Shiny on the Outside

Doha looks like any modern city, even by Western standards.  There are museums, stadiums, and high-rises.  The skyline, up against the cool blue of the Gulf, is spectacular.  Our compound is made up of villas that look really quite lovely.  The shopping malls, where we spend much of our leisure time escaping the heat, have everything we need to entertain us: groceries, movie theatres, bowling alleys, restaurants, amusement parks and hockey rinks.

But it's just a facade.  Shiny and new on the outside, only.  We often talk about things that fall apart in our villa, or the questionable support-post smack-dab in the middle of Dan's office at work. Things are constructed quickly, and often, poorly.  It's not a big leap from this conversation to one about how this city is thirty years behind in other aspects.  The smoking in public places, often comically beneath a "No Smoking" sign.  The story about the family who noticed that the fire alarms had been switched off in their daughter's hospital room.  The small children bouncing around the back of SUVs, or on their parents'  laps, unbuckled, while their vehicle speeds past us.  When I'm with friends, we laugh nervously about how backwards things can be here.  After all, this isn't our city.  We're just guests here.  None of this will ever impact us.  Until it did.

Today, the city is reeling with unimaginable tragedy.  Yesterday morning, we heard the news that there had been a fire at Villaggio Mall.  As reports trickled in during the evening hours, we learned with horror and grief that 19 people lost their lives, including 13 small children.  All were expats.  First reports indicate that the fire may have been electrical, and started in or near a drop-in childcare centre.  Two fire-fighters and four teachers died.  Heart-breakingly, one family from New Zealand lost their two-year-old triplets.  The stories of loss become too unbearable to re-tell.

Information is available in bits and pieces—some of it online, some of it first-hand from people who were there.  A fire alarm did go off, but was described as "benign", sounding like a doorbell.  People continued to shop while the mall filled with smoke.  Members of the public urgently told others to get out, while no direction was given by mall staff.  To their credit, when a 999 call was finally made, fire-fighters arrived on scene within two minutes.

When you grow up on the other side of the world, you make certain assumptions about society that linger with you when you move to one that, on the outside, doesn't look that much different from your own.  You assume that society is inherently safe, and that you will be looked after in your time of need. Without giving much thought to it, you assume that there is an emergency action-plan in place at stadiums, schools, and shopping malls.  You assume that there are working fire alarms, smoke detectors, and sprinkler systems.  You assume someone will call 999 if there is an emergency.

As one friend so eloquently put it, this mall was like a village to our community.  Between Dan and the kids, we were there four days a week for hockey.  During practices or between games, we'd have coffee, shop for groceries, and chat friends and teachers from the kids' school.  I have given my kids more freedom as they get older, in the hopes that it breeds a new level of responsibility.  I have let N, last year at age 12, hang out at this very mall with a group of friends, unchaperoned, on a Thursday night.  It was only two days before this tragedy that I sat beside the ice-rink at Villaggio and told J, aged 10, that yes, he could walk down to Virgin (at the complete opposite end of the mall) to check the price of an iPod, while his dad coached and I watched his two brothers play hockey.  What if fire had broken out between us?  Would he have known to leave the building, or would he have tried to come back to where I was?  More importantly, would another adult, a member of the society I have so much faith in, have guided him to safety?  What if, what if, what if.

As Doha comes together to grieve and to try to understand such a senseless tragedy, I hope there is a way to move forward and make this city a safer place to live.  My deepest, heart-felt condolences to those who suffered such incomprehensible loss.

Where Art Thou, Cheerios?

They sit atop my grocery list

Have you seen this box?

Like something that I must have missed
For months in Doha I cannot find
This staple of the breakfast kind
Someone out there surely knows:
Where are all the Cheerios?

They used to grace the grocer's shelves
But now, it seems, that they, themselves,
Have vanished, vamoosed, disappeared
This cereal, once so endeared
Into our milk-filled bowls fall tear-ios
Where the heck are all the Cheerios?

I snapped and bought the Honey version
A box of fructose—sweet perversion
To say those O's were not the same
Gives understatement a new name
The kids, they found them quite a treat
But Dan, he called them much too sweet
To pass across his breakfast table
"Tell me, dear, are you not able
To fulfill your wifely duty
And provide (besides your beauty)
Love and comfort—all those things
And especially, those oatie rings?"

