state of the repat, one year in

I’m trying to write about what it’s like a year into repatriation without giving advice on how to get here*. It wouldn't help to hear there will have been unexpected growth and grounding when you’re only six months in and it’s the dead of winter and you still don’t have any friends in your tiny village (why did I think I would be happy in a tiny village anyway after decades living in cities??) and you’re missing all your old friends like crazy.

Maybe this is more about commiseration with other people who've made it through a year and might recognize themselves a little bit, and maybe also for those of you about to leap to help you, during the part while you’re wrenching yourself away, pretend it will be ok later. It will be ok, but it will also be much worse, in ways you didn’t expect. And then it will be spring again and the neighbors will come out of their houses in your tiny village and they will be friendly after all. And you’ll be able to think back to this time last year and remember how wretchedly wrenched you felt and all scrambled up about home and identity and what you wanted new people to know about you and on top of all that there was no furniture in the house. What a blessed relief that part is over. 

So for my cohort of yearling repats and those about to leap, I’ll say this: it got better and I didn’t realize how until I let go of trying to recreate things I’d lost. My Doha expat routines and community simply cannot be replicated in rural Vermont.  I made it through the year thanks in part to Netflix, sugar, a few friends both here and far away who did some propping up, a couple of snow adventures, and, now that spring has come: lakes, a paddleboard, and acceptance of this new version of home and my evolving place in it.

*I don’t like to write to give advice, because for the most part I like learning by doing. I don’t like reading what smug people write, from the other side of the problem, about how I should best navigate it. Does it even help to read those lists of things that dying people regret? They didn’t figure this out until they were old and certainly not from someone telling them. It’s related to letting go of being able to talk your kids through all the hard parts. They need to do some of their own messing up.  We only provide the base. I’m only starting to get a hint of how my older kids are choosing to navigate the world and all I’ll say for now is that I’m mostly very relieved, especially about the oldest one because it’s the first one that’s probably the most mis-parented. If he’s lucky he’ll get a good graphic-novel-memoir out of it.

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!

into the glare

Spring in Doha is bringing out the worst in me, and I mostly blame the heat. It's so hot here these days that I wish there were another word for it that conveys more about the flesh-searing, sweat-soaking oppression of it all. Air conditioning is our life support again. An open door can heat a house in seconds. Forget the sunshade on the windshield and your steering wheel will raise blisters on your fingertips. 

Last week the temperatures rose to 100ºF and higher every day and I vowed that it wouldn't keep me inside. "Take that, deadly weather!" I thought as I found a hat to wear, bought a spray bottle, filled my backpack with water bottles, and set out into the glare. I've written here and here about how it's walking that keeps me feeling human in the ways I want to be human- finding beauty, both accidental and by design, and staying aware of and connected to the cycles of people and plants and animals around me. Covering ground by driving, as I've written here, makes me feel human in all the worst ways: furious and terrified.

I took four great, if sweaty, walks and felt triumphant. I started this post and included some friendly suggestions about how to survive a walk in the extreme heat, and how very rewarding it is to be outside regardless of weather.

And then yesterday I had 90 minutes to kill before an art class. It was 7:40am when I set out, only 95ºF. I headed south along a route I'd walked before but kept coming across new alleys I could not resist. By the time I decided to start looping back, an hour later, it was over 100º. I bought water and a spray bottle at a store and kept on hustling back to my art class where I collapsed in the air conditioning. Really unpleasant symptoms of heat exhaustion set in as the class went on and I spent the rest of the day just wrecked. I had taken little of my own advice above- no water, no spray bottle, no hat, few places to stop to buy refreshments and cool off, and most of the taps on the outsides of mansion walls had run dry. The sun humbled me and I'm grateful it wasn't worse. Starting tonight, my walks will take place after dark.

Here are some photos from what may be my final daytime walk until fall. You'll notice that there are no humans in them, as most sensible people were not out.

one of the alleys that led me astray, so shady and inviting

The African Village

The first time I went to the waterpark here I noticed that the area for the smaller kids is called the African Village.  It has a shallow pool and slides and sprayers with a wild animal theme: elephants, snakes, giraffes, a frog. One of the elephants has on a blond wig and a blue bikini.  Another wears a fez. Another, the one with the biggest smile, doesn’t wear anything at all. It’s a mythical version of Africa that has friendly wild animals and bright colors, but no humans apart from the lifeguards.

If this was at an American waterpark someone would sooner or later take a picture and name and shame to point out, and rightly so, that Africa is a huge continent with numerous complex and diverse human societies, and that making this corner of the park a jungle-themed  "African Village" was just another in a long line of ways in which Africa is marginalized, minimized, and generally disrespected on a global level. There would be an active campaign to put it out of business or at least rename and redesign it. There are so many layers to be offended about if you feel like causing a ruckus.

I've also noticed that most of the lifeguards at the water park are African, though I don’t know their nationality. A few days ago I went back with my kids and made a point of asking the lifeguard by the African Village one of the most common questions in Doha: “what is your country?” She said Kenya. I asked her how she felt about the African village, if it resembled her home at all, whether she lived in a city or a more rural place. I expected her to be offended by the Aqua park’s representation of an entire continent as a few wild animals. She said no, she didn’t mind that it bore no relation to her home- she was happy to see something that mentioned Africa at all. 

