Skip to main content

A Tale Of Three Cities



I have been driving around Doha for the last couple of days, which was initially daunting because they drive on the wrong side of the road and almost every intersection is controlled by a roundabout. Roundabouts I generally regard as one of the more enlightened forms of traffic control: as long as everyone keeps cool and keeps moving the traffic slips on through with no problems at all. But add in the factors of having to remember to look the other way, and the standard of Qatari driving they can be a bit nerve wracking. We're all still alive, though, and I've gone a long way through the heat and dust with large 4X4s looming in the rear view mirror with the driver mouthing in Arabic unkind things about my parents .

Doha is about the size of Auckland, both in geographical and demographic terms. It is criss crossed by a network of new roads, often up to 8 lanes wide, which feed traffic into a maze of smaller and often older streets. Yesterday the wide roads took us to the Villagio, a shopping Mall dressed up as Venice, complete with a canal, gondolas and Rennaisance facades.This is just the place to go if you want a bit of a bargain on that new Porsche or you're sick of the old Rolex. It has a wonderful  Dean and Delucca deli and lots of places where you can buy big brand name stuff for cheap. While Clemency and Bridget sought out the bargains, I paid 21 Riyal (about $8) for a glass of orange juice and wondered if they did test drives on the Porsches until I remembered the roundabouts.

Later in the day we went to another city. The old Doha: the Souk. Or at least, it's what people think the old Doha should have looked like if it had only got its act together. The Souk is a labyrinth of small shops selling Arabic stuff. There's no airconditioning. There are old guys with wheelbarrows who follow you around so you don't have to carry whatever it is you've bought. It has spices and colour and people smoking Shisha and a shop which sells falcons, the birds not the cars and accessories for the same. There's been a Souk here for a very long time but the old one was a bit tatty so they replaced it with a better one complete with authentic antique Islamic ATMs, I kid you not. We bought strange sweets and "pies" made from 30 second old flatbread stuffed with deliciousness and Arabic family baboushka dolls.

Then today another Doha. This is one the Emir, so rumour has it, has  marked for demolition as soon as he's finished spending the trillions required for the massive up to the second hyper-city that is arising from nothing all around the shoreline. We visited the Islamic cultural centre, where we were received with great warmth and hospitality. We were given an expensive looking book on Islam, water, and Arabic tea and coffee. We were taken into the mosque and told why people never take the Koran into the toilet, or write in it, or place it on the ground, or carry it under their arm. We were given an object lesson on how to make a faith look hospitable and attractive that I only wish my own Diocese could observe and learn from. Then we went outside into the bit of Doha that the Emir is not so keen on. It is all flat, ugly 1960s modernist architecture and streets clogged with cars and battered airconditioners spewing hot air into the already 50 degree noontime. We went into a mall that sold nothing but Burkas: dozens and dozens of small shops displaying black frocks whose coloured cuffs and collars were the only distinguishing feature; and incongruously, all the tailors and salespeople seemed to be Indian men.

And incidentally there is lesson in here somewhere about the relationship of the genders in Islamic society, which is not quite as we Westerners have caricatured it. There is a story to be told that can only be told by Islamic women, and, obviously, they are hardly likely to tell it to me. But family life here is kinder, softer, richer, more finely nuanced, more balanced than I had imagined it to be. In the Souk I passed a man my own age. He was handsome and dignified in his thobe and kaffiyeh. He was holding hands with a very old man, obviously his father, and the old man, his powers well diminished, had slowed the flow of pedestrian traffic somewhat. The son looked at me and smiled, apologising in a glance for holding me up, but expressing not the slightest degree of embarrassment or regret. It was a 10 second vignette of  love and belonging which spoke a depth of family life we have long lost, if ever we had it.

All this life and vitality and eclecticism and ability to get things done and openness to the future and good taste and style and history and goodness and generosity and decency are not what I expected of Arabia and I find it enormously attractive. At 1 am tomorrow we will drive to Doha airport and begin the long, albeit quite comfortable thank you ma'am trip back to the land of the long white cloud. From this perspective New Zealand looks very young and very cold. I will be happy to get back, but hope it won't be long before I'm here, where it all started, once again.

Comments

Barbara said…
Perhaps you have observed a community lifestyle versus the independence of Western thinking, 'we' versus 'I', a different philosophical base. The Maori people still have 'we', in the 7 meanings of 'aroha', but Maoritanga is not strong in our Diocese for various reasons.
Hopefully we can together live the hospitalty, the generosity, the honesty,the aroha, of The Word made flesh,Who dwells among us,
Shalom.Peace be with you.
Merv said…
I love the '10-second' experiences. And often as not there's a smile in the middle of them.

Safe travels.
Gillian Swift said…
thanks for your word pictures and photos. Feel as though I have been on your shoulders during holiday to somewhere I would love to visit. Community and family have different support in various cultures. Maybe our diocese could put more effort into being both, wonder how? Hopefully start back at work Monday. Safe travel aand blessings to you both Blessings Gillian

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old