Food at meetings

Academic Geekiness level: low
Caffeine level: medium

The nature of hospitality in this region of the world makes me feel inadequate in my own home entertaining. When people come to our very simple home on Webster Avenue, we offer what we can, but it pales in comparison to what is offered here. I think I would have to live closer to Servatis to be able to do what the Emiratis served, and to a different extent, the Qataris. I cannot yet speak for Kuwait, but I will update you as soon as I find out, Gentle Reader. It varies a bit in quality and quantity, from a huge buffet to delicate little cakes. There is always water, no matter what. Also, these photos do not include the "beverage service" that usually happens, which includes coffee and tea in most cases. Tasty yummy coffee. We had most hospitable dinners at two homes that included stunningly beautiful tea sets: my personal resolve is to obtain a tea set that has matching cups so I can serve tea to more than one person at my house. Right now I only have two tea cups that match. I feel pathetic: I want to be a lovely Middle Eastern hostess because they are so lovely and so very very nice in the highest sense of the term nice. I want to be able to make my guests feel like they made me feel when I was a guest in their homes. However, this is a farewell tradition of bringing out some smoking incense to make the clothes smell nice, and then the hostess brings around perfume for all the guests. I don't think I can learn to do this. I will start with something simple like getting tea cups. Maybe when I'm a little older I can progress to also making sure my guests leave smelling nice.

Anyway, what follows is a photo essay of the various treats that have turned up at our meetings and hostings. Nothing has yet to match the "hot banana taco" that got chronicled in this blog last year at Harlaxton Manor in the UK.

Qatar Language Policy: Ready, Fire, Aim

Academic Geekiness Rating of this post: High
Caffeine level: High

Language policy and planning are important issues that are so often overlooked because language, to majority language speakers, is like water to fish: you take it for granted as a part of the environment like sunshine or air. However, when there are languages in competition for usage in different areas of life, multi-lingual people are alert to the issues. Or they *should* be alert to the implications of language choice. The Gulf States (and all of the Middle East (or planet earth aside from monolingual English speakers)) have a serious language policy and planning issue with the roles of English and Arabic (let alone Urdu, Pashtun, Hindi, Tagalog, Vietnamese, etc.).

Qatar (and the UAE (and maybe the other Gulf States)) is in the midst of a push to establish a "knowledge economy" in which they will become an "industrial import" nation. This means that they will educate their population to be able to be support professionals for other companies who want to come to Qatar to establish their industries here. Qatar does not need to develop any industry itself, it just invites other companies to come and create them. Then Qatar provides highly educated professionals at the local level to support these investments. In order to create this professionally educated population, they need to revamp the education system. Part of this "educational reform" is to promote greater English proficiency in science and mathematics so that there can be well educated English speaking engineers and business management people to support the industrial import knowledge economy.

To promote greater English proficiency in high school graduates so that they are ready to do their university studies all in English, the Emir Sheikh Hammad Khalifa al-Thani has decreed that English will be the medium of instruction for science and math beginning in first grade in Qatar. At present there is no kindergarten, but there is a nascent experiment in what they call KG (pre-first grade education). This decree was based on a study that the Rand Corporation did here a few years ago that recommended a series of education reforms necessary to propel Qatar into a knowledge economy.

However, a decree is not a coherent language policy. First, you have to have primary school teachers with sufficient English language proficiency to teach English as a second language as well as math and science. This is a sophisticated professional! You generally have to pay professionals with this type of training a professional wage. At last check, on planet Earth, primary school teachers were not ranking high on the professional pay scale. They are high on the loving care scale, the nurturing scale, and the willingness to do what it takes to help kids learn scale, but not on the professional pay scale. All of a sudden they are asked to teach ESL in the content areas. This is no mean feat. I have not yet heard or read the professional development plans that may have been included in this decree from the Supreme Education Council. They would be complicated.

Another interesting implication of this decree is the problem of teaching language as code. We know (and this is something we actually know as opposed to just suspect) that language is a culturally embedded behavior with a strong social component. If one teaches science and math in English and expects to have high English proficiency as a result of this instruction, one should not be surprised by the lack of success. Already University student admissions professionals in the Qatar and the UAE have explained that they need to have intensive English bridge programs for students to be able to reach a proficiency level that will allow them to succeed in an English only university environment. It was this problem that prompted this decree to start English earlier in primary education. However, language is not as simple as mastering a code. The social issues of language use in science and math as well as the cultural implications of thinking about science and math in English seem to be important elements to consider when constructing a language policy of such magnitude.

