Returns to Doha and home.

Monday 11th Long haul travel part 1:

We woke to a Paris heatwave breaking thunderstorm and rain. Outside our hostel window the lightning crackled in sheets around the Eiffel Tower and the thunder rattled on for much of the early morning.

For Joy and me it was a mad run through the rain to the Metro and the journey to the airport. That mad dash had consequences for us much later in the day when we got back to Doha. We had thought that our tour was ending on a high note - for when we went through the final boarding gate there was a slight delay as the clerk ripped our economy tickets up and reissued us with Business class tickets from Paris to Dubai. The Business class travel has a lot to recommend it - especially the food choice and being able to stretch out and relax for the 7 hour flight. Back to the key saga. Joy had taken care of the key-ring with the apartment key for the trip. She insisted that she would take greater care than I would.

However, a woman’s handbag is not always the most secure compared to a trouser pocket or bum bag especially when she carries a fold away umbrella in the same bag and leaves all articles in the same cavity. Needless to say when Joy pulled her umbrella out of the handbag the key ring got pulled out as well. So somewhere in Paris there is a keyring with a Brass cat, a Ford car key and the key to our Doha apartment lying around waiting for someone to return it!

The result was that when we arrived at our apartment at 3.00am there was no way we could get into the flat. An urgent phone call to Steve O’Neill at 4.00am, just as the first prayer call echoed over Doha, rescued us from the humidity and heat of the Doha morning 38C and climbing to a mid day 49C. Our heartfelt thanks to Steve and Lynley for going out of their way at such an ungodly hour to help out a couple of careless and key-less travellers.

We spent the day repacking our bags, juggling the weight distribution, washing our clothes from two weeks in France, updating the blog, dropping photos onto facebook, and exhausting our hala card credit with phone calls to the family and booking the taxi for our early morning red-eye trip to the airport and the beginning of our long haul to New Zealand and a new direction for another year now that our Qatar contract opportunities have finished.

Part 2: The Red-Eye Special.... enough said.

End of Contract Dinner - Cognition 2010 Doha

The end of the contract and the return of the Doha Darlings & the Dudes in a musical review of the contract from induction to the job and the end of the contract. Complete in the regulation corporate uniform designed just for the night.

The Return of the Doha Darlings - with mates!

The Return of the Doha Darlings ............... with Dudes.
Cognition Christmas celebations.
Doha

The Return of the Doha Darlings - Abba Revivalists!!

The Return of the Doha Darlings part 2

National Day Celebrations at Ahmed bin Hanbal School

National Day at School how to celebrate in style

Check out the celebrations on: http://www.ndqatar.com/english/index.php
http://www.ndqatar.net
http://www.youtube.com/user/NDQATAR

The Final Goodbyes

It is strange not to do our usual weekend phone call to Dad in Wanganui to swap reminiscences and talk about our activities here in Doha and his back home in New Zealand.

Dad's War time love cartoon - a symbol of his humour.

We are still adjusting to a life without Dad’s bluff good humour and cheery “Good day son”when he picked up the phone.

Following Des’s phone call in the early hours of Sunday morning (Doha time) Joy & I moved from our usual work day mode to fast forward and long flights back home to farewell Dad.

Dad’s death was recorded in both local papers ( http://rcp.wanganui.info/sept17/RCPA17sep09A02.pdf. ) with an obituary recording his involvement in the city.
The funeral was, as the neighbours kept telling us it would be, big with 500 people from all sides of the family, from the organisations Dad had been involved with, from the neighbourhood and the wider community there to pay their last respects to a generous friend and neighbour.

Dad had, in his usual manner, scripted everything so that there was little for us to do but follow his instructions with subtle tweaks to allow for those who wanted to speak a chance to say their farewells.

Keren, Linda & Letitia swap Frank stories at his wake.

The wake that evening was tinged with sadness but over laid with the laughter he had instructed everyone to remember him by and went until the early hours of the morning as many a yarn was spun about Dad’s exploits from Waipukurau, to Stratford, through the war, up the River and throughout our lives.

The tribe - Grandchildren and Great Grand children ready to depart after farewelling their Poppa

Des, Jocelyn and I sorted out the estate over the following week before Jocelyn and Caroline drove Dad’s car to Christchurch and Joy and I prepared for the long flight back to Doha.

Before we left Doha was celebrating Ramadan which saw the Malls decorating their atriums with reminders of the cultural heritage behind the 40 days of fasting and meditation on the teachings of Mohammed as this presentation at the City Centre Mall shows. It certainly beats the tired elves and coca-cola created Father Xmas features we are accustomed to at home.

