Hadeel and her dad in front of her haiku translation.
The club girls show the Ambassador's wife around the haiku poetry exhibition.
Me, exhausted, after setting up the exhibition.April 2007
You will all be enormously pleased to know that, since I last wrote, all traces of desert have been removed from my living room floor and that I am now residing in a perfectly clean house!
The reason? A cleaning fairy has entered my employ. Her name is Angie (well, what else would she reasonably be called?), and in the manner of your better class of fairy, she sneaks into my flat while I’m still asleep, so that when I stagger out some time later, the floors, benches, appliances and furniture are shining, my washing is in the machine, my bathrooms are grime-free, and a stack of ironing is mounting up in the spare room. Clean dishes and folded linen appear in my cupboards as if by miracle, and when I open my fridge in the morning, it gleams at me.
May I recommend this as a truly excellent way to start the day?
Angie comes twice a week for a total of 8 hours, which she initially thought would be unnecessary after the first week or two, because “Madam, the house is very dirty now…” I had to explain that, regrettably, Madam is a grot and a slob, and that having someone cleaning up after her would only encourage Madam in her truly deplorable habits.
So, except for the occasional wander through to admire the spotlessness of the place, I can totally ignore it, and focus on work and my social life, which is a relief in the case of the former because work has been so full on, that I worked two 17 hour days last week (beginning at 2am), 12 hours one day of the last weekend, and all of the weekend before. And the weeks preceding that were not much better.
Everything is totally fantastic though.
The Japanese Ambassador’s wife came to open our Club’s Flower Festival and she was shocked.
We had taken over the entire ground floor of the building, and hung it with pink and yellow garlands.
On the floor, we made a metre-wide path of huge, bright pink and yellow flowers, which were stuck and then laminated to the floor with clear contact plastic. As you walked around the path, off to each side but also laminated to the floor, there were photos of flowers with Japanese haiku (poems) superimposed on top in groups of three. One photo had the Japanese haiku, one had my English translation, and one had the Arabic translated by the girls, and also by a guy who will be part of the Guys’ Japanese Club when I finally find time to get it going.
At the back of the building, but inside it, is a big star-shaped fountain, and the rim of that was also covered with pink and yellow flowers, and there was a light lunch served on pink tablecloths, with pink and yellow flower arrangements linked by yellow ribbon for the ribbon cutting ceremony (scissors presented on a yellow brocade cushion!!!!).
They had never seen anything like it here, and it was a really big deal. The Dean of my faculty Dr Khalid put off surgery booked for that day, and came in over the weekend with one of his daughters, and gave us lunch. The Ambassador’s wife has invited us to her private residence again to give us an ikebana (Japanese Flower Arrangement) demonstration, and she said some fantastic things about the Club to the media who were there.
But for me the most wonderful thing was meeting two fathers (we showed them in because it was late at night on the weekend, so they were allowed to enter the Women’s Campus and building).
The first was Hadeel’s father. He bounced in and she ran around looking for the poem she had translated without help and when I said “I’ll take a photo of you with Hadeel’s work,” they flung their arms around each other and were so proud of each other. It was a beautiful thing to see. Go and have a look at the photo I took of them. It’s attached.
When I met the 2nd father of three of my Club girls, the eldest was saying, “Simone, my father is a serious person: don’t be crazy, don’t laugh, don’t wave your arms around, he doesn’t speak English”, so I went out and invited him through (seriously and non-crazily), and again Fatma showed him her translations, and she was so proud, and he nodded and smiled and thanked me. The next day I said to Fatma, “what did your father think of me, - your father would know from the poems I’m a serious person” and she said, “Simone, he never meets women. He’s a strict Muslim. You are the first women he has met…” Dear god. Simone as a representative of all womankind… Truly, the mind boggles.