In addition, there is the issue of Arabic language proficiency. A problem in the United States with Generation 1.5 is the challenge of developing multi-lingual proficiency. If a student speaks one language at home and study in another language at school, we have seen that the student will often attain reasonable proficiency in both languages, but it will still be somewhat limited in different areas. University professors of Arabic has commented that the reading and writing skills of students who speak Arabic at home, but do their studies in English, is not very good. At Al Jazeera, one person commented that they do have an intensive Arabic language institute for their Arabic language reporters to spruce up their Modern Standard Arabic. An administrator in higher ed in Qatar mentioned that in Qatar there is not a strong Arabic reading tradition because the narrative tradition has been oral poetry and reading is for the Qur'an. The same comments were made in the Emirates as well. There is currently a strong movement to try to promote reading for children, and some educators have reported that the large book fairs have a huge proportion of children's books in Arabic. Bloomsbury publishing in Qatar is trying to promote Arabic language reading in Qatar by getting professionals to go into primary schools and read to children. Bloomsbury is also launching a large translation program to publish more face-en-face Arabic/English books. So there is a strong effort to promote Arabic language reading as a leisure activity, but it is new.

Nevertheless, if there is a push for English language proficiency in primary schools for native speakers of Arabic, Arabic language studies may not be a strong as they could be. If teachers are not trained in the delicate art of ESL through content instruction for kids, the proficiency goal may not be reasonable. Also, if Arabic language proficiency is not cultivated throughout a person's education, from primary through university education, that proficiency may also not be fully realized.

On the flip side, in the English medium schools for non-residents (the majority of the population), Arabic is optional. At one International Baccalaureate school we visited, the government has required that Arabic labels be included with the English on all the doors, but Arabic language and literature was not a required subject for the students. Arabic is optional in the Gulf States.

So if Arabic is a minority language in the Gulf States, and institutional ambitions for national development promote English as the medium of instruction, what will happen to Arabic? Will it experience the life-cycle of Irish Gaeilge where it is subsumed by the language of the economy until there is later an upsurge of cultural language development?

I'm off the Journal of Language Policy and Planning to see what they have to say about this. However, from my chats with primary school teachers, they just got a decree, some recommendations from a foreign company, and some pressure from the economy to change everything. Now. There were the sweetest, more caring teachers ever. Good luck to them: I know they will do their best, but they appear to have been given plans but no tools to build this knowledge economy.

Frau Page and Madam Mohammad: your thoughts?

The Grand Sheikh Zayed Mosque of Abu Dhabi

Hey, check out this beautiful classic study in blue and white! We went to visit the Sheikh Zayed Mosque of Abu Dhabi. It is located right up on entrance to the island city, so you really cannot miss it. It is on a rise of land so that it is easily visible when you are not behind a skyscraper office building (ponder that metaphorically as well as literally). It was a huge undertaking, and it was a multinational undertaking. Wool for the biggest single carpet in the world (well it *is* the Emirates after all) was sent from New Zealand to another country for weaving. The marble inlay was done by Italian artisans, and the chandeliers came from Austria. The list goes on.

For a cathedral, you can pop in, check out the relics and leave. Not so in this mosque. It is open to all kinds of visitors, but you have to go on a 45 minute tour and take the tour seriously. Upon entering, the gentlemen mill around while the almost universally inappropriately dressed ladies can go get an abaya and sheyla from the "dress the ladies counter". Here we all are, ready for our tour.


First stop is the ladies ablution room. Here, there is a green marble ablution area, and there are choices of toilets. You can have a western one or a south eastern one. There are also very insistent and helpful attendants who swooped down upon my colleagues to fix their too casually wrapped scarves. We emerged properly attired at last. However, a member of our group, was a sufficiently free spirit that her ankles showed, her neck would show, and her scarf tended to fall off. She was accosted by the costume monitors several times for her dishevelment. Perhaps the real problem was that her toenails were not painted, so she was flaunting her unfashionabe toes which were not as beautiful as the exquisite pedicures the local ladies sported.

The mosque was grand and open and beautiful. Usable net square feet is not something they have been concerned with. The space is enormous, the ceilings almost have another weather system, and the walls disappear on the horizon line. Part of the design aesthetic, as with all structures dedicated to the divine, there is an emphasis on space and scale to create a feeling of humility in the viewer. The floors that aren't marble with intricate mosaic or inlay are covered by equally ornate and colorful carpets. Woven into the carpets are slightly raised lines so that one can quickly orient to the line to be able to pray in an organized way, especially if there are several thousand people in the room. There is a big digital clock on the wall in English and Arabic that gives the accurate times for sunrise and prayer. There are huge colorful glittering chandeliers. There is nothing but air, light, and color.

The young man giving the tour was very general about his discussion of Islam and focused more on the multinational contribution to the building of the mosque. He just reviewed the five pillars of Islam, and he emphasized that only men are required to come to the mosque. However, during high holy holidays, Eid, so many people come to the mosque that they have to clear the parking lot so there is room for everybody to pray.