I sit him down; this needs explaining
It's not just him I've heard complaining
A mother, a baby, a family
My own dear sons, my young friend E
We've gone across this dusty city
(Trust me, hun, it wasn't pretty)
In search of something held so dear-io
A solitary, crispy, Cheerio

But that's not all, across this nation,
That causes pangs of deprivation
Arborio I oft bemoan
Pepper salsa (Newman's Own)
Ketjap Manis - Indo saucy
(Don't ask me—it's loved by Aussies)
Graham crackers, sour cream
Wake me from this hungry dream!
And also in my manifesto:
Jamie Oliver's basil pesto

So if, dear reader, you spot some Cheerios
And change them back from Disappearios
Post it here, but please don't hoard!
Sharing is its own reward
And be prepared:  there is no telling
Which favourite item they'll stop selling

When Things Are Awesome

Have you ever had one of those days that is so stellar, so incredibly awesome, that it fills you with, well, awe?  The kind of day that leaves you feeling euphoric, and undeservedly lucky?  Those kind of days don't happen very often, which is probably a good thing.  It would be hard to appreciate them if they rolled around every week or so.  But there were two things that happened yesterday that made it just such a day in our house.

First off, yesterday, May 6, was guaranteed to be fabulous.  It was Thing 3's 10th birthday.  The best thing about your kids' birthdays is that it helps you to concentrate less on being in the trenches of parenthood, and more on the day that made you a parent in the first place.  For us, it brought back memories of that night in early May a decade ago, days from my due date, when I couldn't sleep and went down to the living room and watched a blizzard out my front window.  This was Calgary.  This was not surprising.  I had already planted petunias and the tulips were up.  It served me right.  Calgary gardeners should never be so cocky before the third week in May.

By the time Dan got up the next morning, the forecast was for a total of 40 cm of snow throughout the day.  He wisely decided to stay home from work, given my "condition".  Sure enough, at 5:00 pm, we headed for the hospital.  As you can imagine, it wasn't a fun trip.  The roads were terrible, and my mood was worse.

But at 7:16 pm, our littlest (biggest) was born.  And since that minute, he has been sharing his joy-filled laugh, his wicked sense of humour, and his uncannily good dance moves with us.  In short, we get to experience his awesomeness, every day.  For me, his birthday, as with his brothers', should be a celebration of how lucky we are to have him.

The second great thing that happened yesterday was The Second Thing.  Thing 2 has some special talents that cannot be denied, even modestly, by his mom.  He has a musical ear that, given his parents' musical ability, is truly baffling.  His "thing" is to listen to a song on YouTube or iTunes, and sit down at the piano and play it.  And I mean play.  He is fiercely understated about his own abilities, and is uncomfortable when complimented.  But on Thursday, he chose to be a contestant in the Middle School's talent show, mostly because we didn't tell him we thought he should enter.  He played his own arrangement of David Guetta's "Titanium".  Here is the video link to his performance:

Talent show performance

After the talent show judges deliberated over the weekend, he made the Final Three.  This meant that he had to perform one more time at school on Sunday morning, in front of the whole student body, along with the other two finalists.  His competition was solid:  an incredible sax player, and a brother and sister band whose power went out during their final performance, and yet somehow soldiered on flawlessly.  My kid had his work cut out for him.  The students and teachers now had to vote, and a winner would be determined by the end of the school day.

And then a funny thing happened.  He won.  He won the competition.  Which meant that a good chunk of the 450 kids in his school voted for his performance.  Which meant that not just his mom, or his dad, or his grandma, thought he was good.  Maybe it meant that others recognized a little bit of awesome in him, too.

Last night, we asked Thing 1 if anything exciting happened to him yesterday, and he said, with a laugh, yes—one of his brothers turned 10 and the other one won the talent show.  As I listened to the two younger boys chat during The Birthday Dinner (steak and Caesar salad, and birthday pie—what else?), I heard them talk about birthdays past and compliments given at school.  I realized that neither boy's special day was made less special because they had to share it.  In fact, it seemed to be twice as special.  Which made it wholly, irrefutably, awesome.

So You Don't Know Driving

It's time for me to come clean:  I know you're reading this.  Well, not you, specifically, but that someone is.  I have a website linked to my blog to see how many people visit, and where that traffic is coming from.  It's interesting to see if anyone is tuning in, and where they are.  But don't worry. The most I know about you is your city, sometimes only your country.  I don't know your name, email address, or physical address.  Except for that guy who sits in his basement and checks to see if I've posted anything lately.  I keep telling you, Dad...I'm on it.

Last week I noticed a hit from a Google search that someone did from Mumbai, India.  This is what the person Googled:

"i don't know driving but is it ok to learn it in doha"

No, sir.  No it is not ok.

I spend a lot of time in the car, mostly acting in my role as Unpaid Family Chauffeur.  My working conditions are deplorable.  Drivers cut me off in roundabouts, men going far faster than me pass me on the right, and I get stuck behind slow-moving vehicles all the time.  I often think I should write about driving in this city.  But the fodder for that post is too deep and too thick, so I think it's best to write little bits at a time, if only to prevent my eye from twitching.

