Hi Wayne:
Thanks for your post. Your are correct, I do tend to gloss over the negative aspects of living in Dubai. That is just my personality, I tend to concentrate on the positives, not the negatives. My point is that you can look for negatives in any city and any job. If you do that with a group of people you will each find something different that bothers you. You then combine that and have a self-fulfilling negative spiral that gets out of control ( ala PPrune ).
I took a statistics class in college. One of the texts was " How to Lie with Statistics ". The central point being that you can do anything you want with statistics depending on how you massage the numbers or phrase the point. There are over 40,000 traffic deaths in the United States each year. There are close to 300 in Dubai. If you divide that out by the popualtion of each place it comes to .0133% chance of a traffic death in the USA or .015% chance in Dubai. That is not a statistically significant difference. There is more though. A large number of the traffic deaths in the UAE are single car accidents involving UAE nationals. Even the police in Dubai acknowledge that statistic:
"Speaking at the launch of a campaign against speeding, he said that the ratio of UAE national dying in traffic accidents in Dubai was 32.5 per 100,000 UAE, while the overall ratio for the country was 19 deaths per 100,000 residents. This was a serious matter, he added. Col. Zafeen said this meant that UAE nationals were the most affected and they lost their children's lives in car accidents and in accidents related to other means of transport."
It is true, and very unfortunate, that sometimes these irresponsible lunatics take out an innocent bystander. That is what angers us and that is what we hope could be prevented. However, I do not know anyone in the USA who hasn't had a relative or friend involved in an accident with a drunk driver, often times with disasterous consequences.
So, while you have a slightly higher chance of being involved in a traffic death in the UAE than in the USA, it isn't enough to warrant a no-go decision. If you stay out of the vehicles of speeding UAE nationals and decide ( wisely ) not to drive in the late afternoon during Ramadan then you are probably safer in the UAE than in the USA.
If we applied statistics to violent crime and the chance of being a victim of such crime than I am sure we would find the UAE far safer than the USA. Petty crime and theft are other matters and I doubt we could find any good statistics for those arguments. I've personally been robbed at gunpoint in the States, doubt that would ever happen here. How about school shootings, how many of those have happened in Dubai ? Better yet, Post Office massacres ?
It is true that there are some really annoying laws in regards to displays of affection and/or relationships out of wedlock, but it's their country and we knew there were those kinds of laws when we came. The one that probably bothers me the most as being inhumane, if not downright barbaric, is when they throw a pregnant woman in jail just because she isn't married. ( note, for those reading, if your wife can't handle that when she reads it in the paper, don't come ).
I'm so depressed now
. Anybody with happy questions?
TP