By Jackson Stocker ‘27
“I was always interested in the bigger world outside Kennett Square.” Shelley Reinhart said when asked about the reasoning behind all of her intensive travels.
In the early 2010s, the Reinhart family lived outside a city in Virginia. One they had been living in for seven years. Arlington is a place the Reinhart’s called home for a big portion in their life. However, something bigger than they imagined was coming into play for them.
Mrs. Reinhart, mother to three and wife to Don Reinhart, moved to the Middle East for Mr. Reinhart’s employment for a phone company that has headquarters in Dubai. While in Dubai, he was promoted to CEO of the company.
Dubai is fairly new, only being about two hundred years old. However this large city saw most of its growth, starting in the 1980s, when money from the huge oil depots in this part of the Middle East hit the city.
Regardless of its age, it is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the Middle East, expanding from little fishing shops and small villages to a largely populated and highly salable city for work and tourism.
Reinhart grew up in a small town called Kennett Square, in a big house with four siblings. The house was always a fixer upper, more projects being done than you could ever imagine.
Reinhart said, “my father was always fixing it up. It was just this big project all the time.”
While growing up in Kennett, she was where she was. The school, the house, and the town were all things she loved. When she got into high school, she started realizing how much she liked international things.
Reinhart said, “I befriended the exchange student. His name was Marco and he was from Uruguay, and I went to prom with him.”
Reinhart loved this concept that other people came from somewhere else, lived somewhere else and how brave of them to come to the United States to learn. Even through church she had people from Mexico who came and cooked them dinner, a very vivid memory for her.
Before graduating high school, she went to a program school called Pennsylvania Governor School. There were different themes inside the program, International Relations being one of them. She was accepted for the summer program (8 weeks) at University of Pittsburgh.
After graduation, she loved International Relations. She knew she wanted to go to school for it, so she applied to Bucknell University in Lewisburg Pennsylvania and was accepted. Her classes were about politics, other parts of the world, and learning Spanish.
Unfortunately for her however, her family was moving to Texas halfway through her program. Her father had a pretty strict rule that she had to be in a three hour radius in case she had an emergency, he had to be there that day. So she had to leave her school and go with them to Texas.
Reinhart’s family moved somewhere close to Houston, Texas. She transferred to University of Houston but for a different major, they didn’t provide International Relations.
University of Houston was a very different school than Bucknell. UH was a commuter school and had around forty thousand students. However this was not going to ruin her future. In fact, it wrote the rest of her future.
Reinhart was determined to explore all of campus and the city of Houston.
Reinhart said, “I made it my mission to know and learn the city of Houston. So I took buses, and I learned all about downtown. I wandered around because there were really big wait times between buses. I really loved that, that’s when I first fell in love with cities.”
She expresses her love and adoration for the tall buildings, the people, the energy and even buses. She loved all of it.
While at University of Houston, she tried Political Science but quickly realized that it was not for her. So she shifted to English Literature, which she did enjoy. Reinhart loves to read, which pushed this idea to action.
She graduated with a degree in English Literature, however she doesn’t use much of it in her current jobs. She did say that it taught her how to analyze people and characters along with plots, which she said was “a helpful major.”
After college, she quickly got married and moved right outside Washington DC. She explains that it was hard to find a job with an English Literature degree because they are “dime a dozen.” So she taught world languages and drama at private schools.
Reinhart loves DC, “Washington DC, gosh. It’s so awesome. I still get chills when I drive down the GW Parkway. You can see the Lincoln Memorial, and you can see the Capital Building, the Washington Monument. It’s so amazing.”
The Reinharts have moved a lot, a pattern you will soon realize. She lived in Washington DC and Arlington Virginia (as well as Laytonsville) from 1995 to 2016. Then moved across seas and lived there for around seven years. And she always lived close to a city, if not inside the city.
When she lived in Arlington, she lived just fifteen minutes outside the city. They rented a small house in a small community that was majority foreign service or government workers, highly intelligent people.
