Day 213 - Protocol

a diplomatic reception

The session during my orientation to the Foreign Service that was most troubling was the session on protocol. Protocol has been defined somewhat flippantly as behaving impolitely on purpose. But that only works because it requires rigid following of the rules. Some of those rules seemed arbitrary themselves. But mostly what struck us all was how important it was to sit at the right end of the sofa, to get into and out of a car in the right order, and to arrange for guests to be seated appropriately at conferences and dinners. Breaking the rules was the fastest way to insult someone. If the someone was the boss, there were career consequences. If the someone was from another mission, there could be political consequences.

Fortunately, most of the rules I had to worry about only had career consequences.

another diplomatic reception

One of the rules required that staff members stand whenever the ambassador entered the room. Since I had not worked at an embassy before, I hadn't observed the rule anywhere, but everyone around me in Doha made sure I knew about it because the ambassador took this gesture of respect very seriously. I knew the ambassador - any ambassador for that matter - would be the last person to enter a room for a meeting. Those who were invited to the meeting were expected to be there on time. No one could ever enter a meeting late if the ambassador was present. So I knew that when the ambassador stepped into the conference room for our weekly country team meetings, we were all expected to stand until he sat down and told us we could take our seat.

But I hadn't realized the ambassador expected us to stand up when he came into our offices to talk with us. When one of my colleagues told me he did expect it, I asked his secretary, Marge, if he expected her to stand up every time he walked into her office, something he did several times a day. She responded that of course he didn't. But she didn't realize he was making an exception for her.

another diplomatic reception

At a larger embassy, it would be a very rare thing for an ambassador to come into the office of a staff member. It would be much more likely that staff members would be called and told to come to the ambassador's office for a conversation. So it is likely people would have stood up if the ambassador entered someone's office at a larger embassy. One of our local consular section employees, Randa, had previously worked at the U.S. embassy in Damascus and she confirmed this was the case there. But our embassy in Doha was about the smallest in the world - the ambassador and six other Americans. The small size meant that the ambassador couldn't avoid entering some of our offices.

When he came into my office one day and I didn't stand up, he stated his reason for dropping in and then pointed out that I perhaps didn't realize all the protocol rules because I should have stood up when he entered my office. I told him he was right, I hadn't realized that, and that I would stand up when he entered the room in the future.

We grumbled about this a bit because we all suspected that at most embassies the ambassador would likely only expect the staff to stand when he entered the conference room for meetings or when there were others from outside the embassy present. Most ambassadors, we thought, would have told the staff to dispense with the formalities when we were alone. But our ambassador was not like most ambassadors.

another diplomatic reception

It was not only our staff that was small; our building was also small. It was so small that the lobby of the embassy had been cut up with partitions to carve office spaces within the room. And since the ambassador walked through the lobby to get to his office and then through it again whenever he left the building, he expected the two employees whose offices were within that lobby space to stand up when he walked through it. As he had frequent appointments, he walked through the lobby several times a day, expecting those two employees to stand up each time.

Another aspect of protocol that the ambassador reminded us of often was that when we were invited to his home for a representational event, we were expected to be there before any of the other guests arrived and we were expected to remain until the guests had left. This was not an exceptional expectation since this protocol was well understood and observed everywhere. The difference in Doha was that the ambassador held so many representational events at his home and he invited all of us to each of them. He thought it was good for morale. We weren't in a strong enough position to point out to him that it had the opposite effect. I didn't find it very morale boosting to be the only embassy staff member to be seated at the table with all the teenaged children of the guests at one sit-down dinner event.

But maybe I missed the protocol point being aimed at me that day.

Day 202 - . . . Requests the Pleasure of Your Company at. . .

Diplomatic Dinner

A consequence of being a member of the diplomatic corps at a small embassy is the number of diplomatic functions I was expected to attend. That cultural guide for Saudi Arabia that advised bringing books, movies, puzzles, games, and hobby supplies might have been accurate for Qatar as well, if the staff of the U.S. embassy in Doha was as large as the staff in Riyadh. But I was invited to one function or another at least three nights of the week. Sometimes even two events in the same evening. And we were all expected to attend them all.

