The other perk granted to us as senior people in the organisation is that we are allowed to take holiday within ten months of starting work. A basic grade nurse, say from India or the Philippines, is not even allowed to leave the country within the first ten months.
Lionel, in his role as chief executive, is phoned at night by an immigration official to check that he approves one of his staff going home to visit a sick relative. Imagine the trepidation of a staff member waiting at the airport wondering whether she will be blocked from getting on the plane unless this has been clarified.
We assume the Residence Permit is a mere formality but subsequently understand that it is only granted after intense scrutiny by the Criminal Investigation Department branch of the Ministry of Interior. This varies depending on nationality. As Brits, it probably is cursory but for others, especially Shia Muslims from neighbouring states, it can take months. Qatar, like its neighbour Saudi Arabia, practises the strict Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam. Thankfully, the legal system and punitive methods are much more lenient: there are no beheadings and mutilations here.
A mobile phone is very necessary and we purchased ours on the first day. All business is done on it, including banking which is excellent (in spite of the shaky start), with text messages arriving instantly after every transaction. This can be galling for a wife if she shares a joint account with her husband as every purchase she makes is immediately communicated to the husband via his mobile phone. I am very relieved that we decided against joint accounts, though I am amused to learn that Lionel has been given an extra credit card.
“What is this for?” he enquires.
“For your wife, of course,” comes the reply.
Interestingly, I am not given an extra one for him. We receive a very personal service from our bank manager who even comes to our hotel one evening to get a signature, but only because things haven’t gone smoothly, for unexplained reasons. The rule of three here means that if you get a result within the first three attempts that is considered a stunning success.
Curiously, the coyly named Distribution Centre is the place for buying booze and in order to do so it is necessary to have a less coyly named Liquor Permit (a permit to drink alcohol, and therefore also to buy it). The amount spent per month on alcohol is strictly controlled and is related to salary, so the better paid are allowed to drink more, or so we’re told. We’re both allowed permits and the clerk who processes mine exercises inordinate care over taking my photograph. At last he is happy as he presents me with the permit. My image is appalling. I look like I need to be in rehab. It is enough to drive me to drink - perhaps they set up the photo shot like this to increase sales?
Another curiosity here is the ruling about traffic offences. If there are any outstanding parking fines or speeding tickets you are not allowed to leave the country. I can see that is probably fair enough, except that no one tells you that you have committed an offence. Therefore before travelling it is essential to visit the Traffic Violation Website, log in your car registration and see if you have offended. Lionel did this for me last week as a joke and was highly amused to find that I had been done for speeding. Needless to say, I swiftly paid the fine, which was administratively a doddle. Worked first time!
Now that we’re ‘official’ with our Residence Permits, driving licences and bank accounts, our farmhouse in the English countryside seems a long way away.
4. Sanctuary in the desert
At last, after three months, we have the house! But no furniture, no fridge, no cooker and everything is covered in a thick layer of fine dust. Our priority is to have the house deep cleaned in readiness for delivery of white goods and furniture, bought locally, a feat that brings its own challenges and surprises.
A cleaning company is recommended so I phone to arrange something. I hit a blank with all phone numbers, then amazingly someone rings back. She tells me in rapid broken English that she can send five Filipina women the next day. They will supply the tools but I must buy the cleaning materials.
She is also very insistent that I should meet her staff at a supermarket on one of the major roads. I explain that my knowledge of the geography of Doha is scant, that I have no idea where she means. However, I describe the nearest big landmarks: three schools, a driving school and a mosque. Since there are mosques everywhere this is probably unhelpful, but I also give our proximity to one of the ring roads and I provide the address. No one is ever interested in the address. I tried to explain our location on a map once and was roundly remonstrated with, “Don’t talk to me about maps!” To be fair, he had a point since the maps are all out of date and half the street names have changed anyway.
All directions rest on narrative and proximity to big landmarks such as petrol stations where there are fast food chains. The sat nav usually shows a blip in the middle of nowhere and there is no postal system as we know it, simply a central repository of PO boxes. So on the morning of our cleaning arrangement, we hold little hope of ever seeing them without some further discussion. Imagine our astonishment when at eight o’clock sharp, a car draws up and out tumble five diminutive Filipina maids dressed in identical pink tabards with the cleaning company’s logo emblazoned on the front.
They twitter like a flock of pink budgies and set to work. They request a stepladder for the chandelier (personally I would have described it as a light but this is not a time for quibbling). One of the blue-overalled men from the construction company produces a stepladder and within minutes we encounter one of the girls at the top of the ladder, leaning out of an upstairs window so that she can clean the outside. The health and safety implications of this manoeuvre are too horrible to contemplate, so we leave them to it and go off to the furniture souq with our friends from Manchester.
Lionel has to visit the utilities office personally in order to arrange for the house to be connected to water and electricity and Mr Khalid in Housing gives him instructions on how to locate it. He’s told to start at the Ramada roundabout, which is unhelpful since he doesn’t know where that is, but even more unhelpful when it is explained to him that actually there is no roundabout there anymore, nor is there a Ramada hotel, which has been demolished. So he has to find a random set of traffic lights where there used to be a hotel and a roundabout. Amazingly he succeeds, although it still takes several cajoling and pleading calls before we are connected to running water.
