Eastward to Doha

Concave and Convex

Multiple times in the last month I have been asked how I “made it” for four years here. My colleagues at Northwestern are ending their first or second year “on the ground” in Doha, and most of my former colleagues at Georgetown who arrived at the same time I did have left already. So when I speak of 2006, the year I arrived, its like I’m an old lady talking of a distant yester-year.

How does one manage, then? It is a story of architecture, this mode of endurance: the architecture of a city, a soul, and a society. It all depends upon what you are able to build and un-build.

Concave and convex

Doha life occurs within a convex fishbowl. Everyone sees everyone do everything, in the traditional sense of a fishbowl, because ultimately it is a small town and a small country. Then, like starring at a foggy reflection on the convex back of a spoon, we are also privy to an exaggerated version of everyone’s faults: big noses, crooked eyebrows, receding hairlines, and proliferating wrinkles—actual and metaphorical—which happen to stick out like sore thumbs in the convex fishbowl, because everything is exaggerated and distorted. We live together in housing compounds and apartment buildings; we work together in the hallways of the university; we socialize together on the weekends; we ride too many elevators together. It’s like being in undergraduate college again, except instead of playful gossip, because we’re old, cynical, and tired, when we get together everyone just complains about everyone else. Our faults grow large.

Home sweet home; my convex apartment building.

These conversations create that convex fishbowl, and they have spoiled many fish dinners. The predictability of these exchanges has made me hesitate to go out to dinner with my colleagues. We become both the bored onlookers and the bored goldfish swimming around in endless circles, having the same conversations over and over again, forgetting how to say nice things about each other, and only vaguely remembering how we still sound the same as we did last time. When you see someone in the hallway, the elevator, or the front driveway, its hard not to think about how so-and-so was complaining bitterly about him or her the night before. And then everything goes bitter.

Concave mirrors, unlike convex fishbowls, turn everything upside down. Look at yourself on the front side of a spoon, and the world goes the other way around. Every time I drive by Doha’s recently completed concave skyscraper, I am put at ease that at least one architect got it right: if you reflect Doha upside down, it can be lived, and you might also be able to endure the sight of your own reflection. 

Tornado Tower

The developers decided to name it “Tornado Tower,” given its spiraling outer décor. The wind blows in a straight line here, never around in circles. But it’s a nice thought something might come full circle, if only hypothetically. New buildings are all hypothetical; no one knows what place they will really fill until the whole landscape fills in around. And that will take a while yet in Doha.

2006, a sunny day

 

2010, a gritty air day

Enduring the sight of your own reflection in Doha is no easy task, and the convex fishbowl makes that worse. The ambient laziness scrapes at the protestant soul. Life requires no physical discomfort: from house to car to office, everything is brand new and upgraded, air conditioned, more spacious, more luxurious, and more cushy than anything before or after your Doha chapter. Swimming pools are cooled in the summer, because the sun makes them too hot to endure. Lawns and trees are excessively irrigated. SUVs dominate the highways. Hopping on a plane to fly six hours somewhere for a weekend doesn’t yield a second thought. Flying 15 hours for a two-day conference is routine, twice a year minimally, and paid for by the Foundation. Taking time of off work is never a problem, and work is lite. Not light, but lite. Most Qataris can be found in their offices from 8 am to 12:30pm. If I spend six hours at the office, I consider it a long day.

 

Thousands of years ago the Arabs built the first Dhow sailboats, convex.

This one is at a boat graveyard in Al Wakra.

To add to the carbon count, recycling bins only appeared about a year ago, and occasionally disappear, while rumors are rife that the contents are just thrown away with the trash after the American and European expats have been made to feel better about themselves for using them. No one knows where the paper, cans and plastic go. A colleague who teaches science told me that per capita water intake in Qatar is five times the global average. The price of gas for the car has not changed in four years; it’s still about 30 cents a gallon. Fresh fruits, vegetables, flowers, and every kind of food you can imagine is flown in daily from northern and southern hemispheres, so nothing is ever out of season. Occasionally wares disappear from the store shelves, but this is supply chain management inefficiency, never about cost.

The trees you’d have to plant to offset this carbon-crazed existence might cover Rhode Island.

