Rock-Throwing & Other Fun Things To Do On the Road

I was driving home tonight, straight into the most amazing sunset I think I’ve seen in my life. The sun seemed to have grown in size, and taken on an incredible red-orange metallic glow. And I realized: this is the first positive thought I’ve had about Qatar in a very, very long time.

I’m dealing with the place marginally better than I’ve done for the last few months during which time I kept dissolving into tears at the thought that I had to keep living here, and this is because I’ve recently made the fourth major change to the way I approach work of my life. (Two of these have been in Qatar.)

I am ignoring all instructions from management that don’t make sense or benefit the students (that is, all of them), and following the advice of at least a thousand people over the last 20 years and doing ‘the bare minimum’ for the first time in my working life.

Okay, so my bare minimum is not quite as bare as other people’s but I am no longer at work 10-12 hours a day. I don’t even check my emails every day if my computer is down. And I don’t do the tasks I’m supposed to do in class (this is the hardest thing for my law-abiding, conscientious little self, and causes me some anxiety, but it’s been overridden by the fact that there are some things I will just not do to my students).

As a result, I think I’m the only teacher at this level (the lowest) who can sincerely say I like and enjoy my classes. I have one class of Arabs from everywhere (Eritrea, Somalia, Tunisia, Sudan, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and on…) and one class of almost all Qataris and Saudis (the latter are no doubt good for me, because I admit that the mere mention of the country, its citizens and their treatment of all others makes me feel physically sick).

But the person I have been wanting to tell you about is a Qatari from a large Bedouin clan or tribe, parts of which are in Saudi and as far north as Jordan, called Bayna, who has so brought home to me ‘Bedouin’ which, if you think about it, is quite a hard concept to get your brain around.

I mean, can you really imagine an extended family that has so little contact with other clans that they have developed their own dialect? An extended family in which, even today, marriage takes place mainly between first cousins? And in which they really don’t meet anyone else outside the clan for all of their lives?

Yeah, me neither.

So I get this little tiny student who rocks up to class in nekab (nothing showing except her eyes). I have lots of students who come in nekab, but most take the material tied over their nose and mouth off completely so I can see their face and head (because I’m a female teacher).. Bayna shoves hers up over her head, and so looks like a small, beady-eyed, medieval Italian court gnome (yeah, I don’t know if they had gnomes, but this is really how she looks, right down to her sparkly, silver-sequined platform trainers).

Then we start on our first piece of writing which is “My Ideal Job”. Bayna writes she wants to be a housewife. Nothing so astounding there. She writes that this is because family is important. Another non-brain twister. Then we get on to the development of paragraphs, and so I’m saying “Bayna darling, why is family important? which led to one of those ‘cos–cos why?-just cos, cos-why? loops which I’ve encountered in students from many, many cultures which hold their truths to be self-evident.

Change tactic.

Okay, I say. I’m 42. I live by myself. I’m not married because I don’t want to be married. I don’t have children and I don’t want to have children. Bayna says, Why?

Gotcha.

And so after a couple of false starts in which Bayna claims not to be able to speak English which is complete rubbish since you only have to get her interested or piss her off to truly get an earful, I start to get answers.

Why is family important? You don’t need anyone but family. Why go outside? Outside is full of strangers and strange things! Outside is full of people you don’t know! Outside is full of people who are not FAMILY! And who needs people who are not family? Her father goes away on weekends and that’s terrible. And she misses her brothers (men and women live in separate parts of the house so she doesn’t see them anymore). She used to visit her grandmother everyday when she was little and now it’s only once a week! And I was a “cold, heartless woman” if I didn’t miss my brother and mother - I quickly reassured her I did, not only because it is so terribly true, but because clearly I was about to loose ALL credibility.

Bayna has now finished her second piece of writing in which she had to write about a holiday they had taken and describe the place. Needless to say, and unlike the rest of the class who wrote about overseas destinations, Bayna wrote about a beach place about 1 hour’s drive from Qatar. Where her family has a holiday house. No prizes for guessing who she took this holiday with…



Now for a cat update.

Ant has taken up football. She plays a mixture of a variety of codes. As umpire I throw the ball, which is eventually kicked back to me through my feet which act as goal posts. (I kid you not. She is really good at this.) This is the soccer component. The rugby part is that, occasionally, she picks the ball up in her mouth, places it on a woven line of the majlis (Arab sofa on the floor) and kicks it in from this sideline. The Aussie Rules play is when she’s feeling particularly vigorous. Some of those (attempted) marks are right up there with Cazaly…

The other Ant news is that last week, on the very first night she was ever out, she went missing for 2 days. I was beside myself. There are 90 houses and 26 apartment blocks (each with 8 flats, which are shaped internally like Australian 3 bedroom houses) in this housing complex. Friends and I posted ‘Missing’ bills with her photo on them across the place and walked around for hours calling her name, in vacant buildings and on building roof-tops.

Eventually she ran into my neighbour’s flat downstairs. She really couldn’t have made a crueller choice. This old Arab guy had a serious car accident last year and can hardly walk since having metal pins put in his legs. When I went into the flat, it was evident that his wife had left him, and all the furniture had been stacked up in the back rooms (where Ant was hiding), and this guy was living in the great big, bare lounge room, which had nothing in it but a hospital bed. What it must have cost him to make that phone call and invite me into the place, poor bugger.

Finally, a traffic report.

I had thought that no young male Qatari driver could do anything to surprise me. (Friends here were incredulous when I made this statement. So call me naïve.) But clearly I was wrong. The problem is that the police have started to enforce traffic laws with massive fines (running a red costs you $1,100 Aussie or more) and a point system.

This has two consequences. First, since no-one is supposed to hassle you (flash lights or beep horn to make you move over), drivers sit in the fast lane regardless of the speed they’re travelling at – drives me bonkers. I was behind a ute with filled with a fluffy goat and bales of hay the other day. The driver was well under the speed limit and chatting merrily on the phone while a stream of cars sat behind him fretting and fuming.

Second, the only people who are speeding are – you guessed it – young male Qataris whose sense of entitlement is even bigger than their bank balance.

So I’m driving down to the beach promenade where I go jogging every day, sitting in the slow lane under the speed limit when a Toyota Land Cruiser (the car favoured by Qataris unless they can afford something really flash like a red, yellow or orange Lamborghini) toots and flashes me.

The fast lane was full of cars and there was no shoulder/edge of road to move over to, and I’m sitting there thinking, “where the hell am I supposed to go?”

And then of course the lights turned orange. And I stop because $1,100 is a lot of money. This bloody car then drives in between me and the fast lane car, through the red light – it’s been red for at least 10 seconds at this point – and drives on, clearly establishing that there is no god, because if there were, there would have been a red light camera RIGHT THERE.

This at least was funny unlike the other incident 2 weeks ago when a guy (yes, you know the description) forced me off the road, picked up a rock, chased me and threw the rock at my car. I thought he’d hit my car with his, but was too frightened to stop (you have to stop immediately if you want to claim on insurance). I did get out eventually when a police car passed (they were totally unsurprised) and the car wasn’t damaged, but I was a basket case for about a week.

The joys of life in Qatar.

To end this post on a happier note: I have joined the Natural History Group and go out once a month in a 4WD into the desert where we look at old forts, mangrove swamps and search for fossilised sharks’ teeth. The relief to be away from the traffic and noise is unbelievable.




Happy Christmas everyone!