Jigglypuff, my gorgeous new car.
Me with gorgeous new car.
Helen Chan visits from Sharjah - and Christmas begins.December 2006
Christmas Greetings from Doha! - where the weather is cold, wet and miserable. Well, according to me, that is. The girls are all for it, “Look at the beautiful weather, Simone, we have to go out and walk in it”, they said to me recently as we watched it bucketing down outside the classroom window. And despite the fact that they employ many and varied strategies to reduce the hours of the English program which has, at this point, left us all feeling completely fed up, this was actually not one of them. I’ve also had both photographs and worried emails from Sharjah concerned that I was missing out on the rain they’ve had there as well – and I teach a lot more girls from Bedouin families here, so you can imagine what a big deal rain is. It puts everyone – including Qatari drivers – in a much better mood, and I find myself giving people cheery little waves through my side mirrors rather than the finger which is my usual non-rain gesture (reserved for those who come up behind me at over 120km per hour beeping their horn and flashing their lights in an attempt to bully me into the other lane).
There’s not a terrible lot of Christmas going on, as you can imagine, in this predominantly Muslim environment. The girls in one of my classes offered to fill in as my “acting family” over the period, and are in the process of decorating a surprisingly Arab-looking Christmas tree which I brought in. They have forever solved the question of whether the tinsel should be draped around the inside or the outside by hanging it maypole-style down the tree after the custom of Arab weddings. They also asked me to sing and translate some Christmas carols and songs (Hark the Herald Angels Sing won approval but Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer left them a bit mystified) and decided this was another Christmas activity that they might like to be involved in (which surprised me because singing is a no-no according to Islam).
So it will be an unusual but fun Christmas and I get to learn a whole lot about their faith and how they practice it as well (this is the bit that really gives them satisfaction) and am forced to try and respond to questions like: “Simone, but what does the tree mean?” (If you have an answer to this, please forward it pronto!)
Over the next few weeks I am hoping to finally get over the actually “moving” part of moving here. I now have a car – an immensely cute, bright lime-green, tiny Kia with a pink Moomin Troll look-alike soft toy in the back window, which pisses off the guys in the Land Cruisers and Hummers attempting to move me to the other lane no end (cheery little wave or the finger...). My hair is now purple (pink when it’s sunny), my living room red, my bedroom pink and orange, my house unpacked and most of the bureaucracy of life here in Qatar sorted, although I haven’t got my landline or internet connected yet (Q-Tel have found our housing complex though, thank god). We even have a working photocopier and paper most days at work now, as of last week (although our textbooks are still stuck in Saudi), and chalk in the classroom for when I feel like taking revenge on the girls by covering their abayats with white powder... (Who would have thought that one could long for a whiteboard?)
The downside is that I am really exhausted, but in this I am the same as everyone else. That’s what people say when you ask them how they are – “I’m exhausted” - and although I thought it was just me who was finding life here very, very difficult and frustrating, it seems to be a universal, even amongst those who have not just arrived here this semester and those who have been living in the Gulf (Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates or Oman) for years and years. Every part of the country seems to be dysfunctional beyond belief, and when there is a problem – any sort of problem – people just shrug their shoulders and wait for someone else to do something about it (God maybe?).
And, bizarrely, this seems to affect even the people working for the Qataris (the Indian and Philipino populations brought in to do the real work) and it means that basic items are difficult to buy, and there is administratively no way to accomplish many things (like ordering toner for a printer, for example). I sometimes think that if the many Palestinians and Alexandrians who live here went home, the country would simply collapse: Splat! What was that? Oh just Qatar falling apart...
Anyway, the upshot was that I became severely depressed for a while. I was in trouble at work, I didn’t think I could continue living here, I couldn’t face another move, getting into the classroom just seemed to be too difficult, I was surrounded by a highly-qualified, committed group of teachers who were just as pissed off as I was, requests for paper and a photocopier were treated with outrage, and when they changed the direction of the road diversions just before the Asian Games started here so that twice in two days I drove head-on into on-coming traffic (fucking frightening), I just felt “I really, really can’t cope”.
