Me and some whirling dervishes,
doing our respective things in Instanbul:
Mohamed Forag, Takuro and Osama:
My wonderful class of Primary Education Ladies who wore
doing our respective things in Instanbul:
Friends to dinner in Doha:
Zoorah, Nancy & Hans
Mohamed Forag, Takuro and Osama:
My wonderful class of Primary Education Ladies who wore
pink to the exam! Now there is a mark of respect!
Girls Day Festival at the Embassy. 
March 2007
Winter is finally over in Qatar and the weather celebrated with a sandstorm. It was the most beautiful, eerie, ethereal thing. There was so much sand in the air you couldn’t see where the desert ended and the sky began, and everything was the same consistent shade of pearl, and with the same sheen.
Unfortunately the day of the sandstorm was the day of a dinner party I was having and, naturally, I had left the window open. I came home to find that the chunk of desert that I had removed from my living room floor that morning had been replaced by an even larger chunk of desert. Oh yay. I have cleaned up after the party itself, but there are visible footprints across the floor because the sand is so deep, and there appears to be a small dune gathering under the CD table...
(People were arriving at the dinner party and saying in tones of wonderment as they entered, “Simone, your window is open,” which was a tad irritating given that vacuuming is high on my list of Things To Avoid If At All Possible.)
I came back to Qatar from Istanbul two weeks ago, thinking that I would be teaching on the Men’s Campus and praying the Qatar-based teachers’ prayer, which goes: “god provide my class with large numbers of Palestinians and Egyptians. An Omani or two would also be nice,” to find that I am not teaching on the pre-university courses at all. Instead, I am teaching post-graduate women who are about to embark on a Diploma of Education and need help with academic English literacy skills to cope with the degree. (Okay, god, forget the Palestinians – trainee teachers of any ethnicity are absolutely my favourite, favourite type of student.)
Better still, the entire set of instructions I received for delivering the course amounted to “Go forth and teach”, so that every time I go to my new boss Dr Fawzi (Iraqi, poor unfortunate, but a gentle man whose son has just graduated from Victoria Uni in Engineering) and ask him if it’s okay to change something (like the entire course and all its assessment), he says “Dr Simone, I think that’s a wonderful idea. We trust you. Do whatever you think is best,” which is a managerial attitude that greatly commends itself to me.
This, unbelievably to me at least, has become the new way to treat Simone! All the new teachers got pay rises, but I also got funding for technology I wanted, and funding for my Japanese Club, as well as this new course, and now that my star has risen (yeah, it’s that little titchy one that will no doubt shortly become a black hole), I actually have people who ignored me totally before coming into my office and smarming up to me. The slime balls.
Re my club: aka Simone’s private sand pit. How wonderful is this venture. Two days ago we took a couple of bus loads to the Japanese Ambassador’s private residence for the Girls’ Day Festival, Hina Matsuri. It took ages to organise and mad vollies of text messages between Doha and Istanbul because, in the words of the Cultural Attaché, “Ambassador is bery stubborn,” but it was really overwhelming when we got there.
The Ambassador’s wife, Mrs Horie, did most of the work. She was utterly amazing. She explained the meaning and history of the doll display (showing the 10th century Imperial Japanese Court), and actually had a rice ball – onigiri – made up specially for one of the girls who had seen them in cartoons, but never in real life. We then went into a banquet of Japanese food which included a bowl of chirashi sushi, a rice dish with grilled eel that is only eaten during this festival. Then she did the big photo shoot (all the girls wanted photos with her, although they cannot show photos of themselves to anyone outside their family) and actually had the girls’ laughing and joking – this was a major achievement because the girls were so overwhelmed and elated by the experience that some of them were speechless. Then one of them asked her to play the baby grand piano which was in the reception hall – and she did, singing Sakura, a traditional Japanese song. What a gifted person.
Anyway, you can see it all on the new club website I created last weekend: http://www.quanimeclub.bravehost.com/ And we have new members as a result of the trip cos I rushed round and put up advertising in places like the Sharia Law College and the Science College – so we got all these new women who are doing Stats and Law and Maths and who had never heard of the club before. Very exciting.
And the last and maybe for me even the best bit, was that I met a Japanese woman who arrived 3 months ago to teach Japanese here for the Ministry of Education, and who is the teacher of one of the girls in my club, the Irrepressible & Highly Excitable, Jat-chan. Aiko, the teacher, came to the sand-swept dinner (okay the adjective belongs to landscapes, but you haven’t actually seen the current state of my living room), and it was so so so wonderful to talk to someone in Japanese again. I have so missed the way conversations get built over high drama consensus. She’s an interesting woman too. Lived in Instanbul for 4 years and speaks Turkish.
