Tag: culture

Why You Don't Have Qatari Friends: Part One

On Thursday afternoon, I co-hosted a teleclass to go with the course I wrote for the Global Academy on living and working in Qatar. Both writing the course and preparing for the teleclass were cause for rumination on  6 years of living in Doha. The most interesting part of the teleclass was when participants asked questions. There was one person on the call who had been living in Qatar since February 2011; she dialed in from Doha like I did because she wanted to know more about the place she had made her home. The questions were fairly standard: clothing for women, women in the workforce, and then the equivalent of “why do Qataries keep to themselves?”

In other fora I’ve talked about the tensions between expats and Qataries. But in this instance, I don’t think the caller had a bone to pick, she was genuinely curious about how to develop friendships with people in her new home base. I suffered from this earnest desire when I moved here in 2005. I came to the Middle East to experience life in an Islamic society since my scholarly work was focused on gender and Islam. Soon I found myself living and working in an expat enclave, far away from the Arabs and Arabic I had hoped to learn more about. I experienced first hand what I relayed to everyone on the teleclass; the numbers don’t work in anyone’s favor.

The numbers in Qatar create a unique situation where the nationals are actually minorities in their own country. I can think of few other places in the world where this is the case. Even in the U.S., my home since childhood, people may grumble about “real Americans” (those born there or white) versus “Americans” (those like my family who have naturalized) but the fact is citizenship can be gained. In Qatar, you are only Qatari if your father is Qatar (mothers are starting to get more rights if they marry non-nationals) and there is an intricate ranking system amongst the various tribes, family names, and points of origin.

During this time, I told every Qatari woman that I met that I was trying to make local friends. She would smile politely and I generally never saw her again; this happened on a regular basis and one night, at a very high profile public event, I thought I might have finally struck gold. A prominent official introduced me to his daughter who was also attending. She was my age, she seemed really interested in what I was doing (yes this sounds like dating and is largely how it felt). He told me that his daughter would call me. He would repeat this smile and phrase for the next three years. Needless to say: she never called.

I did an even risker thing than moving to this tiny country situated on top of Saudi Arabia: I left the bastion of Americanism and went to work for the national university. There was the game changer: I was the only non-Arab, non-Muslim, non-Arabic speaking employee in the entire building. Even the kitchen staff knew enough Arabic to take drink orders and conduct basic business. The numbers were finally in my favor – I was in the minority so I had no choice but to make connections, acquaintances, colleagues, who developed – over the course of three years – into friends.

The second thing I relayed to the teleclass, I also learned around my third year living here. When you have one population that is static (nationals) and one population that is a revolving door (expats), establishing new relationships becomes a dance with the law of diminishing returns. I used to offer lots of help, advice, rides, and listening ears to new arrivals. Quickly though I realized what  a draining proposition this is as I could predict in exactly what order, and what time of year, the topics they would want to discuss.

A summary of the first six months of the expat: The heat, the traffic, lack of bookshelves, the medical test, grocery shopping, how to find the spouse a job, inconveniences of Ramadan, the construction, getting an RP, and buying a car.

This isn’t to say that these aren’t all valid and important concerns; it’s just listening to them, helping people through them, and then two years later, having to do it all over again for an entirely new group of people, makes you realize how transient expat life is. Add to this the fact that by year four, nearly everyone I knew when I moved here had returned home, and you begin to see why making friends with expats might be an energy draining proposition.

I told the teleclass that nowadays when I see new people, I run in the other direction.

“You’ve gone local,” someone said and we laughed.

And honestly, it is a survival strategy that makes sense. If you have over 3 siblings, between them, your cousins, the larger circle of friends of these relatives, you have a ready made play set no newcomers needed. There are other cities that work like this and Pittsburgh was one of them; insular communities where everyone who went to high school together, now works and plays together.

I did eventually make Qatari friends – even now having dinner with the young woman who was supposed to be my friend in 2006  – but it was the outer edge of three years of living here. At that point, I guess most people realized I was likely to stick around and worth the investment. Or perhaps it took this long for the stereotypes about expats to wear off.

More on this soon.

 

 

 

On Being Abnormal

It happened again at a dinner party last night. Someone invariably was talking about a trip they went on where the local people were normal. And the city was normal. And the economy was normal. The latest land to be praised was Oman. Now granted, I’ve been to Oman and it beautiful, lush and green; Omanis are truly friendly people. But the comparison to Qatar is what put me on the defensive. From within our expat enclaves to talk about the other as abnormal is more than my postcolonial heart can stand. Especially since I know that the wall we feel between us and the local community is a mutual construction.