I got into the pattern very quickly as the embassy was preparing to host the first ever cabinet level visit to Qatar two weeks after my arrival. The ambassador was very pleased that the Secretary of Energy had agreed to come to talk with Qatari government and business leaders. The good news for us was that Washington sent plenty of people to help get ready for and support the visit. That was really good news for us, the club of first-timers, many of whom had never experienced such a visit anywhere.

Diplomatic Reception

One of the events during the Secretary's visit was dinner at the ambassador's residence. I ended up seated at a table with a member of the staff of the French embassy and his wife who were leaving Doha very soon. I was surprised at how little food the diplomat's wife put on her plate - nearly all dinners in Doha were buffets. I thought she must have remarkable self control because the range of foods was more than I had ever seen before.  It didn't take me many more such representational events to realize that with only three quality hotels with catering capacity in the city, the range of what was offered at each event was only amazing on the first two or three occasions. By the fourth event, I could predict what would be served based on which of the familiar faces I saw serving the appetizers before the meal. The Radisson, Sheraton, and Gulf Hotels each had their specialties and it didn't take long to become familiar, and then bored, with them.

In addition to receptions and dinners at the homes of ambassadors, counselors, and attaches, there were cultural performances sponsored by embassies. I attended concerts ranging from American jazz to opera, dance performances ranging from square dancing to native American Indian ceremonial dances, plays involving large casts and one-person shows. And there were academic lecturers brought to Qatar for educational exchanges.

Diplomatic Reception

An aspect of life in Qatar in those days was that every cultural event was a family event. I referred to Doha as a G-rated country where parents never need worry that their children will be exposed to an embarrassing concept, word, or image. Several of my friends with children explained they had stayed in Doha longer than they had initially planned because they liked the fact that their children spent time with them while the children of their friends back home were trying to get away from their parents as much as possible. I think it meant that the children felt respected by adults because they spent so much time in adult company, and in return they showed respect to their parents and their parents' friends.

Ship Visit

On the two or three evenings each week that were not taken up by diplomatic functions, we often spent the evenings entertaining the many temporary duty (TDY) visitors were in town. The hotels were comfortable. The food in the restaurants was excellent. But there wasn't much to do in Doha for those who couldn't get out of the hotels. So we invited them to our homes where they could have a beer, wine or something stronger - alcohol wasn't available even in the hotel restaurants in those days - and we could share stories and conversation. Since most of the embassy staff lived in the same residential compound, inviting the TDY visitors to one home usually meant inviting all the rest of the embassy staff as well. We rotated which house the visitors were invited to, sharing the entertainment responsibilities.

And it was our pleasure to do so.

Day 200 - When Is An Employee Not Really An Employee?

Before I went to Doha, I had lots of consultations with people throughout the Department, most of whom had something to warn me about. Life had not gone smoothly for members of the embassy the year before I arrived. One thing about small embassies that continues to be true is that almost all of the staff at them are first-timers. The vice consul was a first-tour officer. I was a second-tour officer, but my first tour was as a consular officer, so Doha was my first tour as an administrative officer. The ambassador's secretary had been a secretary overseas before, but it was her first tour as secretary to a chief of mission. Even the ambassador was a first-timer: he was a political appointee whose qualifications for the job rested on his reputation for having delivered the Armenian-American voters in southern California for President Reagan.

That meant that every one of us was dealing with most aspects of our jobs for the first time. And there were no experienced hands around for us to ask. These were the days before e-mail, when international telephone calls were very expensive, so picking up the phone to ask a question also wasn't an insignificant cost. And that is why I had so many consultations and why so many people wanted to be sure I understood the challenges I would face when I arrived.

One of those challenges was that my predecessor, a first-tour officer who had been assigned as the vice consul but was moved into the administrative officer's position half-way through his tour, was not only a first-timer in the job - he hadn't received any training for the job either. It wasn't a surprise that some of the actions he took were not exactly according to the regulations. I was expected to fix those irregularities.

