"I don’t tell them I clean toilets”
Khaleej Times 02/05/2012

There’s a constant ebb and flow of people at one of the men’s washrooms inside Dubai Mall.

Except instead of the moon, it’s the Islamic call to prayer that brings in the rush of men, often creating a frenzy as worshippers use the toilets all at once before performing their ablutions.

Through it all, Saiful Islam Khan does his best to stay ahead of the tide of people, fervently moping away spills, wiping the sink counters and emptying out garbage bins.

Often going unnoticed in his grey and black uniform, Khan, 31, is a cleaner inside one of the mall’s 25 washrooms.

Beginning at 11 a.m. for 12 hours a day, six days a week, his job is to keep this washroom and the neighbouring prayer room sparkling. It’s all in an effort to uphold the appearance of the dazzling feat that is the Dubai Mall. From Alexander McQueen to Christian Louboutin, designer boutiques dot the shopper’s paradise. “I came from a country where we don’t have a mall like this,” Khan says. He’s originally from the rural Brahmanbaria District in Bangladesh, a part of the country that has produced some of the Indian sub-continent’s most famous musicians and artists.

Khan’s love of music is apparent as he quietly sings a few Bengali and Hindi tunes while spraying the urinals with disinfectant.
“Back home I would sing in school dramas and act in plays based on 1971,” he says, referring to the year Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan. However, his first love is cricket.

After completing secondary school, his dream was to play for Bangladesh’s national team. But with parents, marriage and eventually two kids looking to him for financial support, that dream was put on hold.

Through the advice of a cousin and help from a job agency back home, he found an opportunity as a cleaner at a pool in the Arabian Ranches. After a couple of months, his employer MAB facilities management, relocated him to Dubai Mall, where he earns Dh1,050 a month — not enough to buy the cheapest dress at the Tory Burch shop located next to the washroom.

Nearing his fourth year of work here, Khan says he still hasn’t told his family back home that he cleans washrooms for a living.
“I just tell them I’m a cleaner, I don’t tell them I clean toilets.

“It’ll hurt their pride if they found out,” he says, holding a mop as the sound of toilets flushing and throats being cleared echo in the washroom.

Khan’s zone coordinator, Husam Khalil, says Khan should take pride in his work.

“He works so hard for 12 hours a day. I just finished his evaluation and gave him a nine out of 10,” Khalil says.

“He’s polite, he does his job well,” he says, pointing to the gleaming floors at the entrance of the washroom.

The job does have its perks.

Khan says he’s spotted some big Bollywood stars who’ve come by the washroom, including Bobby Deol and Sanjay Kapoor.

He also likes being near the prayer room, where he prays for bigger things in life.

“My target is to set up my own clothing business back home.”

It’s nearing 3 p.m. and Khan takes his hour-long break as his colleague Abdul Rasul, 22, subs in for him.

Rasul says the washroom consumes 40 bags of paper towels, each with 150 sheets, while 20 rolls of toilet paper are used in a day.

More toilets are flushed. Another throat is cleared.

Khan returns from his break looking exhausted, but ready to continue cleaning.

“This is my work, this is my duty, I have to do my best to keep this place clean,” he tells himself.

When the day eventually drags to an end, Khan is taken to his accommodation in Sharjah, a room which he shares with eight other men. But he doesn’t consider that home.

“This washroom has become my home.”

Stations To Receive Artful Makeovers
National Post 03/08/2008

The TTC is introducing art into its subway stations as part of an underground make-over that has public-art advocates cheering, even as preservationists fear the system’s visual identity is being lost.

“I think this is the best thing, this integration of art into the subway stops,” said Colette Laliberte, a professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD). “Reinventing the subway line and incorporating art there, it’s like walking through a gallery on your way to work, it’s fantastic.”

This week, the TTC held an open house on its plans for the Pape station, the first station that will be revamped under the TTC’s $275-million station modernization program. It was launched last summer on the Bloor-Danforth line, and includes $25-million for “aesthetic changes” in the stations.

The $20.8-million Pape station revamp is anticipated to begin this fall, to be followed by the Dufferin station and then the Bloor-Yonge station, said Dave Grigg, project manager for the program.

“The intent is that basically the whole appearance needs to change,” Mr. Grigg said.

The program aims to improve finishings on the walls, floors and ceilings inside the subway stops, along with better lighting. On the outside, the focus will be on creating new station appearances and landscaping.

However, for Ms. Laliberte — who teaches a course on art in the public realm — more art on the subway line is most important. “When you think of the number of people who take the subway every day, some people are in there for hours going from Kipling to the other side of the city. So seeing the variety [of art] from one station to another is a moment of enrichment in your day to day life,” Ms. Laliberte said.

