Some very weird news has been reported in the local papers lately. On one hand, this seems like an advance of sorts. Are the press muzzles being loosened? Are reporters allowed to say more than before? Or have they been instructed to report on some very disturbing subjects as a warning to the populace to keep themselves in check or face the Kafka consequences?

On October 10 a couple of bakers were arrested for selling “obscene” cakes. According to hilariously-worded Gulf Times article, a sting operation was set up by the Ministry of the Interior to ensnare the culprits with an aim “to maintain the safety and security of the community and to respect its values, characters and public norms.”

Off the record and around the campfire, the rumor is that the bakers were asked to do up a fancy wedding cake, adorned with kissing bride and groom statuettes, which of course, because it represented physical contact between men and women, would be considered offensive.

Not surprising. A month ago when we were on the plane for our Eid vacation to Sri Lanka, the in-flight movie was a pathetic rom-com called Letters to Juliette. The opening minutes of the film consisted of a rotating montage of classic art: paintings of people kissing. Every one of the images had been blurred to protect our innocent eyes.

In other art news, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, where a friend works in the library, has had a significant percentage (25% by his estimates) of its collection pulled for inspection. It’s an art and design school, so it should go without saying that the library holds a great deal of books that contain art. And art has often contained nudity – bare bums and boobies even – and that has apparently got the attention of someone, although how and for what reason will never be known.

The censorship department appears to be clamping down. And its inner workings will remain, by necessity, a mystery, although one acquaintance has been in the magic room where civil servants literally push pens all day (well, big black markers to be exact). It is their job, their one and only mission, to flip through tomes and books and volumes and product pictures to black out anything that might be questionable. At least now I know how Israel disappeared off of all the maps, replaced by an empty black void…

Glad to know those in charge are looking out for me. Last year, QTel, the country’s internet, telephone and cable TV monstrosity, waged a campaign in favour of online safety for kids. Think of the children! An excuse to monitor and block websites (up to twenty percent of what exists according to some rumours). This year, their new slogan, as reported by a friend on her way back from the airport where the billboards have recently been posted, is the counterintuitive, “Your privacy is our responsibility.”
This ain’t Canada anymore, Toto. Privacy is not what we’re used to. And,the Canadian darling Trudeau may once have declared, “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation”, but some of the locals doth protest. Another news story reports that an independent school here in Doha has announced that its female teachers are not allowed to get pregnant while employed by them.

It does violate Qatar’s laws – a favourite topic in the newspaper, which is often filled with reports of jailings, fines and deportations – but it also reflects an attitude here of very conservative values, which is a bitter pill to swallow for some.

I’ve explained before the analogy of the two buckets before, but I think it bears repeating. Foreigners who come to work in the Gulf arrive with two buckets: one for money and one for bullshit, and when one gets full, it’s time to leave. A friend of a friend who arrived in late August has already filled the latter and flew the coop back to Canada last week. Not that I can blame her. Sometimes I wonder if those who get out early are smarter and braver than those of us who stay…

At least she had that choice. The sponsorship system here means that foreign workers are at the mercy of the companies they work for. If an employer doesn’t want to issue an exit visa, which is required to leave the country, the worker is fucked. And when it comes to labourers, they often have no idea who to turn to when their rights are violated, and no way of knowing for sure what their rights are. The system was struck down in Bahrain in 2009, and Kuwait is to follow suit in January, while just a few days ago Qatar confirmed that it will uphold it, despite its neighbours.

It’s been a strange and depressing week, leaving many of us to wonder if the past seven days are an anomalous blip, or a disturbing trend…

The biggest deal for us is that we’re losing one daughter. We’ve been lucky to have her to ourselves for 9 out of the last 10 months, but considering we’re a reconstituted family (not sure how else to say it, though it does sound like orange juice, doesn’t it?), it’s only fair that she goes back to her mom’s place to start grade seven. We’re here for another two years, so she’ll definitely be back to visit us in the oven, and if she wants, she’ll be back to live next year, though I kinda doubt it.

