We’ve been discussing the relationships between Qataris and expats for a few weeks and I’ve tried to pose some new angles to lamentation: “I’ve never been inside a Qatari house.”

The reasons for this are many, but in the last two weeks, we’ve touched on a few key areas.

First: Expats in general do not have a long enough shelf life in Qatar to allow for relationships to develop.

Second: there is a mutual distrust in both circles of “the other” which include a bit of myth and fact that are compounded by isolation.

Lest you were thinking I was only going to cover more of the same ground , now we come to solutions of how to bridge this divide in the city that many of us call home – if only temporarily for some.  Yes, if you hang around long enough you may end up invited to a majlis or dinner; but even there you are unlikely to get past the courtesy hellos because the other attendees will still have the aforementioned reservations in mind. You, as the foreigner, will be there on the good graces of the host and for that reason tolerated.

The best way that I’ve found to make Qatari friends, or indeed friends from any other community in Doha besides my own, is to undertake something of substance together. In short: a project of mutual interest and benefit to everyone who is associated with it.

But if you’d like to be embraced, considered a friend, and share triumphs and tribulations —-find something meaningful to do together. This is the only way to break down stereotypes in any society, culture, country. You stand up and defend a race, a religion, a gender because you know someone who doesn’t deserve to be belittled.

It may be the most time consuming but it is the most tested form and has the most consistent results. You can sit around sheesha and karak places all night long, but until there is something you care about together, a shared goal, vision, mission, plan, that you sweat over and celebrate together; you’ll still not have the measure of who each other are. What’s of relatively low importance here is what the “thing” is that brings you together.

It could be supporting creative writers; it could be developing a concept for children in Doha; it could be establishing a local magazine, it could be creating a business idea – these are a few examples of projects I’m currently working on with the input of Arabs, expats, and Qataris. In essence: anything and everything you are passionate about get out there and start talking to people about it. Social media, real time conferences, or to your friends, figure out what you have in common with those around you and how to broaden that circle to include others.

For me the first hint that working together makes meaning possible came entirely by accident: I was bored to death during my second year in Qatar and I started to write more seriously. During this time someone suggested exploring my personal interest in writing through at grant for Qatar University to do an essay collection. There were so many uncertain elements: would we find writers? And then what about readers? Did a project like this stand a chance? The only way to know is not to decide beforehand, but to try it out.

Fear of failure had killed more good ideas and trapped more people in unhappiness than any other cause.

We tried it and 23 female writers stepped forward. The book launched at the opening of the Waqif Art Center– the first collection of its kind in Qatar – and people (including male writers) began asking: when will the next book be out? The Qatar Narratives Series, now in our 5^th title, was created.

I crunched down all of this in answering one of the questions during the discussion held by the Doha Film Institute a week or so ago to check the pulse of the community regarding TEDxDoha and all things TED. The question: what are incorrect assumptions (or mistakes) westerners make about Qatar?

One of the main concerns is what we’ve been talking about already, the idea that the well-known Arab hospitality is little experienced by the vast majority of expats.

Brian Wesolowski, from ictQatar, and Creative Commons evangelist, began answering this seemingly sensitive subject. And what he said echoes much of what we’ve been saying: He found that he developed relationships with people in the local community as he started talking about Creative Commons. Through coffees, teas, and dinners, he let artists, photographers, designers; know that there was a platform ready for them to display their creativity. Brian was passionate about CC and through CC he gained an entire multi-national community.

It’s not easy, you’re thinking, what about my job, or my family, or my hobby? Well, if it were easy, everyone would do it. And that hobby? Well, it may just be your ticket to a more meaningful experience.

If you aren’t familiar with TED, the NGO that’s believes in “Ideas worth Spreading” then instead of crawling YouTube, spend a few (thousand) hours with experts in Technology, Environment, and Design.  In 15 minute segments, TED gives you access to the world famous including Bill Gates and Madeline Albright, as well as everyday practitioners perfecting their techniques all over the world. Offshoots of the official TED are TEDx, or independently organized events and in 2010 Doha hosted its very first TEDxDoha event, put together by the Doha Film Institute. Contact them if you’re interested in learning more about how you can get involved (and meet others interested in doing so).

It happened again at a dinner party last night. Someone invariably was talking about a trip they went on where the local people were normal. And the city was normal. And the economy was normal. The latest land to be praised was Oman. Now granted, I’ve been to Oman and it beautiful, lush and green; Omanis are truly friendly people. But the comparison to Qatar is what put me on the defensive. From within our expat enclaves to talk about the other as abnormal is more than my postcolonial heart can stand. Especially since I know that the wall we feel between us and the local community is a mutual construction.