Ramadan presentation in the City Centre Mall - Doha

We returned to the Eid celebrations that mark the end of Ramadan.
We got back early Friday morning, with an upgrade to business class on the Dubai-Doha leg, and crashed out until early evening. Saturday saw us sorting out our fridge which had decided to cut out during our absence thus leaving us with a load of food to dispose of. Fortunately we could use a colleague’s fridge until the management provided us with a new working one.

The view from the roof of our apartment block

We are now back into working mode. Joy starting on a new painting and me at school providing professional development and advice to the English teachers and librarian - the Arabic Department will come this week once we see the students at school.

The week, since our return from New Zealand, has disappeared incredibly quickly. Probably because the demands of the job have consumed a good deal of the time! The staff at Ahmed bin Hanbal School are enthusiastic and responsive to the proposals and demands of the curriculum reforms they have to embrace following their move from a MoE school to an Independent one which makes our job both easier and more demanding as the ideas and techniques we present and model are taken up positively, rapidly and used in a constructive manner in their programme and lesson planning.

Outside of work Joy and I have been entertaining some of our colleagues as well as going to a Thai Cultural presentation at the Hyatt Doha which was very entertaining with its mix of dance and martial arts as well as visiting the Souqs in search of the new and different as we adjust to a very different family structure and filling the hole Dad left.

Emirs Cup

Rain and social activities

BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS

At peace with myself!

The past couple of weeks have been busy but without the unusual or different that has been part of our lives since arriving here in December. Probably a welcome relief after the events of March.
The highlights have been a "Geriatrics Party" to celebrate a colleague's 60th birthday. We were invited to attend in costumes that would relive our lost past.

Joy & Me at Geriatics Party: Bruce & Me at same party Whose youth has caught up?.

Needless to say the costumes were varied and sometimes both temporally and spatially confused. This may have been a result of our collectively impending short term memory losses or merely because the 1960s were, for some, a confused blur anyway.

The party was held in a Villa in the West Bay area of Doha which gave usan insight into life outside of the Apartment blocks and an idea of the grand style favoured by Interior Decorators here.
The Villa had a swimming pool and barbeque area outside which catered for those who favoured the balm of the evening air. Once inside one was exposed to an over the top luxury - the front doors opened onto a marble floored lobby and a grand marble staircase that was lit by a chandelier that would have done justice in an hotel.
Beside the entrance lobby was a fully equipped mini-gym with every piece of self torture equipment a masochistic gym lover would need. The walking frame even had a flat screen TV so you could screen films of bush, desert or ice fields as you walked yourself into a trance in the quest for fitness.
The lounge was dominated by a flat screen TV as big as any at a mini-cinema complex while the dining area held a table capable of seating 20 people comfortably at one time.
We were told that the bedrooms each had an en-suite and a built in flat-screen TV screen on the wall at the foot of the bed so one didn't get bored luxuriating in the generously proprotioned beds.
However, we party goers ignored the blandishments of luxury and got down to the serious business of celebrating Bruce's birthday and reliving pasts both real and idly imagined. Great fun!!!
We packed ourselves up around 11.30 - age having put a dampener on early morning party finishing, you know, and headed back to our apartments and the reality of home comforts.

RAIN IN DOHA!!

Then, just for a change, last weekend Qatar decided that it really needed to provide a variation on the theme of perpetual sunshine and, for the fourth time since we've been here, it rained and, for the second time, the front page of the Qatar Tribune was stopped to allow the headline story "RAIN IN DOHA" to drive all other world news from the front page.

Hyperbole aside the rain was heavy and the run off made more spectaular by the lack of an efficient or effective drainage system which meant that the water pools at the lowest points on the roadways - the middle of the roundabouts that mark intersections here.
TV & Burger-King Roundabouts had water at least 60cms deep around them so that drivers were forced to either circle out wide to go around or plough into the pool in the hope one could get through without stalling. It made for interesting driving especially as many of the locals are not familiar with the idea of hydroplaning on wet tyres.

Rain in Doha gets front page coverage again!