Judy

One of them - replace a locally hired American citizen for whom there was no legal basis for hiring. Those were the days when the only American citizens who could be hired locally were dependents of Americans assigned by the Foreign Service or the military to the country. Well, that is practically the truth, although technically there was a provision for locally resident American citizens to be hired, but the process was so complex and took several years to complete that it was not an option. Even under that provision, an American who was married to a non-American was not eligible to be hired through it. And Judy, the American in this case, was married to an Egyptian. My predecessor hadn't hired Judy as a Foreign Service National employee; he used an alternate staffing method referred to as a Personal Services Contract, so technically he didn't violate the hiring rules. But his bringing Judy on board through a PSC coincided with the Department's effort to regularize contract positions to ensure those who worked inside an embassy as contractors received the same benefits as those hired as employees. The PSCs were coming under scrutiny as well.

I spoke with my predecessor about this before I left Washington, and he assured me it was taken care of. He had already hired an Egyptian woman to replace Judy. Her first day on the job would be my first day on the job. Judy had agreed to stay on for a week to train her, but after that, she would no longer be  part of the embassy staff.

So on my first day at the embassy I met Judy, her boss Jirius, and the Egyptian woman hired to replace Judy. The reason I can't remember the Egyptian woman's name is that she didn't last very long. About 45 minutes into the morning, Judy came to my office to tell me that the Egyptian woman wanted to talk to me because she had decided she didn't want to work for the embassy.

When she came into my office, she was shaking like a leaf. I did what I could to make her comfortable and asked her what she wanted to do. She said she didn't want to stay at the embassy. She was uncomfortable with the guards outside the compound wall, with the bars on the windows, and by the lack of light in her office. I told her she didn't have to stay, that I wouldn't - I couldn't - make her stay if she didn't want to stay. At that point she visibly relaxed and talked with me more comfortably. She explained that it was her husband who had convinced her she should accept the job with the embassy because he thought it would be a good move for her. On her last day in her previous job, her boss had told her that if she wanted to come back to her old job, she could. Over the weekend, she had thought about that offer and she realized that is what she wanted to do. She asked if she had to stay until the end of the day. I told her she could leave right then if she wanted. And at that, she smiled. She called her husband and left.

I learned later that there were a few more factors in this scenario. One was that Jirius, the senior local employee in the section, really wanted someone who was fluent in English in the position. That is why my predecessor hired Judy. And because Judy had lived in the middle east for more than 20 years, she also spoke Arabic, making her the ideal candidate for the job, except for those pesky regulations that precluded her from being hired. Jirius' next preference was Gaynor*, a British woman who was married to an Iraqi. But the ambassador had refused to hire her. Everyone around me told me that the ambassador was very particular about his desire not to have any British staff members, something that I found very difficult to understand since the public affairs officer had both an Irish secretary and a British student advisor.

image of a clean slate by Underpuppy,
via Flickr.com

During my first meeting with the ambassador, he told me that I would likely hear many stories about him from those around me. He knew that he wasn't everyone's favorite person. But he asked that I not pay heed to what I heard from others, that I instead listen to what he had to tell me and to begin my working relationship with him from a clean slate. I said I would. I also then explained to him that the woman my predecessor had hired as Jirius' assistant had decided she didn't want the job so I would have to begin again to find a suitable candidate. The ambassador said nothing beyond asking that I let him know how the search went.

When I went through my predecessor's files, I found that the criteria he had used to determine the best candidate was based solely on translation of English into Arabic and vice versa. Since I had no Arabic knowledge, I couldn't assess how well the candidates did on this task, nor could I tell whether translation was a major portion of the job.

So I sat down with Judy to learn what she did in a typical day. I learned that most of what she did was to refer to a series of business directories in order to identify companies in the United States who might be good trading partners for Qatari businesses and which Qatari businesses might be interested in working with American businesses. While Judy was able to translate between Arabic and English, it was obvious to me that understanding English was much more important. Judy also handled telephone calls from both the U.S. and locally. She used Arabic when speaking with local business people, but she told me that the Qatari business people could all conduct their business in English as well. In her opinion, Arabic was a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have, skill.

