on critical incidents, slow lessons, and being an ambassador (sort of)

I've been thinking about intercultural everything lately and my deliberate and accidental studies on the subject, also about what it means to be perceived as a representative of a place and religion that I don’t feel comfortable representing. Ever since we put up our Christmas tree my kids have been bringing in their friends from our block to show them, and the Filipino manager of our compound was clearly heartwarmed when he came in to check on maintenance and saw it.  Both subjects lead me down the same path of having to be secure in myself to be able to handle the rest of the world.

A key part of my undergrad studies at the School for International Training was recognizing “critical incidents” in intercultural situations and trying to extract learning from them.  It was a challenging and uncomfortable assignment, as the critical incidents tended to be experiences that we’d otherwise want to forget as soon as possible- times we had committed some kind of embarrassing faux pas in an intercultural situation.  It’s only now that I’m teaching my kids, and that they are old enough to both reflect on their own mistakes and resist the whole process, that I’m really coming to appreciate the value of the exercise. 

Moving to Qatar is my critical incident, so far. I’m sick of the way moving so frequently makes me feel constantly a little off-kilter, but every so once in a while I get this little break where I have the time and space and presence of mind to reflect on where I’m at and I realize that I’m a hell of a lot stronger/more resilient/more tolerant than I was before I started in on this latest endeavor.  I don't linger on it, but it's a relief to be able to remind myself. Qatar's a critical incident because the more prickly and misfitted and grouchy I get as I struggle to get my bearings and support my kids (while trying to take it out on them as little as possible), the more I learn, and the steadier I feel in the moments in between that are thankfully getting longer and longer. 

Maybe I was just coasting along and the universe or whatever you want to talk about a force greater than each individual being (or the great force within each individual being) noticed I was not working hard enough and tried having me move around the world for 10 years or so. That was a good start but there was still more to learn, so then I got a couple of other jolts (which I choose not to share here), and I still didn’t get it. Finally we landed in San Francisco, which I tried valiantly not to care about (“these are not my hills! this is not my home!”) and fell in love with anyway… just in time for that home to be torn away from us/me.  I ended up being faced with a move to a country that was very near the bottom of the list of places I would ever consider living.  Still, at its very core, my nature is optimistic and curious. I figured that there must be something interesting about this new place even if my first impression was of a contrived artificial urban desert, heavy on consumerism, populated mainly by expats who are only biding their time until they can afford to go home again. Maybe it took this big of an upheaval in my life to start understanding the lessons from decades ago.  Maybe I’m a slow learner, and I’m thankful to be given the time to keep working on them.

The trick with the critical incident thing, that I hadn’t really understood before, is that it’s not an excuse to beat yourself up over whatever intercultural faux pas you just made- that just leads to wanting to retreat back to a more familiar milieu or at least avoid all the people involved.  It’s a chance to learn more about and share more with people and environment, adjust your behavior, and move on.

I’ve also been thinking about how I don't feel like an adequate representative for my very large and diverse home country or a religion in which I have not been an active member, if I can be said to be a member at all.   As far as I know we’re the only non-Muslim family in our compound.  I love the immersion of it, but I’ve wondered how we’re skewing the neighbor kids’ ideas of what an American is, and now that we’ve got a Christmas tree up we’re representing Christians too, though we don’t follow the precept of a particular church. Every time I get into a taxi I ask the driver where he’s from and usually he asks me, too.  Then when I say America he often smiles and says “America, it’s very good there?” and I invariably say, “it’s a big country, lotta people, there’s good and bad.”  More and more it doesn’t bother me that much now when people see me as expert on all things American, and now Christian, thanks to the tree.  Even if by some accounts I’m misleading people by not being a “typical” version of whatever it is I’m representing to people, I’m only offering up chances to learn down the road.  We are all critical incidents.  We learn by untangling our own confusion.  

In other news, my kids have been offered places at our chosen international school here so this first adventure in homeschooling will soon be over.  It has been like opening a door that seemed like it was leading to something small and limited and finding a big world I hadn’t even known existed on the other side, reminding me to not worry too hard about things I don’t yet know about. Despite my misgivings and disorganization and struggle with curriculum, I think we’ve done this right, maybe by mistake, maybe because most things, carried out with good intentions and focus on progress, no matter how slow, turn out to be their own path to something new. 

time for a love letter

I’ve spent so much time working over my apprehension about moving to Qatar and what has challenged me since I arrived. Previous moves have taught me to gravitate to people who are genuinely interested in exploring country and cultures and to limit time with people who complain- so I’m not too proud of all the whining I’ve done during this transition.  Moving from the hotel in the midst of the city center’s tall glassy towers to a house in a small compound has improved my state of mind more than I had thought possible.  I wasn’t aware of quite how much that hotel-living had eaten away at me until I realized that I couldn’t even bring myself to look at our former home as we drove by the other day.  The cooler weather and the freedom to go places on foot, under a wide-open sky, are welcome gifts.