After Arlington, Mr. Reinhart picked up a job in the phone industry, a software company in the Middle East. A lot of his work was done in Afghanistan, Africa and other Middle Eastern countries due to the lack of internet infrastructure in these places. A “new market.” This caused him to travel excessive amounts.
That’s when he came home and said, “Hey, why don’t we move to Dubai? The girls are the perfect age,” and he wouldn’t have to travel as much as he used to. So that’s when they moved overseas, to a large city in the United Arab Emirates.
Dubai is a crazy city. Only 10% of the population are locals, the rest of the population are expats. The city is so diverse and different from other places in the world, all different types of people live here.
An interesting fact about Dubai, they are strict with who lives there. Most people who live in Dubai are able to stay there because of a Work Visa. So at some point, you must leave and live somewhere else. It’s also incredibly safe here because of this, crime is low. If you break a law, you get deported for good.
While Reinhart lived here, she participated in Arab culture. People she met and became friends with invited her to their house to break the fast for 40 days, for Ramadan. She also participated in modest dressing due to the religious beliefs of the country, as well as other traditions.
Reinhart said she “was lucky. In order to do well there, you really do have to speak English.”
The city thrives on business and work, and a lot of companies need English speaking employees to communicate with a great number of countries.
Even though English was the primary communication language used in Dubai, she still learned some Arabic, “Yeah, it was really fun. I’d go to soccer games when the girls would play. And the Arabic speaking moms on the sidelines would be like, عجل, عجل (Eajal). Which means hurry.”
She also said that older women would call her children حبيبتي (Habibti), which is an endearing term that translates into English as my love, my dear, my darling, or my beloved for loved ones and to strangers as buddy, pal, or honey.
While there were many amazing things about her travels and adventures in Dubai, there were struggles too. Moving from a Democratic Republican country where you have a voice, to a country where you have no voice felt “uncomfortable” to her.
She shared that if you say anything negative about the Sheikh (king), you would get into a lot of trouble. You could get deported or sent to prison, and you’re not expected to share your opinion at all.
This also means there was a heavy censor on everything that came into the country. Any news from America or other countries was censored to what the Sheikh thought was acceptable. This creates a bubble that locked her from what was happening in America.
They also restrict unmarital living, meaning you cannot live with each other until you are married. In order to get a house together, you must show a marriage license. And if a spouse doesn’t work personally, the other must have a work visa that can be shared between the two of them.
Mrs. Reinhart lived under her husband’s work Visa, meaning she did not need to get a job. Regardless, she got a job at KnowledgeWorkx, helping people become certified in International Intelligence. Using communication skills and teamwork building strategies to help diverse groups of people work together better.
Reinhart loved everything about Dubai, but still she says she missed seeing her nieces and nephews growing up, only seeing them for Christmas and summer. She missed Thanksgiving for seven years, explaining that was such a weird feeling.
She also missed political advancements. After living in Dubai for seven years and coming back to the United States, she was behind on everything that happened politically. She saw things very differently overseas than what United States citizens would have seen.
Reinhart explained that to come back home after herself and her family had changed, was a really lonely feeling. She explained it as a “culture shock.”
When she came back, she also explained that people did not ask about her experiences, they did not ask about what it was like overseas. She felt alone after coming home. And living overseas had changed her. She said, “I think I cannot make assumptions.”
The brain is wired to make assumptions; however, her experiences in seeing people from all over the world and seeing stereotypes that were just not correct about groups of people really changed her outlook on how she sees people. In order to understand, she has to ask questions.
Moving around the world had always been a dream of Mrs. Reinhart. Meeting people, dealing with international affairs, and exploring the people that we live with is always something that she found herself looking for.
Today, you will find Mrs. Reinhart all around her city, talking and connecting with people, going to and hosting events, giving generosity to everyone, and making strong connections to families that may have otherwise never met her if she was not the person she is now.
She learned a lot of things from Dubai and travel, causing her morals and beliefs to change, in turn changing her life for good.