what will keep me here: finding imperfection

In the spring I got a new camera and wrote this. I still hated Doha but I was trying like crazy to find reasons to like it. It’s been a long process of working on liking this new home, by far the longest of any home yet. This may be the first post I’ve written in which I don’t feel like I’m trying to convince myself of something I’m not quite sure I believe.

Since then I’ve been exploring deeper into the junkyards and neighborhoods near our compound, and found sights that are a counterpoint to the rows of identical compound houses where I live and the sleek towers of West Bay. If I go out our back gate and walk a couple of blocks I find a property that doesn’t look quite finished, with a low house and a strip of single rooms on the side of it.  There’s a cage full of what might be pigeons out back and another structure, I’m not sure if it’s a residence or workshop.  In the parking area out front three falcons wearing hoods take their morning sun bath on stands amongst the pickup trucks. Around the corner is a weird log-inspired concrete edging holding in overgrown landscaping.  Walk a little further and there is a junkyard with debris from a stadium that’s being dismantled, some carefully stacked, some in teetering heaps.

This is beauty too, but not the kind that Doha advertises, not the kind I was expecting.  I’m starting to suspect I could make it through another year here after all.  I swore when I came back after last summer that I would not get on another plane unless I was planning to permanently leave this country. Then we went on a vacation over the New Year and while Oman was gorgeous, with mountains and wadis and dolphins, I was surprised to be happy to return to Doha. My superstitious flying self was relieved that the gods had forgotten my vow. 

One of my favorite mornings of the fall (second only to this one), just when my attitude started to turn imperceptibly from I hate this hell that is Doha to maybe oh maybe I could be happy here, was when I drove to an unfamiliar part of town to buy cranberries for my son’s school project.  I went a couple of hours before I knew the store was open so I could leave the car there and go for a walk while the air was still cool.  I turned left out the gate and then right, and soon got a little lost, making turns by whim.  It was an older part of town, with fewer compounds, more shops and narrower, busier streets than where I live.  It was grimier.  There were leaking air conditioners and a demolition site and even though everything was paved over, some green growth had managed to force its way through cracks here and there. It was a relief, somehow, to be somewhere so messy, which gave more sense of history and humanity and, despite the pavement everywhere, nature.

Even more recently I’ve been venturing further into old Doha, within a couple of blocks going from bright new high-rise apartment buildings to warrens between crumbling buildings overgrown with vines and laundry to more crumbling buildings being crushed by an excavator to make room for more high-rises. I go with a friend, we take lots of pictures, hoping to contribute to the record of a Doha that's steadily disappearing.

I don't really care about the shiny skyscrapers that make West Bay look like a futuristic spaceport and I'm fine with the soothing oldnew of Katara and Souq Waqif, but realizing there is ever more to discover in Doha than I'd imagined that grumpy first year is what will keep me happy here.

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Even the dust gives us these wild flaming sunrises.