BOOKS, WRITING, LIFE
In need of laundry, lunch and ahem, some service? Here’s an example of a well targeted ad – the audience is men who are left in Doha while their families travel on summer holiday – but the creativity calls up the worst of sexism.
What do you think? Did they go too far? Or is this meant to be in tongue in cheek?
The flavor of your summer depends on where you live. Like anything in life.
But I can’t shake the suspicion summer here is unique from life elsewhere, unless you have lived in a beach town during the winter. The impulse towards uniqueness must also be a human compulsion. Hear me out, though, on summer in the desert.
Unlike a beach town which has a seasonal peak, rather than escaping to the desert, those who can, escape from the heat, leaving behind a skeleton population, which in a disaster movie, would most likely be described as “essential personnel” by a big chested general with muscular arms as he strode through the street.
For our family, this summer is no different than the others preceding it. Except maybe that we are going away later than everyone, which again conjures up survivor-like feelings, though this time of a social apocalypse. We, along with the others that are left behind (“to work” as my husband gruffly puts it) band together against the zombie causing level of heat, which when combined with boredom, can be lethal to the pursuit of happiness in these the most idyllic months of the calender.
People are taking advantage of Ramadan occurring over summer this year, overlapping with the school holiday, to travel for longer than normal. The requisite one month stretches to two months (you read that right my-reluctant-to-take-two-consecutive-weeks-American reader). They wave with glee, a sticky hand of each child in their grasp while climbing the metal staircase into the plane’s belly.
Friendships are challenging to maintain in such a seasonally driven place. You may be facing the pressure of work, family, and the unfulfilled desire to see friends who live only a mile up the road.
In a nomadic place like Qatar, which may have migrated from tents into skyscrapers, associations between people are still based on place. Your interaction with a person will start up, be paused – either by the long summer or winter holiday – and then end. Because sooner or later, everyone leaves.
Whether expat or national, whether because of summer, winter, a degree, secondment, or wedding, everyone leaves. The leaving may be temporary, it may be permanent. Ten years later people have been known to return to find the entire landscape of the country unrecognizable.
The intermittent quality of relationships here is reminiscent of the friendships you had during school. Thrown together by a particular context, making friends (or enemies) with those in proximity, and the tearful promises to keep in touch.
The average expat/family stays for three years before moving on or moving home.
I thought I was safer blending into the national social scene.
But my Qatari friends go to graduate school in roughly the same cycle; they come back, work a job, and then are off for the next degree.
We have buffeted two and a half cycles of leaving. No coincidence we have two children. Averaging a child, a semi-permanent social connection, guaranteed to need you for at least seventeen years, or six cycles, means we need to leave soon. Or consider adding to the family.
And no matter how hot it gets this summer, that’s an idea I’m not yet ready for.
What’s ahead for your summer?
The weather in the world has been strange lately. Earthquakes in Iran, floods in Europe, and sandstorms in Qatar. Yes, sandstorms are strange even in the desert because they are a winter phenomena, not for summer time.
For many people, this is the chief compliant about Qatar: the weather. It’s pleasant enough eight months of the year but those four months from May – August are HOT. As in 40 degrees Celsius, 100+ degrees Fahrenheit hot. As in, you go outside and feel the flesh on your face shrink from the heat, flesh peeling hot.
As I used to say when I first moved here, Africa hot.
There is only one standard response this kind of heat evokes in people whether they are single, married, childless or parents. Driven inside by the oppressive heat, everyone comes to the same conclusion:
“There’s nothing to do here.”
Since the climate is so unlivable at the height of summer, no wonder most companies have a 25 day leave bank for employees. This number can rise as high as 45, depending on the institution. While American organizations still maintain the earn-as-you-leave-accural method, Qatar is one of the few places people can take the amount of leave they have accrued, say two or three weeks, and know their job will still be waiting for them. Thus the mass exodus every summer when families bundle away to grandparents, uncles, and aunts while singles hightail to exotic beaches while men from all over South Asian continue to wear blue overalls hanging from structures all over the country that continue being built.
It’s fashionable to complain about the weather without realizing that the very burden is the reason for the blessing.
What is your favorite complaint? Do you ever hear others settling into a familiar pattern of behavior?