We all have a tendency to moan about Health and Safety back at home but here it is virtually non-existent. There are vast armies of blue-overalled construction workers. They cover their heads and faces with scarves to keep off the sun and dust and can be seen in the numerous Tata buses going home to their dormitory villages, which by all accounts are extremely squalid. Our own particular man lives in a hut on site and he is probably lucky. Whenever we arrive at the house he appears from nowhere and follows us around in case we need anything. We had a lot of trouble connecting to water and electricity and although he could do nothing about the former, a large spanner on the electricity company’s box seemed to do the trick so that we had power, although he switches it off when we go.
The problem seems to be a dispute between the hospital and the landlord, but eventually the housing man at the hospital and the landlord resolve their differences and a car from the utilities company pulls up outside the house. It is driven by an Qatari, with three Qatari passengers who sit there while an Indian worker leaps out and fixes our water connection and I proffer grateful thanks to them all. Of course the next day, although our huge water tank in the courtyard is full, we still have no water flowing out of the taps.
A blue-overalled man, head moving in a vigorous figure of eight, calls his boss and suddenly there are blue-overalled men everywhere: one on the roof, one walking along a narrow twelve-foot high wall from next door, another inside. The wall-walker is leaping from the wall onto the top of the water tank whereupon he produces some tools and starts dismantling the
wiring in order to get the pump to work.
This makes me very nervous, with visions of electrocution and worries about my resuscitation skills. But at least I’m assured that the electricity has been switched off and sure enough in a few minutes we have a filling header tank and functioning hot and cold running water, electricity and air conditioning. Oh joy!
This miracle hadn’t happened at the time of the deep clean and our visit to the souq had been interrupted by the cleaning company boss phoning me in a state of agitation because the water had run out. We’d hastily finished our business in the souq and returned to the villa where we found that the cleaners had drained the water from the header tank but were calmly brushing the courtyard and the inside was spotless.
Everyone was happy. They smiled and chattered and asked me if I was a Christian like them. They were delighted by my affirmative reply although I failed to mention the lapsed Catholicism, which was probably an unnecessary detail. In Doha itself there are only mosques: all the places of worship for other faiths - Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Jewish - are out of town, near the industrial zone.
I paid the cleaners the equivalent of about £200 for twenty-six hours work in total, Lionel slipped them a tip and they gathered on the pavement to await their car.
The house is clean but not yet liveable. We still need furniture and communication. We are expected to organise all this ourselves and the rule of three certainly applies.
Signing up for a telephone is a case in point. The service includes television and internet access and we are helped by a charming Qatari lady who guides us through the process of filling in the form. Then she stuns us by asking for our nearest landline. We tell her that there will be plenty and name the nearby school and mosque so that she can look it up. She looks at us in amazement and informs us that she has no access to those numbers and we must find a neighbour with a telephone then return to her office with the number so that she can process the order for connection.
We wonder if this is an elaborate hoax until we hear a customer at the next booth being given the same instruction.
Still, it makes us go and knock at a neighbour’s door, which is a good introduction and they fully understand about the phone number. We return to the telephone company’s office where the nice Arab lady tells us, “Now you will await a phone call giving you a date for installation.” So far, so good, except that we receive no call.
So Lionel phones and is informed that our account has been cancelled. Furious, I march over to see our helpful lady who investigates and apologises that the back office have failed to do their bit.
“But I will do it now and all will be well,” she says.
Several phone calls and two further trips to the office and we now have a date fixed.
Handsets are not part of the package so we buy a couple in the supermarket only to discover that they are not compatible with the wall sockets. This is a triumph for British marketing as all the phones sold here have European connections but all the wall sockets are British Telecom standard. Another trip to find telephone adaptors is necessary. Lionel volunteers and finds a helpful specialist telephone/electrical store where they attempt to change the connection on the phone.
The wrong plug is cut off, leaving bare wires, and a new correct one attached ... which doesn’t work. So the process is repeated - several times. By now the cable from the telephone is considerably shorter than when they started but eventually it works. They beam up at him.
“We can do all your house wiring for you sir! No problem!”
We decline that offer. Meanwhile we are still waiting for our landline and internet connection.
What is the house like? It is brand new and part of a block of eighteen identical villas, as they call them, next to the mosque and school, with a building site opposite. We were originally offered what we’d describe as a town house, in a compound, with other European ex-pats. Status is everything round here and although we were entitled to a much larger villa, with its own swimming pool, none were available. (A swimming pool is less desirable than you might think as the water gets so hot). The town house compound option was OK, but we had been tipped off to ask if there were any stand-alone ones.
“Certainly,” said Khalid, the housing manager, “but they are in the Arab style. Are you still interested?”
“But of course,” we reply, intrigued by what he means.