I took the information Judy gave me and created a series of exercises around the type of tasks Judy did each day, hoping for two different outcomes. First, I would have some semi-objective data to determine how well the candidates could manage the work. Second, the candidates would have a better idea of what they would be expected to do than a translation exercise offered.  The next step was to place an ad in the paper for the vacancy. I also reached out to neighboring embassies to see if any of their staff would be interested in being considered for the vacancy.

The exercises involved using the directories that Judy used each day to find information in response to a series of questions. Then, because many of the entries in the directories were referrals to other terms, such as pets, See specific animals, I provided a list of ten words with the task of writing down as many related words for each as the candidates could think of. Since the directories were alphabetical, I provided several lists of words for the candidates to alphabetize, including a string of words that all started with the same letter and where looking to the fourth letter was necessary to determine the correct order. The last exercise was for the candidates to write a few sentences of what they thought they had learned about the job from the exercises.

When I brought candidates in for interviews, I gave each of them the exercises and a fixed length to complete as many as they could. Once the fixed length of time passed, I gave them the short writing exercise. I didn't write the names of the candidates on any of the exercises. I assigned each of them a letter so that no one would know which papers were completed by which candidate.

There were two candidates in Cairo, one Egyptian and one British, who were interested in being considered, so I had the personnel officer there give those candidates the same exercises. By the time I was done, I had results for nine candidates. I gave the exercises to Jirius for him to identify the top three candidates based on the exercises and I then arranged for him to interview the top three.

He picked Gaynor, again. Everyone around me told me that the ambassador would never allow me to hire her. But I stuck to my agreement that I would not listen to others. I had kept the ambassador informed of the process and he hadn't yet told me that I could or couldn't hire anyone of a specific nationality. So I contacted the security officer in Riyadh to begin the process of getting Gaynor cleared. And I sent a letter to Gaynor offering her the job, subject to satisfactory security and medical clearances. And she accepted.

When I told the ambassador the security officer would be coming to interview the candidate, he finally asked questions that gave away his true feelings. Eventually he asked a question I couldn't finesse - he asked what passport she carried. I told him she was British, he lost his composure and said that I couldn't hire her, that everyone knew he would not allow a British citizen to work for the embassy. I just looked back at him and said, "but you never told me." And he realized he hadn't.

So he decided he would conduct her background security investigation. He contacted the security officer to tell him he didn't need to come to Qatar. And he did his own digging. I don't recall the details, but the end result was obvious before he began. He declared that it would be a security risk for us to hire her. I had to contact Gaynor to tell her that I had to withdraw the offer based on the results of the security check. She had to know that was bogus since no one had even come to talk with her.

Judy remained at the embassy throughout the time I was in Doha. To avoid the appearance of employment (as well as the lack of any legal basis for employing her) I structured a non-personal services contract for her to ensure that she would be paid for the work that she did, but she received none of the benefits that other employees received. It wasn't fair. But it was clear that Jirius would never accept a non-native speaker of English, the ambassador would never accept a Brit, and I had no authority to hire an American. So we waited until the ambassador and his family left Qatar before advertising the position again - nearly two years after I arrived. The woman who was selected that time? Gaynor.

What about the British woman who was the American student advisor for the Public Affairs Office? The ambassador made the public affairs officer fire her, too.

*A name, not necessarily the right one.

Day 196 - Demographics

Image of Doha Sheraton Hotel, one of the only buildings
in Doha now that was there in the late 1980's,
by vobios, via Flickr.com

There were about 300,000 people living in Doha when I arrived, 200,000 of whom were from somewhere else. Fewer than 100,000 of the people in the country, including the elderly, the women who didn't work outside of the home, the babies, and the school children, were Qataris. That left a very small number of Qataris in the workplace. Most of them were the bosses.

A large proportion of the 200,000 expatriates were there without their families. Those who were the laborers in construction and transportation, the gardeners, the drivers, the security guards, the cleaners didn't make enough money to be able to support their families in Qatar. They usually lived several to an apartment or room and only got home to their families every two or three years.

