Dancing to a different Tunis

I'M UP at 6.30am to get my 11-year-old daughter Sonia off to the local French school by 7am. We rent a house in Carthage at the moment, but have bought some land nearby and hope to build a home on it next year.

It is very expensive to live in Tunisia - most things cost the same as in England, but wages are usually less than half those at home.

I'm at work by 8am and hope to have a chance to grab a coffee before hearing my boss, Victor Zahra, call out my name. Immediately there could be tons of things to do - it might be sending off a quick memo or fax to the head office in Malta, or going to replace a slide projector missing from a conference room.

At 8.30am I take notes at the daily briefing of the management team. There are usually 10 managers involved and the meeting can last anything from 15 minutes to an hour.

Then there is all the follow-up work to be done - writing more memos and calling people to organise meetings - in between answering the phones, which never seem to stop ringing. They drive me mad - sometimes I'd like to rip them out of the wall.

I'm often called out of my office to meet and translate for English-speaking visitors. Two of the management team are Maltese, while the rest of the staff are Tunisian. I speak French fluently and swear quite well in Arabic - it's a matter of having to, sometimes. Tunisian men can be very chauvinistic and women in business have to be forthright to succeed. Luckily, my husband is not typically Tunisian as he's lived abroad for 22 years.

I think I'm probably the only English employee working in the Tunisian hotel industry, although there are around 300 British expats in the country - most of them working in the oil, gas and insurance industries.

When I first came here I needed a lot of support from the other expats. My husband continues to return to France for a month at a time on business. At first, I cried for a week. Now I provide support for the other expat women when their husbands go away for work - usually to Libya or Algeria.

I take lunch in the staff canteen at around 1.30pm. I don't particularly like Tunisian food - it's too spicy and heavy. I hate fish and I can't digest couscous - I just take the meat and vegetables off the top. The chef will do me a steak or some chicken if I ask him.

At home I cook roast chicken, roast potatoes and cauliflower cheese, or steak and chips. I dream of broccoli - there is a limited supply of green vegetables in Tunisia. As a treat, my husband bought me a kilo of Brussels sprouts at Christmas!

Back in my office after lunch, I often help out the operations manager with his work, then there will probably be more letters to write and translate.

I love the hotel industry, the work is so varied, and you never know what is going to happen next. But it can be frustrating getting things done here, as the Tunisians take ages to do anything and they're not very punctual, which can create all sorts of problems.

Theoretically I should leave at 5pm, but in reality it's more like 6pm or 6.30pm, Mondays to Fridays. On Saturdays I work just half a day, but in the summer I'm often still here until 4pm. During the month of Ramadan, though, things are very quiet and I can usually get away by 3pm.

Then it's home, helping my daughter with her homework, and bed. I often go out on Saturday evenings with my husband to a restaurant, but my main social event of the week is on a Friday evening when I go to the British Club, where I am secretary of the committee.

Thank God for the British Club. I meet up with all my friends, who are British, Canadian and American, and have a beer without being bothered by anyone. nrcel fil