In Doha, I find myself in an awkward position, not unfamiliar as the child of immigrants. Being a third culture child: living in one, raised in another, fashioning your way, perhaps was the best experience for this life of in between apologist. Invariably this word normal has always gotten my back up. Growing up as a South Asian in north central Florida, I was anything but normal. I was the fly in the ointment as they say and very much felt it in the way my parents dressed, spoke, behaved and the resulting impact on what I brought to school to eat, the social rules I had to live by: in short my American teenage years were nothing like what we see on prime time U.S. television.

Now I am constantly defending Qataries to expats and expats to Qataries. Rarely do these two communities ever actually meet in a meaningful way. And whey they do, it’s more like crashing into one another. I’m often like an eavesdropper, hearing what each side has to say about the other, wishing I could call for a meeting of the minds. The complaints are so constant and familiar as to be unoriginal and borderline boring. If only they weren’t so serious in their examination of the other group. We dwell on the worst in each other.

The impatient Qatari man or woman is indignant at being made to wait in their own country in a line, for example, and pushes ahead of everyone else.

Or the skimpily clad expat woman, for another, is walking around the souq dressed as though she were at home, for another, because of the scorching heat, not realizing it’s Ramadan.

We live in the same city but never really on the same plain. And I can’t figure out what it is. But perhaps like the cause of war, there is no one specific reason, just a mishmash of facts and emotions. Some of it is the transient nature of the Doha labor market intersecting with the need to maintain the boundaries of these various nationalities. People come on short term contracts, to make money, never expecting to stay and also not really encouraged to think of Qatar as home.

Dress is a distinct way to make sure no one ever forgets where the other person is really “from” and to where they will return. While we are together, even eating, shopping, or visiting each others homes, there are visual reminders we are different.

In an environment where one group is here today and gone tomorrow – a phenomena I’m growing increasingly sick of as one of the ones left behind – I see now why the group that’s staying doesn’t really bother with the new group. After all, now I’m the one running in the other direction in early August as the new arrivals are trooping out of the airport and onto the immigration buses for their medical screenings. I know exactly what they’ll want to talk about for the first six months they are here: Ramadan, driving, the heat, dust, censored movies, and migrant workers. No one wants to learn Arabic because they don’t need to use it. No one knows any Qataries either because they don’t work with any or those that they do with rarely come to office. And the Qataries that are working outside of the government or ministries often feel outnumbered at the office the same way they would have been at City Center or Villaggio. It’s not that these events and feelings aren’t important to discuss – after all what else can you talk about when you first arrive but what you know? The sad fact is that many never develop their conversation or their relationships beyond these initial impressions.

But it’s many of their companies that are the ones promising expats that their lifestyles – implied: their mindsets – don’t have to change in order to move to Doha. Being a moderate state has its draw backs: alcohol being sold in hotels, burgeoning night life, the pace of change constantly on your front doorstep and price the seemingly endless tide of people coming and going, while you keep living your life.

In the past, before the financial crisis, and pre-2022 host city status, most people wouldn’t come to the desert without great motivation. Hence the now well known financial and lifestyle incentives pile up for the adventurous expats. But you’re not necessarily getting what you pay for, as most career expats can tell you: those who are abroad are either there for the adventure, or there because nowhere else will have them. These poor specimens are often the ones Qataries single out when explaining they feel that they are being passed by for blue eyed, blond haired non-expert, living in a fancy house and driving a nice car on their money.

Meanwhile, the same foreigners, or indeed even credential non-white expats, see the in day to day effects of Qatarization – people not coming to work, young men skipping industry altogether to drink coffee at Starbucks, colleagues that are not motivated – as proof that a merit based society will never thrive.

And we reach another impasse as stereotypes are circulated, confirmed, and recirculated.

As one of the people who has hung on, now in my sixth year, I’ve grown almost deaf to these complaints. People always want to know how I did it, how did I make Qatari friends? The answers are so easy as to blatantly obvious but they demand the one ingredient not many have the luxury of: time. I was around, I engaged in meaningful work (in my case writing projects), I had multiple opportunities to show that I cared. Though in an interesting side bar, I have to admit that no one over the age of 40 is a good friend, though I have many older colleagues I feel great mutual respect for.

