Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Dubai's version of swimming pool deaths

I read the Gulf News online a few times a week, and the headlines there don't refresh in any systematic way. Sometimes old stories stay up there for a week or two and are then replaced with a slew of new stuff all at once (in its physical form, it's a daily paper, so I'm not sure why the online version is so irregular). I thought that's what was going on when I kept seeing all these headlines about little kids falling to their deaths from high-rise buildings. I honestly believed it was all one article about one kid who fell out of a window a few weeks ago.

Sadly, I realized today that all these headlines have referred to different children falling out of different windows. There have been FIVE such deaths in the last month, in addition to the double window-fall-death that happened in September.

I guess this is Dubai's version of swimming pool deaths (which I don't hear much about, by the way, though it does happen occasionally). So sad. When we lived in Cairo in a sixth-floor apartment with a balcony, the girls weren't allowed on it unless Jeremy or I was RIGHT. THERE. Even then, I always got the heebie jeebies if they got too close to the railings. At times I felt like I was being too vigilant, but now I'm glad I was. So sad.

My quest is almost over

The winter charade