Fate and circumstance have me moving to the Middle East's latest boom town in a few days. I'll be working with a team of journalists and filmmakers from around the world at Qatar Television, and will finally learn how to correctly pronounce the name of this tiny thumbprint-shaped country.
Qatar has become the world's wealthiest nation, and is certainly one of the more bizarre. Doha used to consist largely of pearling settlements, and as its oil and natural gas fortunes grew, so did its penchant for bleak and shiny corporate architecture and its population of foreigners. Qatar has a population of 1.8 million - only 20% of which are Qataris. The rest are expats from all over, and they are building the country. I'll join them in about three days and I've also been accumulating a happy collection of random facts about the tribal families of the Arabian peninsula, about expat life in Doha (kayaking in mangroves? brunch at pretentious hotels?), and on just how weird it will be to live in the Middle East as a single woman.
While I've watched a few jaws drop as I share the news, for me, moving to the Middle East is kind of a family tradition. My parents moved to Dubai in the early 70's, when it was mostly a remote desert outpost; a beach town with big aspirations. Then, after stints in Toronto and New York, and three children later, the Buchens decamped for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where we lived on a small compound and spent weekends in a vintage Land Rover bumping over greyish desert sand and rocks, in search of
wadis to unfold our picnic in. Now it's my turn. Footloose and fancy-free, I find myself leaving one of the most desirable places to live in the world - the Bay Area - and trading in my life full of friends, family, beautiful places to hike and surf, and good bands to hear at local clubs - for a city that's been called the world's most boring place.
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| On our compound in Riyadh, circa 1991 |
It will be a literal trial by fire - I arrive during the hottest time of the year when temperatures can reach 120ºF. "But it's dry heat!" someone reassures me. "No, of course it's humid, it's on the sea!" says an Al Jazeera reporter. No one seems to agree on much about Doha, other than that the traffic circles are pain to get around. I guess it's all in the eye of the beholder, so we'll see.
There's a lot that's interesting about Doha. It's just that it's mostly interesting in a "dystopic future" kind of way, as someone put it to me recently. A growing city that glitters like a desert mirage, flush with oil cash, importing foreign architects, designers, and journalists to train Qataris to be world-class in all they do. At least that's my impression from afar. Growth and more growth without a lot of mind to labor rights, human rights, and environmental concerns. To put it bluntly, Qatar brings in the first world to train them, and brings in the third world to build for them. It's an extremely hierarchical society, and Doha bends over backwards to accommodate the professional class of foreigners. The Muslim standards of dress are somewhat relaxed for my ilk, and alcohol is allowed in high-end hotels. The working class of expat laborers are not treated with the same velvet gloves, however. Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos and Malaysian workers are banned from the posh malls on the weekends and suffer other humiliations and abuses.
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Speaking of high-end malls, Doha's crown jewel of shopping, the Villaggio mall, was recently the site of a national tragedy; a fire that killed 19 people; 13 of them children. The fire exposed the lax enforcement of fire code and standard safety procedures and shocked the country. It might be one of those watershed moments for this rapidly changing society, drawing the curtain back on the incompetency and corruption that plagues many projects.
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| Doha builds up |
It also reflects the need for good journalism. And while Al Jazeera has successfully covered the region, the lens has not frequently been turned on Qatar and Qataris. I'm looking forward to seeing what that looks like, and will join a growing team of journalists and filmmakers from all over the world to build a documentary series. To join a start-up newsroom was an opportunity I couldn't pass up, since the era of long-format TV journalism in the U.S. is basically dead, or at least static. Most journalistic enterprises are shrinking and especially moving away from expensive investigative documentaries. Qatar has a lot of petrodollars to spend on many things - buying up Barcelona's soccer team, 20% of the London Stock Exchange, and, it turns out, documentary films.
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| Doha skyline by night |
Meantime it's been a wonderful last few weeks in California. I'm enjoying the kindnesses of a smattering of goodbye parties from friends, finally reading Joan Didion's essays about her home state, and realizing just how much California has entered my bones. More on that later. For now, I'm researching the Al-Thani tribe - rulers of Qatar and funders of Al Jazeera and Qatar TV (QTV is under the Al Jazeera umbrella, and the buildings are next door to one another) and trying to decide whether to bring my surfboard to Doha (no waves there, but nearby Oman....) and packing up to ship out. I'll keep you all posted.
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