The Limiting Incidentals

It has become chic for the beautiful people, the wealthy and the privileged to hie themselves off for holidaying and partying to exotic parts of the world, like the Arabian Peninsula. Dubai, for example, like many others of the oil-rich sheikdoms, has built wondrous playgrounds around soft sand, sparkling seas and warming sun to entice moneyed visitors to their palatial hotels and comfortable services.

It's the place to be, to enjoy life's special moments, to see and be seen, to flaunt one's sophistication and lifestyle, and to indulge fantasies of beauty and pristine environments. Yes, those pristine environments. There were that, once. In the process of planning, designing, funding and building these monumentally gorgeous hotels placed on prestigious and fabled shorelines, something has gone awry.

The wealthy entrepreneurs who have been further monetarily advantaged by their ownership of these grand getaways have indulged in the pedestrian carelessness of most such businesses, in their philistine treatment of those countless people engaged to provide the vital and comforting services to their wealthy clientele.

The tales of exploitation and woe of service people brought into the sheikdoms are well enough known. These are not people indigenous to the area, but rather those who have been encouraged to travel to the Gulf States as servants to the wealthy and the privileged. Poor people from other places in Asia, and particularly from the Philippines.

As it has been with truckers working there, originally from southeast Asia, performing work that no one born in Dubai would descend so low as to humiliate themselves with such vulgar work as hauling sewage. The truckers, engaged to carry human waste are charged with emptying their tanks to a sewage treatment plant which is a long drive into the desert.

The long drive is complicated by long queues, so the truckers decide instead to empty their tanks into storm drains, emptying into the ocean. Those drains are meant to carry run-off from the rainy season. Certainly not the offal of human waste, nor the effluent from industrial areas. Yet this is exactly what has occurred.

The truckers say they are paid by the truckload. "We are paid so poorly, we have no other choice", said one driver, but to illegally dump the contents of the city's septic tanks and waste from cement, paint and furniture factories. The result of which has been an unpalatable and richly grim reek pervading the shoreline, presenting a real health hazard.

"It's a cesspool. Our tests show too many E. coli to count. It's like swimming in a toilet" claims the manager of the Offshore Sailing Club, which has undertaken to post warnings, and been forced to cancel sailing regattas. The pristine waters have turned a muddy brown colour, with an unbearable stench for emphasis.

City authorities are scrambling to undo the public relations debacle that has resulted. They promise to build another sewage pit to assuage the problem, and claim that their clean-up efforts to date have resulted in safe-standard water samples. That independent tests commissioned by private interests contradict.

Life for the rich, the famous, the celebrities and the idlers in the international community is becoming more tediously difficult all the time.