I agreed with her that it must be nice to have a pleasant reference to one’s home, as an American bomber roared overhead after taking off from the nearby air base.

celebrating 41 in Doha

Two years ago I decided to celebrate my birthday with a walk of as many kilometers as I was old. I started at Stinson Beach and for two days climbed over and around hills overlooking the ocean all the way back to my home in San Francisco. I planned to celebrate my 40^th the following year by being brave enough to do miles instead of kilometers, starting at the tip of Pt Reyes, camping along the way back to SF. And then Doha happened. I gave up on making the big walk a tradition and did this instead.

I used to learn all my new homes on foot. I stopped when the first kid began walking and then by the time he could keep it up for a reasonable distance he had a little sister just starting. When we moved to Vietnam the two were nearly three and nearly five- finally big enough to cover significant ground between snack breaks. One of our first days there we rode the hotel shuttle as far as it would take us and then walked home through bustling streets.  We didn’t let the third one slow us down at all, just popped her in a pack until she would walk too. We walked a lot of miles in the Atlanta area and San Francisco Bay area, but then we moved to Doha.  We arrived in August, when it was so hot that more than 15 minutes outside seemed unsurvivable. The streets here are wide and designed to facilitate vehicle traffic. Even where there are sidewalks they can be obstructed, without warning, by construction in the middle of a block, forcing pedestrians to take their chances in the road. We spent the first five months being shuttled around in taxis that stuck to the main roads, so that is what I did too when I finally got my license.   It wasn’t until the kids were all in school that I made an effort to start walking again, and I started to learn my way around more back streets and feel like I was finally starting to orient myself at ground level (more about this here).

Suddenly in January I realized that I might be able to do a big walk (and enjoy it!) in Doha after all. I experimented with different paths using Google maps and MapMyRun and found a circle that started and ended at my home, meandered through some interesting neighborhoods, and equaled roughly 41km for my 41 years. I couldn’t measure exactly because I knew I’d be cutting across empty lots and down alleys that mapping programs didn’t recognize, but I wasn’t that hung up on exact distances anyway.

Friday morning a friend and I left my compound by the back gate and set off down roads and alleys and across empty lots. We stopped to rest on a couple of patches of green grass and paused frequently to take photos of whatever caught our eyes. We watched Aspire tower shrink behind us and West Bay loom larger and larger ahead until we reached the sea. There we turned our backs on the skyscrapers and let the wind blow us the last couple of kilometers to Souq Waqif where she left to rejoin her family and I checked into the hotel where I would spend the night.  A few hours later I met some of my drawing friends by the dhow harbor for some sketching and then a few more joined us for a delicious Lebanese dinner in the souq. One friend had told us how to go to the roof terrace of a nearby hotel and I made plans to have that be my first stop the next morning.

Saturday I left my hotel early and alone to walk home through old Doha and some southern suburbs.  The view from the top of the Hotel Mercure gave me a new perspective on the work that is happening to transform the Msheireb neighborhood from crumbling old houses on narrow streets to a shiny new multi-use development.  Streets we had walked just a month before were already barricaded and the houses were being demolished. I descended back to street level and headed into bustling streets and alleys, staying alert to vehicles forcing their way through and stagnant puddles from leaks.  I hadn't walked through this area alone before and while I never felt unsafe, I was quite aware that of all the people busy in the streets of Old Doha that morning, I only saw two women there and both were accompanied by men.  After a few hours of walking the city around me changed. Newer compounds and larger houses lined the wider, mostly empty, streets. Now I kept an eye on Aspire tower as it grew nearer and taller and my glimpses of West Bay mostly came at major intersections. An hour's walk from home, I stopped to pat a friendly camel at the camel souq then cut through the Wholesale market, relieved to be back on familiar ground and feeling very footsore. I limped the last bit, with frequent stops to rest feet and attempt capture the way the sun was making everything, from demolition equipment to minarets, glow.

Here are some things that I expected, some of which I was looking forward to and some of which I wasn't: dust and wind, major road crossings,

doves,

cats,

spiral staircases,

camels (because I was not about to plan a route that didn’t include the camel market),

bougainvillea,

and interesting alleys:

Here are some thing I hadn’t expected, most of which I enjoyed, a few of which I didn't: the lizard,

the cool wind making whitecaps and pushing our tired selves along the Corniche for last leg of the first day,

the view from the roof of the Hotel Mercure looking out over the destruction of Old Msheireb and construction of New Msheireb (a little more about that here),

a friendly Qatari man in Abu Hamour who asked me about my picture-taking and walking and didn’t suggest I was crazy, a friendly Pakistani man in Msheireb who told me about the history of his neighborhood,

appreciation for small changes in elevation, wishing that photos could include sounds (calls to prayer, doves and mynahs) and smells (cooking, camels, petunias), a friendly Sri Lankan man tending a café who told me about his travels to twelve different countries and how he wasn’t allowed to make conversation with women while he worked, this demolition site -the ragged edges and bright colors of the rooms and how the other side of the building looked completely normal,

and the enormous blisters on the soles of my feet (you're welcome for not taking a picture of these).

It was not easy and there were parts that did feel like a slog, especially at the end, but I still felt pride at covering so much ground in a place that had me so defeated the year before. I spent the following day, which was actually my birthday, hobbling around and feeling very old but very satisfied with this year’s celebration and thinking ahead to next year’s, when I am thinking of leaving the city behind and braving the desert.

Here are some more pictures: