Last week I was foolishly thinking about how rarely I'm sick here in Qatar--how it seems that the harsh desert climate and the harsh indoor air conditioning have somehow made me strong and vital. And now what? I'm sick. I have a sore throat and the chills and I'm feeling pretty unreasonable in the head. Then I thought back to the end of last semester and my mysterious Sri Lankan exorcist illness. Maybe it's the end of semesters--my body is purging the pent up toxin of grades, committee work and general stress of educational bureacracy. Twice a year sickness is okay though. I just wish I was on the other side of it.
Part of the reason is likely that I haven't had a real weekend in close to a month with grading and graduation, and this weekend coming up is going to be chaotic too--Doha Memories is gearing up for Phase 1.
What is Doha Memories, you ask? Well, I will tell you. Line applied for a big Faculty Research Grant this past semester and got it. The project is to create a temporary oral history museum using interactive design (more on what this is later). See, the issue is that Qatar is more than a little absent of artifacts of the obvious variety. Many of its old, traditional buildings have been bulldozed to make way for new space age skyscrapers and compounds. The objects from the bedouin and pearling culture have been largely lost or belong to families. So what do we have to reconstruct Qatar's history with? Stories from old old old people who were here before the gas, the oil, the building warp speed.
So this week, the student team and I are on a mad mission to collect as many as we can while dealing with the hard fact that many people in this country are not willing to speak in a public forum or to strangers. It's been a challenge and we're in the second week of petitioning the elder center to let us in to talk to their residents. Many flaming hoops have had to be jumped through, and I'm afraid, after all this, they might just tell us no but not actually say "no" because that's the way things are here.
Luckily, one of my students, F--, was already able to sneak one from a little man at the center whom we are referring to only as "the green man" because of his all-green pajama suit and uncanny resemblance to an elf. Though the interview is entirely in arabic, and translations will be done at the end of the week, F--told me that he "really likes girls" and she had to cut the interview off in several places because it got a little x-rated.
Oh I wish I was fluent!!! Can't they make a pill?
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