My Qatari Rite of Passage

One of my favourite parts of Qatar is its newness. Another aspect that I find charming is its straightforwardness. For example, there are about 6-7 universities in Qatar: Qatar University, Texas A&M (which teaches Engineering only), Cornell (Medical school) Virginia Commonwealth University (Fine Arts), the University of Calgary (for Nursing), Carnegie Mellon University (Business Admin. and Computer Science) and a few others. If I wanted to visit any of these campuses, where would I go? 'Education City' of course! Education City is a beautiful section of Doha: the art and architecture of this desert investment is bright and creative. Lines of palm-trees beckon students from one university building to another university's building along  pathways which are dramatically lit at night. (This reminds me, Qatar comes ALIVE at night time. At 11pm on a Thursday, the major downtown boardwalk - the corniche -  has playgrounds full of picnicking families!). I will do my best to take a few pictures of the campus and the corniche in due time.

Now, Leona is not a student of Education City... simply an admirer. What she is a student of is the fantastical rite of passage that is the Qatari health exam for incoming foreigners. A few days ago I had the privilege of diving head first into an entertaining round of this: here I will record a play by play of that evening. Larissa & Darren wished me luck as I whisked out the door to meet my driver/experience facilitator. I called from the stairs - "Do I need my Passport?" To all of our surprise, the DRIVER pipes up: "I've got it.". Great. Well, at least we are keeping track of our documentation. I theorized that it would be better to be on familiar terms with any potential human-trafficker looking my way, so I initiated with: "Nice to meet you. I'm Leona!" Silence.

"Don't worrry. He gave me the same response when I asked him earlier." a friendly voice popped from inside the taxi. This was the redemptive feature of my dinner-timed health exam: a fellow foreigner about to be healthfully examined! Thankfully, she had been through this process before. Actually, the more pertinant quality of my new friend is her female-ness. (I realized this as I tried to explain the hilarity of all this to my 3 new ex-pat guy friends. In retrospect their chest x-rays probably were much less of an orchestration then ours were.) So: unnamed driver, fellow female and I buzz along the mediocre Qatar-at-4pm traffic.


Everyone's story here in Doha is quite interesting (I call it self selection of the travel-happy), and my new girl friend’s story proved to be no exception to my rule. So the comic relief continued, combined with some life history swapping and small attempts to master our new ghetto cell phones (I being the only one really struggling... the tiled floors here make cell-phone dropping more technically-homicidal). When we arrived at the public hospital (which is decidedly night and day different on the Rtitzy scale from the private hospital in Doha -- check out my sister's post-natal buffet on facebook if you want propaganda for birthing babies internationally... Seriously! Fly me out to Qatar for the delivery of my children. But I digress.)... When we arrived at the public hospital our escort roughly educated us on the presence of separate gender hospital entrances; however, true to style, he didn't elaborate on which was which, or the fact that there exists additional waiting rooms that are unofficially co-ed/family oriented. That might have made my accidental galluping into a room of only men [at the time] (honest, I was following signs!) a little less like a playing a doomed round of "MouseTrap" (the board game). Round and round the building we went. Two girls? "Nope. You can get your finger pricked at the other back door.” (Note: I'm completely inferring the conversation based on the direction we walked... whether the real negotiations went on in Arabic or Security Guard Hindi is beyond me.)

Next came the waiting room with its unnecessarily insistent security guards (I truly feel that a pack of tired ex-pat women will manage their own line formation a little more succesfully than my co-Economy flyers in Dubai from a couple weeks ago) and a child that insisted on sucking at the metal junctures of the hospital wall and making honking noises.

Then came the x-ray. Those lucky enough to find the x-ray room in the face of tricky-inaccurate signage (although I'll hand it to you, facilitating the use of the same medical equipment for the genders to access separately takes some coordination) would encounter a tall, burlesque woman in a white lab coat. "From here up (she motioned with her hands) EVERYTHING COMES OFF! Put one of these gowns on." she barked. Pretty straightforward stuff. We started to form our line to the change room while the lab coat lady moved in and out of the waiting room roping up whoever was changed to hit the machine. You could hear that she was coming according to her category 5 volumed "FINISHED", and then the click of the door closing behind her. Happily aware of being in the right place for the procedure my new friend and I waited patiently among the women with shrugged shoulders and (for a few women) clutched abbayas. To go from having never seen an outright Qatari woman without her black covering in my life to being half-exposed in little gowns next to one was quite a surreal experience. To heighten the oddity of it all the beefy lab technician reutrned one more time to "help" us with our undressing. "YOU." she shouted as she called an unsuspecting ex-pat out of line for the changeroom "Take off your shirt, your bra, this, that..." My giggle reflex kicked in (which, if you know about my terribly sad Bollywood Dance Class fiasco would inform you of how quickly I explained the reaction to the poor girl afterward). After a few chats with women about where to find the most authentic Qatari embroidery, and the actual radiation, the x-ray was over. 

For the sake of time, I will not elaborate on the drama of reassuring a woman from the U.K. that the blood drawing system did indeed seem to be according to protocol, minus the fact that we had to elbow through a hallway of 50 young Sri Lankan men to have it done; the fun we had when our driver did eventually tell us his name; and the cookies and Pepsis which sweetened up the irony of the whole experience as we went along. I thought at one point that night that I should probably turn my cell phone off since we were in a hospital. Then I thought of the boy essentially teething on the waiting room appliances and felt that my caution would be a little excessive. 

This country that is my temporary home is so loveable. Also, I had forgotten how humbling it is to bumble around making cultural errors... with the mix of ethnicities present in Qatar, I am sure to (quite) accidentally offend more than one group!  At the very least, my Qatari health exam makes the considerately-sterile hospitals of Canada seem boring in comparison.