I even appreciate (though I don’t want to dwell on) the extreme experiences of life here, as they help me be grateful for anything even slightly more moderate- extreme temperatures, isolation, traffic.  The heat when we first arrived was so intense that we could not survive more than about 20 minutes outside. Trapped indoors in air conditioning, I questioned why people would choose to live where they have to be on virtual life support half of the year.  Feeling so cut off from social interaction outside my family for weeks at a time has made me value interactions with friendly strangers that much more.  No longer stuck in a maze of high rises and traffic-choked streets, we are thrilled to be on foot going to parks, the supermarket, and neighborhood exploration. This post owes its existence to the mood boost from a simple trip to the clinic.  It was two whole hours that included walking there and back and, most importantly, talking with other adults who weren’t in my family- one guard, one receptionist, one doctor, and several medical technicians.

clinic with my kids after two weeks of moving and staying close to home.

To be fair, even the beginning days were not all isolation and heatstroke. I love how being in a new place with few familiar reference points can feed our imagination.  Our early weeks in the hotel we talked about what the shiny skyscrapers looked like to us- like comparing shapes in the clouds- was the one sheathed in a metallic grate a seltzer bottle?  A pickle?  A narwhal pointing its snout at the sky? If I blurred my vision a little bit, in the fancy part of the mall in the evening, it looked like there were dozens of weddings and funerals going on all at once with the women in their black abayas like mourners and the men in their white robes like brides. 

I have not yet met an expat who says that Qatar is an easy place to move to, but I feel so lucky that the first community in which I found a place was that of the home schooling families, who are remarkably positive-minded about the challenge of living in Doha.  Doha's expat community has long since outgrown its educational offerings, so for the time being my children are studying from home. Fortunately the home education network here is very strong and we hooked up with it right away.  The other home school parents are from all over the world, and have a variety of reasons for making the choice to do this.  They are a very supportive and generous community and are keen to look for learning opportunities everywhere, in contrast to the often-insular community of big international schools. I would not have realized this if I hadn't joined the homeschooling ranks, so I appreciate this choice that was kind of forced on us, grateful that we're trying this and expanding our awareness of what's possible. 

I’m enjoying renewing my awareness of a wider world. This is the third country where we’ve lived which has a majority of the population believing in Islam, but the most traditionally observant.  We spent the last five years in the USA, where for many, the word “terrorist” is a synonym for “extremist,” which was rarely far from the word “Muslim.” Here, surrounded by a diversity of Muslim culture from Arabia, South and Southeast Asia, Europe, and North Africa, I’m more aware than ever that terrorism is as little a part of Islam as it is part of any major faith, and more firmly convinced that terrorists are violent people who are using a faith (whichever one they choose) as an excuse for causing mayhem and destruction. 

I love the international diversity of the people I meet every day. My neighbors in this compound are all North African/European, I just found out that the compound down the street is full of Danes, the taxi drivers are mostly S Asian: Nepali, Sri Lankan, Indian, and Bangladeshi, sometimes African: so far Nigerian and Ethiopian. Receptionists and shop clerks are often Filipino, nannies are most of those and Indonesian as well, the guards I’ve talked to have been Kenyan and Ugandan.  

What first seemed like either a sterile desert or artificially maintained greenery is starting to reveal tenacious life. The feral cats here are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen- orange cats with light blue eyes, others with spots like cheetahs.  We found this amazing locust on a fence near the beach today.  As winter advances on the Northern hemisphere, migratory birds have begun to show up. We’re looking forward to exploring more along the coast and hopefully seeing more birds and sea creatures. 

It’s still premature to make any judgments about my latest home, but I know I need to make an effort to appreciate it, for the exercise of it, to prevent me feeling like I’m one of those people I have no patience for who can’t stop complaining, and to check in with later on, in case I need to be reminded what there is to love about this country.  This is only the beginning of that list, anyway. 

Snapshot, six weeks into Doha

Frustrations, Delights, and Questions

Homeschooling, moving, readapting to being a two-parent household, new roles for everyone, can we survive this?(yes)

Settings. A two-bedroom suite 32 floors above downtown Doha (only temporary until we are assigned a house in a compound), a view over the curve of the Corniche.  The pool, several malls, ice skating rinks, another pool, stuck in traffic in violently perfumed taxis, yet another pool.  Hot streets framed by curved glass towers. 