The house is semi-detached, with servants’ quarters outside as a separate building at the back. We’ve a double car-port at the front with electric doors operated by a zapper from the car. There’s a pedestrian front gate with an answerphone to the house and the whole property is surrounded by a high wall. The ‘garden’ is completely tiled apart from a narrow eighteen-inch border of dirt, hardly soil, inside the front wall. I can already envisage frothy fountains of fuchsia-pink bougainvillea tumbling over this wall, but perhaps my imagination is too vivid.
Currently I doubt even bindweed would grow there. The house is double fronted, with wide marble steps leading up to a square porch. White pillars grace the corners and we’ve a well-appointed wooden front door with adjoining brass latticework. The walls inside and out are painted cream and white and there is a terracotta pantiled roof, although there is a flat element to the roof also, which is accessed from the back via a fire escape ladder fixed to the wall. The numerous satellite dishes are tastefully hidden from view.
Inside, the house is spacious, an open plan with a large wooden archway between the reception room, from which the front door opens, and the dining room. This latter room is almost thirty-seven metres square and has the staircase coming off from one side and large sliding French windows that open onto a shaded raised outside dining area. The somewhat unusual feature of this room is the washbasin in the corner, presumably something to do with pre-prandial ablutions. The other concession to what we presume is ‘Arab style’ is that all the bathrooms and lavatories have hosepipes and drains in the floor.
We have noticed this in the hospital; constantly wet floors in the loos and hosepipes by every lavatory bowl. There is a reasonable kitchen and utility room, a separate room that would do for a TV room, with its own bathroom and hosepipe (just in case) and upstairs, four large bedrooms each with an en-suite, a huge landing big enough for a couple of sofas, and a balcony.
We are expected to have live-in help. For about two thousand riyals per month (about £400), they would live in the servants’ quarters: the air-conditioned room is a reasonable size with an en-suite bathroom. However, we do not want a live-in maid and instead we elect to convert the ‘servants’ quarters’ into a gym.
All the floors are marble and the finish is good. The house has a feeling of space and light and we love it!
5. Daily rhythms
After a few months of living here, life has settled into a rhythm. We are awoken by the first call to prayer, which is currently at 3.30 am. Our alarm goes off just after five and we are in our cars, driving through the busy traffic, about an hour later. From the moment the car door closes all systems are on high alert. Dodging the numerous accidents and taking short cuts across bits of desert scrub is the norm. We are being constantly bombarded by blasting horns because of a nanosecond’s delay at the traffic lights. Our arrival at work is a blessed relief.
The surprising thing is that the trip has become less fraught with time, although no less intense. We both now have our own designated parking places with our names displayed above them on the sheltered canopy that shades the steering wheel from the sun, otherwise it would be literally too hot to handle and would need cooling with splashes from a bottle of water kept in the car for such purpose.
Everyone makes a point of greeting me. Ibrahim arrives with my cup of coffee and the day begins. As a deputy chief in the corporate offices, I am essentially deputy corporate medical director for the whole corporation and every day brings different issues. I
make a point of going out to the eight hospitals in the group, three of which are situated away from Doha, although I do have colleagues who summon people to their offices at corporate headquarters (and then they wonder why the staff aren’t properly engaged).
At our home, domestic life has also settled into a comfortable rhythm with Agnes the maid coming four days a week, the drinking-water cooler man twice a week and the cockroach exterminator men once a month. Agnes twitters around in her pink tabard and drives me mad. She constantly forgets things, unplugs the phone and leaves the hosepipe on, but she is an excellent and conscientious cleaner. It is impossible to be angry as she giggles disarmingly and says, “Sorry, madam”.
Lionel and I agree that our house is probably the most peaceful that we have ever lived in. This is partly because there are no other responsibilities such as children, pets or maintenance, but the clean lines contribute to the feeling of tranquillity. I marvel at our spacious rooms, spare elegant furniture and cool marble floors all enclosed by the high walls surrounding our courtyards. Driving back from the frenetic shopping mall, reaching home where we metaphorically pull up the drawbridge, settling down to a cool glass of sparkling wine, sitting on our veranda, gazing at a new crescent moon in the Arabian sky ... all this is peace indeed.
We’re gradually becoming acclimatised to the intense heat and humidity, in fact probably more so than the Arabs who hardly go outside but live constantly cocooned in air-conditioned splendour. As a result they suffer from obesity and its concomitant diseases of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, plus vitamin D deficiency.
Even a trip to the shops, for an Arab, does not involve venturing outside. Arriving at one of the huge shopping malls, it is not unusual to see the Indian driver of a large Land Cruiser seemingly oblivious to the chaos he has caused by simply stopping outside the main entrance. The reason becomes clear when out of the back, unseen through the tinted windows, emerge several abaya-clad women of different sizes and ages. Of course they all sport designer handbags and sunglasses, and totter on spindly heels as they make their way into the cool mall by the shortest distance possible. The children follow accompanied by their Filipina nannies, who are dressed in a uniform of pyjamas with their heads covered. The ‘thobelets’, as we call them, are the sweetest little boys imaginable, similar to choir boys in their long robes. They parade the malls behind their big brothers, the adolescent ‘thobes’ who somehow have lost that charm.
800 Days in Doha Page 4
