Tag: gender

I love visitors

not just because living in the desert can make you appreciate human companionship more than nearly anything, but because visitors to the place you live can give you fresh eyes. This always happens in Doha when I host groups from North America, as I did recently for a three week summer program. There’s so much to say, so it’s likely this will be the subject of several entries.

For now I will focus on the one thing that many people don’t understand about life in the Middle East – gender relations.

The group I hosted was co-ed, or ‘mixed’ as we say here. This mixed group was the first mixed class held at the university where I work that has adjacent but separate male and female campuses. The ironies of this exception (because it was summer) were numerous.

What was most confusing for the North Americans – but not for the subcontientials also in their group – were the apparent contradictions in the Doha based group’s behavior. The female and male students would talk to the female and male student visitors, but never to each other. The local female and male students would sit next to, work with, and laugh in conversation with the visitors of both genders. But they remained invisible to each other, even when traveling as a small group of six back from a weekend trip outside the country.

Years of disciplined socializing ensured that these boundaries were never crossed.

Typically when confronted with something different, the visitors wanted to change this, insist that it didn’t exist, or read their own motivations into this clear delineation of gendered behavior.

As the hinge person between these two groups, I was often caught in the middle. What surprised me is my lack of desire to ‘change’ or ‘make right’ the situation. Perhaps because this is the start of my fourth year living in the Arabian Gulf. Or perhaps I truly am beginning to have more respect for the host country and culture. In either case, I found it natural.

But I am glad the program is over and I can go back to working predominately with the female students (who outnumber the male students in significant numbers). Now I don’t have to worry about who is sitting next to whom or who doesn’t want her photo taken or who is trying to shake the hand of a person who doesn’t shake with people of the opposite sex.

In short, I’m excited about getting back to work.

Shorts no more

A friend and I were at the mall recently and found ourselves discussing why neither of us wear shorts anymore. This is odd, particularly for me, the girl child who argued fiercely with her mother to wear the fashionable cut offs in high school that gave Daisy her “dukes.” She found it equally so since growing up in California, she often showed off her ballerina legs.

We were both used to living in the conservative culture of the Middle East for several years and perhaps that was the most obvious reason. That plus the slowing of our metabolism as we raced towards becoming thirtysomethings.

The truth is I loved wearing short things in my teenage years which I spent most of weighing no more than 100 pounds. And then, as I became part of a committed spiritual community in college, I gave up the short hems as anything higher than the knee was frowned upon. Thus it was that the wild child of adolescence willingly forsook the shorts, bikinis, and other scanty wear of young shapely women the world over as a twentysomething.

Now on the doorstep of thirty, living in the Middle East, unexpectedly finding myself eating, traveling, and sitting next to women in hijab, I’m reminded again how much in common conservative cultures the world over have in common, regardless of the religion. For hijab means so much more than just the headscarf that is so viciously debated (a senseless debate if you ask anyone, because you aren’t going to make anyone stop wearing it). Hijab means covering the ears, the neck, arms, breasts, and hips – in short creating a cloak of modesty which covers the woman.

Coincidentally these are very similiar to the areas I was lectured against exposing at various faith based conferences in college; we were urged to be modest in our dress and looked in sympathy on immodestly dressed girls at those same conferences. They would learn if they wanted to stick around.

Religions  all over the world want to cover women up – to encourage men to think on other things – and in addressing women’s clothing Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims are surprisingly in agreement. Modesty, each of them preaches, is essential to social order, to well behaved men, to protected women.

Not that I support the direction that young women’s fashion has headed in the last few years. A woman does like to have some secrets, after all.

But where is the line between what someone chooses and what is enforced, either socially, legally, or morally? 
How do we develop our codes? From our families, our communities, or our own sense of what makes us feel right?
Some combination of all three?

Don't leave my daughters

As part of my job, I often design trips for students which require international travel. In the Middle East this is a new counter culture concept for many families who do not let their daughters out their sight. Most of my students have never traveled without their families and in the instances they have, they are usually returning to their countries of origin for a summer trip. Family travel can involve six or more people and is never a casual affair. Given the 40 days of annual vacation allotted to most employees in the Gulf, it stands to reason that traveling 10+ hours for a week seems like a tremendous amount of hassle for a short period of time.

Yet, these international trips are increasingly popular for the female students where I work because they too are catching the millennial fever to travel the world and see all that it has to offer.

What I found interesting, yesterday morning at the check in counter of the airport, was a father’s reaction to seeing me at the head of the group.

“It is only you going with them?” He asked me, eyeing me up and down.

I smiled and nodded.

“But there is a team of people on the other side to receive us,” I assured him. 

This is the second year that I have planned and taken students to Mauritania (a country in West Africa) to see how 
a Qatari created NGO does work with local people towards sustainability. The first trip was last summer and one of 
the best student trips I have ever been a part of.

“Are you Indian?”

This question surprised me, but it’s not unsual for people to assume your place of origin based on your skin color. With so many transplanted people in the Middle East, living outside their countries, Iraqis, Palestinians, Lebanese,
no one would have a country of origin if they got absorbed into their countries of residence. So you are where you come from.

“Yes,” I said, taking my American passport back from the check in agent, not wanting to get into a long conversation about my accent, dress, or years abroad.

“Don’t leave my daughters in Mauritania and go back to India,” the father said, laughing.

Now, this took me completely by surprise, as did the two hours it took for our group of seven to get boarding passes for our connecting flight in Tunisia.

At the end of the processing, one of the woman behind the counter was holding my passport.

“May I have my passport please?” I asked her, ignoring the fact that in the past two hours I watched two of the employees at this desk get into a screaming argument, another employee walk off her job to collect her children from an arriving flight, and accept the profuse apologies of the desk manger.

She nodded and held up one finger, Arab hand signal for WAIT.
She flipped to the first page of my passport, read something there that she found interesting, and flipped it closed. She nodded to her friend and something in a mix of French and Arabic that none of us watching needed a translator for.

“Not really American,” is probably what she said to her friend after reading my birthplace on the first page of the passport.

It appears that Americans are not the only ones who discriminate based on color.

Discrimination is alive and well the world over and yesterday’s reminders took my breath away.

Have you had cases such as these? Or feel that your identity is more complex than most people want to deal with? 
Share and join the club!