For this entry, let's concentrate on the driving school in my neighbourhood.  This school has a collection of little brown and mustard-yellow cars with big red "L's" stuck with a magnet on the back.  My kids asked me what the L stands for.  I told them:  "Learner".  When I'm behind one I mutter another L-word under my breath.  (Not a bad word, but it might be a little impolite.  Think fingers in the shape of an L on your forehead.)  These cars always have two people in them, the Learner and the Instructor.  They are always both expats.  Chances are high that the Learner has come to Doha to get a job as a driver.  Chances are also high that he has never before been behind the wheel of a car.

The Neighbourhood Learner

The beauty of having this driving school right in my very own neighbourhood is that I get to encounter these little cars and their drivers frequently, and collect quite a few data points about them and their habits.  Here is what I've managed to piece together so far:

1.  The Instructor's arrival in Doha preceded the Learner's by about two and a half weeks.
2.  The Learner is incapable of looking over his left shoulder, and
3.  If there is an employment sector in Doha whose remuneration is solely Danger Pay, the Instructor may very well be the highest paid man of this sector in the city, next to the guy at Carrefour who won't let me return my faulty blender.

It must be a joyous undertaking having a fellow-countryman teach you to drive in a foreign country. You speak the same language.  You're comfortable in each other's company.  You both have an affinity for under-shooting the posted speed limit by a good 30 per cent.  And culturally, you both think that checking your blind spot is for sissies.

But I fear we may be reaching a Dark Age of driving in Doha.  Those with seemingly little experience (or maybe just not enough knowledge of how they make the rest of us crazy) teach new expats to drive, and they in turn teach others to drive, and so on, into perpetuity, until soon no one who has attended a driving school will even know what the colours of the traffic lights mean.  If that's true, then things on the streets of Doha will only get worse.  It may already be too late.  I saw this printed on a card hanging from a rear-view mirror just the other day:

The Pledge of the Driving School Graduate


I will go 70 in a 100 zone because I fear the awesome power
of this Nissan Sunny.


Why merge when pulling blindly out into traffic
is so much more exciting for everyone?


The roundabout is mine.  All mine.


I will ignore the woman in the white SUV behind me,
who is honking and gesturing wildly.
My English is not great, and I have trouble hearing her, but I can read her lips.
I think she just called me a Learner.

Learning Curved

"Not that I'm complaining, but do you think the next vacation we take can be one where we don't have to learn anything?"

Ha.  'Not that he's complaining.'  Well, not now, anyway.  But I do recall an awful lot of griping coming from this 11-year-old and his two brothers on our previous holidays.  Granted, those were filled with old churches, ruins, museums, temples, tours, technical visits, road-side attractions, more ruins, and a couple more old churches thrown in for good measure.  And always, on these adventures, there was their dad, eager to fit in "just one more stop", and happily providing all the minutia they never dreamed they wanted to know, displaying his love for all things historical, sometimes sounding like a walking guidebook.  In a good way, of course.

Don't get me wrong.  We had a great time on these trips.  They were an escape from the regular routine and the confines, both tangible and not, of Doha, and we crossed some serious swaths of must-do's from our bucket lists.  But they were anything but restful.

This trip was going to be different.  We would turn off our brains and not learn a thing.  This holiday was going to be about navel-gazing.  So, we unanimously decided on the Maldives, and spent a week at Kuredu Island Resort on the northern atoll of Lhaviyani.  Upon arriving, we took off our watches and tossed them, along with our flip-flops, back into our suitcases.  Certainly we wouldn't need them on this vacation.  We walked barefoot down the beach to breakfast, and then returned to snorkel just steps from our front door, where we saw a little shark on our first outing, and crazy multi-coloured "rainbow" fish.  We banana-boated, wake-boarded, knee-boarded, parasailed, and dolphin-safaried.  We cooled off in the pool, then had Happy Hour mock- and cocktails.  We ping-ponged, night-golfed, and played board-games before dinner.  We went to the spa, and slept in.  We ate, we drank, we ate, and we drank.  We swam in the ocean.  The only ruins we saw were the kids' dessert plates from the buffet.

About four nights in, Dan asked the kids at dinner, "Has anyone learned anything, on this trip so far?"

Thing 3:  "I learned how to knee-board.  And also that there are mini sharks right out there!"

Thing 1:  "I learned how to wake-board, and that if I use a 7-iron, I can get the ball about 75 yards."

Thing 2:  "I learned to parasail.  And also that recently, the first democratically-elected president of the Maldives stepped down voluntarily (or more likely was overthrown in a bloodless coup) as his detractors thought he was too much of a moderate for an Islamic state—"

Hold the phone.  The only reason this aforementioned 11-year-old knew this is because he asked. And naturally, his father answered.  As if he could help himself.

