Setting off on the first day of a new job, in a new country, with new people, requires a little preparation; a sharp outfit, a solid breakfast, some small talk prepped and ready to go, and a breezy stride that suggests an approachable confidence. I had all the boxes ticked. On the surface, I was ready. The dress was tasteful but stylish, the walk was natural but enviable, my inquisitive get-to-know-you opener was mentally cued and I had even squeezed in time for some scrambled eggs. I was in Abu Dhabi, UAE, far from home, and excited if not nervous at this new opportunity. The sun was shining and I was happily bounding over to the next building of the hotel for my first meeting regarding my job in sports presentation with the Special Olympics World Games. Pleased to be out in the warmth instead of stuck in cold Toronto traffic, I walked with purpose, casually and cooly checking out a text on my phone. Or typing a quick text? Or peaking at Instagram? I don’t even remember. In mid, powerful stride, my foot hit the track of a gate and I was hurled through the air like a lawn dart at a garden party. I went arse-over-tea-kettle down. My hands shot forward and skidded across the unibrick, my phone launched 4 feet in front of me, the back of my dress rode up, and my cute-as-a-button Kate Spade messenger bag flew up in the air and landed on my head like a bomb being dropped from a drone. My left knee hit the ground hard and the momentum of the fall opened up the skin like a garbage bag being dragged down a driveway. Instead of trash leaking out, a rich ruby blood, seasoned with dirt, trailed off down my clean shaven leg. In this country that demands modesty, I quickly adjusted my dress, swallowed my bad words, and maybe a piece of my lower lip, picked up the contents of my bag and snatched the cell phone from the hands of the security guard that had run from his post to rescue me. “Thanks. I’m totally fine” I spit as I walked off looking like Wile E Coyote after a bomb explodes in his hand.

I no longer wanted this adventure. Limping and stained, I decided, I want to go home.

Lucky for me, a piece of home was waiting back in the hotel apartment. My kids were fast asleep and my husband was still getting ready for his work day. I wanted to see them not this group of strangers waiting to chit chat over morning tea which, I knew would eventually lead to my confession of never having worked in sports before and ultimately exacerbate my buried feelings of being lesser-than. The butterflies were almost too much. Now I would have to make this small talk in a dusty dress with a bloody knee and the knowledge that there is likely a surveillance video of my sloppy wipe-out entertaining a large group of hotel workers in the bowels of a building somewhere nearby. Why in the world do I still like bright patterned underwear? For all I knew, I was wearing my Tuesday’s on a Wednesday! My confidence was shot and in my mind, that meant this whole experience was going to be a disaster. Home home home! Get me out of here.

Right from the start, geography had sorted us like an old coin machine at a grocery store. Australia was sitting with Australia, UK with UK, Canada with Canada and then of course, the singles table, Egypt and Brazil with Spain. Logically, we must have all been seeking a sense of home; shared experiences of flights, weather, and other cultural idiosyncrasies. “Ha ha ha, remember that time Susan Aglukark sang on Parliament Hill for Canada Day and the dancers bumped into her. What a gas!”.(for Canada)

By the time lunch hit though, we had begun to regroup into what resembled friendly peer clusters in a high school cafeteria, motivated now by curiosity, humour and like-mindedness instead of cultural familiarity - a different kind of comfort. As this social pairing-off was happening, the details of the actual job ahead of me were being revealed. Despite my newfound relationships, my confidence continued to drain like water in a sandcastle moat, or in this case, blood from a freshly skinned knee.

My knee. I couldn’t bend my knee for fear of exploding my fresh scab and a piece of it landing on someone’s laptop, so I sat sprawled out looking as confident as Maverick about to challenge IceMan, minus the flight suit, aviators and bulging male package that dares you not to look . Oh how the opposite was true. I have never done this type of work before and to say I felt like a fish out of water is not quite cutting it. I felt more like a daycare worker with a single wet wipe in a room full of kids with poopy diapers - ill-equipped to say the least.

I tried to drink in the exhilaration of trying something new, to honour the butterflies and turn my nerves into passion. But all I really wanted was to get back to my crew. My real crew. When my work day was done, I walked along the water, past multiple pools and soothing views before I found my gang swimming, laughing, and of course, snacking. I could breathe again. I couldn’t bend my leg, but I could breathe. And I would get through this experience because of them.

“I am such a baby” I thought as I slipped out of my shoes and hung my head. I watched them swim, took in my beautiful surroundings and reminded myself of a conversation I had with a cab driver the day before.

