Day 204 - It's Just A Game

In addition to offering me something to do every spare evening during the rehearsals for upcoming plays, Doha Players introduced me to a Gulf Sunday* afternoon tradition in Doha - team trivia teasers, a two-hour radio program that mixed music and trivia.

Listening to the radio by OZinOH,
via Flickr.com

To take part, people formed teams and picked out silly names for themselves. They gathered each Friday (Gulf Sunday) afternoon by 5 p.m. and tuned in to the English language radio station which posed 12 trivia questions interspersed with music between 5 and 6 p.m. The teams spent the next hour coming to agreement on the answers to the questions, calling in their answers to the radio station before 7 p.m. when the answers were revealed. Chris and Matt kept track of each team's scores, accumulating them each week throughout the school year months. At the end of each season, the radio station hosted a dinner and party where prizes were handed out to the teams with the highest scores.

Not all of the teams were in Doha. The radio station could be heard in Bahrain as well, so at least one team called in from that neighboring country each week. One team was known to call the London Museum each Friday to get help with the answers. Most of us just collected trivia books of all sorts and looked up the answers. Our team had members who specialized in certain subjects so that we could divide up the questions and not spend all our time on the same ones. Phil, for example, was our music specialist. He would record the musical clip each week and go off into a corner of a room far from the rest of us to listen to it over and over again until he thought he had the answer.

Our team took turns hosting the evening. Hosting meant providing the meat - usually grilled - to accompany the pot luck contributions of everyone else. The hosts concentrated on getting the food ready and were excused from trivia duty.

It didn't matter which team won. It only mattered that we have fun. But team trivia teaser only happened during the school year. When summer arrived and so many of the women and children left Doha, we were without a Friday evening activity, until one of our team members figured out how we could play other games as teams, without the radio. We began playing team Scrabble.

Image of Scrabble board by alex_untitled, via Flickr.com

Now back when Chris and I began hosting the English Language Social Club in Iași, I had thought Scrabble would be a great way to get the students to use English in conversation. It didn't take long, however, to discover that word games might involve language, but usually they are accompanied by silence. And only one person at a time is involved in playing the game. Our hosts found a way to change that. Instead of each of us taking a turn at laying out words on a Scrabble board, we worked in couples all with the same tiles to see how many points we could get with the letters drawn within a fixed time limit. When time was up, each couple revealed the word they had put together with the tiles and what was already on the board. The score for each team for the round was the score for the word they added - and the highest scoring word was written onto the oversized version of a Scrabble board that stood on an easel in front of us. Play continued when new tiles were drawn to replace those put down for the high score. Everyone was involved throughout the game, every team received a score for every round, and a level of competition prevailed along with the fun.

Pictionary was also a big hit in Doha. It is another game where everyone in the room is invoved, even if the teams aren't all drawing at the same time and at least the picturist for the team must not speak. We ran into some serious Pictionary players in Doha. The couple Alex and I were teamed with for the international road rally, for instance, observed the rules of not using letters of numbers on their pictures, but they had developed an extensive set of shared symbols that were more helpful than letters or numbers. For example, a large equilateral triangle with a smaller triangle balanced upside down on the tip of the larger one was Great Britain. A dot appropriately placed identified a city or region within England in seconds.

PJ and Heather

The most impressive Pictionary play I recall however was as removed from the Great Britain example as I can think of. Heather and PJ, the children of my friends and neighbors, Pete and Sofia, were teamed up one afternoon when the phrase was Pacific Ocean. One of them drew what I could only describe as an amoeba-shaped scribble at which point the other said immediately, "Pacific Ocean."

If they had been twins, I could better have understood it.

*The work week in Qatar and most of the other countries around the Gulf was Saturday through Wednesday, with Thursday and Friday being the weekend. But since the names of days of the week conjure up specific contexts, many of us used "Gulf" in front of the western day of the week that the actual day of the week was comparable to. Thus, Gulf Sunday was Friday, but since Friday conjures up "end of the work week" to most people, not "day before I go back to work" the Gulf prefix helps convey the context for the events mentioned.