NORMALITY RETURNS

With the excitement of the party and the rain past life has returned to normal - up at 4.30am to the first of the prayer calls - Fajr (Dawn) and preparation for school as I listen to the BBC news on TV while the second prayer call - Shorook (sunrise) swirls through the window. The mosque nearest to us has a call to prayer that ensures one is aware of his aural presence. Thankfully, he gets submerged in the more musically adept calls that begin to blanket Doha and the day begins in earnest.
This week school has been dominated by the Grade 10-11 national testing which has meant that the Grade 12 students were at home supposedly studying for their own end of Cluster (Unit) tests in Arabic and English which took place on Thursday.
This was, in itself, unusual as the students had to sit two two hour papers in one day! The reaction to the second paper, English, was as expected.... looks of total incomprehension and loud claims of excessive difficulty when faced with what was little more than a reading and listening comprehension requiring them to write full simple sentence answers based on two typical airport /flight announcements and a two minute recording of a business meeting.
At the end of the day the teachers of English were looking as though they'd been through a session on a really rigorous gymnasium and then pummeled into submission by an over-enthusiastic masseur as they assembled in the workroom to mark the students' contributions to academic enterprise.
During the hiatus from classroom teaching each subject Department has been expected to write up a full annual plan for each grade level, a break down of the proposed Unit Plans and, given time, luck and enterprise, specimen lesson plans that allowed for differentiation for classes that would, in the 2009-10 year, be operating at both Foundation and Advanced levels according to the Curriculum descriptors. Just a small task.
We succeeded in creating a logical and sequenced Annual plan with interlocking and more student centred units for English. It now remains to assemble the resources and begin to write coherent standard based lessons to satisfy the descriptors in the Standards, the proposed unit content and allow the students to develop their spoken and written skills in English without falling into total grammar lessons and rote recall responses to questions. That, of course, means that we have to begin a series of workshops on effective test creation and assessment methodologies which will be another story in itself.

JOY'S PAINTINGS

While I've been enjoying work Joy has been busy painting and selling some of her work. She's sold four pieces so far and hoping to sell more as the contract period draws to an end.
She received a real boost this week when she was invited to contribute to an exhibition of works by artists resident in Qatar at the Souq Waqif galleries over July-August. She is to select three of her paintings and provide a brief biography to the gallery who will select the paintings they wish to exhibit. Needless to say she is keen to see her work on exhibition here in Doha.

We'll keep you posted on the exhibition.

Sandstorms & Camel Racing

Of Sandstorms and Camel Racing.

This week has been one of coming back to earth after our travels in Egypt and heading back to work and implementing the various professional development plans to address the issues I identified in the first hectic six weeks of the project.

I spent the first few days writing up the proposals and the monthly report that summed up our activities over January and the first few weeks of this month before plunging into the classrooms to observe and make recommendations that may, if pursued, encourage the students to enjoy and learn English more enthusiastically than they have been doing.

The euphoria of reaching third place among the Independent schools remains but now comes the hard part - raising the academic progress of the students!!

The week was marked by our first experience of a sand-storm. Whereas three hours of rain grabbed front page headlines in the Tribune the two day sand-storm merely warranted a brief mention under weather conditions assuring us it would all be over by Friday afternoon.

The view from our apartment window was one of grey gritty air for the three days the winds swirled through from KSA. The photos show the view over the street and the neighbouring buildings. In normal conditions we would easily see the tower blocks in the middle distance (The shadows in the haze ).

Walking anywhere in the haze was like walking down Foxton or South Beach on a windy day but without the bite of driving sand one experiences there. Afterward we needed to drink copious amounts of water to wash the grit from our throats.

The storm and the sand haze had lifted by Saturday which meant that we could finally witness the Camel racing we'd been told so much about when we arrived here.

All of the Mazda Apartment dwellers drove out to the Camel Race Track and, through the good offices of the Chairman of the Qatar Camel Racing Association, were able to ride in the spectator bus, with th e owners around the track and cheer the camels along.
The camels were, unlike horses, calmly waiting their turn on the track in a large screened off enclosure while their trainers fussed about them and discussed tactics with the owners.

When the race was about to start they had their robot jockeys attached and were walked into the birdcage ready to be lead into the starting gate.

Here the trainers held them in the ready position with a rope until the starter signalled the start - at which point the trainers slipped the ropes free of the camels and began to run in a desperate scramble to escape the camels towards the fence.

As the camels careered down the track the owners and us in the bus headed off after them on the 6 km journey to the finish line.