“Where are you from?”

“I’m from India m’am.”

“Where in India?”

“Calcutta. Do you know it?”

“I know of Calcutta but I’ve never been. How long have you been here?”

“Two years m’am.”

“Is your family here?”

“No m’am but in a few months time, I will see them. I’ve been waiting - for the contract to allow me.”

“Do you like it here?”

“Yes m’am. It’s agreeable. Very nice people.”

“Are you here for work?”

“Yes m’am. I make the money to send home. Have you been to India?”

“Yes but never Calcutta. Only parts of Rajasthan”

“Oh it is amazing place. Calcutta! You must go!”

And that was it. The rest of the cab ride was filled with stories of home and the family who waits for him. It was a large family from what I could tell. He was so animated I never did figure out if any of the family mentioned were wife and kids but one thing I knew for certain, he loved them all deeply. As his arms flailed and he met my gaze continually in the rear view mirror, I wondered if either of us would ever see home again. It was more likely we were going to die here in a twisted crash that would read “distracted driving’ on the police report. Before long though I realized - he was home. His words and memories had taken him back. The shine and scale of futuristic Abu Dhabi architecture had morphed into bicycles, food stalls, cows, baskets on motorbikes, colours, sweat, open shirts and soft bellies peeking out from flowing sari’s. I could hear the horns and smell the dahl. ‘I can take this ride with him’ I thought. Each time I blinked and looked out the window, flashes of India appeared like strobe light images in an art film. He talked about the troubling politics, corruption, and unstable economy that rocks Calcutta. Finding a decent job is near impossible so making the decision to leave was an easy one. After two years of service with the cab company, he will be granted 4 weeks annual vacation which, for the foreseeable future, will always be spent going home.

It will be just over 26 months that he waited to see his family. I waited 8 hours. He uprooted his life, mastered another language and took on a job that places him either alone or with transient customers, all day, every day. Little time for connection, little time for relationship building, but long enough hours to leave him with little else to do but wait - wait for those four weeks. As painful as it must be to be so far from home, I can’t imagine the sting he will feel on that last day of vacation, when he packs up to leave again and slide behind the wheel of his taxi to serve another endless stream of strangers that may or may not speak to him or ask him his name. If I did ask him, I have somehow forgotten.

So that’s it. “Suck it up buttercup” became my new mantra. So what if I was in over my head at this temporary job. My family was actually with me and we would all go home together at the end of it all.

“Where are you from?”

“Syria.”

“Where are you from?”

“Nepal.”

“Where are you from?”

“Uganda”

“Where are you from?”

“Bhutan”

“The Philippines”

“China”

“Nigeria”

I couldn’t stop myself from asking. Abu Dhabi is like a designer loot bag filled with treats from around the world offered up to its guests. With only 3 million people actually from the United Arab Emirates and 10 million people from India alone, my question was rarely met with “Here. I’m from here”. One young man was flying back to India for three days to get married. He would arrive the day before his wedding and leave the day after.

“I thought weddings were like 5 days long in India?” I asked.

“Not for me m’am. No money for this. Will get it done.”

The overwhelming wealth of many of the UAE citizens leaves a lot of available employment opportunities for expats hungry for work; forgoing the emotional comforts of home for the financial comforts of a job. Not an uncommon story to find - anywhere, including Toronto. Somehow, here in the desert, I had became more aware of these stories and the realization that back in Toronto, I had managed to drop my head in the sand.

I often struggle with overly sentimental notions of home; needing it, missing it, sweating to make one for my own family, and vehemently fighting the distress when ‘home’ is in jeopardy. Most recently, closing the front door on my emptied-out childhood home for the last time after my parents moved, out of necessity, not of their choosing, was a moment that shook me like an etch-a-sketch, erasing a part of my past, and even a part of my future, that I hadn’t realized was this vulnerable. No more meals at the dining room table, no more visits, no more listening to the furnace kick-in, or eavesdropping on grandma while she makes the kids breakfast and I lay in bed a little longer. There will be no more soccer games or water gun fights in the yard. No more walking the dog and showing the kids the park I used to play in, the streets my friends used to live on, which trees we used to climb and most importantly, which houses had pools. The stories of “we played outside until the streetlights came on” were once told beneath the actual street lights that signaled us all back for food and the dreaded shower. There is no going back to the smells and comforts of childhood. “Suck it up” was again a mantra I leaned on. Those times when my car accidentally steered itself off the highway, instinctively heading ‘home’, had to be ignored and endured in secret.