Her party was a lot more laid back than planned. She had invited her whole class, and some friends from the grade higher, so we were expecting upwards of 15 moody, screaming, hormonal maniacs. But, as it turned out, she had put the wrong phone number on the invitations, which meant that even though she knew not everyone was going to make it, even fewer actually showed up. In fact, it was just her closest girlfriends, making it pretty cool and tight after all. Then one poor skinny boy showed up an hour late and he had to chill with the ladies. Perfect if your 18, but not if you’re an awkward pre-man who’s smaller than all the girls.

Bringing a twelve-year-old girl to the Middle East is a cruel and unusual punishment for an innocent being. She was frequently freaked out by many of the weird things here, from the lavish opulence of oil-money riches (seven years ago, when she was five, we lived together in a tiny bachelor apartment, eating toss-offs from the grocery store where I worked because we couldn’t afford anything else), to the masked madness of women’s clothing and the creepiness of labourers for whom this adolescent blonde is the personification of female perfection, all the more pronounced for them because of the absolute dearth of females in general, and especially those who dare emerge with elbows, neck and ankles exposed. Poor her.

On the other hand, she made some of the best friends a girl could have. Right next door was another young one her age with whom a bond formed very quickly and strongly. Another friend from across town was a welcome and frequent visitor. Compound living is fantastic for teens in its confined freedom. She could wander unsupervised, go for a swim with her friends, host regular sleepovers in the giant spare bedroom (four smelly teenage girls in one bed – ewww!), and generally live the kind of life we all wanted when we were twelve, but couldn’t because gallivanting in a big city was just not an option.

But now, she’s leaving home, off to Canada to rejoin her friends and family there, as a couple of our new companions here have done recently. One friend left by choice, and one by force, taking her family with her because she had to. The former had just moved in with her boyfriend (extremely unusual here where marriage is required for cohabitation, but they seemed to have found a loophole somewhere). They held their housewarming in mid-May, and the next time we heard from them was about two weeks later when we got the invitation to her goodbye party. Nothing was said about her reasons for going other than her tearful claim that her time here was done, and she’ll miss us all enormously.

Our other friends left for worse and uglier reasons. In an extremely rare move, the woman’s employer – mine too, we met through work – did not offer to renew her contract despite successful performance, unlike every single other employee. After the initial shock wore off, she and her husband looked high and low in Doha for a job in their field and came up empty. Just as well, I’m sure. Her husband liked it here about as much as my wife (not at all – one of the reasons they got along so well). In fact, he was so ready to leave that he booked the departure tickets for the evening immediately following her last day of work, leaving them little time to pack and say goodbye.

Their party was a two-hour, early-evening affair, crammed with awful screaming babies and children. It seemed like the only well-behaved rugrats were their two little ones and our five-year-old, who, yet again, was the oldest kid there even though all the parents were older than us. (The 12-year-old stayed home, understandably.) We were more than happy to bail out even earlier than planned when my wife got a call from work telling her she was late.

Even though they didn’t want to leave and had to face the rejection of not being hired back, at least they weren’t subject to the embarrassment and humiliation of being deported. There are several stories going around lately, many of which have been “confirmed” or at least heard from a number of sources. The first has to do with a man who gave the finger to another driver after being viciously cut off on the road. Apparently, the man he fingered had enough connections that the fingerer received a visit to his home that night from the authorities informing him that flipping the bird is immoral in Islam and therefore intolerable in this country, and demanding that he and his family leave the country within twenty-four hours. This was back around Christmas.

The other story is a bit murkier and more mysterious. In one version, a woman went to Israel over the May break and was refused re-entry upon her return. Another version has her allowed back in with some kind of warning, causing her to decide to leave of her own volition after some heated exchange with the local authorities. The real truth will probably be forever concealed because it’s not like these tales ever get coverage anywhere, and there’s no need to keep official records on them once the culprits are gone…

I do know that the former financial director at my workplace lived here for only a few months with her husband. Being a devout Christian, her husband took it upon himself to charitably bring some water to a crew of Nepali labourers. Problem was, he also decided to bring the word of God, and somebody noticed. They went to Nepal for a vacation and when they got back, he was turned away and told to go anywhere else but here. Missionizing for Jesus is also looked down on around these parts. Surprise, surprise. They now run a fair trade internet company in Nepal, so at least they’ve done well in the end…

As for us, we have every intention of coming back after the summer. I bitch and whine about life here, but it’s starting to feel kind of familiar, although it’s still far too dysfunctional to call it home. Travelling is far too tempting to give up just yet, and there are still a few debts to repay.

