On Qatar and Contradictions

Over the past 2 years and due to my work I’ve been visiting Doha every couple of months, over these visits I started developing this opinion about the country and the people living here, be it Qatari’s or expats, in general it’s a really calm relaxing country, one of the richest in the world and definitely the richest in the region, they have what seems to be an infinite amount of gas that they are trading out for education, good cars, food, and living standard that’s much higher than the regional average, all while maintaining their local roots, Qatari’s feel proud of their nationality and they aren’t afraid to show it, they’d prefer being seen in their Qatari outfit than any other outfit, be it at work or the mall no matter how old are you or what social class you come from the white Qatari thob is what to be seen in. that’s the impression you’d get in your first visit to Qatar staying longer though you start understanding what this country is really about. 

They do have the money and the will to make this country into something truly special, something that can compete with the major capitals of the world, however this fact ended up painting a huge bulls eye on their back, any company that wants to make some extra cash heads to Qatar, knowing that if you talk to the right people and throw in a good enough presentation you’ll end up making a kill, even if you aren’t that good at what you claim you can provide them with, you’d still get the cash, additionally most of the expats working here know that this is just a stop along the way it’s not a place they’d settle in and thus all they need to do is to survive the few years they are spending in this country make enough money and then head to somewhere else to spend it, so they’re never that loyal to their companies. Put these two facts together and you end up with Qatar.

Everything in Qatar looks good at the first glance, until you look deep enough and 9 times out of 10 you’d end up disappointed with what you admired at first, you know that somewhere in the world, some European company made a kill selling them that product and then cheated them on the fine details and that company is most probably several time bigger than it was when it first came to Qatar. For instance you’ve got Dafna/West Bay area, a 10 squared kilometer area overlooking the sea covered with glass covered architectural wonders offering a magnificent skyline that ravels dubai’s however if you look anywhere you can tell that this country is flat, scorching summer heat and the fact that buying a piece of land isn’t that expensive here resulted in most people building small houses that are cheaper and easier to build and cool than these buildings in dafna, building a skyscraper in a mostly vacant country doesn’t much sense does it, unless of course you are the construction company building it there no reason for you buy a skyscraper, why expand vertically when you’ve got the much cheaper horizontal expansion to grow into. so you end up with 10 squared kilometer with the worst urban planning ever (tiny streets that go round and round) filled with huge buildings that are mostly vacant.

The conference dome, a glass dome in the desert

I mostly work in whats is called Qatar Science and Technology Park, the Qatary answer to Egypt’s smart village, another admirable idea at first sight but as you spend more and more time there you start getting disappointed, first of all the buildings look expensive, metal lattice covers for all buildings with empathizes on form rather than function, its built in a way that’d insure that you’d feel impressed by the buildings once you see them, however the person designing them took no consideration to the fact to this countries weather and how dust is everywhere, so after a couple of days worth of dust they ended up with what looks like a meat packing factory, you can tell that the company building it made sure to pick the most expensive option whenever they could most probably because the more expensive it is the bigger the profit margin is, for instance you get this water fountain that’s imported from Australia, it looks nice, and most probably really expensive, however Qatar’s tap water is undrinkable! Then you get the carefully manicured grass, it’s not native to the area and I’m sure maintaining it in the 8 or 9 months that make out summer is really hard and require a lot of fresh water that they don’t have to begin with.

Designer water fountain for undrinkable water

Whats truly inspiring about Qatar though is its people, I’ve not interacted with a lot of Qatari’s however the few I interacted with truly inspired me, they are extremely well mannered, well educated, urban and they are proud of their heritage, and they make sure that anybody who is in this country respects that, for instance all the store names are written in Arabic as well as in English, even though i don't think there is a single Qatari who can’t speak enough English to get by. they always dress up in their national outfit, even though they’ve got all these stores selling all the kind of clothes you can imagine, they prefer to dress as their ancestors did decades ago.

In conclusion I believe considering Qatar a country isn’t fair as it’d appear to be lacking on many aspects that are considered basics for any country to survive, I believe Qatar should be compared to a major cooperation with dorms inside of its campuses, with full time employees as well as contractors that come and go, they have overheads and resources leakages just like any other major cooperation.