Even across the seas, our families are closer than ever

For many expats, the phone is an essential link to home – but it should be used properly, writes Brett Debritz.

Taxi drivers have very little personal time with their families. (Srijita Chattopadhyay / The National)

I got quite annoyed the other day when I jumped into a taxi in downtown Abu Dhabi and discovered that the cabbie was taking a phone call while he was driving. There is no real excuse for this. It’s illegal, it’s unsafe and it’s unnecessary.

But my view softened just a little when I became aware that the driver was talking to a child, almost certainly in his home country, thousands of kilometres away.

I am mindful that many expatriate workers are in the UAE on their own, and are lucky to see their spouses, young children and extended families once a year. Some can go two or three years without face-to-face contact with their loved ones. (One cab driver I spoke to hadn’t seen his children in three years, but said he felt he was doing more for them by working non-stop and sending money home.)

Maybe, I thought, that this was my driver’s only window of opportunity to talk to his child that day. Or that week. It didn’t excuse his unsafe driving, but it put it in context.

Of course, the very fact that he can speak across the oceans to a child using an affordable mobile device is something of a miracle in itself.

Telephony and, more recently, the internet have changed the way we connect with each other, and have softened the tyranny of distance.

When my great-grandparents set sail for Australia from Prussia in the late 19th century, they accepted that they would probably never again see, nor hear from, the people they left behind.

Family lore has it, however, that my grandfather, who was born not long after the family settled in Australia, ended up face-to-face with his cousin on opposite sides of the battlefields of France during the First World War.

After the war, he spent some time in London, where he met my grandmother and my father was born. But when the new family came back to Australia, they did so without my father’s half sister, who stayed with her grandmother. That’s the way things were done in those days.

For decades, through another war and beyond, brother and sister communicated by post – “snail mail” to today’s generation. When long-distance phone calls became available and affordable, they were able to speak to each other. They also swapped cassette tapes full of family gossip and, eventually, my aunt was able to fly out to see her family in Australia.

Even in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was living in the rural UK and Asia, the only news I could get from my hometown was when my father sent me letters and clippings from the local paper.

Email, SMS, Skype and Facebook have changed all that, and I now have a range of affordable ways to keep in real-time contact with my mother, daughter and other family members.

But nothing can replace being in the same room as our loved ones and I cherish the few weeks I spend at home each year.

So the next time I see a taxi driver on the phone – and, sadly, I know I won’t have to wait too long for that to happen – I might quietly suggest that he pulls over while he makes his all-important family call. Because the one thing worse than not being able to talk to a loved one at the time of your choice would be to never see them again due to a totally avoidable car accident.

On Twitter: @debritz