I first met the folks at SmartLife a little under a year ago to find out about their “Adopt-a-Laborer” program that pairs low-skilled workers with a white-collar counterpart. Over the course of the last year, I’ve kept up with them as they planned hundreds of Ramadan iftars and prepared for their seminal event, the SmartCup cricket tournament, which I write about here.
By ANGELA SHAH
DUBAI — Sanjeev Kumar’s face lights up when he speaks about days playing cricket with friends in his native Punjab in India before moving to Dubai in 2009 to work in a glass factory. “I so much love cricket,” he said, shyly, in halting English.
Last Friday, in an indoor sports facility in an industrial quarter in Dubai, Mr. Kumar played again, for the first time in more than two years. He bowled with a furious circular swing of his arm, intent on eliminating the batsmen at the wicket.
His exhilaration came from more than running around the pitch. Many of his teammates, as well as players on the opposing side, were office workers, the sort of people who usually do not even give laborers like him a passing glance.
Everyone was speaking with me respectfully,” he said, speaking more easily in his native Hindi. “It was as if we blue-collars are like everyone else here.”
The tournament, held in Dubai’s gritty Al Quoz district, was sponsored by SmartLife, a local charity. In speed-cricket games limited to a maximum eight overs for each team, 24 teams with an equal number of laborers and white-collar workers began playing at 9 a.m., whittling down the contenders until only two teams battled for the trophy by evening. A disc jockey provided a thundering Bollywood soundtrack.
Dubbed “SmartCup,” the tournament might have lacked the star power or the spectator crowds of sporting events usually hosted by Dubai. SmartCup drew few more than 80 fans, compared with the 8,000 who came out on a Friday a few weeks earlier to see Pakistan sweep England in their test cricket series. “But these guys will be speaking about this cricket day for three months,” said Arun Krishnan, an Indian who works in information technology and one of SmartLife’s founders. “Many of these workers, they come here alone, without their families. They have no one.”
(Gabriela Maj)
Laborers in the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf nations exist on the periphery of everyday life. Predominantly from the Subcontinent, they live in labor camps often located away from the city center in the desert where they share dormitory rooms with at least four bunk beds. Privacy is nonexistent; the men are here only to work. Six days a week they are bused in and out of the construction sites or factories that have powered the Gulf economy.
Accounts of being exploited by unscrupulous employers are commonplace. These laborers find they have little choice but to accept reduced pay or squalid living conditions since their families have often mortgaged lands or sold jewelry in order to pay agencies to bring them to the Gulf.
SmartLife’s founders say they want to give as many workers as possible the tools to move out of their low-skilled employment purgatory.
Two years ago, the charity started an “Adopt-a-Laborer” program that paired a worker with a white-collar mentor. Mentors must be in touch with their adoptees at least once a week. Some pairs have a structured time for computer lessons or help in wiring money home to families. “For other blue-collars, it’s just someone they can talk to,” Mr. Krishnan said.
Existing charitable efforts to donate clothing and other supplies to workers or to help send a destitute laborer back to his home country are noble, but palliative, says Andrew Gardner, a cultural anthropologist who has spent a decade studying the lives of migrant workers in Bahrain and Qatar. “Rarely are these efforts able to address the underlying causes that were producing these problems in the first place,” he said.
“Pairing migrants with people who are capable of helping them navigate the complex bureaucracy,” he added, “makes a big difference in their lives.”
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Porbandar, a port town located on Gujarat’s western coast, is known for being the home of Mahatma Gandhi and his family home is now a shrine/museum to his life. The home’s rooms are quite small. Climbing between flights along claustrophobic staircases reminded me of my visit to Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam. A swastik marks the floor in the room where Gandhi’s mother gave birth to him. We also visited Sudama Temple, named after a childhood friend of Krishna, and I walked through a swastika-shaped maze on the temple grounds. Traversing the maze is supposed to wash you of your sins. The day we were there, a Friday, was also the Birthday of the Prophet Mohammed, and a celebratory parade wound through the city streets. Considering Gandhi’s message of religious tolerance, I thought the timing brought a nice addition to our visit.
