On a recent Sunday morning, Laxmi Parekh stood under a low ceiling of flickering tube lights in the cafeteria of a housing compound in Dubai and faced an audience of painters, carpenters and electricians, tasked with teaching stress management.
“Who knows what’s been going on here for the past 43 days?” Ms. Parekh, 59, who volunteers with a nonprofit organization called SmartLife, asked the group of men.
“War situation,” someone in the front shouted.
Since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran began on Feb. 28, Iran has fired more missiles and drones toward the United Arab Emirates than any other country, resulting in the deaths of at least 10 civilians, and injuring 230 people, according to the defense ministry in the U.A.E. Most of those affected were migrant workers, like those gathered in the spartan cafeteria, where steel plates and spoons clanked as Ms. Parekh spoke.
Ms. Parekh has been running these weekly mental health workshops across Dubai’s migrant-worker dormitories for the past two years. Outside her day job as an I.T. professional, Ms. Parekh gives her time to SmartLife, which organizes free English-speaking lessons, mentorship programs and game nights in the city’s blue-collar migrant communities. It gets much of its financial support from the companies that employ the workers and the money transfer firms that help remit their income home.
In March, as the regional conflict intensified, Ms. Parekh began adjusting her sessions to include discussion of it.
“How many of you are scared?” she asked the gathered 40 or so men, many from India, Pakistan and Nepal.
The room burst into protest — a boisterous chorus of denial, awkward laughter and overlapping voices. “Not for a minute,” one man said. “You cannot let fear control you,” another said. “Scared of what?”
Many of these workers have lived through periods of instability before — debt, unemployment, political unrest and climate disasters. The fallout from the war was just one more stressor in lives already filled with them.
In her sessions, Ms. Parekh tries to offer tips for coping: steady breathing during air raid sirens, maintaining daily routines and speaking calmly to anxious families back home.
“Yes, we will hear sounds, shrapnel will fall somewhere, you may see smoke,” Ms. Parekh said. “But think of it like a Hindi film — a bad guy’s bullet is stopped by a good guy’s bullet. The same thing is happening in our skies.”
Still, even as their teacher counseled calm and the men put on brave faces, the war was taking a toll.
Since the first day of the conflict, when he had seen a fireball bloom in the sky after a missile was intercepted above him on his weekly grocery run, Ramapathi Sharma, 48, a carpenter from the north Indian city of Gorakhpur, said he had struggled to sleep.
He would lie awake with thoughts of his three children, his youngest son in ninth grade, and the promise he had made to his dying brother to look after his family, too. Now and then, the low rumble of fighter jets circling overhead would press down in waves. The booms would rattle the room’s windows, followed by the frantic screeching of birds. More than once, he had considered leaving after 22 years on the job.
“Of course I am scared,” Mr. Sharma said.
But his fear was less about what could happen to him — and more about what could happen to those who depend on him.
He turned to his friend of two decades, Gopal Sharma, 47, from the Indian city of Siwan, a foreman in the same company, who was sitting beside him. “If something happens to us here,” he asked, “how will our families survive?”
“The real question, brother,” Gopal Sharma, who is not related to Ramapathi Sharma, replied, “Is that even if we go home, who will give us work that pays as much as we get here?”
Untold numbers of migrant workers across the U.A.E. were making similar calculations: No matter how bad the fighting might get, could they afford to leave?
Since the discovery of oil in the 1960s, a bolt of fortune that set off a construction boom across the Emirates, the country has relied heavily on foreign workers like the Sharmas. An estimated 2.2 million blue-collar workers, largely from South Asia and Africa, account for the majority of expatriates, who in turn, form over 80 percent of the population.
And however hard the work, or long the hours — or the number of missiles that fall — the workers can make far more here than at home.
Azan Tahir, 26, a delivery driver from Attock, Pakistan, spent his days in Dubai ferrying meals and groceries across the city as missiles and drones were intercepted overhead. Often, GPS signals were scrambled to confuse incoming threats, leaving him at the wrong location and dealing with frayed tempers on the phone.
“You have to keep your cool in this job,” Mr. Tahir said. “The war situation may keep changing, but our necessities don’t change. We are here to earn.”
As the war wore on, the Sharmas developed a routine for dealing with it. The two friends would rise together at dawn, make tea and walk slow loops around the dormitory grounds. Before their shifts doing carpentry work at different hotels, they would sit down and pray together. At work, whenever a shelter-in-place alert sounded, they would text to make sure the other person was safe.
Ms. Parekh, the stress-management teacher, has noticed a shift in the mood among the migrant laborers she visits as the war and fragile cease-fire, have dragged on. The workers, especially newer recruits, withdraw more than ever into their phones, scrolling through the news, watching videos — and checking ticket prices home. In one case, she said, a worker ground down his teeth in his sleep. In another, a man suffered a breakdown and turned violent, hurling himself at strangers and lashing out at friends.
This shift has presented an additional challenge to Ms. Parekh, who sees her role not just as helping workers manage stress in general, but, also as helping them cope with the strains of life in Dubai — so they can continue to work here.
“I tell them — you’re having all these anxieties, people back home are calling you and telling you that money doesn’t matter. You are having second thoughts because your friend is telling you that he’s going back. I tell them — I’m here in front of you, and I am not leaving,” Ms. Parekh said.
Recently, she was called in to provide counseling when crates of bootleg alcohol were found buried in sand just beyond a housing compound’s grounds. Booze is expensive and hard to buy outside licensed shops, so migrant workers sometimes make their own.
“Madam, what do you expect?” one man asked her. “A laborer should go to a wine shop and buy Johnny Walker?”
Before her recent stress-management session ended, Ms. Parekh played a video, and the soothing sounds of singing bowls, gongs and chimes swelled through the cafeteria speakers.
“Sometimes all we need to do is close our eyes and breathe,” she said.
After the workshop, Ramapathi Sharma took a glass of milky tea to a wooden bench outside and dialed his wife. As usual, he flipped his camera to show her the 163-story Burj Khalifa glittering in the distance, beyond a horizon of sand-bleached housing blocks, covered in scaffolding and clothes hung to dry.
A stream of men passed through the frame, carrying crates of eggs and bread back to their rooms. A group of workers cleared a parking lot for an informal game of cricket, and the wails of a Hindi love song spilled into the air. For the moment, amid all the tension, the camp returned to its weekend rhythms.