Maybe there is something modern about the notion of having an expat friend come over on a Friday to the family house, be invited to the ladies majlis, or go to visit in the hospital after she has given birth. Most of my male and female Qatari friends are under the age of 30, hovering closer to 25.

These relationships, like any friendships, are not easy to build and often harder to maintain given the various demands that everyone is juggling. But that is the thing that’s normal. Take it from someone who has seen several cycles of expats come and go; the mistrust on both sides is about the only thing normal about life here. Nearly everyone that I went to my medical screening with in 2005 has left Doha.

So as a survival mechanism I started making friends with Qataries. If I was staying and they were staying, I figured I couldn’t go wrong. But then a strange thing happened: even my Qatari friends started going abroad to purse further studies, or temporary assignments, leaving me once again bereft, the only answer being to make more friends.

“Where is the famous Qatari hospitality?” a lot of people ask at dinner parties. I hear stories of their travels elsewhere in the Middle East where complete strangers invite them in for meals, or give them directions and walk the entire walk, etc. etc.

The United States cannot really claim to be a bastion of civility to foreigners and as recent headlines show, neither will Europe win any words for raids on xenophobia. The numbers do not make it easy for the average Qatari, vastly outnumbered in their own country, rushed into speaking, studying, living in a foreign tongue, to open their hearts or homes to just any of the tens of thousands of people passing by. Add to this the context of gender segregated socialization and you’ve just halved the opportunities for interaction again.

It is not easy for either side to see the other across this wall of indifference. And there are people who benefit from this consistently wide gulf between us. For the sake of Qatar, and my friends on both sides, I hope more people keep reaching across. It is the only hope any of us have at living an abnormal life and creating connections between these historically different communities.

If you’ve seen the email forward of the guy on the bike, riding through traffic, on the back of his t shirt is the slogan "It’s called a white house for a reason" then you know some of the fallout from the election results.

People are justifiably upset by this slogan and it’s racist underpinnings.

I think the statement needs more credit. The slogan is true because the mentality behind it has held true. It has been a white house for 43 presidencies. And people have been used to thinking of it as a white man’s job.

Guess what? 

No longer!

I went to a debate in here Doha last night, with people who represented both parties, Republican and Democrat. What struck me as I listened was how much was not being said. The Republican representative kept talking about John McCain as the ‘acceptable’ candidate. Now what, in the world, does that mean?

I did ask a question during the Q and A (about why the Republican party likes to apply mud slinging rhetoric to others and ignore their own mud) but not the one I’m contemplating this morning.

Regardless of who wins, what happens next? Will we just go back to pretending the content of a man’s character was not the subject of pre-election days, but rather the color of his middle name? All uncomfortable racial and gender politics that have been uncovered in this long campaign – will they just be swept under the rug and business as usual?

Forget about reaching across party lines for a moment. Who is going to breach the racial divisions?
Let’s hope for our sake it’s whomever is elected president.

Believe it or not, the title of this piece is an actual quote of a woman during a recent NPR story when questioned about her leanings for the 08 vote. This gem came out while she denied that she was "racist or whatever you want to call it." Clearly, as you’ll see in a moment, she couldn’t use the infamous refrain, "some of my best friends are…." because she doesn’t know any. We can assume the last black person she knew was someone she went to high school with. Scary but true of the racial divide in modern society.

Later on in the interview this woman mentioned she  is opposed to John McCain but may not cast a vote in this election because "until he [Obama] was nominated for president, I didn’t really think about it [having a black president]. She’s worried that he [Obama] "would only think about his people".

Revealing, shocking, honest, scary commentary from your average American citizen.

Are the majority scared? Do they sniff change in the air?

The world holds its breath…

Is being attractive or likeable more important than being smart? 

Watching the US "veep" debates and the hours of analysis later, you might think so.  Apparently designer clothes, winks, kisses, and ‘shoutouts’ are what it takes to win the nation’s hearts and minds these days.

I’m tempted to wash my hands of the whole thing and say that they deserve what they get. But I (although with my campaign addicted husband) can’t look away from the TV. It’s like watching a train wreck or the reason why there is so much rubbernecking on the freeway. Bad news makes you stop, stare, and slow everyone else down.

Sure, I like perkiness. I like audacious claims. I even will use slang during important business meetings to show that I haven’t lost my connection to my ‘block.’ But lately I’m realizing how fallible these tenants of being ‘down to earth’ are. Sometimes it’s okay to be smart. It’s fine to use big words that I learned during graduate school.

