repatriation, here we come! part one...

We’re moving and it’s a big one. For the first time in our history as a family we are not moving to a city, or to the site of a new job, or to a temporary home where we will wait for the new job to materialize somewhere else in the world.  We’ve bought a house in a little town in my home state, though not a town in which I’ve ever lived. A couple of years ago I might have described this as moving from a place I hate to a place I love but turns out Qatar is not just a place, it’s home, and I don’t hate it anymore, and that an imminent move to even a beloved place can produce a good number of concerns. 

Just lately I’ve become aware that I have a much better handle on my current life here than I will for at least the whole next year in the place we’re going. I resisted Qatar for so long that I thought I never quite considered it home, even as I learned my way around, made friends, and settled into routines.  There were hints that I ignored- like when I was happy to return to the wide-open streets and familiar routes after being away, or when I actually missed it from my green and cool summer in my home country last year.  Only now is it starting to be clear what an important home this has been and that no matter how much I am looking forward to where we are going, I will be sadder than I expected to say goodbye to it.

This move marks a shift away from living in a place with a fixed end date and ultimate move. I wonder how long it will take me to gain a more settled mindset. I don’t know if I ever can, though the fact that we’re moving for place rather than for job does make it seem like this home might hold us longer than the others have. Up until now I’ve observed that the point of view of settled people and that of more nomadic expat types is very different and while we can all be great friends, some things seem easy to them and are not for us and vice versa.  Messy transitions have been a part of life for us and while not easy, they are expected and the work involved is something we made a choice to do. That kind of uneasiness about the future is a much more painful weight on people who have rarely had to carry it.  We also have to refrain from belittling how overwhelmed they can be at making transitions as small as daylight savings time (Really? You’re complaining about a time change that didn’t involve transcontinental flight and culture shock? Sshhhh). We can’t take personally their suggestion that our children will never be able to put down roots anywhere since they’ve attended seven schools in three states, five countries, and nine years. I hope we can hold onto our resilience and broad perspective while we learn how to make a home last for longer than a few years.

Luckily there’s too much to do preparing for the move to let the worries be too distracting. When they start to pile up, I am grateful to social media and those friendships that have continued strong beyond the stints living in the same place. There is usually someone awake out there who will have the right response to my culture-confused trans-global existential angst, whether it’s a cartoon about not wearing pants, the wise-ass response I should (but shouldn’t) have said to the person who made that comment about roots, skimming off the drama by changing the subject, or even just a long line of hearts.

Onward and outward and homeward.  

From this clear water

to this clear water.

From these hills

to these hills.

From this road

to this road.

 And a most important reminder for anywhere:

between worlds: remembering and forgetting

At the beginning of the summer, not long after I arrived in VT, I wrote this:

I’d forgotten what it’s like to be cold, how green the plants are, how soft grass can be on my bare feet, the beauty of sun streaming across the green hills and fields and lighting up a dark thunderhead. So much color.

I’m remembering what it feels like to walk on the street in shorts and tank top, skin exposed to sun and breeze. Seeing my arms from shoulder to fingertip, my legs from mid-thigh down to my toes reminds me how strong they are, how much they can lift and how far they can carry me.

I’m feeling between worlds: the joy of being in the US when they make marriage legal for everyone, the horror that someone would go blow people up while they are praying in Kuwait, shoot people while they’re on vacation in Tunisia, while here I am taking advantage of a few hours of childcare to organize shelves of food and get stuff done. In Doha I can stop, read the news, have time to think about it and I have a very international community- Tunisian neighbors, friends who have lived in Kuwait. Here I am in my happiest place surrounded by green and hills but I miss my people of Doha. I just admitted for the first time that I would be sad if I heard that we weren’t returning after the summer, no matter how much I hate the traffic and the construction and the social system there, no matter that the sadness would come with relief.

And at the same time I wrote this, which I now realize applies to both Vermont home and Doha home,  especially these first days after returning:

It is so strange every time to be somewhere utterly familiar and totally foreign at the same time. These first days back in a previous home are so hard and so illuminating.

And then today, a week after arriving back in Doha to start our third and final year here, I wrote this:

I’m remembering again how it feels to be shut up inside on our life support of AC because outside the sun is trying to kill us. I’m remembering how covering up isn’t simply out of respect for my hosts, it’s also just good sense in this climate. I’m remembering that there are other colors for the sky than blue- dimmer, dustier colors.  Soon enough I’ll forget that clouds and hills can be normal too and how you have to think ahead about dew if you don’t want your shoes and cuffs all soggy for the rest of the morning. I’m already forgetting about what it feels like to have a constant stream of company in my kitchen, people who thank me for my work and offer to wash dishes. I’m remembering the peace and quiet of my house, cooking for five instead of forty, with the view out the window of my daughter in capris and a t-shirt sitting on the curb with girls in abaya and hijab.

I've realized that there is more about Doha that I liked than I realized.  I worked so hard at Doha this year. The summer before this one I went to Vermont with such relief to be away for a couple of months- I needed a full-on Doha-detox and I got it, so much so that I had a very difficult time returning. This past summer I missed it. The places that are the most challenging become important to us in their own way. Two years ago, after I’d only been there a month or so I posted this on Facebook: 

I still hate malls, traffic,  and indoor life in Qatar but there are also, surprisingly, plenty of things that I like, projects I’ve started and to which I looked forward to returning.

