Tag: work

Why is this an "indian" problem?

I went to a very stimulating conference today, sponsored by Carnegie Mellon, Qatar, focused on research students had done on the issues facing immigrants living in Doha. I will leave aside my pleasure in undergraduate research, my congratulations to their faculty advisers, or my hope for their future as purposeful academics – all of which are true and any of which I could write a segment, and perhaps will later.

Instead, one remark has been ringing in my ears since I left the building.

A person from the audience interrogated one of the student panels, asking why the Indian Benevolence Fund did not intercede on behalf of a 63 year old Indian man whose restaurant enterprise had gone bankrupt, necessitating that he spend 7 years in Qatar working back a debt of 200,000 QR  (apx. 54,000 USD). The man was unable to see his daughter in this intervening period.

Why, the questioner prodded the student panel, didn’t this ‘fund’ do something about this deplorable situation?

Well, I have a different question.

Why is this an ‘indian’ problem? Why are only indians moved by pity for this man?

Does not the idea of 63 year old man, unable to see his daughter, burdened by debt, move any heart? Of any nationality?

This is the basic question facing Qatar: how much does nationality matter? And where does it stack against the fact of our shared humanity?

The case on the everyday Doha street appears to be that social class and status marks those points between human and some not quite sub human but not quite above dust category of species. 

In many countries in the world, you can be someone who works in plumbing, not a plumber, on Friday, Saturday, Sunday (or whatever days are your weekend). People can change their clothes, walk around with their families, be themselves.

But here, in such a small city, where we are all pressing up against each other, even on Friday, we see the small framed sub-continental men, shuffling their feet at the entrance of malls that they are baned from entering, regardless if they helped build them.

We in Qatar, and in the world, will only be able to progress in so much as we can move beyond race, class, even gender, to respond to the universal in those around us. We must do the good we can. Otherwise, all is lost. 

I felt good when I left that room this evening because I saw the stirrings of this generation, Qatar and the world’s hope, beginning to grapple with these larger questions of how to deal with rapid change in a just and equitable manner.

But the question plagues me. Why didn’t I, as an naturalized American national respond to the plight of this 63 year old man?

As the man from the Indian Benevelonce Fund stated, quite passionately, “The minute we knew about it, two business men stepped forward and helped.”

It is my promise that I will seek to know and to notice where I can help – whether Indian, Filipino, Qatari, or Australian.

After all, isn’t this why I’m blessed with discretionary income, employment flexibility, as much schooling as I want , even up to a Ph.D?

Aren’t you?

Who Goes to those Campus Lectures?

This was the laughing question of a friend to me over dinner, a few years ago, in a city I didn’t last more than one year in, partly because of emotional and professional isolation.
            “Well, I do,” I answered.
            Another friend was sitting with her, across from me; they shared both physical and mental opposition to me.
            “Yeah, I always saw those fliers and wondered who does go to those?”
            They had a good laugh and I shrugged.
            He was an IT service guy at a vocational community college who had changed majors twice in college and taken six years to finish; she an unemployed daughter of a retired doctor, stopped a year during college to travel abroad and study dance before finishing. Upon graduating, he bounced around a few entry level jobs, landing one that set him up comfortably at the community college and commenced to late night bouts of X-Box against other males of his undergrad glory days.
She was living with me because her parents’ house was too big to stay in alone (they had since moved to be closer to grandchildren, leaving her alone in multi-bedroom childhood home). She stayed in the spare room in my apartment and we held mock interviews to prepare her for dream job in the media industry.
They were as different from me as could be, but I couldn’t see it at the time.
I thought they were my friends and support during a very difficult time of life.
I worked at a university, abundant in resources that I took advantage of: theater, lectures, even sports, while at the same time struggling to find a suitable career that would lend me blend concern for students with solid scholarship.
            They had both gone to college to get a degree.
            I was still working at a school in order to complete my education which would become – a fact I didn’t realize during this dinner – a life long pursuit for interesting facts, stories, and knowledge about the human experience. I was never going to stop learning and learning was entwined in my living.
            Both at that moment (and now), I’ve been to lectures of every kind: by diplomats, scientists, doctors, academics. Anyone and anything I’ve been invited to or announced as open to the public.
Not because of the free food (although this is an admitted plus, particularly when it’s good) but also because of the free stimulation. The sharing of ideas sparks in me my own. The wheels start turning – as they always have – in the presence of creativity. The presenter doesn’t even have to be a stylistically perfect orator.
            I’m not sure if it’s the sitting down in someone else’s mind, something I’m not disciplined enough to do with my own on my own (a nap of a few minutes always seems like a good proposition just before a planned work period) or the fact that I now “work fulltime” and the better part of my day is spent in a office, or actually sitting down period, and being still that triggers this phenomenon.
            Every time I go to a lecture, I’m struggling to reclaim the right to think. I find moments on my own here and there, but I’m more likely to do it if I’ve been in the presence of someone else who has been working on something and is sharing it with others.
            Perhaps this is my father’s gift – the great monologist in the family – wiling to gather information from any source: by listening to the news, to lectures, to presentations (to anyone but family.)
            Perhaps echoes of his recurrent warning during my teenage years – “Words of wisdom are going down the drain, down the drain” – a leftover from his own childhood, draws me into various auditoriums all over the world, seeking others, finding myself.
            Here in the desert, lectures are spots of light combating short days and an increasing sense of intellectual isolation which can be held at bay for another hour in the company of other thinkers.
            Oh, and those friends, the non-lecture goers?
            Let’s just say I’ve found truer companions.
 