The IMF identifies Qatar as the world’s richest country, with an average annual income around $80,000 per person. A colleague doing research on the politics and economics of the Gulf recently told me that the IMF number is actually very distorting, because it calculates into that average the salaries of ex-patriot workers, including close to a million poorly paid construction workers. If you recalculate that figure to include only Qatari passport holders and citizens, the per capita income is closer to an average of $450,000 a year. That’s what you feel on the streets, as the workers are hidden away on the outskirts in crammed temporary housing.

The waistlines of locals and expats alike (except those construction workers) are just as bloated as everything else; a tax on carbs is needed as badly as a tax on carbon. The New York Times recently found interest in Doha’s obesity levels, likely due to the connection with Cornell Medical School, part of Education City and tasked to do longitudinal studies of health issues, including birth defects from cousin marriages and diabetes. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/middleeast/27qatar.html

Even jogging and riding my horse almost every day, consciously minimizing consumption, my clothes no longer fit. Its like the air makes you fat. And then there are the wrinkles. While the humid salty air has been good for the pores, the last four years have brought lines all over the face.

The concave building, like a concave mirror that turns everything upside down, has its aesthetic appeal because it’s the antithesis of convex Doha.

 

Another recently completed part of the Doha skyline, convex

Horse Plane Ticket!

Import-Export Office

International child adoption must be easier. So must be abduction. But he has four legs, isn’t potty trained, and weights about a thousand pounds. If only I could tuck him under the airline seat…

 

 Since the day this creature chose me as his new owner, I’ve been traversing the canyons of confusion about how to give him his ‘Coming to America’ day. I have had the pleasure of learning many new biology lessons about equine venereal diseases, a parasite with the beautiful name of ‘screw worm,’ the desirability of various tranquilizers, vaccination regimes, and how elevations of 30,000 feet affect the equine digestive system, which happens to be the same as with humans: constipation and dehydration.

 Along with biology class, there have been new courses in international relations, something I thought a PhD in political science might actually help me in understanding. But it turns out that when the US Department of Agriculture, the European Union’s veterinarians, and the Qatar Ministry of the Environment (apparently responsible for animal exports) try to agree on something, all the academic theories of alliances and trade regimes seem to be rendered non-sense. 

 

How could you leave him behind when he looks at you like this?

 

I have called the USDA at various intervals since I first decided this horse could not be left behind in the Qatari desert to an uncertain fate, which was more or less the day I bought him. Each time I got a different answer. When someone at the USDA animal import office finally picked up the phone—definitely not the first time I tried—I had an optimistic conversation with one Dr. Buck, who seemed to think that he needed three days quarantine when he arrived in the US, as long as a European vet did some certain sort of paperwork on top of the Qatar paperwork. Grand, I thought. That’s easy.

Then I called shipping agents. First scenario: 60 days in Dubai, then 7 days at US quarantine.  Second scenario: 15 days in Europe, then 37 days quarantine in the US. Third scenario: 24 hours in Amsterdam, 7 days quarantine in the US. The sixty days in Dubai had something to do with a fluctuating interpretation of the presence of African Horse Sickness in the Arabian peninsula. (But it turned out for these purposes, Qatar was not indeed part of the Arabian peninsula. Who knew?) The 15 days in Europe had to do with the European interpretation of Screw Worm, a disease easily treated with one dose of horse aspirin equivalent. The 37 days in US quarantine had to do with the American interpretation of an equine venereal disease known as CEM (contagious equine something-or-other). It’s sexually transmitted from stallions to mares and causes abortions, but apparently if he stands next to a European horse on a shipping pallet, to the USDA this counts as a possibly infectious scenario. (And no, they can't lose themselves to the air of springtime and eagerly jump the barrier between the compartments...quarters are too tight.) The Europeans were always a bit too promiscuous for Puritan Americans, even when they’re just standing next to you…

With the exception of African Horse Sickness, all of these diseases already exist in the US, and a recent CEM outbreak brought Kentucky breeding farms to a halt just a year ago. But laws lagging behind realities, they go onward with the quarantines, because if for nothing else, they raise a lot of revenue for the USDA.