“We don’t have enough art in our life and this is bringing it to us in the subway,” she said. “It’s refreshing.”

After its renovation — set to be completed in 2010 — the Pape station will display approximately 80 digital photographs of the station by Kitchener artist Allan Harding MacKay.

Mr. MacKay said the $85,000 artwork will be displayed in a series of two-by four-foot photos, with the actual photo set alongside abstract versions.

“The images are first literal and then get made into a series where they get transformed, abstracted, swirled or highly textured. In other words, they move from being very recognizable images to more of an abstraction,” said Mr. MacKay, who also created the Veterans’ Memorial Wall at Queen’s Park.

Mr. MacKay said the works took six months to complete, and although the TTC commissioned the project, the idea behind the art was his own.

“I wanted to do something with the environment that stimulates the imagination of people, to let their own subjectivity develop meaning for them,” he said, adding he wanted passengers to view the Pape station and its surroundings through their own eyes.
The modernization program has raised some controversy with purists upset the subway line’s iconic visual identity — the system even has its own typeface — is being tampered with.

“There are a few stations that are in their original form and to renovate that you obviously lose some of that. The question is, is it significant or of value? Is that loss something that’s irreparable?” said Andrew Pruss, an architect with ERA Architects Inc.
City councillor Adam Vaughan, who is on the Toronto Preservation Board, said the TTC should take into consideration the historical value of the subway line before it tears it apart.

“The Bloor-Danforth line is a rhythm of colours that has a set pattern and it’s designed as a piece and it speaks to an era gone by,” Mr. Vaughan said.

“Before we start tampering with this and breaking it up, there’s some history there, and I think there needs to be a discussion held on how to preserve it and recognize it as heritage,” Mr. Vaughan added.

Mr. Grigg said heritage considerations ”are being reviewed,” and the TTC hopes it can renovate the stations without offending the preservationists. ”We plan to bring something on board,” he said.

Other stops to be renovated on the Bloor-Danforth line, which opened in 1966, include the Islington station, at a cost of $19.6-million, Kipling for $35.5-million and Victoria Park for $46.4-million. Construction is set to complete by 2010 and renovations on these stations will focus on restructuring, along with having easy accessibility.

Similar reconstructions along the University line, which opened in 1963, are a joint initiative between the TTC and Toronto Community Foundation.

In that initiative, St. Patrick and Osgoode stations will be renovated, each at a cost of $5-million. A date hasn’t been set as to when the construction will start.

An ongoing $5-million facelift for the Museum station will be completed on April 8.


In Saudi Arabia, Praying And Working For Prosperity
Huffington Post 06/06/2010

Rippling-golden sand dunes and rocky fields surround the sleepy city of Al Kharj, located in the Riyadh province of Saudi Arabia.
Everything shuts down here five times a day when the call to prayer blares from the city’s many minarets as worshipers flock to mosques.

These days, those flocks have grown larger with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan in full gear.

Among those Muslims is 26-year-old Ryed Sunaid, a resident of Al Kharj who is using this month to pray for not only a place in heaven, but also for prosperity here on earth. Sunaid was born in Dilliam, a Bedouin village located just outside of Al Kharj.

Sunaid comes from a large family with 10 siblings—five of them sisters who are all married now. His father is an elementary school teacher and his mother a homemaker. Paying the bills is a difficult task.

Living in an economy dented by the global recession, Sunaid juggles college and a part-time job greasing agricultural irrigation machines, which he will go back to once the Ramadan vacation ends this Sunday.

“Can you imagine greasing those machines under 120 degree weather? Wow. It’s like hell,” Sunaid says. He’s been working this job for the past three years, earning $720 a month—most of which goes to his parents.

Since such positions typically are held by South Asian or Filipino contract workers, Sunaid is an anomaly in the Saudi workforce, according to writer Saeed Al-Yami.  In a recent op-ed in The Arab News, Saudi Arabia’s most widely circulated English-language newspaper, Al-Yami discusses why young Saudi men continue to remain unemployed.

“We have unemployed Saudis searching for the right job when the right job they are searching for does not fit them. Sadly this is a reality…Our fathers and grandfathers worked in cleaning, construction, farming and many other jobs that young Saudis these days deem unfit for them.”

According to a report compiled by the General Department of Statistics and the Saudi Ministry of Economy and Planning, 9.8 per cent of young Saudis remain unemployed, while unofficial estimates stand at 20 percent.

