Class Clown

As requested, the crew of the Indian coal ship in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Covered from head to toe in black coal dust they spoke to us in broken English dialogues taken from famous Hollywood blockbusters and posed like they were in the middle of a New York fashion shoot.

In Dubai nearly every taxi driver is Indian or Pakistani, many of which come from Peshawar, Pakistan where war and violence is almost a continual state of being and continues to escalate daily. A young Pakistani driver told us that he came to Dubai to make money to support his young wife and family back in Peshawar but he is worried because he hears of more and more violence in his home town every day. Thousands of hopeful immigrants flood into the United Arab Emirates every year looking to make their way in one of the fastest growing resort cities in the world, a place with its own middle-of-the-desert indoor ski resort, hundreds of high-rise hotels and a dozen or so man-made resort islands. However, the massive construction projects driving the city’s economy have nearly all gone stale in the current conditions, a state of affairs that began largely with the mass exodus of the city’s migrant labor backbone last winter. Thousands of cars were left abandoned at Dubai’s international airport with hand-written notes of apology for unpaid bills; but with the construction industry shutting down multi-million dollar projects and workers losing jobs, they have only a few short days to find new work or leave the country.