Decongestants in Doha

I sit in my Japanese style room at the Ramada in Doha downing a delectable cocktail of Melatonin, Tylenol, and a random decongestant discovered at the bottom of my purse. Alas, I’ve been the first soldier to drop on this trip despite having paved my way through 21 Emergen-C packs and enough garlic tablets to fill a candy tray. Running on the treadmill put me over the edge cold-wise, as did the spore-infected room I shared before we migrated over to this newer part of the Ramada. But I’m in Doha now, and enlivened by the notion that on Thursday we’re headed to Al Jazeera (Qatari television station made famous after 9-11), not to mention the fabled Museum of Islamic Art (designed by I.M. Pei).

This place, to use a technical term, is “kinda weird”. From my vantage at the Ramada I catch a glimpse of the “The Ponderosa”, that protein palace of a restaurant that was once sprinkled across the USA in the 80s and 90s and has recently gone the way of the dodo. In Doha, I am within walking distance of a KFC (nope, haven’t been there), a grocery store (accompanied by my umbrella in the late afternoon heat), where I’m able to procure all manner of foods from the West. Save for the women in their flowing abayas and the men in their perfectly pressed dishdashas, on this particular day, in this particular place, it’s as if I’ve never left home! The vanilla landscape of Anywhere has been airlifted to the eastern edge of the dry, dusty Empty Quarter once inhabited by traders and pearl divers, allowing me the nightly luxury of boiling my bones and organs in a bath with hot, desalinated water from the Gulf that Must not be Named (so as not to offend Persians or Arabs).

Change here in the Gulf seems to be rapid fire, fearless, even reckless, not unlike the spectacular mistakes we’ve made back home in terms of growth and development (think: Las Vegas). Largest chandelier in the world! Highest building in the world (sure we’re bankrupt, but that’s OK)! Largest carpet on Earth! Interestingly, the Qatari and UAE nationals make up a very small percentage of the nation’s population (~10%), and while many of the nationals work in government jobs even when they don’t need to work, the labor force consists mostly of foreigners, largely guest workers from poor countries like Pakistan, India, Nepal, and the Philippines who labor in restaurants or construction sites as maids, taxi drivers, landscapers. The guest worker issue is the proverbial white elephant in the room. The grand mosques and marbled universities and soaring hotels have been built upon their achy backs. And while economic “push” factors in their villages back home provide motivation enough to leave, unscrupulous agents abound here. People get trapped. Organize a union, and get deported. We attended a great lecture on alternative housing designs for guest worker populations, where radical words like “livable space” and “solar hot water heater” and “advanced wetland techniques” were employed.

The highlight of the past few weeks was a dinner we shared with an Emirati back in Abu Dhabi. He had attended the School of Mines (engineering), recounting how much he loved Colorado, beaming whenever he spoke of his experiences in and around Golden. He was in Coors country on 9-11, and when news came on the TV that the first tower had fallen, he expressed the same disbelief as the rest of us, remembering every nuance of that morning. I asked him what it was like to be an Arab living in an America now on high alert. He said that it was difficult, sure, but made easier by the fact that most people thought he was Mexican-American.

Until later. A container of medicinal pecans await my company.