The number of Americans in Doha was about one-tenth the number of Brits. There were small numbers of other Europeans as well, including French, Germans, and Norwegians. Each of those western nationalities had schools for their children, even the small group of Norwegians had a school, but there was no American School. And that was something the U.S. ambassador was determined to change.

The effort began the year before I arrived. The ambassador brought together the American community to float the idea of starting an American school. The response to the idea was positive, but the vision was not shared by all. The devil is, as they say, in the details. I had been led to believe that those details were sure to doom the idea to never see the light of day. Within my first month in Qatar, however, I attended an American Women's Club meeting at the Ambassador's residence where he announced that there would be an American School in Doha by the opening of the following school year.

The support for an American school came from three different constituencies: the American-born citizens; the naturalized citizens, most of whom were from Arab regions; and the non-Americans who wanted their children to get an American education. Many in the first group assumed an American school would cater only to their children. They were not enthusiastic about what began to look like a school for everybody that was American only in the curriculum it followed. The latter two groups were closer to agreement, but they each had slightly different expectations about the curriculum or the make-up of the staff.

Once the ambassador announced there would be a school, we had to get on board to ensure that it happened. It was clear no school would be viable with only the children of the first constituency. The number of Americans working in the country with educational benefits sufficient to cover what would end up being very high tuition was too limited. The tuition would have to be comparable to what was charged by the British School or the French School. And that meant a larger number of students was necessary to collect the funds needed to pay the rent and teacher salaries. It was also clear that recruiting teachers from the United States, the expectation of a number in the second constituency, was impractical. Teachers would have to be recruited locally and that might mean not all the teachers would be American. It was also clear that it would not be possible to set up a school offering classes for Kindergarten through 12th grade. The school would begin with a limited number of grades, K through grade 4, and grow as the children in the highest grade moved up.

As the enthusiasm waxed and waned, getting the school started was delayed until just before the academic year was about to begin. Diane, the wife of the public affairs officer, Martin, agreed to serve as the first principal of the school. I don't know that she felt she had much choice. A correspondence course curriculum was selected for the teachers to follow. And a building was rented. Most of the initial group of students were not Americans, but were children of parents who wanted them to get an American-style education, the third constituency.

Progress the first year was positive. By the end of the first academic year, the principal and board of directors felt they could expand the number of grades more aggressively, through 8th grade, not just adding 5th grade as had originally been planned, but the building wasn't big enough for the additional classes. The landlord agreed to add another story on the building. Work began as soon as the school term ended.

That summer, the ambassador and his family left the country at the end of his term in June. The public affairs officer and his wife went back to the U.S. with their daughters for their rest and recuperation travel the month of August. During that month, an advertisement appeared in the Doha English-language newspaper offering a school for rent. My first thought was that an existing school in Doha must be closing at the last minute. But that wasn't the story at all. The school was a compound of buildings on a large plot of land owned by a Qatari woman who decided to develop her land. She thought there were enough apartment buildngs in the city, so she decided to build a school instead. She hadn't pre-arranged to lease it. She trusted that the school would be needed when it was done. And if she didn't find a renter the first year, she would leave it empty until the next year. Some might have characterized it as a que sera, sera attitude, but I saw it as an inshallah attitude of the most positive nature. Truthfully, I thought she was overly optimistic that an advertisement two weeks before the traditional opening of schools would have any result at all, a not very generous assessment of her business savvy.

Now that the Ambassador was no longer in the country and his successor wasn't expected to arrive until several months later, I didn't think there would be any pressure for the embassy to pursue leasing the new school. But the senior local employee in the Public Affairs Office contacted the woman to learn more about the property and the circumstances. He then called Martin to tell him about the school. Martin gave the go ahead for the local employee to contact the landlord who was adding another story to the original building to break that lease in order to sign a lease with the new school. I expected the first landlord to be reluctant - or worse - to break the lease since he had already added a third story to his building. But he wasn't; he just demolished the third story and went about finding new tenants. And the American School moved into the new buildings in time to open the second year of operation.

It was one of many examples during my two years in Doha that what looked impossible to me turned out to be just another day in paradise.

