BLOGGING A STRANGER #2

In this blog I was assigned to have a face to face chat, interview and talk to strangers, of course it isn’t just about a hello and a goodbye but knowing and connecting with someone’s personal story, which makes this experience a very, very special one.

I went to a huge building where my father works at and I was waiting for his shift to end so we could go back home, I went to his building because I was spending some time at Deira city center and both locations are a few minutes away from each other, but his shift was ending in an hour so I had to wait for a while until we can go home.

In the meantime I thought of exploring the building, I went to the main floor where I met this very nice receptionist who asked me if I was looking for somebody and I told her that I’m just waiting for my father, she saw my camera and asked if I’m a photographer, so I told her all about what I do, showed her a few pictures on my camera and then it started turning into a conversation, she enjoy photography as well but her job takes the most of her time, we kept jumping from a topic to another, from cameras to books to pets.  

We had much in common so I thought of asking her if I could ask her more about her personal life, in the form of a conversation with an interview and she was very happy to do it.

Her name is Katherine but everybody call her Kathy, she’s in her late 20’s, born and raised in Manilla in the Philippines, a mother of 4 bright children and a heavy book reader.

She spent all of her life in Manilla before moving to Dubai, because of family and friends but also because it’s a simple place (country side) surrounded by supportive, open minded people.

For her school years, her favorite subjects were social science and history, a bit of geography as well, but she didn’t like mathematics, we had two things in common I loved history but totally hated mathematics.

Then she continued her studies and studied bachelor of secondary education major in English minor in physics, you’d think she will end up working as a teacher but she didn’t instead she picked her first job at IBM, mainly in customer service but also taking different tasks within the company, such as fraud cases.

For her other jobs she became a communication trainer and her batch was working for Citi bank and AT&T as well, later on she moved to Dubai and became the main receptionist for Baqer Mohebi in Dubai, where she’s in charge of answering important calls from international companies, she basically answer over 30 calls a day or more which makes it a very busy job but also in charge of purchase orders for the company.

Her daily routine before work is important, she wake up, have her breakfast and have a morning walk all the way to work, once she’s back home she’ll call her family everyday then she’ll definitely read another book, she’s a heavy reader as mentioned above, she read over 13 books in a month and a half, I’m a reader myself so we talked about our recent reads and favorite books, she consider books to be a different world, a flexible world she can connect to.  

She have an interesting habit of keeping everything of a different color organized, for example she’d keep every item in red aside, while keeping everything in pink on the other side and so on, it’s just a sense of organization.

The person she look up to the most is her dad who used to be a politician, he always supported her, gave her advice and taught her how to manage with life, her memories with her family is the true joy of life and that’s what keeps her pushing in life.

For her advice or life lesson would be to respect to be respected, love yourself so you’d learn how to love other people. Just basically be the best you can be.