Cultural Insights

Insha'Allah written in Arabic, with it's counterpart "Masha'Allah", meaning "God has willed it"

We're now three weeks done with the semester, and it's been going really well. We've had some interesting cultural exchanges. For example I talked to them about the Arabic phrase "Insya'Allah", which translates to "If God wills it." Arabs will say this for just about anything. I remember I was talking with a student last year who was failing the class about what she needed to do to get turned around. She said she'd do it, insha'allah. I was a bit annoyed at this, as though she was shifted the blame from her to God if it didn't work out. So I told my students this story and they were surprised that this would be how an American would react. They consider it to be an incredibly respectful thing to say, not just to God, but to the person they're speaking to also. This was the first of many cultural insights during the past few weeks.

We watched two videos in class the last few weeks in order to give them insights into some other cultures, as well as teach them critical thinking skills. In one class I showed them a video about victims of gavage (force-feeding) in Mauritania. They were pretty grossed out about it. The idea I had about it though was to show how people all over the world do horrible things to their bodies in order to look beautiful. In Mauritania, fat is in, so people force feed their children to get fat. In the West we have anorexia, bulimia, fad diets, and smoking to lose weight. It's really all one.

The following week, I showed them a video about Congo that went over better, though it's also a bit disturbing. Basically, Congo and Qatar are similar in that they have trillions of dollars worth of resources. The difference is that the people in Qatar are very wealthy and the Congolese are poor. So in watching the video students had to come up with questions they'd like to ask the people in the video. They came up with some very interesting responses.

Couldn't get through the airport with this

One other thing I've been doing is soliciting Qatari recipes from students. There really aren't any Qatari restaurants in town, you can only get it at home. So a girl wrote me one for a chicken stew. She did a real good job, and even included several of the ingredients in a bag, claiming that I wouldn't have any of them at home. Oddly enough, we have about half of them in the kitchen (notably ginger and cumin, though I'm not sure what the mysteriously labelled "spice" was). The bag looked quite a bit like it was filled with narcotics though, which was good for a laugh.

Delicious stew

The stew itself was very good, it reminded me quite a bit of Indian shorba. I added a little bit of chili powder to mine to give it a little kick. We had enough for leftovers the next day and it was even better reheated. Hit me up if you want the recipe.

Speaking of food, last night we finally went to the Fruit and Vegetable market. I'm not sure why we hadn't done this before. It's a lot cheaper than going to the grocery store because it's wholesale, plus it's also right by our house. It took us a while to find, but when we did, we got way more food than we'd normally get and spent about half as much. We are suckers for not doing this earlier. While on the topic of bargains, we also bought tickets to see the Sony Ericsson women's tennis championships at the end of the month. After the Grand Slam tournaments it's the biggest one on the calender, and being held right here in Doha. The top 8 ranked women in the world will be there, including both Williams sisters. Total cost to us, about $11 a ticket, or a bit more than going to a movie here. You've got to love a country totally run by dudes who puts cheap sporting events up as a political priority.

Christian with his favorite book

Christian has been adorable the past few weeks, but he's also been sick. The university finally shelled out for us to have private insurance here, which means we've got a lot more options as to where we can go. It'll probably be more useful once we want to see a dentist, since none of the private hospitals or clinics here are set up as well as the state run ones. No surprise, we took him first to the private clinic, who told us just to take him to the state-run children's emergency room. He had a real high fever (about 104 F), so we didn't have to wait very long. The doctor figured he had the flu, but they're not doing swine flu tests in the country anymore due to limited resources. I suppose it doesn't really matter, since they treat it the same with anti-virals no matter what. He's been doing much better now, though to be fair he was always really active and jumping and playing around. Aside from the fever, cough, and a runny nose, you'd never know he was sick.

The best part of course, is that the total cost of all of this was nothing. Absolutely free. I fail to see how that's a bad thing, nor am I afraid that this is socialism encroaching upon us. Actually, it's not socialism at all, since we live in an ultra-conservative absolute monarchy. A 2006 survey actually ranked Qatar as politically one of the world's least free. And yet, the people here are incredibly happy and don't appear in any way disenfranchised. Now to be fair, Qatar is probably a bit of an exception, since an absolute monarch can be (and usually is) incredibly cruel and abusive. But one of the things I've really noticed about living here is that when people are affluent and happy, with food in the belly and a roof over their heads, they really don't have any scrupples about politics. It's a very intersting contrast to the US right now, where people are terrified of losing their rights, yet get to pick their leaders.