“Saudi youth can’t work as cleaners or drivers, the community won’t accept them. I think it’s a shame the way our society thinks because even the Prophet [Muhammad] said you have to work to live and not depend on other people, like how most Saudis depend on their parents even when they’re old,” Sunaid says.

At the Al-Kharj Technical College—where Sunaid is studying accounting—student adviser Salah Alanzi says even though post-secondary education is free in the Kingdom, many students from poor households drop out simply because they can’t afford to take a taxi to college everyday.

This is besides the fact most students get a monthly allowance of $260 a month from the college, money that is instead used for paying the bills at home, Alanzi says, noting that for most students, school isn’t seen as a way of getting a job.

According to Alanzi, other more well-off students drop out because they don’t want to wait three to five years for a diploma or a degree, choosing instead to remain unemployed and live off of their parents.

“I can’t do that. I want to have a good future, I want to study as much as I can—keep studying until I get my doctoral degree,” Sunaid says, who has a GPA of 4.45 out of 5. He has a year and a half left until he completes his diploma.

After that, he says he wants to study abroad to complete his degree in accounting.

“When I want to do something, I do it no matter what it takes,” he says, adding that this month of Ramadan is definitely giving him a boost in achieving his goals.

“Without my faith, I would be hopeless to be honest. It feels good to pray, it keeps me optimistic.”

Off to Egypt's Oldest Pyramids
Arab News 02/05/2012

Death is what Saqqara’s all about, the site of a cemetery for Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt.

The flawless, sunny afternoon air is a sharp contrast to the squalid canal that creeps alongside us. The landscape is littered with date palm groves and farm houses as students shouldering backpacks slowly slog home from school.

There’s a calm in the air that’s a world away from the onslaught of Cairo’s frantic pace. And we’re only some 30 kilometres south of the Um Ad-Dunya (Mother of the world) — as Cairo’s righteously nicknamed.

As we edge closer, I look above the date palm frowns and spot a pyramid designed in steps. A rush of adrenaline gushes through me. It hits me. I’m about to see the first pyramid ever constructed in Egypt almost 5,000 years ago.

But the euphoria eases upon seeing two tour buses parked near the entrance, a sight it seems, that can’t be avoided while touring the ancient monuments of Egypt.

Hearing the Southern drawl of senior citizens from the US and high pitched French speakers eats away at the exotic atmosphere of the moment. Though, compared to the hordes of tourists at the Great Pyramids of Giza, this place looks downright empty. But it’s understandable, since most tourists who plan a trip to Egypt don’t conjure up the image of this single, cut-stone step pyramid.
Often when travelers plan a trip to Egypt, the first picture that comes to mind is of the Great Pyramids — one of the ancient wonders of the world — that reign over the Giza skyline. Little is heard of Saqqara and its Djoser Pyramid.

The brainchild of this Pharaonic feat was Imhotep, the first ever architect known by name, whose design was used later in the plethora of pyramids seen all over Egypt.

He was such a great architect that the ancient Egyptians began worshipping him after his death. Unfortunately, his tomb was lost in antiquity. But the pyramid he built for King Djoser still stands.

As I stand under the base of the Pyramid, the blazing Egyptian sun radiating down on me, the euphoria rushes back. The few crowds that I saw earlier haven’t reached the base of the Pyramid and it seems like I’m the only person here.

A thought comes to mind: This first ever built pyramid has passed through many dynasties, rulers, empires, wars and here I am staring at this testament of time. Being there in that arid landscape alone, I feel like I’ve become a part of that history.

Then the crowds show up and my moment alone is up. Lucky for me, this place is vast — scattered around are ancient tombs (some of which haven’t been discovered yet) and dilapidated pyramids. I continue to avoid the crowds, getting lost in this desert landscape.
Eventually I head for the cab where my driver Ahmed is waiting to take me back to Cairo, and I’m glad I decided to opt out of a group tour.

Saudi Arabian City of Jidda Defies The Stereotypes
The Georgia Straight 25/08/2010

Arabic music blared at an outdoor café as a group of men played backgammon while puffing water pipes and sipping mint tea. As the sunset call to prayer reverberated through the city, some of them got up and headed for a nearby mosque. Others stayed put, duelling it out.

It’s a scene that has garnered the city of Jidda, Saudi Arabia, the label of ghair—or foreign—by the rest of the country. Located on the Red Sea, Jidda is the second-largest city in the kingdom and the gateway to Mecca. It’s long had a reputation for modernity, and contrasted sharply with the Saudi Arabia I was familiar with.