I have attached a photo of Aiko, Jat-chan (in nekab, you’ll have to imagine her face underneath it, which exactly matches her personality) and me. Please don’t do anything with the photo though – although she’s in nekab, Jat-chan would be in serious trouble having it passed on anywhere on the Internet (this photo not included on this site).
Next month, I’m starting a Japanese Club on the guys’ campus (at their insistence) and that will be incredibly interesting, mainly because the guys who live here are not as used to interacting with women as the Emiratis were. When I lived in Sharjah, the absolute hardest thing for me was not touching the men’s arms as I talked to them (you know how I do this when I talk to people), and when one of them offered me his hand to shake, I used to feel like crying I was so pathetically grateful.
Anyway, here I assumed that the guys on campus were much the same, but not, it turns out. And I was really worried that I had upset one of the guys, Aziz, a Pashtun (ethnic Afghani who is actually from Afghanistan) who was so fantastic helping me with Internet access when I first arrived, and who lent me the anime cartoons I needed to start the girls’ club. Anyway, Aziz saw me at the beginning of this new semester in the car park, and bounded up smiling, offering me more anime – and then carefully removed himself backwards till there was a distance of about 5 feet between us. And I thought, “Oh. Okay. So that’s the personal space they need... Better late than never, Simone...”
I probably can’t finish a mass email from Doha without a road and traffic report. The latest is that the highway that runs along the new sports stadium built for the Asian Games has broken apart (yep, the Games that were held 3 months ago. The road that finished the week before they started). The Ministry of Public Works released a statement explaining that the reason the AUD 22 million dollar road had collapsed was that people weren’t driving along it properly. Of course!
I went through the newspaper article carefully to find out where I had been criminally negligent, and it turns out (I think) that no one is actually supposed to change lanes (and this in Doha where the activity is practically the Qatari national passtime) or turn left or right at intersections (which I need to do to actually get home). I came to the conclusion that the 7km highway is like the photocopier at work – there because we need it, but not meant to be used, as such.
Anyway, the road-building has started again, and so have the ‘diversions’ (detours). And the problem again is that these diversions don’t actually come out anywhere. And you have to have a 4WD to use them. And if my totally gorgeous little car has a defect (which it definitely hasn’t), it is that the undercarriage of the car is very near the road. This is because it’s made in Korea. Where they know how to build bloody roads. A couple of photos of me with my car are also attached. Tell me there is anything cuter. Of course I mean the bloody car!
Anyway, must go and remove desert from living room - again. And shut window...
Love,
Simone
Club Members, me, the Ambassador and his wife:
March 2007
Winter is finally over in Qatar and the weather celebrated with a sandstorm. It was the most beautiful, eerie, ethereal thing. There was so much sand in the air you couldn’t see where the desert ended and the sky began, and everything was the same consistent shade of pearl, and with the same sheen.
Unfortunately the day of the sandstorm was the day of a dinner party I was having and, naturally, I had left the window open. I came home to find that the chunk of desert that I had removed from my living room floor that morning had been replaced by an even larger chunk of desert. Oh yay. I have cleaned up after the party itself, but there are visible footprints across the floor because the sand is so deep, and there appears to be a small dune gathering under the CD table...
(People were arriving at the dinner party and saying in tones of wonderment as they entered, “Simone, your window is open,” which was a tad irritating given that vacuuming is high on my list of Things To Avoid If At All Possible.)
I came back to Qatar from Istanbul two weeks ago, thinking that I would be teaching on the Men’s Campus and praying the Qatar-based teachers’ prayer, which goes: “god provide my class with large numbers of Palestinians and Egyptians. An Omani or two would also be nice,” to find that I am not teaching on the pre-university courses at all. Instead, I am teaching post-graduate women who are about to embark on a Diploma of Education and need help with academic English literacy skills to cope with the degree. (Okay, god, forget the Palestinians – trainee teachers of any ethnicity are absolutely my favourite, favourite type of student.)
Better still, the entire set of instructions I received for delivering the course amounted to “Go forth and teach”, so that every time I go to my new boss Dr Fawzi (Iraqi, poor unfortunate, but a gentle man whose son has just graduated from Victoria Uni in Engineering) and ask him if it’s okay to change something (like the entire course and all its assessment), he says “Dr Simone, I think that’s a wonderful idea. We trust you. Do whatever you think is best,” which is a managerial attitude that greatly commends itself to me.
This, unbelievably to me at least, has become the new way to treat Simone! All the new teachers got pay rises, but I also got funding for technology I wanted, and funding for my Japanese Club, as well as this new course, and now that my star has risen (yeah, it’s that little titchy one that will no doubt shortly become a black hole), I actually have people who ignored me totally before coming into my office and smarming up to me. The slime balls.
