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.