For a year, I had been living in the ultra-conservative city of Al-Kharj, in the heartland of the kingdom. The experience was akin to living in the American Bible Belt, but on steroids. The dusty city is an hour’s drive southeast of Riyadh, the capital. From Riyadh, it’s a one-hour flight west to Jidda, the San Francisco of Saudi Arabia. Like most Saudi cities, Al-Kharj has stores that shut down five times a day like clockwork for the daily prayers, as Saudis rush to the nearest mosque to kneel before God. Smoking a water pipe in public is frowned upon, especially during prayer time, and music on the streets is unheard of. But these vices apparently seemed to be commonplace in the Balad neighbourhood of Jidda.

I found myself in Al-Kharj after signing a yearlong contract to teach English to adults. It was my students who persuaded me to visit Jidda. “It’ll change the image that Al-Kharj has given you of Saudi Arabia,” said Mohammed, one of my students. “You won’t want to come back here.”

Mohammed could see right through me. I had become jaded living in a city smack in the middle of the Arabian desert where the austere Wahhabi form of Islam is the norm. Wearing shorts above the knee went against the propriety of desert society, and could land you a long lecture from the Mutaween, or Saudi religious police, on the importance of wearing three-quarter-length shorts as opposed to basketball shorts, which they say have the tendency to rise above the knee. You could easily spot these men driving around town in their white Nissan Patrols, dressed in white tunics and wearing long black beards.

My experiences in Al-Kharj hadn’t been entirely good. Just about every situation entailed me being judged through a strict Islamic lens—whether it was the way I dressed, how often I prayed, or how well I comprehended Islamic texts. (I understood them well, but interpreted them too liberally for those in Al-Kharj.) I avoided using Arabic because my pronunciation often elicited laughs. But I was once berated by a clerk in a dollar store for asking a price in English. “Don’t you know that when you die you’ll be speaking in Arabic in the hereafter?” he screamed, drawing the attention of everyone in the store. I hung my head in embarrassment. Then he asked the question that strangers asked me from the day I arrived in Al-Kharj to the day I left: “Are you Muslim?”

Being Muslim but having lived in Toronto all my life, I felt totally out of place in Al-Kharj. Because I was foreign, I was constantly ridiculed, judged by strangers, and even by new students. When I told people that, indeed, I am a Muslim, I was viewed with suspicion and asked to recite the daily prayer to prove it.

Everything was different in Jidda. Sitting in a café in the Old City of Balad, I couldn’t help but be shocked. Young men were wearing shorts—of the basketball variety. Unlike in Al-Kharj, the majority of women didn’t have their faces covered with the niqab, which only exposes the eyes. A couple of them didn’t even wear the hijab, or headscarf that covers the hair. And a few women along the seafront corniche were fashionably sucking on cigarettes. They sat next to young men, and all stared out at the setting sun. There wasn’t a single member of the Mutaween in sight.

I decided to get lost in the Old City, which dates back 2,500 years to when fishing from the Red Sea was the main source of income, not the oil drilling that defines modern-day Saudi Arabia. I walked through the winding, narrow streets lined with coral-white houses, some covered in bright splashes of  magenta bougainvilleas. The houses were built by wealthy merchants in the late 1800s, when European trade with the Arabian Peninsula increased after the opening of the Suez Canal.

As I wandered deeper into the neighbourhood, I came across a trio of newcomers. These Somali immigrants explained to me in broken Arabic that they had come to Saudi Arabia a year earlier. They had performed the hajj, or the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, and had then decided not to leave. Apparently, many of Jidda’s residents came to the kingdom from much poorer countries to do the hajj, tore up their passports upon arrival, and decided to call Saudi Arabia home.

“Have some tea with us,” they urged. A group of Pakistani labourers sat a few metres away. Noticing my camera, they asked me to take a group photo. But first they poured me tea. I would be offered tea at least a dozen times that evening.

Seeing Pakistanis sitting so close to Somalis was a first for me in the kingdom. The ethnic diversity in the Balad contrasted sharply with other Saudi Arabian cities, where members of different tribes living on the same street is considered diverse.

Mohammed was right—I didn’t want to go back to Al-Kharj after seeing Jidda. Walking through the Balad, I felt the last thing people were worried about was my faith. After just four days there, Jidda had broken down the stereotypes of Saudi Arabia that had begun to solidify in Al-Kharj. The visit showed me a side of Saudi Arabia that I never could have imagined existed while living in the conservative central region.

Then I understood why Saudi Arabians consider it a “foreign” city. It was a place where I could finally fit in.

ACCESS: Saudi Arabia has some of the world’s most stringent entry requirements. The best way of getting a visa is through work; you’ll need to be sponsored by an employer in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia rarely offers tourist visas unless you’re going for the hajj or umrah pilgrimage, for which you must prove you’re a Muslim.