Now that 2013 has come to an end, I’m looking back at a year that began in the UAE and was spent mainly returning home and figuring out what to do here.
During eight years as an American expatriate living and working in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, I visited the US every summer and in the winter months for conferences and special events. Since I had kept in touch with my country and my friends, I believed that coming back to living in the US would be easy. It has been, but not entirely.
I landed in New York on March 20 and went on a day later to Miami where I was going to live. That first evening in Miami was spent with Emiratis Jalal Luqman and Sumayyah Al Suwaidi who was showing a selection of evening gowns at Miami International Fashion Week.
From then I was on my own as Jalal and Sumayyah flew back to Abu Dhabi, and I contacted the only two people I knew, a former journalist for the National and an acquaintance from when I lived in Orlando.
For the first time, I moved to a city I didn’t know without the comfort of a job. Having spent eight years in the academic world in the UAE, I didn’t want another university job and hoped to try my hand at other things.
Being old enough to have had three different careers, I wanted to get closer to the two others – journalism and public relations – and, especially, to be an entrepreneur again.
Before coming to Abu Dhabi, I had continued the business I started in 1990 on a smaller scale. It had become a decent-sized PR company operating primarily in Poland. As one of the first PR companies there, we drew the big corporate clients eager to try their luck in the Polish economy emerging after 45 years of stifling socialism.
When I finally left Warsaw in 2003 for Orlando, the company became a vehicle for me to provide free lance communications services, and I thought that perhaps I could do the same in Abu Dhabi while teaching at a national university.
The reality was no time for outside work.
So in Miami I started to network with a vengeance in order to gather potential clients. I joined the local chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) and the huge Miami Chamber of Commerce. NAWBO Miami has at least one event per month while the Miami Chamber has almost daily events as well as committees. I went to everything.
I joined the Government Relations Committee of the Chamber and participated in several so-called Fly-Ins to Washington DC to urge Florida representatives and senators to support legislation friendly to business.
NAWBO Miami invited me on the board of directors, and I contributed often to their newsletter and helped with some upgrades to managing the chapter. At the same time, I joined other women’s groups because belonging to one didn’t offer enough.
As 2014 begins, I am a member of the Women’s Chamber, the local chapter of Organization of Women in International Trade (OWIT), and the Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce where I’ve joined the Global Trade Committee and the Women’s Business Network.
From all this have come many contacts and a few friends. I’ve found a company that is trying to do business in the UAE with a glitzy high tech product – I’m busy upgrading their information about what the country is really like. Everyone here seems to think that women aren’t allowed to drive and have to wear burkas. They ask me what it felt like being covered.
In 2014 and onward, I expect to be telling people what I know about the Middle East and the Gulf, so that some of these foolish misunderstandings can go away and stop interfering with doing business.
By Alma Kadragic