Turkey was a multi-fold celebration. First, it’s my wedding anniversary on the first of May, the day after we left. Second, we were declared non-residents of Canada for tax purposes recently, so that means we are making a significantly larger chunk of change every paycheque, and on top of that, my lovely and amazing mother-in-law, who happens to work for Revenue Canada, scored us another huge tax return, so we’re lucky on that front too.

Finally, we sold our house in Canada. It was a brutal and ugly feat at the outset, with recalcitrant tenants attempting to foil the sale in every way possible. Not only did they refuse to take phone calls from us, insisting on paper correspondence by mail alone and labeling the calls and emails “harassment”, they would not acknowledge our real estate agent as our representative. When he came by to talk to them, they had removed the for sale sign and put in their (my!) basement, and hollered aggressively at the agent to get off their (my!) property.

We were a pube away from calling in the big dog lawyers, not knowing what other options we had and stressed beyond compare in our remote and impotent position, living halfway around the world and all, when the in-laws came to the rescue again. This time it was my father-in-law who swooped in with some serious eleventh-hour diplomacy, delivering missives from the warring parties and negotiating a peace treaty between us and them. Three days later we had a deal and the house is sold (more or less – we close on the last day of the morons’ tenancy at the end of the summer, but the deal is set).

We received confirmation of the deal at 4:45am on the day we were leaving for Turkey, 15 minutes before our cab arrived to take us to the airport. It was like waiting for the results from the STD doctor, not knowing whether we’d be able to consummate our marriage. We came back negative, and could enjoy our vacation.

It was awesome. Turkey rules. There is a cool Islam, after all. We spent 4 days in Istanbul, and 4 in Cappadocia before the females went off the Fetieh and Ephesus. Istanbul (not Constantinople, now!), is a chocolate cake of a city – so dense and rich with history and life, new stuff glazed over old. They say that you can’t dig down anywhere in Sultanahmet (the oldest part of the city) without coming across something of archaeological significance, and I believe. We dipped our fingers in the icing in four days, touring the Aya Sofia, the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi Palace and the expansive and expensive Harem within, as well as continent-hopping between the edges of Asia and Europe by boat and by bridge, and would have gladly stayed on for more.

Cappadocia is a Smurf-land, mushroom-caved, moonaged daydream. There we spent four days straight hiking through valleys, discovering and inspecting unmarked ancient dwellings and churches, returning to town each afternoon worn out but sated. We crawled through an eight-floor underground city first carved in 1200BC and not vacated until 1930AD. We gawked at crucifixes and Christian graffiti from the fourth century and gorgeous frescoes from the 12th. We wandered through kilometer-long tunnels and cliffside cave houses from no one knows when. I even went with the kids on a hot-air balloon ride into and over the phallic rock formations of the aptly-named Love Valley.

On my way home, waiting for my flight in a pub in Istanbul, I met some friendly Turks – a mid-20s couple – who bought me a local coffee and chatted in broken English about Canada and such. The last few hours just served to prove what we had experienced all along in our trip, that Turkish people are among the friendliest and most hospitable anywhere.

I spent a bachelor’s week after my return leaving empty beer bottles around the couch while falling asleep to the original Star Wars trilogy, inspired initially by the Cappadocia trip as 16 seconds of the first installment were filmed there. I went to the God-awful Irish Pub at the Sheraton hotel one night for a few drinks – a mistake I will never make again unless someone can convince that there will be no testosterone fuelled homo-erotic douchebags hopping insanely to cover-band radio hits at an obnoxious volume. A pub it most certainly is not, although that’s what it sells itself as. One more membership I had to buy that will not be used again…

Much of the week was spent crafting and honing a speech I was to give to a crowd of high school students about to graduate from one of the best all-female schools in Doha. Don’t ask me how I keep getting roped into these weird engagements with teenage Muslim girls – I just do. It went over well, with congratulations and iterations from both the organizers and the audience that I gave the best talk of the morning. I did my best to summon revolution among the youth, and the response was a tepid ovation compared to what I hoped to induce, but better than the alternative… deportation. Maybe next time.