When I was offered scenario #3 in mid-March of this year by a shipping agent, the shores of America seemed suddenly close, and in a great whiff of excitement, I gave the agency the go-ahead to start booking the trip. I felt like we’d be on a plane tomorrow.

But then the problem of international import-export regime cooperation moved out of the realm of the hypothetical into a new reality: getting actual people on the ground in Amsterdam (the European transfer point), JKF airport (the destination), and Doha (the origin) to agree on a set of procedures and blood tests.

I called the agent every few days: “I’m waiting on America.” “I’m waiting on Europe.” “I got word back from America, but now I’m waiting on Europe to respond again.” A few days turned into ten, and once word was confirmed that representatives on the ground would approve the horse’s health condition based on certain blood results, it turned out that the Qatari office that processed the final schedule was on vacation.

And here began the latest lesson in the culture and sociology of the Arab world. In a small country like Qatar, there actually is only one person who can organize the export blood tests in the whole country. His stamp, which only he can wield, is the only official one to get the process of blood tests underway. This particular vet was in Sydney, on vacation. (At least he wasn’t under the ash cloud in Europe!) When the agent announced to me that he had returned, I asked her if I should go to his office in person. “Oh, no,” she said. “I’ve emailed him.”

This is a laughable statement, which prompted me to call her boss, who explained to me she hadn’t done many shipments out of Qatar, and had really only done things out of Dubai. In the UAE, he explained in his British accent, things mostly worked normally. After apologizing for the slowness and explaining the problems they routinely encountered in Doha, he blurted out to me: “What’s wrong with that country, anyway?” I responded that I had been working here for four years, had been unable to answer that question, so I was leaving on the cargo pallet with the horse. He laughed. And told me to engage all local resources I knew to help out his inexperienced colleague.

One phone call and a trip to one vet clinic got me the cell phone number of the gate-keeping vet in question at the import-export office, recently back from his vacation.  One phone call to him, with the proper Islamic greetings in my pigeon Arabic, relevant (or irrelevant) thank you’s, apologies, flattery and reference to how the other vet who gave me his number was a good friend, he faxed me the paperwork within an hour. Nothing like a bit of kowtowing and obsequiousness to get things done... 

No small accomplishment, this.

Since the agent in Dubai had been waiting nearly ten days for this paperwork, and I managed to secure it in a couple hours, her embarrassment spurred her into action. The next morning, we had a shipment date: May 28^th. It was, indeed, about two weeks later than I had planned, but the international relations lesson and the Arabic sociology lesson had taken two weeks.

Closed doors. The usual.

At seven a.m. the next morning, I was at Dr. Yousef’s office, going over paperwork and planning the blood tests. When I gave him my business card and he saw that I was a professor, he asked what I taught at Qatar Foundation. When I responded “politics,” he chortled and responded: “That’s trouble!”

The Color Gatorade

It has been around long enough now that we stop seeing the yellow. But when it first went up at the beginning of this academic year, all we could see in every direction was that yellow, the color of lemon-lime gatorade. It is the Qatar Foundation's attempt at an international publicity campaign to promote their goal of making people THINK. Or at least to start thinking, according to one of the signs up in Education City. Whether the 'eye-catching' color was a well thought-out plan, however, is questioned by the aesthetic senses. Big plastic letters on the grass, signs on every light post, gigantic billboards, t-shirts and placards--all yellow.

   

 

 My personal favorite: the THINK campaign in Dulles airport in Washington, DC, next to an ad for a wine bar. It can also be seen in London Heathrow. 

 

Westward from Doha

After a vacuum of silence for most of two years, it occurred to me on the way work today that the final thirty days in Doha might be worth chronicling. There could be a few before and afters, some new landscapes, and more odd stories. There's the gatorade campaign and the potential of melting astro-turf; more construction and destruction; more pictures filled with monochrome landscapes; more facades, visual and otherwise; some meditations on how money can't buy happiness; near-death driving experiences; and some more flying horses. At least the blog is something to do during the commercial breaks while I am servicing my new addiction to various television series re-runs from years ago that are now being broadcast here...

Story #1: This is a plant I bought, growing with the building outside of my window. The plant died when I went away for a week, but the blossoms dried crisp on the plant, making it look alive when its actually dead. Very Doha.