In Doha, I find myself in an awkward position, not unfamiliar as the child of immigrants. Being a third culture child: living in one, raised in another, fashioning your way, perhaps was the best experience for this life of in between apologist. Invariably this word normal has always gotten my back up. Growing up as a South Asian in north central Florida, I was anything but normal. I was the fly in the ointment as they say and very much felt it in the way my parents dressed, spoke, behaved and the resulting impact on what I brought to school to eat, the social rules I had to live by: in short my American teenage years were nothing like what we see on prime time U.S. television.

Now I am constantly defending Qataries to expats and expats to Qataries. Rarely do these two communities ever actually meet in a meaningful way. And whey they do, it’s more like crashing into one another. I’m often like an eavesdropper, hearing what each side has to say about the other, wishing I could call for a meeting of the minds. The complaints are so constant and familiar as to be unoriginal and borderline boring. If only they weren’t so serious in their examination of the other group. We dwell on the worst in each other.

The impatient Qatari man or woman is indignant at being made to wait in their own country in a line, for example, and pushes ahead of everyone else.

Or the skimpily clad expat woman, for another, is walking around the souq dressed as though she were at home, for another, because of the scorching heat, not realizing it’s Ramadan.

We live in the same city but never really on the same plain. And I can’t figure out what it is. But perhaps like the cause of war, there is no one specific reason, just a mishmash of facts and emotions. Some of it is the transient nature of the Doha labor market intersecting with the need to maintain the boundaries of these various nationalities. People come on short term contracts, to make money, never expecting to stay and also not really encouraged to think of Qatar as home.

Dress is a distinct way to make sure no one ever forgets where the other person is really “from” and to where they will return. While we are together, even eating, shopping, or visiting each others homes, there are visual reminders we are different.

In an environment where one group is here today and gone tomorrow – a phenomena I’m growing increasingly sick of as one of the ones left behind – I see now why the group that’s staying doesn’t really bother with the new group. After all, now I’m the one running in the other direction in early August as the new arrivals are trooping out of the airport and onto the immigration buses for their medical screenings. I know exactly what they’ll want to talk about for the first six months they are here: Ramadan, driving, the heat, dust, censored movies, and migrant workers. No one wants to learn Arabic because they don’t need to use it. No one knows any Qataries either because they don’t work with any or those that they do with rarely come to office. And the Qataries that are working outside of the government or ministries often feel outnumbered at the office the same way they would have been at City Center or Villaggio. It’s not that these events and feelings aren’t important to discuss – after all what else can you talk about when you first arrive but what you know? The sad fact is that many never develop their conversation or their relationships beyond these initial impressions.

But it’s many of their companies that are the ones promising expats that their lifestyles – implied: their mindsets – don’t have to change in order to move to Doha. Being a moderate state has its draw backs: alcohol being sold in hotels, burgeoning night life, the pace of change constantly on your front doorstep and price the seemingly endless tide of people coming and going, while you keep living your life.

In the past, before the financial crisis, and pre-2022 host city status, most people wouldn’t come to the desert without great motivation. Hence the now well known financial and lifestyle incentives pile up for the adventurous expats. But you’re not necessarily getting what you pay for, as most career expats can tell you: those who are abroad are either there for the adventure, or there because nowhere else will have them. These poor specimens are often the ones Qataries single out when explaining they feel that they are being passed by for blue eyed, blond haired non-expert, living in a fancy house and driving a nice car on their money.

Meanwhile, the same foreigners, or indeed even credential non-white expats, see the in day to day effects of Qatarization – people not coming to work, young men skipping industry altogether to drink coffee at Starbucks, colleagues that are not motivated – as proof that a merit based society will never thrive.

And we reach another impasse as stereotypes are circulated, confirmed, and recirculated.

As one of the people who has hung on, now in my sixth year, I’ve grown almost deaf to these complaints. People always want to know how I did it, how did I make Qatari friends? The answers are so easy as to blatantly obvious but they demand the one ingredient not many have the luxury of: time. I was around, I engaged in meaningful work (in my case writing projects), I had multiple opportunities to show that I cared. Though in an interesting side bar, I have to admit that no one over the age of 40 is a good friend, though I have many older colleagues I feel great mutual respect for.

Maybe there is something modern about the notion of having an expat friend come over on a Friday to the family house, be invited to the ladies majlis, or go to visit in the hospital after she has given birth. Most of my male and female Qatari friends are under the age of 30, hovering closer to 25.

These relationships, like any friendships, are not easy to build and often harder to maintain given the various demands that everyone is juggling. But that is the thing that’s normal. Take it from someone who has seen several cycles of expats come and go; the mistrust on both sides is about the only thing normal about life here. Nearly everyone that I went to my medical screening with in 2005 has left Doha.