Anyone who’s met my better half, especially in this foul land, can anticipate myriad reasons for her inevitable brush with the law. First of all, she’s Jewish in an adamantly anti-semitic society. Next door, in Saudi Arabia, world maps are sold with Israel blacked out, as if everything within its borders is sucked into a void of nothingness, and here in Qatar, the International Day of Rage and Solidarity which happened a few weeks ago was the subject of both headline stories in the local paper, the Gulf Times. Officially, Qatar does not discriminate against Hebrews, but local attitudes belie the real truth, as one young man recently tried to convince me about the true power of American Jews with an “academic” article by one David Duke. (If the name’s not familiar, look it up. The point of view is questionable, to say the least.)

It’s not like her heritage is enough to cause her to be picked up by the local authorities. But her big mouth is. Many a time we’ve been out and she has vociferously expressed her opinions on a wide variety of topics of concern to people here. Maids following their masters silently, dragging the screaming kids and the mountain of shopping bags. Simple things, like thoobed men cutting lines without objection. And more complicated issues, like the treatment of construction workers. The spoiled children are rarely spared a tongue-lashing, and even the ninja-wear of conservative women rarely goes without comment.

And when we’re driving, the torrent of constant rage erupts every time we go out onto the road. Giving the finger here is susceptible to heavy fines, and potentially jail time – a law that falls under constant testing by my lovely “better” half.

I am exaggerating of course, as no man could stand a monster so vicious. And truth be told, her indignation is frequently warranted, and I often find myself following suit, although I do my best to calm her at the worst of times, though often unsuccessfully. It’s just that the laws out here in the desert are so draconian, and the rumour mill so flooded with stories, you never know who’s watching you and when they’re coming to take you away…

But the other day, she came in the door laughing at the Qatarded events of her day at work. She is employed part-time at a tutoring centre, which serves the best students trying to get even further ahead of their class, and the worst just trying to catch up to the previous grade. Many of the students are royalty, and one kid from the local ruling clan was recently threatened with expulsion for not behaving, which may have led to the events of the day, but no connection has been made…

When my consort arrived at her workplace on this fateful day, she was quickly ushered up to the director’s apartment above where she found all the rest of the day’s part-timers huddled into one cramped and poorly maintained room, while four full-timers stayed downstairs to do their own job, and everyone else’s too. Turns out the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs was on its way to raid the joint. The centre found out about the “secret raid”, however, because the Ministry officials had gotten lost on the way and had to call for directions.

They were coming because they had discovered that the part-timers were working without the required labour cards. Full-timers are sponsored by the centre itself, as everyone working here needs sponsorship from someone or other. My employer provides mine. Local hires, as opposed to people like me hired from abroad specifically to work here for a particular company, are usually spouses of sponsored employees. These part-timers have only just discovered this labour card law, and no one can tell if it’s a new law, or just newly enforced, although some other local-hire-employers are getting the same crackdown.

In a typical privacy-effacing maneuver, these local hires have to provide copies of their passports, their spouse’s passports and both his and her local IDs (stuff the government already has for me), as well as a letter saying their spouse does not object to their working and 500 riyals, all for the privilege of being pestered and defied by the spoiled children of local royalty. My wife is wondering if it’s really worth it…

The company learned about the law last week, and was going to follow up on it at the next meeting, but the Ministry didn’t even give them a chance. Now people like my wife have to hurry up and get their shit together before the centre is subject to another raid, because the company will just get a fine. It’s the employees themselves who can be arrested – and because the information isn’t available publicly (it never is…), no one knows the consequences: Hefty fines? Jail time? Deportation? Roll the dice and take your chances… (Oh wait, that’s gambling. That’s illegal too…)

