Day 211 - Gloria

Sandra and Gloria

In the spring, Gloria, the ambassador's new secretary, arrived. The Department had some challenges finding someone willing to replace Marge because word had gotten out that the ambassador was difficult to work for. The process for assigning a secretary to an ambassador is unlike the assignment process for other Foreign Service staff. An ambassador's secretary's tour length depends on the length of time the ambassador is in country. The expectation is that the two will remain in the country for the same length of time. It is very unusual for an ambassador's secretary to leave ahead of the ambassador. Marge's request for her tour to be broken early was therefore unexpected.

An ambassador gets to select his or her own secretary, but a political appointee ambassador doesn't have the advantage of knowing much about possible candidates. The pool of candidates is small and word gets around quickly. When an ambassador's secretary leaves early, people ask why. When no Foreign Service secretary could be convinced to consider the position, exceptional steps were needed. Gloria was a Civil Service secretary with a reputation for getting along with everyone, including some senior staff who were considered difficult. Gloria agreed to come as the ambassador's secrertary and the ambassador accepted her assignment.

Gloria shopping, one of
our favorite activities

Gloria was a breath of fresh air for me. All the other Americans at the embassy were men, most of them single so there weren't even many wives to be my friends. Marge had decided to leave even before I arrived in Doha, so I didn't take the time to get to know her. That was a poor decision, albeit perhaps not a conscious one, and therefore it was my loss. When Gloria arrived, she and I became friends quickly, spending lots of our spare time together as well as going with one another to official functions.

One event we attended together was a Qatari wedding. In a segregated society such as Qatar's, weddings had two separate venues, one for the men and one for the women. Gloria and I were invited to the wedding because the groom was one of our Qatari contacts. But we were invited to the women's event where we knew no one as it would have been inappropriate for us to attend the men's event.

Muslim marriages are concluded through the signing of a contract, not the performance of a public ceremony. The wedding ceremonies are just celebrations that the marriage has taken place. The women's event involved women gathering at a large venue - the one we attended was in the ballrooms of the Sheraton hotel - moving the chairs around into conversational groups while musicians and dancers performed as entertainment.

When Gloria and I arrived, there were rows and rows of chairs set up from front to back of the ballroom, facing the end of the room where the musicians and dancers performed. The rows were set up just as a fire marshall would prefer - with a wide aisle down the middle and even wider aisles on either side of the two halves. Gloria and I sat down in chairs about two-thirds of the way back. Since we didn't know anyone and neither of us spoke Arabic, there weren't other people for us to join.

We watched as more and more women came into the ballroom. Each woman would grab a chair from the neatly organized rows and move them forward so they could join a group of women they knew. The neat rows disintegrated into messy groups congregated in the front half of the room. It didn't take long until all the other chairs had been moved forward, leaving Gloria and me sitting in two isolated chairs all alone in the otherwise empty back half of the room.

Gloria being fitted for new clothes,
another of our favorite activities

Then we saw the ambassador's wife enter. The ambassador frequently reminded us of protocol rules that he felt we staff members either didn't know or ignored. One of those rules was that when the ambassador or his wife entered an event where we were already present, we were to go over to greet them and make sure that they were introduced to someone else so they were not left alone at any time. Gloria and I looked at one another, knowing that once we got up from our chairs, they would disappear and we would be left without anywhere to sit. But we had to greet her.

We walked to the ambassador's wife and escorted her to the area near the musicians as that was where we hoped she would recognize someone she knew since neither Gloria nor I would be able to pick out someone to introduce her to. That worked. Mrs. ambassador joined women she knew and someone among that group gave up a chair so Mrs. ambassador could sit. And Gloria and I headed back to where our chairs had been, hoping they would still be there. They weren't.

So we had to stand for the rest of the event.

Until that point, only guests and those hired to entertain guests were in the room. The bride and her family arrived much later. The groom, the bride's father and brothers and the groom's father may accompany the bride, but they remain for only a very short time. When it was known that the bride would be arriving with men unrelated to the guests, the Qatari women all grabbed their abayas, the black outer garment that covered women from head to toe, and wrapped themselves in them so the men wouldn't see them. What had been a room full of color and patterns and sparkling jewels turned black, as though the lights had been turned off.

Modern brides in the middle east wear white wedding gowns just as most brides in the west do. And the brides do get their opportunity to walk down an aisle of sorts. There is usually a raised platform more like a catwalk runway than an aisle in a house of worship which the bride walks along so that everyone in the room gets the opportunity to see her. After the bride, her mother and sisters have made their way around the room greeting the guests, the bride and the men leave the event, leaving the bride's female relatives with the guests for the rest of the evening.

At a time of the evening that always seemed way too late, the food would be served. For this event, tables lined the area outside of the ballroom where food was set out buffet style. Once all the food was in place, the hotel staff opened the ballroom doors, the abayas covered most of the women again, and the guests dashed for the tables where the mountains of food disappeared faster than I thought possible. And then the guests left.

Without Gloria, I would have missed so much.