As we near our destination we see Arabic signs to it and arrive along with several other women. I am the only westerner and I am greeted like a long-lost friend by one of the sisters, who grasps my hand and kisses me numerous times on the cheek, muttering thanks as she does so. We are ushered into a large reception room and offered tea in exquisite glass cups, served by the Filipina maids. There is a recording of verses from the Qur’an being played in the background in an incessant loop.
We all sit on chairs and sofas placed around the edge of the room and chat quietly. Since my Arabic is non-existent there is little I can say till I discover that one of the nieces speaks good English, so I engage her in conversation. She is a delightful teenager who wants to be an engineer so we have a good chat before a suitable moment comes for us to leave. Again the thanks are profuse and we leave as an elegant lady in a flowing abaya steps out of her Porsche and trips across the scrub to the front door.
I think no more about it until one of the brothers tells me how appreciated my gesture has been, particularly that I bothered to speak to one of the nieces. This impression is reiterated when one of the wives tells me that the family has been talking about my visit for days. What do I mean by one of the wives? I simply mean the wife of one of the brothers. However, translating the family set-up for me as we left the deceased’s house, I discovered that there are two wives and that the sisters who greeted us are in fact half-sisters but that the families run concurrently and the mourning of the first wife is shared equally across the family.
Multiple wives are becoming less common but still occur, especially in rich families. A western-educated doctor explains it to me. “Although men can marry foreigners, women cannot and anyway there’s a dearth of men,” she says. It all seems very strange to us, but maybe we are just not attuned to the cultural mores.
“Why not?” she says, explaining, “maybe the first wife couldn’t have children or maybe she didn’t like sex, so why shouldn’t the man marry again?”
I have also heard that a career woman might marry a man as his second wife so that she can easily continue her career without worrying about domestic issues.
Meanwhile Lionel has a case of sexual harassment to deal with. It’s not quite droit de seigneur, but pretty close: a senior Arab harassing a young foreign woman. What to do? First inclination is outrage and confrontation, but what would that achieve? A plane ticket home for us and the woman would be left with nobody to protect or help her. On reflection, she is safe and nothing has actually happened, so she is swiftly moved to another post and the whole business is quietly forgotten. We then learn that apartments downtown are often rented by rich Arabs as places to take their mistresses; usually they are foreign girls who enjoy the gifts bestowed. It all smacks of hypocrisy and our tacit approval can feel uncomfortable.
There is pervading fatalism. Everything is God’s will and in sh’Allah punctuates every other sentence. It can be irritating for us who think that we should give the Deity a helping hand. Trying to instigate emergency procedures, for instance, can be an uphill task.
Fire is frightening, especially in a hospital filled with sick debilitated patients. Evacuation plans and rehearsals are common at home but what is the drill out here? Lionel is sitting in a lecture at his hospital when the fire alarm sounds. There is no test scheduled and the alarm is very loud, implying that the fire is genuine and very near. No one takes a blind bit of notice. There is no smoke and Lionel, who as chief executive is ultimately responsible for safety in the hospital, leaves the lecture in order to investigate. It appears that the cause is the coffee machine outside the lecture theatre: it’s steaming and triggering the alarm, so there’s no real danger, but not yet proven either.
However he is perturbed to discover that in spite of alarms and flashing lights at the entrance to the hospital, people continue to wander in and out unchallenged. Nurses are arriving for duty and the security guards are ignoring the incoming stream of visitors and patients, seemingly walking into a building that’s on fire. Everyone is completely oblivious to the possible danger. His secretary is calmly chatting on the phone so he asks her if she is requesting information about the fire. “No,” she replies simply.
Fire alarms are not unusual in hospitals and staff do have a tendency to ignore them, but in a country where there was a major disaster due to fire less than a year ago, this attitude is surprising. Fire broke out in a new shopping mall and the consequence was several deaths, among them a number of children who were being looked after in a nursery sited within the building. The whole episode was related in graphic detail at the hospital’s fire lecture, which I attended recently.
The errors were legion: fire doors were padlocked, there was no plan for evacuation of shoppers and staff, and people became trapped on the roof. The worst thing was that the nursery did not appear on the plans of the building. Mothers were screaming that their children were trapped, only to be told that there were no rooms on the plans in the location the mothers had indicated. When eventually the fire was brought under control and the firefighters, several of whom also lost their lives, broke into the nursery, they found all the children and their carers dead from smoke inhalation.
Are we simply mercenaries, taking the money and putting up with it all? There is an element of that and some of our Arab colleagues see Westerners in that guise. On the other hand, while we are certainly not missionaries, we like to think that we have something to offer and wish to impart that knowledge so that any positive change is sustainable. The argument then goes: well if you want change then you have to become accepted and trusted and that won’t happen without some acceptance of cultural mores even if, superficially, they are anathema to you.
So we press on, extolling the good things, building relationships, trying not to be judgemental yet holding onto a moral compass of sorts.
13. A Pyrrhic victory
It is our second Christmas and we have been here sixteen months. By now I have managed to build a fiercely loyal team, not easy given the difficulties with recruitment.
