HOW'S THAT PORT SALE GOING?:

In U.A.E., Tradition Yields to Times (Anthony Shadid, April 27, 2006, Washington Post)

Zaabi lives in Fujairah, one of seven small monarchies that make up the United Arab Emirates, along the turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. When she was a child, fishing and farming brought in a few dollars. Today, the annual per capita income is more than $21,000 and nearly 10 percent of the world's oil is within the emirates' borders. There are 88 cellphones for every 100 people.

From beneath her black gown, Zaabi pulled out one of those devices and belted out a string of salutations.

"I'll call you later," she shouted. "I have guests now."

And back she ventured to a reservoir of memory, the relics of another life that she has collected over the years near her home.

"There weren't dishwashers in those days," she said. "It was all by hand, and it was torture."

She pointed to a lantern, obsolete with the advent of electricity. "We used this back then," she said.

Zaabi grasped a hanging bag, woven of palm fronds, where fruit and salted meat once hung, cooled by a breeze. Then she hurried to a sheepskin pouch that, when shaken, turned milk to cheese.

"Beautiful!" she cried out, and she moved on to a saddle, stitched of worn leather.

"You'd put it on the donkey's back and then you would ride," she said -- two days to Abu Dhabi, the capital, or two months across the desert to Mecca, the destination of the Muslim pilgrimage. "Thank God, it's not like that now."

"Sheik Zayed," she said simply. "God rest his soul."

Sheik Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan was the founder of the United Arab Emirates, in 1971, and he presided over the country's modernization until his death in 2004. A simple man, albeit with tremendous wealth, he is remembered fondly here, credited by many with maintaining tradition amid change. Those forces are still at work today -- with the breakneck growth of booming Dubai, where English has become a lingua franca, and with the vestiges of the past in a place like Fujairah, population 130,000, where conversations celebrate the success of Dubai, the U.A.E. capital, and recoil at its materialism, competition and, in the eyes of some, greed.