The quality of food outside of the top-notch restaurants is often questionable, and it leaves one wondering whether there’s such a thing as health inspectors looking in behind the scenes. My suspicion is that kitchens are a grey zone – the cooks are all from abroad, so locals likely aren’t interested in trodding in their zone, even though the owners are more likely to be from these parts, claiming their space at the front of the house. But this is just conjecture. Suffice it to say that I have heard many more stories of suspected food poisoning in the past few months than I can recall hearing before moving – one colleague emerging from an airplane ride with something far beyond motion sickness; another bailing out of work instead of perpetuating her jogs, no, make that sprints, to and from the loo; and another friend’s visible loss of several pounds, not to mention the colour from his cheeks, in less than a week.

Worse off by far, though, are the kids. Both have required late-night trips to the pharmacy for emergency medicine after the elder came down screaming and terrified one night before bed, seriously disturbed after finding a writhing live worm, about a centimetre long, on her toilet paper. My wife and I exchanged the requisite WTF? looks before comforting her and running out to fetch the meds. A few days later, the younger kid wailed inconsolably about her itchy asshole, and it was out to the drugstore again for her candy-flavoured treatment.

Where the hell could they have caught these disgusting parasites, we asked ourselves later, knowing there was nothing at home that could have been infected or infested. The only possible answer we came up with was the school cafeteria. Needles to say, they are now brown-bagging it. Really, this is supposed to be one of the richest countries in the world, and our kids are getting worms from their school food? Something seems very wrong with this picture…

The hospitals in Doha have been top-notch, almost too good. Al Ahli, where both my wife and the younger daughter have been in the last couple of months, loves tests. Tests, tests, tests, for everything. When we went in to find a cure for my wife’s endless cough and burgeoning earache, there was no queue in emergency and the doctor was almost immediately available (although she did have to undergo a weird screening in which the nurse asked her if she had ever had an abortion). Then, after checking her breathing through her shirt with a stethoscope stretched out as far from his body as humanly possible – Allah forbid a man’s skin makes actual contact with a woman other than his wife – he suggested she get a blood test and a chest X-ray. She turned down the radiation, but they took a vial, finding that she had a slightly elevated white blood cell count. No shit – she had an infection of some kind.

Then, just like when we brought one of the kids for a fever, they gave us a mile-long list of prescriptions. For a country that is strictly anti-drug and that has banned some of the fun stuff like opiates (yep, codeine is completely illegal here), they sure love their meds. Antidepressants are apparently available over the counter, and any trip to the pharmacy will have you leaving with a cartload of little boxes. For the fever, our daughter got 6 of them. The other daughter once got 4 for a cough, and the wife got 3, and that’s only because she turned down a few suggestions.

Qatar has one of the highest nurse-to-population ratios in the region, although a 2005 study showed that 92% of them were foreign, mostly from India or the Philippines. This kind of ratio isn’t going to change anytime soon, as locals aren’t interested in becoming nurses themselves – the shifts are too long, the work is too hard, there’s no glory or honour in the position, and, horror of horrors, there would be ongoing mixing of sexes. Scandalous.

Despite all that, though, there is plenty of public concern for health. There’s a new campaign against spitting, for instance, which will now cost 200 Riyals if you’re caught. The H1N1 scare produced a slew of ads depicting dirty foreigners sneezing and touching everything, like doorknobs, with their infected hands, while upright, clean Muslim Arabs properly used tissues and washed their hands regularly.

And some public washrooms have a piss-o-meter poster on the wall, telling you exactly how dehydrated you are by the colour of your urine. Apparently if it gets brown, you should get some liquid into you immediately, unless you’re already dead. This is actually a real problem that I grapple with daily, trying to keep my pee as pale as possible. It can change within the hour from something like sugar-free lemonade to apple juice, forcing me to try and balance it out again by choking down litres of water. Now imagine how hard it is to regain that equilibrium after a night or two of heavy drinking…

And we thought getting away from the harsh Canadian winter would mean that we could escape colds, flus and other health issues. Turns out that even though the climate has been a perfect remedy for my allergies and asthma, the spring dust storms cause all kinds of respiratory issues in many other people, including a couple of the neighbours’ kids. More proof, I guess, of just how sick this place can be.