Joramae is a gem. She is remarkably adept linguistically, having been born in the Philippines and brought up in Saudi Arabia. Hence she is bilingual in Arabic and English and speaks three Philippino dialects. She also has a pharmacy degree, remarkable emotional intelligence and knows everyone. She would be perfect as my assistant executive director but, because of the perverse labour laws, she cannot be promoted - so I am trawling the ex-pat head-hunters to find someone suitable.
Andrea fits the bill perfectly. She arrives and in a no-nonsense way gets to work with the Arabs in outlying hospitals. She builds up a good relationship with the plastic surgery team who then give her tips on how they might improve various bits of her anatomy. She is a good-looking woman who has no need of such work. The surgeons merely laugh and say, “Well if you change your mind, Miss Andrea, you know where we are.” It is fascinating that they feel comfortable with making such personal observations. I seem to have escaped, but maybe they think I am beyond improvement.
Things are getting better. I am building up my team. Honeylet’s replacement was poached by an unscrupulous colleague so for a while, I had no secretarial support. Joramae came to the rescue. She found a Filipino schoolteacher who had fallen out with his Qatari employers for unfathomable reasons. Nevertheless he was keen to stay in the Gulf and to bring his family over to live with him. His clammy handshake and tense expression revealed his nervousness when I interviewed him. He had no direct secretarial experience but was well educated and keen to learn so I took a risk. It paid off and he has proved a loyal and companionable worker.
Achieving even the smallest or most trivial thing here can take an amazing amount of time, effort and wheeling-and-dealing
There are masses of new hospital buildings under construction but somehow they never get finished. Meanwhile we are appointing new staff in droves and there is nowhere for them to work
. The solution is obvious: send staff working in an adjacent building into a new block off-site, then move our admin staff into the vacated space.
Unsurprisingly no one wants to go. Possibly if plush new offices were on offer it would be different but sadly the reality is that this is a communal open-plan space off-site.
I have not been involved in the planning and anyway it isn’t really my responsibility, but with the boss away and the incumbent statisticians deciding on a sit-in, I am called in to sort out the mess. Their diminutive professor is angry: diplomacy and tact seem the only solution. Keep him talking. He is originally from Turkey and as I extol the virtues of the Aegean coast, he starts to calm down. Eventually he agrees to move half his team.
It’s a Pyrrhic victory since that still doesn’t leave enough space for the incomers, our admin staff. This move is like a line of dominoes except they are falling haphazardly and there is no contingency plan. Actually it becomes increasingly apparent that there is no plan at all. From memory of the new offices, I sketch a floor plan on my flipchart and allocate a few desks and suddenly people are crowding into my office (luckily I am staying put) to see The Plan.
Not that they take any notice. It is first come, first served and still the statisticians are reluctant to leave and make way.
Meanwhile someone complains about the smelly carpets and then termites are discovered, so an army of painters, pest destroyers and cleaners appear among the complaining exiting statisticians and the newcomers bagging all the best desks. Anarchy doesn’t even begin to describe the chaos.
I retreat to my own territory where Aliya is in melt-down. She isn’t moving over there. The large, heavily made-up eyes are flashing above her niqab as she tries to explain that as an Arabic speaker she needs to be near me in order to converse with people in Arabic, thus helping my communication. This is a fair point except that she doesn’t speak English, so her skills as an interpreter are somewhat limited.
However, my advice is always to choose your battles and I am unlikely to win this one so I capitulate but explain that she has to move desks. “No problem”, is the reply and this time the eyes are smiling. She settles in next to my male secretary, bringing her assortment of trinkets, dates, boxes of Arabic sweets and other such useful paraphernalia on her desk.
By now things have calmed down over the road. The professor has gone on leave back to Istanbul and his staff have moved into their off-site offices, grumbling about the lack of parking. There’s actually plenty of parking: they simply mean there are no named spaces and the new car park is built on European lines, which means that it is necessary to manoeuvre the car into a space rather than sweeping into the slot in one easy motion. Meanwhile the walls of the newly emptied space have been freshly painted ... although there is now a hole on one wall where the termites were happily munching until the exterminators arrived.
Back in my corridor, I am surveying the scene when Aliya of the niqab comes in and tells me, with a combination of halting English and body language, that a senior Arab has passed by and is appalled that she, a local woman, is being made to sit opposite the gents’ lavatory. This is an exaggeration since the gents is in fact across the corridor, down another and around a corner, but again, deciding that this is another battle to dodge, I arrange for her to go somewhere else, after much cajoling of other staff. Peace at last, except that she doesn’t want to go there, but wishes to stay in the room with my secretary. Her solution is simple: she will nick someone else’s desk, then they can face the lavatory. The unfortunate, putative lavatory gazer spends most of her time elsewhere (in a place where space is at a premium, one might ask why she is allowed the luxury of two desks, but the answers would be unbelievably opaque) so I agree to the niqab-wearer’s desk nicking plan.
Five minutes later my secretary sidles into my office and explains that he feels very uncomfortable sharing an office with a veiled Qatari lady.