So as a survival mechanism I started making friends with Qataries. If I was staying and they were staying, I figured I couldn’t go wrong. But then a strange thing happened: even my Qatari friends started going abroad to purse further studies, or temporary assignments, leaving me once again bereft, the only answer being to make more friends.

“Where is the famous Qatari hospitality?” a lot of people ask at dinner parties. I hear stories of their travels elsewhere in the Middle East where complete strangers invite them in for meals, or give them directions and walk the entire walk, etc. etc.

The United States cannot really claim to be a bastion of civility to foreigners and as recent headlines show, neither will Europe win any words for raids on xenophobia. The numbers do not make it easy for the average Qatari, vastly outnumbered in their own country, rushed into speaking, studying, living in a foreign tongue, to open their hearts or homes to just any of the tens of thousands of people passing by. Add to this the context of gender segregated socialization and you’ve just halved the opportunities for interaction again.

It is not easy for either side to see the other across this wall of indifference. And there are people who benefit from this consistently wide gulf between us. For the sake of Qatar, and my friends on both sides, I hope more people keep reaching across. It is the only hope any of us have at living an abnormal life and creating connections between these historically different communities.

 

 

 

The Year that was 2010

I love the count downs that occur during the last week of December. There are the top music videos and most embarrassing moments; celebrity shockers and sports highlights. It’s the one week every year that my inner pop culture junkie can get her fill of the year that was. Even grander are those moments which observe the passing of a decade which we find ourselves in as 2010 draws to a close.

Before New Year’s Eve comes to Doha, however, is another event of equal resonance, if only locally in Qatar: National Day. Observed on December 18, a year ago this week, a blog post about National Day ignited a firestorm of controversy. A woman blogging on Qatar Living.com posted a piece about the antics of youth on the cornice, ending with the conclusion that the boys (for they were mostly) were symptomatic of the country and both needed to grow up. Spray painted cars, wheelies, people hanging out of windows – all of this, plus someone accosting her with a facemask on, led the blogger to call out her host country and also its people.

The response – over 600 replies to her posting – covered the range of emotions: defending, decrying, and debasing her claims. Whatever people were saying, the outpouring was something few people could have predicted. Hate pages for the blogger and the website sprang up on Facebook and gathered several hundred members. The post and the responses exposed feelings not just about a group of boys out on the town to have fun, but on a range of topics, some as innocuous as driving, to differences in compensation, polices such as Qatarization, and lack of respect for culture.  Whatever the topic and rebuttal, people were arguing ferociously for “their” side.

A year later, what I’m ruminating about is not the incident itself, but what it revealed about those of us who share this tiny peninsula on the larger land of Arabia. The post and the subsequent reaction revealed the deep rooted tensions between ex-pats and locals in our small city state.

As someone who often has to code switch and defend expats to locals and locals to expats, I was saddened by how large the rift still seemed last year and can’t say that things are really drastically changing. The gulf in Qatar (pun intended) is not merely between the haves and the have-nots though that is evident when I sit in traffic next to the buses full of laborers. It’s also between us as people. The expats are not a homogenous group as they seem. There are distinctions between where people come from – Europe, America, and South Asia – as well as their occupations; oil, educational, sports. And locals have an intricate ranking system based on tribal ancestry, how long their families have been on the Arabian Peninsula, and who they are connected to by marriage or otherwise.

When one population is constant – the Qataries, and one population lasts only 1-3 years – the expats, there is no real window to confront these myths and stereotypes. A year later, coming upon National Day, I’m reminded that while we may all live next to each other, stand in line together, driving the same roads, we don’t actually see each other or engage.

New Year’s resolutions are known for triteness and being doomed to failure. Instead of waiting until January 1, I’ve started implementing “life changes” earlier so that by the time the New Year comes; it will find me already practicing my desired habit.

December 2010 is about daily exercise and the practice of being present with people. No messaging, or mobile, or internet. Just being present and really hearing what they have to say.

It is only by really hearing someone that we can stop seeing them as the “other.” And we know that the boundary between us and them is not as firm as we once thought.

Hotels, DJs, clothing manufacturers, want me to buy into the buildup of that other dread holiday – New Year’s Eve. I’ve had the rare opportunity to spend the most talked about night of the year in a different country over the past five years. This isn’t as glamorous as it sounds since often my companions for the evening go to bed before the witching hour, leaving me watching fireworks around the world via satellite.

Despite the hype and commerciality, the end of the year is good to evaluation and introspection, both of what’s happened and what’s to come.

For the sake of all the people living in Qatar, I hope 2011 finds us turning a new page together.