What saved me was the enormous kindnesses of people. Qataris as well as everyone else. In the space of a few days, a girlfriend in Sharjah booked flights to come and visit, I was given a ticket to hear Handel aria, and tickets to the dress rehearsal of the Opening Ceremony of the Asian Games (which was wonderful – if you saw it on the night you missed the best part which had to be scrapped because of the weather). The Kia car salesman drove to my house with his boss to jump-start my car because I’d left the lights on overnight and my battery had died, and the rental car people charged me a mere 200 Riyal (AUD$70, Dhs 200) for all the damage I’d done to their rental car - bashed in front (car park pole), scratched side (car park debris) - yes we’ve established that Simone’s spatial awareness is negligent to non-existent – and destroyed brake (driving all the way home with the hand-brake on...).
Maybe even better was that the Qatari girls in one of my classes really made an attempt to understand what I was going through and were very reassuring (yes, Simone, it was a good idea to give male Qataris the finger on the roads because they didn’t know how to behave – this, ’though, said with head in hands, shaking with laughter) which is something I would have found difficult if someone was abusing my country. And two of the very senior Qataris at the university told me, “don’t worry about the university – it’s unprofessional – don’t get depressed, just say “to heck with it” and get another job!”
So I came out the other side of the black cloud, and am mostly enjoying my life again by making the most of all my friends (and I appear to have lots here without having gone to any trouble to make them) as well as by ignoring the department I work for and just treating the university as my own little private playground. The teachers are still very demoralized and are continuing to write abusive emails to the International English teachers’ site “Dave’s ESL Cafe” which is a problem in one sense because there is an on-going witch-hunt for those responsible, and there are some in management who think I have been partially responsible (as if it’s not bad enough to get into trouble for my own big mouth! – as I said to one of my bosses “you would KNOW if it were me!”). I still come to work feeling stressed and anxious – and I still don’t seem to be able to work less than about 10-12 hours everyday, but hopefully that will change next semester.
I started a Japanese Anime Club two weeks ago and it is already the most popular club on campus. Anime are Japanese cartoons, which I haven’t watched since Kimba the White Lion and Atom Boy when I was three, but the cartoons are really just an excuse to explore Japanese culture (we’re making sushi next week, and there is a large Japanese community here so it should be easy to get people in to do dancing, flower arranging etc). It’s just nice to be surrounded by women (the students) who are passionate, loud, demanding, and articulate and actually want to really communicate with another culture to explain their own and find out about a world out there.
Anyway, that’s life my life in a nut-shell, but I did want to tell you about one thing that happened in class which is the downside, I guess, of people being very open about their culture to foreigners and letting me in to have a look in at it, I guess, and it’s interesting to me because it means I’m forced, as you can see from this letter, to deal with feelings of racism much more quickly than I was forced to when I lived in the Emirates last year.
This is what happened.
One of the girls failed all her mid-term exams very badly. I was explaining to her how she needed to change her learning strategies but I also said to her that she needed to get some sleep because she was coming to class perpetually exhausted. She told me in response that she was actually due to have a baby in two months (you can’t see this because of the abayat, and none of the other girls know) and that she couldn’t sleep because she was at the university from 6am when her husband deposited her there to go to work, until 6 at night, and couldn’t sleep until after her husband came home at 10 at night because she had to get him dinner. She also said (and she’s 18 years old by the way) that she wasn’t able to visit her mother because her husband was too busy to drive her there and that she couldn’t take a taxi because she couldn’t be in a car with a man who was not a male relative (this is the law in Sharjah still and used to be here in Qatar until recently). When I offered to drive her, she said that her husband had promised his mother that all of her needs would be met by him.
Shit, I felt powerless. I went to the university but they have temporarily scrapped their counselling service while they get another one together and while they said they’d get her some help, (we’ll make an order!), of course it didn’t happen. I hate telling you this because of course this is the downside of Muslim culture and the only bit that you hear about when you’re in Australia or wherever from my experience, but it was a really horrible thing. The only good that came out of it was that she told her husband about talking to me and he did take her to visit her mother, and her doctor also stepped in for a few days and put her in hospital so she could get some rest from her responsibilities (she doesn’t have a maid as I imagine the young Qatari wives would because she is Palestinian).
Anyway the rest is all good and just after Christmas I fly to Sharjah for a couple of days and then Jordan on New Year’s Eve... Eat your hearts out. But have a glass of champagne for me.
Love and best Christmas wishes,
Simone
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