Some Random Thoughts on Class and Gender in Doha

I’m working in my office and a student, wearing nikab, a face veil that drapes in front of the face and covers everything except a woman’s eyes, which a friend who lives here affectionately calls a ‘ninja mask.’ (in case you need a photograph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/niqab/). 
A side note: many nikab clad women drive wearing these veils, despite the fact that the limit peripheral vision enormously. This is not just my un-hijabed opinion. When I was talking about this with another student, one who wears a shyla, a headscarf that covers hair, neck, and ears, she agreed and said this is an opinion that her father shares: women driving wearing nikab are not necessarily the safest (a whole new angle to women driving stereotypes).

 

But back to this particular day, she is wearing nikab and comes in to ask me to use my cell phone. She has to use my phone, she tells me, because her parents won’t let her have a phone. They think it’s “bad.” Yet, they think it’s okay for their daughter to walk into a stranger’s office (I have never seen this student before, expect on the first occasion that she came to use my phone) to ask to use the phone. This seems a discrepancy to the issue of modesty, which is what they seem concerned with, if her dress and lack of phone are any indication.

 

“You remember me?” She asked, as though surprised.

 

“No one else has asked to use my phone,” I respond. And it’s true. An area of the world where workers can SMS in to bosses that they aren’t coming to work, and people break up via mobile phones, not to mention use Bluetooth technology to make assignations with strangers in public, her not having a phone stand out.

 

Other issues?

 

At a mini-conference this week, I asked a few co-workers to help assist in taking microphones to audience members who had questions for panelists, I was confronted with the divide between acceptable forms of work and unacceptable forms of work. This is determined by status and image of course.

 

“Aren’t there any servants to do it?” One asked me.

Servants? Was work an extension of her home?

 

Let’s flash to the sight that greeted me as I got out of my car earlier this week: two women who work in the kitchen of our building, bringing tea and making copies, scurrying into the parking lot to get two grocery bags from staff in my building. The bas had the contents of the other women’s breakfast.  They were items that could have been stuffed into my tote bag that was slung over my arm. I watched as the procession, the staff in front, and the tea ladies in back, proceeded into the building.

 

Back to the microphone handler search: Of course I had to start with the women because the men were too dignified to do this task.

 

Of the few I asked, most pointed to their long abayas, the hems of which were dragging on the floor, and said they couldn’t run because they would fall. This is how dress marks us in our everyday lives here; the thobes and abayas don’t allow for running, pushing, lifting, or any other semi-manual labor. They make for great gliding however, as women’s feet are hidden, and girls from a young age learn to walk in small, mincing steps, designer handbags dangling from the crook of their arms. There isn’t any sense of the egalitarian idea of shifting identities – I may be a plumber during the day but at night I can be whatever I want, all I have to do is change my clothes – you are what you wear, essentially.

 

There were two volunteers, eventually however, and this was even more interesting. One was sharp: the microphone was right there when someone needed it. She moved swiftly (even in her abaya) and stood to the side as the speaker said whatever was on his/her mind. The other was much more timid. And although she stood against the wall and made to approach several speakers near her, she never did actually hand the microphone to anyone. She was shy and the distances too far for her to travel.

 

“I might meet my husband,” one person said, as I asked her why she didn’t want to help us out (it was a long day and these handlers were on their feet for an hour at a time).

 

In the end she turned me down; I guess he’ll just have to wait until another day.