Abu Dhabi continued to dazzle me with it’s hotels, amusement parks, beaches, art, culture, historical and meteoric rise to wealth, religious devotion and of course, the reason I was there, the first-class staging of a global sporting event aimed at celebrating athletes with special needs - the Special Olympics World Games. But time and again my eyes, words and heart searched the crowds and venues for stories of ‘home’ - mine and others. The athletes had come from so far themselves, not only mastering a sport that may have seemed impossible to most, but many had left their loved ones and the security of ‘home’ to compete on a massive scale. Winners right out of the gate in my mind.

“What’s your name?”

“Christine. I’m 51.”

“Wow! You show these youngins how it’s done Christine.”

“That’s right!”

“What’s your event?”

“Power lifting.”

“Awesome. Where are you from?”

“Medicine Hat.”

“You’ve come a long way.”

“I flew to Calgary, then Calgary to Toronto, then Toronto to Abu Dhabi. I did it”

Although we were fellow Canadians, Christine Sullivan and I do not live near each other and I’m pretty sure our life stories are very different. Her intellectual disability has likely been a challenge for her in ways I can’t imagine. In this moment, she was proud, she was Canadian and I was very aware of how much stronger and braver she was than me. For many of these athletes, just leaving their bedrooms has been a struggle at some point in their lives - and yet, many planes, trains and automobiles later, they’ve made it here. This realization was enough to turn us from strangers to huggers in a hot minute. Of course, it was me that needed the hug. If I had told Christine that I was nervous about taking on this new job, something tells me she would have lifted me up, like one of her warm-up dumbbells, with words of wisdom that even Oprah would pause to savour.

Christine Sullivan (on the far right) posing with my kids and I and the rest of the Canadian power lifting team

I was not surprised to hear, after having met Christine, that during competition in Abu Dhabi, after nailing a squat, Christine’s enthusiasm got the best of her and she reached over to high five a judge, a no-no in international competition. She wondered to her coach afterward if she was going to be arrested for having broken the rules.

Instead, the photo of that moment became a banner for the spirit of the games.

Her constant smile and powerful stance made her glow. It was almost impossible to walk past her without wanting to engage. Her presence and endless energy made it hard to believe she would ever suffer self-doubt.

“I can do it, I have to say. I say it a lot. Or my coach tells me to say it”.

A far cry from my “suck it up” and probably a little more productive. She has competed in the Special Olympics for 22 years. Despite her occasional nerves, she has found herself in competition everywhere from Greece, to China and now Abu Dhabi. She’s even been in a documentary.

“It was on tv - TSN or something. You should see it.”

“I’ll look for it.”

Right after I grow a pair and remind myself that trying something new at my age shouldn’t be this nerve-wracking! She smiled and walked away, her team surrounding her like family - a home away from home. With her red and white jacket stretched across her strong frame, and her shoulders back, she swung her head cheerfully from side-to-side looking around for the next fan to talk to.

“I can do it”, I thought.

The stories almost overwhelmed me by the time the first week had passed. I collected them like strange fruit from a tree - arranging them in a basket, wondering what to make of them . Slowly but surely I started to feel comfortable. I fell in love with my new team, the job and the exhilaration of having wholly completely left my comfort zone. Drinking in these stories had settled my stomach and cleared my mind.

From those I encountered in Abu Dhabi, I learned a poetic lesson - to feel at home, I only needed to feel home; a sense of my own, a feeling of others and the belief that a new one can always be formed - with a little trust and bravery. My relationships in Abu Dhabi grew and so did a tender new layer of skin across my knee. There will always be a street light coming on to signal me home - whether it’s in my mind, my memories or in the relationships I foster around me. Home is the light that guides our taxis, our athletes, and our ability to always move forward. It can be fragile and chaotic, like childhood and Calcutta. It can be fractured or far away, like a broken home or a small town, but it is always that starting point, that place we sometimes step away from only to look back and remind ourselves why we are here.

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” George Moore

When my band aid floated to the top of the pool, I fished it out and placed it in my son’s palm as he walked past me on the deck. I asked him to put it in the garbage for me. He glanced at me sideways with a slight sneer that only a teenager who has spent the day napping in the sun can muster.

“You’re disgusting” he murmured.

Maybe a little imperfect, but present and bright, my street light went on, the day came into focus, and I was home.

By Carol Sloan

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