Al Jarir Bookstore

Just an ethnographic note on bookstores. While Bloomsbury Publishing is doing a big translation project of classical Qatari poetry, it has not yet reached the popular bookstores. The biggest bookstore in Doha is Al Jarir, and we went to see what it had. Four of the six bestsellers were from Twilight, and Who Moved my Cheese was there along with Dan Brown's newest mystery. Also among the best sellers was The Alchemist. Half the bookstore was devoted to Arabic language books and the other half to English language books. In the Arabic language section were six shelves of Qur'an and related texts. The res of the shelves were dedicated to romance novels, famous biographies, and business texts. In the famous biographies were four that were interesting. Here they are. You can decide whether the contents are positive or negative from the covers.



In the English language section there were cookbooks, interior design books, children's books, lots of trashy fiction, and some cursory books about Qatar, one a little defensively titled "1000 reasons why Qatar". We also found a copy of Arabic language scrabble, and I will get one in Kuwait because I think Sameera Mohammad, my Arabic teacher in Ohio, might like playing it in class.

There was also a large magazine section. Debbie Page wondered in a comment about the body image presented in Arabic language magazines, and I will say it is identical to the one presented in American magazines but with darker eyeliner. Impossibly tall and slim with big pouty lips and dark 'ojos de gato' eye makup. More than half of the Arabic language magazines were wedding fashions and wedding design. The other half were about cars. One was on body building for men, which looked to be a rather ancient publication from the 70's.

In the checkout line, there was a man who bought 500 riyals worth of car magazines. The man after him bought the first volume of Twilight and the Dan Brown novel. A pair of ladies bought several wedding magazines, but one of them had to run back into the store to retrieve her daughter who was still playing the store testing station version of "megafight", an new violent video game. Some one had set the game to "high blood spatter", and the young person in question appeared to be doing quite well at dismembering her video opponent.

Doha: Squalor to Splendor

On Saturday, we moved out of Abu Dhabi and migrated to Doha in Qatar. When we would tell people in the UAE, either Dubai or Abu Dhabi, they would offer comments such as, "What will you do in Doha for two weeks?' or "Why are you going to Qatar? Why not Bahrain?" or "Doha? They are 5 years behind the UAE" or "Doha? They are 10 years behind the UAE" or even at one point "Doha? They are 20 years behind the UAE." We were primed for Doha. Beth Traxler and I anxiously monitored the Ramada Plaza Doha website to try to understand all these comments.

When we arrived, the Ramada was lovely. We had to negotiate our check-in, and while we did that, a nice lady came around with a tray of tasty chocolates. The rooms are small, but that is okay. My specific objection is the tasteless decoration. There is a nasty triangular mirror, and most intensely horrific pink urn stuck to the wall. [insert photo]. The evening that we arrived we took a tour called "Charms of Doha" and I would at a colonated subtitle "Squalor to Splendor".

Our tour included a "camel yard", a vegetable market, an equestrian center, and the "traditional" Souk Waqif. The camel yard was tragic in terms of the suffering of the camels and the humans. Why do humans do this? I guess the camels and the humans were both so tough they could withstand the heat, the dust, and the crowding. But my heart broke, and I stood at the edge of the dusty parking lot and wept.

The vegetable market was less stressful since the vegetables did not have eyes like camels do. It was hot and green. Everything was imported from somewhere else: Jordan, China, Syria, Egypt etc. There were ancient men with few teeth who pushed green wheel barrows after one asking in an ancient language if we would like them to push our purchases around. We smiled because we did not know what to say. One wheelbarrow man was quite insistent about his right to demand that he carry Brian's purchases. Brain was carrying a plastic bag with four bananas in it. Wheelbarrow Man pushed his wheelbarrow up against Brian's leg and continued to incomprehensibly lecture him about the fact that the bananas belonged in the wheelbarrow. Brian walked away, wheelbarrow man shadowing him in case he should change his mind. It was as poignant as the camels.

From there we moved on to the equestrian center, poster child for splendor. Air conditioned stables, a private box stall for each exquisite arabian horse with a way for each one to look out and see each other. As we walked into their palace, they all looked out of their cedar bedded stalls to inspect us with great well-groomed curiosity. They were so pampered and loved. One man was hosing down a horse outside the stables, and the horse was clearly loving it, stretching its nose out to play with the water. Quite the contrast to the Camel gulag.

