Where Next?