“Don’t worry,” I assure him. “She might wear it but she isn’t religious and she couldn’t care less.”
“But I am religious,” he explains, “and it makes me uncomfortable. In fact I can’t work there.”
So now we have grumbling statisticians in their off-site open-plan office, but their professor has somehow kept a personal office on-site. Some of our staff have moved into the vacated offices but have used three of the spaces for large, unwieldy and unnecessary filing cabinets, so we still have too few desks and my male Muslim Filipino secretary is floating around trying to dodge the flirtatious niqab-wearer. The boss is back next week! Good to know that we start the New Year in good shape.
Lionel points out that the pinnacle of my career has turned into becoming an ex-pat overseer of multi-cultural office allocation, not unlike a medieval bazaar - as ever, back in the Middle Ages.
The addendum to this story is that the blustering fussy professor is subsequently accused of cooking the books. He is said to be creaming off research grants for his own personal use. Whether this is true or not, now one knows but he goes in a hurry. I last see him clearing out his office.
“I’ve resigned,” he beams. “I’m on the plane back to Istanbul tomorrow.”
Presumably he thinks it best not to argue his case.
14. Foreign affairs
We keep a close eye on world events, and although the Middle East is in turmoil and friends in the UK worry about us, we reckon that Qatar is as safe as anywhere from threats of terrorism. Within the first few weeks of our arrival we experienced Arab diplomacy in the raw, while still ensconced in the Ritz Carlton hotel.
Our hotel was certainly in the thick of things. One week we had a world military conference and we couldn’t move for military types dripping in medals and gold braid. Lionel pointed out that most countries in the world seem to have copied our basic design and elaborated on it. Increasing the bling factor was clearly a high priority in many states. There were numerous cars with diplomatic plates in the car park and alongside the usual array of Land Cruisers were a selection of cars painted a matt red colour, which designated the military police, but only in an Arab state would they be Porsches.
Last week it was the Syrian National Congress meeting, which was fascinating. As I write, President Assad of Syria is ravaging his country, civilians are being killed and the purpose of the congress was to choose the Opposition in exile, as a challenge to President Assad and his cronies.
We would read about events in the newspaper then recognise one of the opposition players having breakfast at an adjacent table. Security was increased and an x-ray machine installed at the hotel entrance into which bags were put while the guests walked through a sensor similar to those found at airports. Sitting at the desk behind the bag machine was a young Arab, intent on texting on his mobile phone and seemingly paying no attention whatsoever to the screen in front of him, while the punters passing through the sensor caused a series of bleeps that were received with a wry smile by the security guards ... who then did nothing.
The on-stage part of this important world event was closed to us but we were able to experience Arab diplomacy simply by sitting in the hotel lobby and watching. Groups of men would congregate (I counted only a handful of women) with much hugging and kissing on the cheeks. Conversation was loud and voluble and people would move between groups whereupon these tactile demonstrations would be repeated. Occasionally a couple or three would separate to sit and drink coffee before returning to the fray.
The noisiest times were in the evening after dinner and appeared to continue into the night judging by the loud telephone conversations emanating from our next-door neighbour’s hotel room. Delegates wore a mixture of dress, some in thobes and varying head-dresses, but many were dressed in western style. Sheikhs were resplendent in long flowing robes with an outer black or brown robe expensively trimmed with gold. One of them was certainly eyeing me up with a lascivious smile, much to Lionel’s discomfort (although I sus
pect Lionel was secretly wondering about the price of camels!).
Travelling between floors by lift was carefully controlled by having to insert your room card before pressing the button for a floor. This means that you are unable to visit another floor and during the Syrian National Congress, when the delegates’ homeland is being ravaged by civil war, security might be expected to be on serious alert ... but no. The system was switched off so that anyone who managed to breach the security entering the hotel could then wander its corridors with impunity. Moreover as the delegates started to leave, their exact itineraries were posted in Arabic in the lobby for all to see. Thankfully there were no incidents or threats and the local press deemed the congress to have been an exceptional success.
Generally Doha is a great venue for large international meetings and the Qataris love to show off their city and its amenities. At HMC we are organising one such event. My role is not a major one so I can observe the conference with an objective eye.
Delegates from all over the Gulf are flocking to the conference centre, which is a splendid futuristic building with huge lobbies, grand lecture halls and more intimate wood-panelled areas for small group working. I drive past the university and follow the signs to the VIP parking. The uniformed security guard has a list but doesn’t check me, simply handing over a VIP pass and directing me to the special car park. Lionel is less lucky and undergoes laborious checking procedures before being let through. Sometimes it helps to be a blonde western woman with a big smile.
The marble and steel central atrium is embraced by a huge sculpture of a spider, which is familiar since it once had pride of place in the turbine hall of Tate Modern. The delegates, numbering two thousand in total, scurry around below the eight legs, booking sessions, eating, drinking, greeting each other, while the American visitors move in packs shepherded by an important-looking man in a grey suit carrying a walkie-talkie.
800 Days in Doha Page 10