From there we went to the Souk Waqif, a rebuilt replica of how a traditional "Gulf Style" market might have looked. It had a kind of Egyptian flavor, but there were a lot of Indian restaurants and clothing areas in addition to the abaya stores. There were also trinkets and falcons. The falcon shop was clearly a specialty shop, full of dusty equipment, two falcons, and two very languid guys to let us walk around their shop. In the restaurant area, it looked like it could hold a lot of people, and our guide, Suriya, said that the place was packed in winter when the weather was nicer because at night it would get down to 75 F.

Dubai to Abu Dhabi to Doha

There is an interesting book about Dubai titled, Dubai: Golden Cage (the author was deported) which nick names Dubai as a “utopia of greed.” On our city tour of Doha (more on that later), we passed a shop that made neon signs with flashing palm trees, and the Nepali tour guide said, “Look: the store is called ‘Dubai Lights’. It’s a great place to get something flashy and tacky.” We didn’t know about this stereotype of Dubai until we got to Abu Dhabi. Evidently, Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, aims for the more upscale tourist trade (is there a down-scale tourist trade in the Gulf?), and they seem to view Dubai as “that city of those merchants in the North”. I recently read a newspaper article that complained about the “ghost buildings” on the skyline in Dubai. These are the skyscapers that have been abandoned as hollow hulks due to the economic crash.

It would seem that Abu Dhabi feels a bit superior about all this. They still have money, and they bailed Dubai out. They have cooler tourists, and they have more palm trees, so there. Evidently it costs 10 Dirham per day to keep a palm tree alive. There are lots of palm trees, so the greenery of Abu Dahbi is a little expensive. In Abu Dhabi, we attended both formal and informal events. Some were faintly challenging and some were intriguing. It was a more walkable city, certainly, in that we could walk a little more to get places, but still it was very focused on big cars. Big Cars. Cars that can jump curbs to get out of bad traffic. We had one taxi driver who managed to get us back to our hotel really quickly because he left the traffic jammed main road and drove through parking lots to get around it. He was a person from South Asia, and he had to make a quota of 350 Dirham before he could quit; he said that traffic was so bad that he often had to work 12-15 hours for a shift to make that quota.



The challenging aspect was the "Dune Bashing" event. I have such sensitive environmental feelings that the very name made me nervous. One should never bash anything on purpose, for one thing, aside from, maybe, trashcan lids if you want a really large noise. But a dune? What did a dune ever do to me? I got into the four wheel drive Big Car with minor trepidation that was well rewarded. We zoomed out at top speed right off the highway, over the burm, and into the desert. We drove with wild acceleration up the sides of dunes, slid down them (brakes on for a proper skid), and zoomed back up and over the lip of the next dune. There was no effort to stay together or on the same track. My sister, Mary, and I have always been VERY sensitive about going "off piste" and here were 35 (at least) SUVs driving higgled piggledy over the dunes and desert grasses. We arrived at a reconstruction of an imagined "sheikhs compound" in the desert. There were tasty shwarma sandwiches, mint tea and coffee. There were pink (?) ATVs that one could ride around over the dunes and desert grasses, and these were much in demand. There were three camels dressed in tassels and wearing crocheted muzzles. They had deep, dark, long lashed eyes, and they burbled like cheery wookies. They were also wearing, under their pretty embroidered head gear, chain link halters that had rubbed much of the hair off their noses. As a member of our Team, I hopped up for the Camel Ride. As my camel rose like a mountain lurching into motion. As soon as the first one was up, the next two rose without urging to walk slowly around in the little circle of their employment, closely head to flank in a little herd. It was quite companionable. I must say, despite being anxious about the quality of their working environment, I enjoyed my camel ride. Perhaps the nadir of the experience was the bellydancer who was "not from around here". She did a good job of entertaining tourists, by shaking her tatas in their faces, but she did not cultivate the artistic merits of the art form.

In stark contrast to this touristic dream of an Arabian night, we had brunch with the Sheikha in her palace surrounded by paintings in the orientalism style and fine French antiques. In equally stark contrast, we visited a night club in Abu Dhabi full of beautiful people too cool to dance to the sternum thumping trance music. I had a strawberry martini for 10 dollars. The smoke hurt my throat.

When we left Abu Dhabi, several of us had to buy another suitcase so that we could carry the material largesse lavished up on us during all of our visits.

Out a bit

The deal I struck with the dark ones was that if I came on this research seminar, I would have all my classes online. Yes, please, I said, I would like two full time jobs. So, sometimes my blogging gets a little behind because I need to work with my students at school. Each day, after a full schedule of meeting, greeting, observing, reflecting, questioning, and sometimes getting a bit confused, I go back to Ohio on my computer to read about consumer behavior from my Comp I friends, and tonight about the Lion King of Mali, Sundiata. Soon I get to enjoy final postings and final exams. All the students seem to have adjusted well to this very distant relationship, and I'm glad it is working. Now that we are in Doha, we have a much better connection so that I can load more photos.