Re my club: aka Simone’s private sand pit. How wonderful is this venture. Two days ago we took a couple of bus loads to the Japanese Ambassador’s private residence for the Girls’ Day Festival, Hina Matsuri. It took ages to organise and mad vollies of text messages between Doha and Istanbul because, in the words of the Cultural Attaché, “Ambassador is bery stubborn,” but it was really overwhelming when we got there.
The Ambassador’s wife, Mrs Horie, did most of the work. She was utterly amazing. She explained the meaning and history of the doll display (showing the 10th century Imperial Japanese Court), and actually had a rice ball – onigiri – made up specially for one of the girls who had seen them in cartoons, but never in real life. We then went into a banquet of Japanese food which included a bowl of chirashi sushi, a rice dish with grilled eel that is only eaten during this festival. Then she did the big photo shoot (all the girls wanted photos with her, although they cannot show photos of themselves to anyone outside their family) and actually had the girls’ laughing and joking – this was a major achievement because the girls were so overwhelmed and elated by the experience that some of them were speechless. Then one of them asked her to play the baby grand piano which was in the reception hall – and she did, singing Sakura, a traditional Japanese song. What a gifted person.
Anyway, you can see it all on the new club website I created last weekend: http://www.quanimeclub.bravehost.com/ And we have new members as a result of the trip cos I rushed round and put up advertising in places like the Sharia Law College and the Science College – so we got all these new women who are doing Stats and Law and Maths and who had never heard of the club before. Very exciting.
And the last and maybe for me even the best bit, was that I met a Japanese woman who arrived 3 months ago to teach Japanese here for the Ministry of Education, and who is the teacher of one of the girls in my club, the Irrepressible & Highly Excitable, Jat-chan. Aiko, the teacher, came to the sand-swept dinner (okay the adjective belongs to landscapes, but you haven’t actually seen the current state of my living room), and it was so so so wonderful to talk to someone in Japanese again. I have so missed the way conversations get built over high drama consensus. She’s an interesting woman too. Lived in Instanbul for 4 years and speaks Turkish.
I have attached a photo of Aiko, Jat-chan (in nekab, you’ll have to imagine her face underneath it, which exactly matches her personality) and me. Please don’t do anything with the photo though – although she’s in nekab, Jat-chan would be in serious trouble having it passed on anywhere on the Internet (this photo not included on this site).
Next month, I’m starting a Japanese Club on the guys’ campus (at their insistence) and that will be incredibly interesting, mainly because the guys who live here are not as used to interacting with women as the Emiratis were. When I lived in Sharjah, the absolute hardest thing for me was not touching the men’s arms as I talked to them (you know how I do this when I talk to people), and when one of them offered me his hand to shake, I used to feel like crying I was so pathetically grateful.
Anyway, here I assumed that the guys on campus were much the same, but not, it turns out. And I was really worried that I had upset one of the guys, Aziz, a Pashtun (ethnic Afghani who is actually from Afghanistan) who was so fantastic helping me with Internet access when I first arrived, and who lent me the anime cartoons I needed to start the girls’ club. Anyway, Aziz saw me at the beginning of this new semester in the car park, and bounded up smiling, offering me more anime – and then carefully removed himself backwards till there was a distance of about 5 feet between us. And I thought, “Oh. Okay. So that’s the personal space they need... Better late than never, Simone...”
I probably can’t finish a mass email from Doha without a road and traffic report. The latest is that the highway that runs along the new sports stadium built for the Asian Games has broken apart (yep, the Games that were held 3 months ago. The road that finished the week before they started). The Ministry of Public Works released a statement explaining that the reason the AUD 22 million dollar road had collapsed was that people weren’t driving along it properly. Of course!
I went through the newspaper article carefully to find out where I had been criminally negligent, and it turns out (I think) that no one is actually supposed to change lanes (and this in Doha where the activity is practically the Qatari national passtime) or turn left or right at intersections (which I need to do to actually get home). I came to the conclusion that the 7km highway is like the photocopier at work – there because we need it, but not meant to be used, as such.
Anyway, the road-building has started again, and so have the ‘diversions’ (detours). And the problem again is that these diversions don’t actually come out anywhere. And you have to have a 4WD to use them. And if my totally gorgeous little car has a defect (which it definitely hasn’t), it is that the undercarriage of the car is very near the road. This is because it’s made in Korea. Where they know how to build bloody roads. A couple of photos of me with my car are also attached. Tell me there is anything cuter. Of course I mean the bloody car!
Anyway, must go and remove desert from living room - again. And shut window...
Love,
Simone
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