There have also been a number of non-fantastic things happen over the last 6 weeks and one of the more hideous, but not the worst, was being chased by a young Qatari man in a car onto the Women’s Campus, horn blaring and lights flashing as we finished setting up for the Flower Festival. We had to be locked inside the building while they called the police, cause he came back twice, and then they advised me they he may try to stalk me – easy enough given my car, one of only 2 or 3 in Qatar. I had braked on a roundabout to avoid getting killed by another arsehole who decided he didn’t have to give way to a woman in a Kia (road rules here are interpreted according to car type, ethnicity and gender), and this guy took it as a personal insult. The line between narcissism to sociopathy being not so fine in this case…
As far as the work part of work goes, things have been equally manic, but also interesting politically, and rewarding personally.
You remember I told you I was teaching a group of post-graduate women who were doing teacher training? Well, the deal is that Qatar Primary Schools teachers are, in the main, completely unqualified, so the government has provided a grant to retrain women who have a degree in anything at all (we have lawyers, accountants, scientists, nurses, and a nutritionist) as primary school teachers in an intensive 18 month program. I get them first to teach give them the literacy skills they need to pass the course.
The first problem was the original course did not match the Primary Ed course in terms of skills, so I had to rewrite the program from scratch. Easy Schmeasy. Much worse was that the women were expected to do 20 hours a week of Academic Literacy and 2 hours on top of that in computer skills. This meant they were out of the house for about 7 hours – at the time their kids were coming home from school – and day care hours do not match working, studying hours. Plus, the ones that worked couldn’t come to the computer classes. Plus, half of them are pregnant, so problems with hospital visits, maids disappearing, no family support in the case of non-Qataris, never seeing their kids, never seeing their husbands, exhaustion. I mean, they made it as difficult as possible for these women, who they desperately need to teach.
Not that they kept silent about it, mind you. Imagine 40 Arab women bearing down on you waving their arms about, with determined looks on their faces. Scary.
Anyway, English wouldn’t do anything, so I went to the Dean of Education (who is one of the most powerful women in the country) and she talked to my Dean (Dr Khalid) and they accepted my solution which was to have one morning, one afternoon class, shorten the course to 10 weeks (from 14), run the computer skills course intensively after that and ring up the women who had dropped out to bring them back in and catch them up. It all went though, but I was pretty worried about going over my 3 bosses’ heads.
Anyway, it all worked out. Dr Fawzi came to me terribly worried and said, “Dr Simone, they’ve shortened our course, I’m so sorry” – and I felt guilty so I had to tell him it had been my doing. He laughed and laughed, waggled his finger at me and said “You are a dangerous woman” before collapsing with laughter again. Relief! Since then we have gone back to our usual interactions which involve him saying repeatedly “Dr Simone, thank you very much! You are FANTASTIC!” for which management strategy I have a particularly strong predilection...
The women were even more grateful and bought me flowers and a cake (see the attached photo), and have made the hours and hours and hours I’ve spent rebooking rooms and computer labs and finding working photocopiers and paper (yep, some things never change) worthwhile. They are just so amazing, and so brave. I am learning so much from them, and we lean on each other like mothers and sisters and daughters (depending on who has the current need), and we teach and learn from each other, and reflect every day on what we have learnt and it is truly an amazing community to be part of.
My social life is also wonderful. I’ve never had so many good friends in all my life. Bit off a bit more than I could chew catering a sit-down dinner for 30 people for a girlfriend’s 60th birthday (Angie saw my kitchen the next morning, put her hands across her face and wailed), but Nancy is worth it, and it’s good to meet people who are not teachers.
And have recently met an Aussie chef who is moving here for a year. Yippee! Recently came across him in my kitchen cooking, ’cause he’d got so fed up trying to find a restaurant for us to go to in Doha (the food here is crap). He apologised to me for going through my fridge. What the…??!! I explained to him that he could go through any cupboard or fridge in the whole house if he was going to cook for me, and that was before I’d tasted the results…
Besides, my fridge is clean now.
Simone
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