Pink Caravan: Riding For Courage.

The Pink Caravan initiative has been going for the past five years in the UAE, a drive to raise awareness of breast cancer early detection and screening and to raise funds to buy an advanced mobile mammography unit to serve the United Arab Emirates. This unit, the 'Carevan', has screened almost 30,000 men and women (men can get breast cancer too) and detected 21 malignancies in women and one in a man since the programme started.

There's a whole cultural angle to breast cancer and its screening here, of course. But the women of the UAE are rallying together and some remarkable work is being done here at a grassroots level to bring women across the country around to the idea that regular screening is a good idea. A couple of years ago, Ajman turned its speed bumps pink to raise awareness. Hang on, in the 'conservative' UAE, we're making pink bump gags to get the point across? Yes, we are.

As anyone who remembers the days of GeekFest will know, I'm a massive fan of communities and online activism for good - and Pink Caravan is both of these things in spades.

Side note/ramble: now a long time dead, GeekFest was a regional social event for online people I was involved with - I was reminded sharply of it over the past couple of days as names I knew from the events we held back then started popping up around the audience of the Arab Social Media Influencers' Summit event in Dubai wot I have bin attending. Much nostalgia followed. Funny how in the Internet age, a couple of years is 'the good old days', isn't it?

Anyway. Pink Caravan. Each year, a group of some 250 horse riders takes to the roads and tracks of the seven emirates, joined by 200 volunteers and ambassadors, well-wishers and supporters. The ride has visited over 80 schools, travelling some 1,000 kilometres around the UAE in its quest to help build awareness, detect and eliminate this deadly disease. They call it 'Riding For Courage'.

From March 16th to the finale on the 25th in Abu Dhabi, the riders will do their thing. They left from Sharjah through Dhaid to Masafi and ended up in Khor Fakkan today, via Fujeirah.

Tomorrow, the 19th March, you'll find them in Ras Al Khaimah, starting at HCT Women's college at 9am and finishing at the Cove Rotana in the evening. The 20th (Friday) will see them riding in Umm Al Quwain and ending up at the Ajman Kempinski at 5.30pm - I'll see you there, it's my 'manor' and I wouldn't miss 250 riders with pink tack for the world!

Saturday the 21st March they'll leave the Ajman Kempinski and ride to the Qasba in Sharjah (passing by my house, natch) and then on Sunday 22nd they'll set off from the Palm Jumeirah Rixos to the Fairmont, The Palm. On Monday 23rd March they'll ride from Downtown Dubai to the Burj Al Arab, Tuesday they'll ride from the Formal Park in Abu Dhabi and end up at Zayed Military Hospital.

Finally, on Wednesday 25th March, some 300 saddle-sore chaps and chapesses will ride from the Sheikh Zayed Mosque to the Galleria Mall. This will be followed by a closing ceremony at the Rosewood Hotel in Abu Dhabi. Anyone wants a VIP pass, they can have mine, kindly sent me by the Pink Caravan Team. For a Sharjah boy, Abu Dhabi on a school night is not really on the agenda, dears.

The Carevan will be following them on their trip around the UAE, visiting an average of three hospitals, health centres or community centres in each location and offering free breast screening at selected stop-offs.

You can find out more, donate or join in by going to the Pink Caravan website here. There's an agenda detailing locations, a calendar of Carevan screening sessions and other events and the chance to donate to support the campaign both as an individual and a corporate partner.

Coming together for good. What's not to love about that?

Laugh, and the World Punches You in the Face

You know you’re overdue leave when every small incident seems to bring that red mist down and you feel like you’re spending most of your day controlling your natural urge to strangle people. There are those among us for whom this is normal, everyday behaviour, of course. But for most of us, it comes in that last two or three weeks before flying off to pastures greener for a well-earned break being forced to eat stale Dundee cake by long-forgotten aunts.

Quick diversion to ask a perennial question. Why are you on duty when you go home, but they’re on holiday when they visit you out here?