Day 195 - War Broke Out Between Two Little Countries You Probably Never Heard Of

Image of Qatari flag by Madame Tussauds,
via Flickr.com

I arrived in Doha in October at 10 p.m. at night. I wasn't prepared for the heat. When I walked off the plane and headed down the steps that had been rolled out to the tarmac, it felt as though I was walking into a kitchen where the oven door had been left open and a fan was blowing directly at me. It took my breath away.

So many things seemed backwards in Doha. Instead of my glasses steaming up when I walked indoors in the winter, my glasses steamed up when I walked outdoors in the summer. We had water heaters in our houses and water tanks outside on the roof. We turned the hot water heaters off in the summer to use them to store water at room temperature. The water tanks on the roof heated up the water to such high temperatures that we used water from the cold tap to wash clothes and dishes. There was a swimming pool on the compound where most of us lived. It didn't have a heater to make the temperature comfortable; it had a chiller to keep the pool from feeling like a bathtub in the summer. In the winter, it barely cooled off.

My previous experience in Iran was a backdrop for my expectations. I knew Iranians are not Arabs. And while I was teaching at San Francisco State University, I had both Iranian and Arab students in my classes and I knew they did not share the same language, culture, or world view. I knew Qatar would be different, but I wasn't sure how much different it would be.

I was a bit apprehensive about meeting the local staff at the embassy. I knew that none of them were Qatari nationals. All the staff were from somewhere else, like the two-thirds of the residents in the country who provided the workforce. Most of them were from South Asia - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. Many were from the Philippines. Those in technical positions were a mixture of Europeans and Americans and Arabs from North Africa and the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean. And many of the latter were Palestinians.

I still remember the irrational, reflexive thought that crossed through my mind when I heard there were Palestinian employees at the embassy. If I had taken a word association test at that time, the word that I would have responded with after hearing Palestinian would have been terrorist. The two words were so indelibly connected at a sub-conscious level even though with my brain engaged I would have rejected the connection. The summer before going to Doha, I saw a billboard in Minneapolis that addressed this point directly. The words said We Are Palestinians, But We Are Not All Terrorists. My mind knew that was correct. But emotions are powerful competitors to intellect.

During my first two weeks on the job, one of the Palestinian employees, Ohaylah, was on leave. During the two weeks she wasn't in Doha, I heard so many wonderful remarks about her that I wasn't sure my impression of her could match the expectations others were creating. But when Ohaylah returned to Doha and I got to know her, my impression was even more favorable than the efforts of others had implied. Ohaylah and the other Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Egyptian employees erased my emotional connection between the word terrorist and any of the nationality adjectives.

The Doha I got to know was the pre-Al Jazeerah Doha, in the Qatar almost no one had ever heard of. Even some of my Foreign Service colleagues thought that the letters DOHA in my return address was an acronym for some federal agency, not the name of the capital of a middle eastern country.

The summer before I arrived in Doha, the governments of Qatar and Bahrain adopted a threatening posture towards one another, as a result of a dispute about Hawar and adjacent islands off the coast of Qatar. Both countries still claim the islands which can be seen from the western coast of Qatar on a clear day and are miles away from Bahrain. The islands are uninhabited, but are in an area with rich petroleum reserves. The increased tension between the two countries led to the closing of air lanes to international flights and for a short period of time Bahrain severed communications links between the two countries. This proved to be a challenge to the embassy in Qatar since without telegraphic communications, no reporting on the war could be sent from Doha to Washington. Instead, telegrams had to be printed and carried by non-professional courier from Doha to Bahrain where they were sent from the embassy in Bahrain. The fact that all reporting about the dispute, covering both the Bahraini and the Qatari perspectives, arrived in Washington with the name of the U.S. Ambassador to Bahrain at the bottom was a source of some embarrassment to the U.S. Ambassador to Qatar, I was told.

Hearing the story from my colleagues on my arrival reminded me of a Ziggy cartoon I had seen just before leaving the U.S. for Doha. In the cartoon, Ziggy was watching TV as the announcer said, War broke out today between two insignificant little countries you probably haven't heard of.

Sometimes life is just as funny as a cartoon.