They’re impossible to compare, my Doha life and my Vermont life, but each one makes me appreciate aspects of the other, especially at these points when I haven't quite shed the one I was just in or fully rejoined the one to which I've returned.  

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!

unburdened and grounded by a day of drawing on the street

I feel utterly exposed those first few times I step out of my gate solo in a new country.  Accompanied by my kids I am a mother and while I don't mind that label, its duration is finite- as they get older, fewer of their activities involve me and without them by my side, a stranger couldn't tell by looking that I have any children at all. Walking down the street on my own, I wonder what the reaction will be from people I encounter… Will they ignore me? Will they start a conversation? Ask me where I’m from? Be distrustful? Assume my nationality and make judgments from there? How will they react to me as a woman? As a foreigner? As a white person? As time goes by and I get used to my new home, that nakedly vulnerable feeling goes away, but in certain countries -especially those like Qatar where there are more gender-specific expectations around behavior and dress- I never can forget that I am female and foreign when I am out in public.

Saturday I drove deep into the heart of the oldest part of Doha, a bustling noisy place where people live in tiny unlikely spaces and hole-in-the-wall shops sell nearly anything you might need, where there were more people on the street than I see outside in a week in my neighborhood, though not a single woman. It’s a mashup of old dingy buildings trailing wires and leaky pipes, grimy streets and alleys, uneven pavements, overturned garbage bins guarded by scrounging feral cats, and huge new construction projects that will slowly transform the area into a developers dream of luxury housing and expensive retail spaces, fountains, and greenery.  I couldn't help but feel that the city is losing something important, even if it is the nature of cities to recreate themselves, burying the old layers under the new.

I was there to join a day-long drawing class sponsored by the Msheireb Arts Centre, whose main project is “an artist-led initiative to record and collect a wide range of artefacts, stories and memories from Msheireb, Qatar’s earliest suburb, as the area undergoes extensive regeneration. The collection created from this ambitious salvage operation will be used as a resource for local and international artists, schools and community groups, so that the new development retains the memory and identity of Msheireb.”  Seven of us gathered at the Centre and then walked out into the neighborhood to draw. 

I’ve been taking a lot of photos lately, in an almost desperate bid to find enough beauty here to balance out my hatred of the Doha traffic and bewilderment at the Doha consumer culture.  It has certainly helped, but Saturday brought me a kind of peace that has transcended that. Standing there with a drawing board propped against my middle, my pencil busy, my gaze alternating between my paper and the alley before me, I wasn’t worried about being a woman or a foreigner. Men would walk by and sneak a glance at what I was doing.  Some would stop and stand behind me for a few minutes to watch. It was obvious what both artists and observers were doing, with little need for mistrust or guessing (though outsiders taking a close interest in the buildings of Msheireb can arouse some concern that demolition and reconstruction will follow). It was unlikely we had much language in common but it didn’t matter, as very few of the men said anything.

Drawing, for me, is a combination of deep observation and trust, examining the contours and planes and textures before me, choosing which to include and how to represent them on my paper. The trust part is about having faith that I can capture what I'm intending and build my initial sketch into something more interesting, even if it looks pretty ragged along the way.  Drawing outdoors in an alley and then on a busy street, surrounded by the sounds of birds, car horns, construction noise, traffic, shouts and conversation of people all around, the smells of exhaust, food cooking, and decay was all a world away from my previous experiences drawing figures and still lives at home and in classrooms. I loved it, and enjoyed the quiet company of those who came to watch. 

For one day, I shed most of the weight of gender and nationality and put on the lighter and more universally accessible label of artist, and I’m still marveling at what a relief it was.  I have no doubt that gender and race still played a part in how I was viewed but for once, it wasn’t primary.  Connecting with my surroundings, deliberately and deeply, was grounding in a way that’s rare in my life here, where I’m so often zooming around in the car or have my attention scattered by demands of three kids and household tasks.  Even photography keeps me at a certain distance and is more about moments captured than careful examination of a scene.

I’m very grateful for the day and looking forward to heading back into the streets to draw more.

gratitude, twelve ways

I've been doing a lot of complaining lately and so it’s time to do a Qatar gratitude post. Sure there are some other places I'd rather be but I am grateful for experiences I would not have had if I had not come here and for certain things that may be more abundant elsewhere but are that much more precious here because of their rarity.

I am grateful to be in Qatar because

1. frequently cloudless skies make moon-gazing easy.

2. frequently cloudless-skies make clouds that much more exciting.

3. the dusty horizon makes for stunning sunrises and sunsets, daily. 

rise

set

4. the kids go to a school that encourages the middle-schoolers to make these, and then festoons the palms with them.

5. there is peace, inspiration, and cool at the Museum of Islamic Art.

6. there is color, action, and surprise at Souq Waqif. 

7. I have an even more profound appreciation for green, from dusty to lush,

8. and for clear clear water,

9. and for this noise it makes.

10. camels.

11. horses.

12. (bonus) after years of never having a pizza cutter when I needed one, somehow we now have them in abundance, enough to share and give away!