Locals and the expats we’ve met never discuss crazy bullshit like Iran and Israel, and the maniacs between them. While several neighbours are fairly peaceful, like Oman and Jordan, those others have been stirring up some strange business as of late. Iran, for isntance, has recently been threaatening to ground planes whose in-flight displays don’t call the body of water I swim in regularly by the right name. Over here, we mostly call it the Gulf, but that’s not good enough for them. And calling it the Arabian Gulf is sure to raise their ire to boiling. It’s Persian Gulf or nothing, say, and a rose by any other name will have you and your airline banned from their airspace.

The quiz night had a round on Cold War history, but the Muslim world’s role was conveniently left out. While depressed and bored looking wives accompanied their husbands and his workmates sat forlornly over their tables, our team gathered points on all sorts of questions about the three U’s: the USSR, the US, and the UK, but were not really surprised that questions about Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war (fuelled, in part, as just about every major geopolitical event of the era was, by the US and the USSR) were unasked. As always, expats of all political and skin colours try their best not to offend their hosts.

I’m going in two weeks to the local land of bacon, bars and bling – Dubai – for a conference, and I look forward to returning with tales of decadence and intrigue. I don’t expect to come across my own answers to the recent mystery of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mahbouh’s apparent assassination, but I do believe it will lead to more scrutiny of my person and my stuff. And so it should, I think. Especially considering this isn’t the first such an attack – almost exactly a year ago, in March 09, a Chechen leader, either Sulim Yamadayev or Suleyman Madov depending on the report, was shot in the liberal capital of the Gulf. For all the Emirati border guards know, I could be the next hashshashin, although I am from the wrong part of the world to be accused, neither from the UK, where all this week’s suspects have passports, or the Middle East.

But then again, this weirdness shouldn’t be anything new. Iran may be quibbling over the name of its waters, and Dubai may be scrambling to solve its one big murder, but America delas with every day. Negrohead Mountain in California has just been renamed, hasn’t it? (Granted, however, it’s airspace isn’t contested…) And I bet there have already been several murders in Canada, while there hasn’t been a reported murder that I can find here since 2006. Although in 2004, the former president of Chechnya, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, was car-bombed to death, prompting a whole lotta WTF?

Apparently the Arabic news discusses the government, injustices, the issues within Islam and all sorts of other shit that the English news won’t go near, probably because the Anglo news providers are all guests afraid of being deported. It seems, though, that the silence is mostly self-censorship, although a recent blogging case has exposed this issue.

Meanwhile, the deserts, skies and coasts around us are being armed and cocked inpreparation for disaster. The US is supplying Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar with weapons, Iran is going nuclear, and Israel has acquired a long-range drone capable of flying to Iran and blowing up without a pilot. But we don’t talk about it. Everything is peachy-keen behind our compound walls, and nobody even discusses why we have security guards at our gates. Hell, parents have even been loudly critical of their children’s schools for not putting up signs and flags, making them easier to find, without even stopping to wonder why they aren’t there in the first place. It simply doesn’t cross their mind that their precious snowflake, like ours, may be someone’s target.

This place is fucked, and it just may be that we’re the biggest thing making it that way.

My suffering cerebellum is doing its best to unravel the mystery of going to watch the closed-door-but-open-minded World School Debate Championships, where young Qatari women defended the notion that doctors should report signs of spousal abuse to the police (I suspect the cops would start to see a whole lot morebusiness if that ever came true, and I’m not sure if they’re quite equipped for dealing with it… but I digress) against a team of firm Germans, a mere two days after taking in a censored movie at the theatre. Several scenes were clipped from the recent George Clooney offering, The Men Who Stare at Goats, as were the hinted love scenes of Avatar, which I went to a few weeks ago. How is that Qatar can promote free and open dialogue on potentially volatile topics like wife beating, and then cut kissing out of movies? Oh wait. I know. To steal a locally coined phrase: it’s Qatarded.