Each camel has a little robotic jockey mounted on their back and controlled by the owner from the comfort of his 4x4 as he races at a steady 40kph alongside.
As the race nears its end the little jockeys begin flailing away like demented helicopters in an effort to urge greater speed from the camels while the drivers parp and blow their hours and we in the bus yell at our favoured animals to get a move on and cross the finish line in pride of place. Incidentally, sound track aside, apart from the horn blowing and yelling in the last km of the race there is no sound from the camels as they pound along the sand track for the entire 6 km.

A lot of enthusiastic fun for all of us.

The finish line was a familiar form for the camels while the sight of a line of 4x4s six abreast heading for the finish line on the track beside the camel track was a little more daunting for us!

Doha Days 2-4

Boys outside school - waiting to head home.

No one thought to ask us what time we had on our watches so we were still on Dubai time - an hour ahead of Doha - so Joy & I woke at 5.00 am (4.00am Doha time) - breakfasted and prepared for the driver and the journey to work only to discover that I was an hour too early!
Nothing like being eager for work?

Once our driver arrived, my partner at the school, Dave Parry (Lakes High School ) and I headed out (at the correct time - 6.30 am) to work and my first day of offical contact as Teacher Advisor!

The drive out took us through construction sites of mainly large houses or compounds of apartment blocks interspersed with commercial buildings of incredible granduer -ornate castellations and curved windows, like the shopping centre "Villagio", a huge complex that has an ice rink and a canal and gondolas - surrounded by apartments, piles of rubble, sand and trucks as Doha spreads itself outwards from the Corniche.


The Mohammed Bin Abdul Wahab School is out on the fringes of Doha overlooking the desert on one side while the other looks over what will become a new suburb of Doha. In the middle distance behind the school is a wadi with a couple of tents pitched into the shade of the palms and several camels drifting around the compound watched over by several little kids.

The staff meeting was under way when we arrived at school. The Deputy Principal, an Englishman in three piece suit and academic gown, was giving out the daily messages and notices to the staff, a mix of nationalities - Jordanian, Egyptian, English, Syrian, Palestinian, Saudi Arabian and Morrocan. We were welcomed as "Mr Dave and the new English Advisor, Mr Alan." Surnames appear to be not used in favour of forenames.

The school day starts at 7.30 and finishes at 1.30pm so I'm heading home around 2.00pm. The first week I spent wandering the classrooms, talking and observing the teachers in action and the students in various attitudes of attention. Each period is two hours long by the way.

The school is built in concrete so the classrooms echo which makes the reception of spoken English some what difficult even for a person who normally speaks and hears English so imagine what it would be like listening to a person speaking English he has learned as an accented second language to students for whom English is a reluctantly taken subject!!

The students appear to be pleasant, happy individuals who, although being anywhere between 15 - 20 years old, behave as though they are enthusiastic 10 year olds until they leave school and climb into their 4 x 4s or utes and one sees car driving that the Boy Racers at home would freak out at.

Boys leaving school

In school one has to adjust to the sight of boys holding hands and kissing each other in greeting. In one class a boy arriving late shook hands with his teacher and then kissed him on both cheeks before sitting down.

Wednesday break saw a 5 a side soccer game played in the gymnasium. The winning team was presented with a trophy by the Principal, Mr. Nasser then all present, including staff were lined up for a photograph.

Spot Mr. Alan in the line up.

I'm in the process of developing a 5 hour workshop on unit & lesson planning and a staff PD presentation on effective power point presentations to be delivered after Eid.

We're now settling in for the ten day Eid break which, for some students really means 14 days as many headed out into Saudi Arabia earlier in the week.

Doha Day 1. (29.11.08)

Saturday 29th: To Doha.
Joy & I were fare-welled by the family- Rachel & Matt, Josiah, Eden, Kyra & Heidi, Rebecca & Georgia, Reuben & Beth- from the airport.

Then a 20 hour flight via Sydney to Dubai & on to Doha. We spent the flight watching movies of varying quality on seat screen format. Discovered that the Nats had pinched their slogan and me-to-policy initiatives from comedy - drama "Swing Voter" where the choice of President relies on the single vote of a traditional enrolled non-voter in backwoods isolationist America. (Even on a plane I discovered a political parable).
Arrived in Doha and met by John Ellis and taken to our apartment in semi-central Doha.. ideal location - right behind the Jarir Bookstore on Salwa Road.

Had settled in- unpacked and sat to recover from the flight when others from the team arrived in from work around 3.00pm.

Were given a quick familiarisation tour of the immediate area so we could find the grocery shop and local supermarket to stock up the kitchen. Then home to prepare for work on Monday... a 6.00am start!