When we grudgingly finished our week on Kuredu Island, and I hung onto the dock for dear life, my body stretched horizontally while my family tried to drag me onto the seaplane, I wondered if I had learned anything.  Turns out that I did.

I learned that there is a place on Earth whose beauty surpasses all others.  I learned that the sea can be an impossible turquoise and that sand can be as fine and white as flour.  I learned that there is water is so clear you can stand ankle-deep and count the fish swimming by.  I learned that sometimes, in the morning, you can look outside your bedroom door and watch dolphins jumping out of the ocean.  And that the shade of a palm tree, just steps from the water, is the best place in which to lose yourself in a good book.

I didn't learn, but was reminded, of how lucky we are to live where we live, for better or worse, and to go to the places we've gone.  Check your boarding passes and fasten your seatbelts, boys.  Class is in session.

Mr. Donna Tracks an Elephant

For those of you keeping score at home, you'll remember that on our recent trip to Sri Lanka, I purchased a wooden elephant.  We've been lucky enough to visit countries that we had never dreamed of going to before, and I've felt compelled to bring back "a little something" as a memento of our time there.

Our visit to a wood-working shop in Matale was a bit rushed, and I'll admit that my decision-making skills may have been impaired.  I had thought that a carved, wooden elephant would be the keepsake of choice, and since I'm not much of a knick-knack-on-shelves kind of person, that would mean that my elephant would have to be large enough to sit on the floor.

And then I spotted him:  two feet tall, intricately carved dark wood, with his trunk curled upwards — good luck, I'm told.  Done.  Let's buy this baby and get out of here.  The salesperson directed us to the counter.

I'm sorry...how much did you just say?

"That's with the 20 per cent discount, Madam.  We'll ship it free of charge to your nearest port, and there will be a small clearance fee once it arrives at Customs."

OK, fine.  I paid about that much for the mosaic table I bought in Jordan, and delivery went smoothly.  I can practically spit from my house to the Port of Doha.  When it comes in, I'll just whip down and throw it in the back of my car.  Easy-peasy.

That was mid-December.  Then for over two months, nothing.  Nothing, nothing, nothing.  Silence, even.  Cue the crickets chirping, the tumbleweeds rolling.  I was starting to feel a little sick about it, thinking I'd been had, so about six weeks into this silence, I picked up the phone, and with a terrible connection and the three Sinhala words I know (none of them useful in this situation), called the shop.

[Loudly] "Hello! I'm calling about an elephant I purchased in December!"  I repeated this sentence to each successive person to whom the phone was passed until ultimately being handed to a fourth who could speak English.  I was assured that it had been shipped in mid-January.

Finally, on the last day of February, I received an email from a local freight company saying it was here.  Or rather, Mr. Donna received an email.  This was a handle I was unable to shake for the remainder of the long, drawn-out transaction.  It said I owed 1100QR, and when I called Leo at the freight company, he said it would be best if I came down to his office to discuss obtaining my shipment.

Well, suddenly, things really seem to be moving along!  I'll just drive down on Saturday, talk to Leo, pay my "small clearance fee" of 1100QR, and collect my elephant.  I'll be home before my teenager is even out of bed.  Leo invited me into his office, asked me to sit down, chatted for a bit, and then surreptitiously added another four-digit number to the total of my invoice.  I looked on despondently.  This, apparently, was his company's service charge.  A service charge in addition to the 1100QR I already owed for the privilege of having this elephant arrive in the country.  As he put the final zero on that amount, I watched as the invoice transformed into a ransom note.  I envisioned my elephant in chains, blindfolded, trays of sloppy gruel and filthy water being passed through a slot at the bottom of his cell, desperate to be released.

The following two and a half weeks brought a series of phone calls, emails, and texts from Leo, each outlining more demands.  I needed a Certificate of Origin from the shop, more cash, copies of my passport and Residence Permit, a Letter of No Objection, in Arabic, from my employer (my husband's employer...and what, exactly, were they not objecting to?), even more cash, my first-born.  These instructions were doled out to me, each one like a carrot on the end of a thin strand of hope, just out of my reach.   Every additional condition diminished my purchase, and made the size of this elephant seem inversely proportional to its cost.  I felt, with certainty, that it would arrive at my house and it would stand six inches tall.

With no great fanfare, and in an anti-climactic blur, my shipment was delivered early last week, a mere 13 weeks, a confusing paper chase, and an unmentionable amount of cash later.  There was no picking it up at the port myself.  One single man carried the 50 kilo wooden box on his shoulder into my house, and then I uncrated it.  All 21 inches, or about half a metre, of elephant sit on the floor beside the piano.  Sometimes when I walk past it, my passive-aggressive side kicks it a little.  Sometimes a tusk falls out.  And sometimes, when I look at it, I recognize what a unique piece it is.  Welcome to Mr. Donna's house, Big Guy.