Filipino workers in Dubai gather to celebrate Christmas far away from home
Filipino workers come to the United Arab Emirates seeking opportunity and to support relatives back home. Christmas isn't a UAE holiday, so many will work — but also manage to find joy and community.
DUBAI — A life-size electric Santa Claus sways his hips back and forth outside a grocery store on Rigga Street in Dubai. It's Christmastime across this desert metropolis. Shops, malls and hotel lobbies are decked out in holiday decorations and fake snow for the season.
Rigga Street is no exception. It runs through Deira, a neighborhood built decades before Dubai's futuristic skyline of high-rises. Here, a cup of sweet milky tea known as karak chai sells for just a dirham, the equivalent of about 25 cents. This is where many Filipinos working in Dubai call home. Most are Roman Catholic and marking another Christmas away from their families in the Philippines.
