to my summer world: what I want you to know

This is some of what is under the surface of the me you’ll be seeing again in a few weeks, the parts that may be different from people making the transition within the US. 

This place I’ll be for the summer is possibly my favorite in the world, both for its natural beauty and that people there who are making a conscious effort to support each other, work hard, and have fun creatively. No matter how beloved, it is worlds away from where I am right now and it will take a certain amount of adjustment to settle in again. I want to think I can just shrug it all off, leave my Doha-self in Doha, but I know from experience that I can’t and probably shouldn't anyway.  I’ve come back to this place from many different countries and adventures over the years and it's in these transition times that I am the most challenged and learn the most (when I will start learning from staying in one place for a number of years remains to be seen…). 

I am coming from the desert. Right now, and until I leave, it’s over 100ºF every day and the horizon is always a hazy dusty yellow every direction. I haven’t seen a forest since last August. I haven’t climbed a hill that you would call a hill since last August either.

Most of my interactions here are with people who are not from my home culture, and with whom I don’t share a first language.  One thing I like about living abroad is being able to tune out conversations around me because I can’t understand them. It is so exciting to be around people with whom I share fluency in the same language, but also awkward and exhausting.

I know there will be discussions this summer about privilege and race and class. I know people where I’m going are concerned about long-term structural inequalities in the US.  I remember from last summer that it was hard to take part in these conversations at first. For the past two years my framework for that has been built in a very different place and from a different point of view than I would have had in the US.

I’ve been working on understanding privilege over the past few years and living here has helped me think about it from the less-privileged point of view –as a woman and a non-Qatari, though there are many further down the privilege scale than me here, including workers from South Asia, Africa, and East Asia. The anger expressed in my own home country, where having more relative privilege somehow made it harder to see the problem, is making more sense.

I get frustrated here by having to behave according to cultural expectations of a people who seem to have an overwhelming sense of entitlement.  Since I have lived here the respect I’ve gained for the generosity and kindness of some Qataris has been vastly outmatched by my experiences with the reckless and rude behavior of some others.  Most of this I experience on the road but some also in how I have witnessed Qataris treating shop clerks and from reports of abuse of domestic workers in Qatari households (http://dohanews.co/after-assault-in-qatar-indonesian-domestic-worker-returns-home/). This country often does not seem to be a healthy place, for Qataris or foreigners.

From this other-side-of-the-world point of view I’m proud of my country, proud of the work and dialogues taking place there.  I miss those here, especially within the upper-class international expat community where we almost never talk about race or privilege and only rarely about class, even though all those things affect our lives every day.

So give me a couple of weeks to get used to hills and native-English-speaking community and courteous drivers again.  Let me let my soul catch up with me so I can be present for important discussions, and be patient while I try to make my point of view more locally relevant. 

I know we’re all coming from very different places, both our environments and what’s inside our heads.  I’m so looking forward to seeing old friends, meeting new ones, and hearing about where you’re coming from, too!