Let me make this clear: we all want to see women advance in all fields, all over the world. But not just because they are women. I rejoice when people of color do well. But not just because they are people of color. What happened to liking someone because he or she was competent? Or, dare I say it, the best candidate for the job?

Psychology has proven that there is a ‘halo’ effect. That attractive people get more from life and from those around them. We are friendlier to those we consider attractive, give them more leeway, allow them more time.

Hopefully the American people are aware of this bias for the surface charm and will chose, not based on looks, or likeability, race or even gender, but on rationale, reasonable facts. Only 31 more nail biting days to go to see which wins out.

I went to a very stimulating conference today, sponsored by Carnegie Mellon, Qatar, focused on research students had done on the issues facing immigrants living in Doha. I will leave aside my pleasure in undergraduate research, my congratulations to their faculty advisers, or my hope for their future as purposeful academics – all of which are true and any of which I could write a segment, and perhaps will later.

Instead, one remark has been ringing in my ears since I left the building.

A person from the audience interrogated one of the student panels, asking why the Indian Benevolence Fund did not intercede on behalf of a 63 year old Indian man whose restaurant enterprise had gone bankrupt, necessitating that he spend 7 years in Qatar working back a debt of 200,000 QR  (apx. 54,000 USD). The man was unable to see his daughter in this intervening period.

Why, the questioner prodded the student panel, didn’t this ‘fund’ do something about this deplorable situation?

Well, I have a different question.

Why is this an ‘indian’ problem? Why are only indians moved by pity for this man?

Does not the idea of 63 year old man, unable to see his daughter, burdened by debt, move any heart? Of any nationality?

This is the basic question facing Qatar: how much does nationality matter? And where does it stack against the fact of our shared humanity?

The case on the everyday Doha street appears to be that social class and status marks those points between human and some not quite sub human but not quite above dust category of species. 

In many countries in the world, you can be someone who works in plumbing, not a plumber, on Friday, Saturday, Sunday (or whatever days are your weekend). People can change their clothes, walk around with their families, be themselves.

But here, in such a small city, where we are all pressing up against each other, even on Friday, we see the small framed sub-continental men, shuffling their feet at the entrance of malls that they are baned from entering, regardless if they helped build them.

We in Qatar, and in the world, will only be able to progress in so much as we can move beyond race, class, even gender, to respond to the universal in those around us. We must do the good we can. Otherwise, all is lost. 

I felt good when I left that room this evening because I saw the stirrings of this generation, Qatar and the world’s hope, beginning to grapple with these larger questions of how to deal with rapid change in a just and equitable manner.

But the question plagues me. Why didn’t I, as an naturalized American national respond to the plight of this 63 year old man?

As the man from the Indian Benevelonce Fund stated, quite passionately, “The minute we knew about it, two business men stepped forward and helped.”

It is my promise that I will seek to know and to notice where I can help – whether Indian, Filipino, Qatari, or Australian.

After all, isn’t this why I’m blessed with discretionary income, employment flexibility, as much schooling as I want , even up to a Ph.D?

Aren’t you?

When I was growing up, FAIR AND LOVELY face cream was kind of a joke. After all, the whitening properties of the face cream, targeted at a South Asian female demagraphic didn’t apply to me. I was living in the U.S. where during the summertime, you’d see rows and rows of white bodies baking under the Florida sun. Trying to get darker.

But after a recent visit to Malaysia, I see that FAIR AND LOVELY has bigger aims. Their ads now target Asian women of all stripes: there are even ads on channels shown in Qatar.

The story is the same: the hard working, well deserving woman – model, designer, whatever – can’t get ahead with her assignments because her bosses all find her ‘dark’ skin tone unattractive. Introduce the cream, and VIOLA!, she’s on her way to being the next mega mogul.

I’m puzzled by these opposing long existing trends – white is desireable, but all white people  try to tan – which sreams of double standards and contradictions.

Why all the spray tans and ‘fake bakes’ if white people dislike browness?

Is this what is holding Obama back – a man who everyone admits has poise, confidence, and the momentum for a historical moment in the making – only he may also have a little too much brown in the face of Clinton’s whiteness?

My friend at the pool today suggested the mideval idea that white was a sign of class status: the fairier your skin, the less hard you were working, particularly with your hands in the sun.

But I suspect that a more malicious lingering of colonial ideology is to behind skin bleaching.

As my friend Allison used to say, “Here’s Moha, my little brown friend.”

And proud of it!