Pushing the limits of weirdness was this past weekend’s big event – the University of Calgary-Qatar’s version of the westernest western, The Stampede, which it brought to Doha complete with pancakes (but no sausages!), pony and horse (and camel!) rides, a (non-functioning) mechanical bull, and bouncy castles. They even brought in a serious country band from Alberta who played hurtin’ country songs in English and French. Topping it all off were plenty of cowboy hats, an uncanny and unearthly sight perched atop full burqas, as sported by several women.

The best Islam-cum-cowpoke moment of the day came much later, however, when I walked out to see the lead singer of the band serenading my 11-year-old daughter and her best friend and neighbour. He was singing a profanity-laden little ditty called “I Like ‘Em 2 at a Time”, more or less summing up polygamous attitudes ’round here in a little under 3 minutes. Despite having to give him a few words of disapproval and threats of eggregious personal harm, I did get to enjoy, along with a whole crowd of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, Townes Van Zandt fans, an evening of after-hours campfire singalonging, even if the fire wasn’t lit. (OK, so the band and I were the only ones singing to Townes as no one else knew who he was or what he sang.)

As the band flew out, the first lady of American diplomacy flew in and declared a new chapter in the impending war against Iran. Hillary Clinton was finally able to put Qatar on the front pages of the NY Times, BBC and several other real papers, and the local papers had a story to print beyond the usual great news of cutting ribbons at opening ceremonies and deporting domestic workers, as she was in town to address the US-Islamic World Forum at a local university.

Her main goal, apparently, was to strike fear into the hearts of local officials and students about the impending Iran nuclear threat, as well as to convince Qatar officials, who have enjoyed peaceful relations with their neighbours across the Gulf, that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is “supplanting” the current powers on a path towards military dictatorship. Apparently, the US is equipping their forces here with additional military supplies to bolster themselves against potential engagement with the new Persian Empire, as well as providing additional might to the local armies of Qatar and Kuwait so that they might start picking up their bootstraps and keep a better eye acros the waters. The shit may soon be on its way to our fan…

As if all that wasn’t deranged enough, I just got back this afternoon from a conversation club I was hosting in which the young ladies in attendance filled me in about their views on polygamy. What started with a general topic, something like “Decision-making can be difficult, especially when it comes to marriage”, ended with them telling me all about how blended families work. In most instances, these groups are steered by a few older women, more restrained in their opinions and delivery, but today they didn’t show up. It was a gang of close friends, all in full burqa, only eyes exposed, with me as the only man. I wavered between feeling like a spy, and a privileged guest.

Through giggles and broken explanations in second-language English, I learned quite a bit about second and third wife relations. Often, apparently, the idea for a second marriage is proposed by an infertile wife (which may just mean she hasn’t given birth to any sons, only daughters), but this is not true in a majority of cases. All the girls there had close friends or relations who were somehow attached to polygamous households, either as wives or as children. Many times, according to these girls, the second marriage is kept secret from the women, as the man goes out and does the searching on their own. When this happens abroad, the first family may never find out until the man dies and there’s a fight over the inheritance.

Bringing this up, a couple of the girls shared an awward, sideways glance, as if they knew more than they were talking about. Another too-obvious glance came when one gave the example of what happens when a secret marriage is discovered. Apparently, she knew someone who knew someone (from the looks of it, the “someone” was probably there at the table), who made a friend in elementary school class with the same family name. One day, while talking about their families, the two discovered that they had the same father. Ummm….awkward…

A popular conception among expats is that the big palaces you see around are designed to house the families of several wives under one house. As it turns out, this is probably less common than we think, as most women understandably don’t get along when they share a husband, unless, as mentioned, it’s their idea and everything is out in the open. The main rule, though, is that all the families must be treated and provided for equally, and the children are considered full siblings, none of this idea of half-brothers and half-sisters we have in the wild west.

It’s been a week of feet in both worlds, and playing Twister between them. But then, this is what we came here for…