Spreading the Love....

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It's not always easy to get involved in volunteering or charity in Dubai: these things do exist, but they're sporadic, and hard to find.  One very simple way of feeling philanthropic (and easing the issue of zero storage in apartments) is to regularly and ruthlessly go through your wardrobe and pass on unwanted items to others.  For many of us, that's meant giving them to the lovely people in the service industries (don't make me say the word maid!) who work in our swish buildings. 

My lovely cleaner, who reminds me of a Sri Lankan Mrs Pepperpot (Google her if you're too young to know her!) regularly takes bagfuls of clothes , shoes and accessories off with her after her weekly session looking after my apartment.  As she is a completely different shape and size to me she takes them to her local church and distributes them.  It warms my heart to think of church goers rocking around the city in my once-loved over-priced Whistles dresses.

And it's not just girls who are doing this, a lovely male friend of mine recently had a good clear-out (obviously been friends with me for three years) and came up with bags and bags of clothes he never wore, which he distributed to the security guards and maintenance men in his building.  One small problem: as he left his apartment this morning, he had a strange sense of deja-vu.  The man fixing the electricity meter outside his apartment looked familiar....he was wearing a shirt last seen on a  podium in a Dubai nightclub.  And it didn't stop there, the man cleaning the lobby, whilst in his ubiquitous uniformed t-shirt, was also wearing jeans and trainers.....last seen drinking in Okku.  It's all about spreading the love and the fashion, people.....!