Winter is grand, in Abu Dhabi. A dozen weeks of highs in the 70s, nights in the 60s. Every day is a beach day, even those when it rains, because rain here comes in violent spates, and a half-hour under a canopy will see off the most determined storm. And the other 11.5 weeks … well, yes: Beach days!

But now we are into March, and summer is hanging over our heads like a credit card come due. Even before February was over, we had a day or two that climbed into the 90s,  and the brute force of the Arabian summer was awoken in us. (Having felt it before it had quite receded, in October.)

And those air-conditioners in the house that we have left to molder … well, they are about to become our most necessary appliances.

But you can’t just fire them up without a bit of maintenance. Oh, no.

That is where Mr Mohammed’s assistant came in.

I don’t know his name. I haven’t had the wit to do the “mi nombre es Pablo” deal with him. You know, pointing to yourself while announcing, “Mr. Paul.” So he can reply with his given name.

But he is a young man (I was going to say kid, but that would not be correct) who seems to work about a half-shift per day for Mr. Mohammed, the actual caretaker of the villa in which we live.

I believe it is his second job because he is never available before 3. And no one in this country does no work before 3. Well, practically.

He seems to get the jobs Mr. Mohammed doesn’t want to handle or perhaps isn’t particularly adept at. Plumbing issues. Clean-up events. The Assistant seems to know a little about a lot of handyma-type issues.

The Assistant is at least 20 and perhaps as old as 30. He is thin, probably Pakistani and perhaps 5-foot-7. He has a scar on his nose. He often wears the sort of dress/kilt-like skirt that some men from the subcontinent seem to prefer, and sandals and a loose shirt.

He appeared at the outer door just after 3 today for a very important event: The Cleaning of the Filters.

Abu Dhabi’s atmosphere, at even given moment is about as much “dirt” as it is “gas”. We not only have an enormous tract of shifting sand known as The Empty Quarter just behind us, we’re pretty much sitting on our own beach. The whole of Abu Dhabi Island is a sandspit on which some palm trees have been planted — and lots of buildings thrown up.

So, to turn on an air-conditioner after three months of letting it lie fallow is to invite a sudden eruption of grit into your Tiny Apartment. And perhaps some mold, as well, since we have a lot of soggy heat, here on the desert waterfront.

I was not keen to take on The Cleaning of the Filters myself. My first excuse is that I don’t have a ladder and could not reach the blowing units near the ceiling of the bedroom and living room. Both are about 10 feet above the ground. And The Assistant arrived with a ladder. My second excuse is, hey, I’m asthmatic. Like about half the people on the island. Many of whom didn’t know they were asthmatic until they had been here a week, breathing deep of refineries, SUV exhaust and particulates the size of your thumb nail. To open up the AC blowers would, I knew, be a very dusty venture.

So, The Assistant took this on. I was getting ready to leave for the office, but I saw him pop open the blower in the living room, and the dirt was leaking everywhere. He pried off the curved, metal filter, and came down the ladder and went outside, and the dirt he banged and shook and swatted off the filter left a pile big enough to support radish seedlings. While he had the filter off, he wiped down the inner and outer surface of the mounted blower. Collecting so much dirt he had to wash his towel out in the kitchen sink. Oh, and he sneezed. Well, of course, he was working in a cloud of dust.

I then left, asking him to get the one in the bedroom as well, please. I tipped him as I went, knowing he would lock up and not touch a thing.

When Leah returned, several hours later, both AC units were on and blowing and it was nice and chilly in the unit. She didn’t sneeze. And she didn’t see any mold anymore, or what might be mold. Whatever those stains were.

I would have preferred to see some sort of replaceable filter in there … some fabric the air would have to go through first, before it went into the apartment. But that’s not how the thing is built, and that metal filter is … what it is. I also would like to think The Assistant tuned up the compressors, which actually are outside the unit. Wipe those things down, too. And maybe he did. I just don’t know it.

When I got home, I was convinced there would be dirt everywhere, especially on the bed, which is directly below one blower. (That’s what we have on the walls; just blowers; the actual cooling device is outside.) But there were just little hints of grit, here and there. I had put down a white towel where I thought the dirt was likely to fall, but it appeared to be fairly clean. Perhaps he had shaken it out? The only sign he had been at work … was the grit we found in the shower. He must have shaken out the towel there — or washed his cleaning rag in there.

Anyway, the bottom line: The AC is about as clean as it is going to get. And when we turn it on, to keep from melting, sometime in the next week … we will not be met by our own little homegrown sandstorm, inside the Tiny Apartment. No one can really be ready for summer in Arabia, but we have done what little we can to prep ourselves.