So this time of year is a great time to catch one of those sights unique to the east-meets-west polyglot melting pot that is Dubai: that of a furious European shouting at an Indian guy who’s laughing at him.

It’s one of those facts of life here, where the world’s cultural tectonic plates rub, that different people react in different ways to different situations. The personal space of the average Brit is about three metres. For the average Malabari it’s about two millimetres. When Arab women see a cute baby, they like to fuss over it, squeeze its cheeks and give it sweets. Touch a European woman’s baby and she’ll mace you and leave you lying in the street in a heap, puking and crying. Northern Europeans queue. Nobody else bothers.

And many people from India, particularly the south it would seem, giggle when they’re nervous. It’s a natural reaction for them, particularly when people are so rude as to raise their voices. And there’s no better way to send an upset European’s temper into the stratosphere than to laugh at them when they’re shouting at you.

It always reminds me of that classic piece of that classic comedy, Fawlty Towers. O’Reilly the Irish builder has just screwed up the interior of the hotel and Basil’s fire-breathing wife Sybil is having a go at him. He laughs her off as Basil can be heard saying through gritted teeth, “Don’t laugh O’Reilly, oh please don’t laugh” and then, of course, she beats the crap out of him with an umbrella.

And so when the watchman in our building told a furious colleague that the basement parking would remain shut for another week (consigning us to another week circling the building trying to find non-existent parking spaces and then walking hundreds of yards in the sticky, hot humidity) and she started to shout, I found myself thinking of Basil Fawlty’s “Please don’t laugh!” But it was too late.

He giggled and it got twisted.

Father Angelo's Last First Communion

One of the strangest buildings on earth is St Mary's Church in Sharjah. It's a marvellous, miraculous little place, even for those of us that don't really buy into the whole miracle thing. Built by donations from its (mostly unmoneyed) congregation, St Mary's has long been dominated by the figure of its priest, Father Angelo: a huge figure of a man who makes Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo look like a rank amateur.

We went today for friends' daughter Lily's First Communion, an event that would, coincidentally and ironically, be Father Angelo's Last Communion. And, to be honest, that's why I went. I've seen him in action before and it's wonderful. Now he's in his 80s, although you'd be hard put to guess that, he's about to slip away to a home for retired gentlepriests somewhere in Italy.

St Mary's is unique. A Catholic church with a touch of the Eastern tarbrush, it plays host to a strange, globalised religious eclecticism. It feels somehow a little Orthodox, its got a tiny touch of Eastern, Greek lasciviousness. And yet the choir's gospel-tinged American bible-belt singing praise-the-lord Philippino and many of the regulars are pre-Vatican Indian Christians who dress the statues, kiss the hems of their robes and stand touching the picture of Padre Pio or the robed Child of Prague, festooned in Hawaiian style flower garlands, in silent supplication. The Lebanese St. Charbel rubs shoulders with St. George, the dragon-slaying Syrian adopted by the Levant-unfriendly Brits. It's like the United Nations of Christianity in there and, just like they did when they were wearing blue helmets in Lebanon, the Irish stand around looking at the way the other fools are carrying on in wide-eyed wonderment.

And then there's Angelo himself. He's huge, bigger than his physical presence. His accent is impenetrably Italian. The last time we were in this church together was the wedding of our friends Terry and Orla. Fr. Angelo managed to marry 'Elvis' and 'Olga' in an accent so thick that I've been dining off the impersonation ever since. "Jaysuus," Father Angelo would tell us, "Jaysuus he lovva you. Jaysuus he lovva you all. He lovva me anna he lovva you. He looka downatus from heffin and he sayaa I lovva everone!"

This is the stuff.

And yet, at the same time, there's something marvellous about the man; something that makes even the most agnostic of us admire the sheer weight of belief that has shaped this church of two millenia. He believes it; the miracles, the wonder, the eucharist and the sacrament. He lives it, breathes it and is it. His passing will, somehow, make this little church in the heart of Arabia a smaller place: another last note in a sad, small threnody.