Cast. We are all expats.  I have yet to speak to a real Qatari.  Our taxi rides are a geography lesson with drivers from Bangladesh, Philippines, Nepal, Ghana, Sri Lanka, and India.  We are here for the glorification of and at the mercy of our hosts (and to make enough money to eventually move back, or on, hopefully to a place where there are green plants and cool water).  I love being surrounded by people from somewhere else, but I'm not sure that solidarity is felt by everyone. While we expats are diverse internationally, it doesn’t seem to solve the problems I was talking about in this post.  Teachers, administrators, managers, etc. are nearly all American and European (though not all white), while guards, gardeners, nannies, maids, construction workers, store clerks, etc. are overwhelmingly South Asian, Southeast Asian, and African. I'm already curious about what the kids will take away from this aspect of this stage of their lives. 

Awkward first days. The elation of meeting a new friend who seems to be a kindred spirit, the dejection of realizing that a long awaited event was missed due to miscommunication, or traffic, or an ear infection. I’ve started running into people I’ve met before but rarely recognizing them.

Small Pleasures. Finding beautiful seashells in the sand excavated from a ditch at a construction site.  Spotting a friend at the mall. My older daughter teaching her little sister how to swim underwater, both so so proud. Recognizing where I am by familiar landmarks out the taxi windows.  Sunshine every day.  Frangipani.  

School. The international schools to which we would consider sending the kids are unbelievably expensive, have lengthy waitlists, and require assessments to ensure no child with any kind of special needs will get a place.  What a racket.   We’ve narrowed our choices down to one and are homeschooling while we gather the requisite school records from the five schools my kids have attended over the past three years and fill out applications in preparation for our tenure on the waitlist.  I am reserving judgement on whether or not homeschooling is a good match for our family, until we’ve moved into a larger space and completed a few more months of it.  So far, it appears to be beyond my abilities to give adequate attention to a 4 year-old, a third grader, and a sixth grader, using a curriculum that is very hands-on, parent-involved, and, unfortunately, nature based- the sixth grader's science assignment this week is to find three natural places to take 15-minute walks. 

My Clothes.  What to wear?  Cover shoulders and knees always, cover more if I know the A/C is going to be set to glacial, but what to wear to the pool?  Should I cover my tattoo?  What’s the line between respect and conformity?  I am obviously a foreigner and as long as I’m covering the necessary parts I want to feel like myself, in my own colorful clothes. I know I'm partly just being silly and grouchy. 

Their Clothes. Women who are all covered up except for their eyes still disconcert me.  I respect people’s right to choose what they wear according to their faith and/or style sense and I’m willing to adapt my own dress so as not to offend people but the full-body monochromatic cover thing is proving hard to get used to.  The first week we were here a man, his wife, and their two children got onto the elevator with us.  The man was in his long white robes and white headscarf, the woman was covered except for her eyes, and the kids were dressed like mine.  I only realized when I got off the elevator that I had talked to the man but hadn’t even made eye contact with his wife, ignoring her, because all covered up and quiet, she didn’t seem to be really there. The next day, on my early morning walk, I had to force myself to greet a group of women who again only had their eyes showing.  The lack of familiar body language cues was entirely intimidating, but as soon as I said hello they replied and started chatting about the strangely shaped skyscraper next to us. It made me remember –somehow from Liberia especially, but other places too- that sometimes the most unfriendly expressions are really just from people being guarded with a stranger and it wouldn’t take more than a smile or a hello to transform our relationship.  Maybe it will be easier if I think about it that way. 

Partnering. My husband was here on his own for over two months before we joined him.  During the first weeks after we arrived I was happily shocked to find him cooking dinner for the whole family, doing all the laundry.  Six weeks later he’s going to work, coming back, going to the gym, playing with the kids, putting them to bed, reading the paper, reading a book, watching TV, checking the internet.  This evening I can’t say I panicked but I did use more bad words and slamming appliance doors than was warranted by my own clumsiness, when I realized I had done nearly all the food-preparing, cleaning up, laundry, arranging the education and social schedule and taking care of necessary logistics.  For a brief while I let myself wonder again if this is a team effort or just a one-mom-show with an occasional guest star, and why I’m doing it here.  Then back to yes, of course we are a team, but we’re still working out (again) what this means.  Working on patience, as always.

Parenting.  Kids force involvement. Riding lessons, skating at the mall, attempted soccer ball kicking in an empty lot, pool play dates, any and every invitation accepted. We’re still in each other’s business way more than necessary, kind of like those chickens who start pecking one another’s feathers off when their quarters are too cramped.  I know I need to back off when they’re fighting with each other but looking at me, waiting for me to take their side.  My headache seems nearly constant.  But aren’t we homeschooling?  What??!  Why? Yes, but somehow those parts of the day are different, in moments.  

Advice. Read this again and be patient, you are rocking towards balance.