Doha dreaming

“Oh. Where exactly in Saudi?”

“Qatar.”

“But Qatar isn’t in Saudi Arabistan!” It hadn’t seemed an especially promising start to the venture, and I had to remind myself firmly that my own mother would have had difficulty locating Göreme on a map.

Nor had the leave-taking gone particularly easily. Members of the extended family gathered for the off. Dad was driving his son to Ankara to catch the plane, but C’s youngest brother was beside himself at the imminent loss and couldn’t be comforted. I well remember C and his father walking down the alley to the battered old car, doing their best to ignore the anguished cries that followed them. Then at the last moment grandma remembered age-old custom and ran back inside the house for a basin of water that she could sloosh under the wheels of the car as it pulled away, thereby ensuring the travelers’ safe return.

Now C was home again, and so much seemed to have changed in the relatively short time that he’d been gone. The family had a computer now on which he had uploaded his photographs of Doha. They made fascinating viewing for someone who had never visited any of the Gulf states, not because they were snapshots of exciting tourist attractions but because of what they revealed of the country’s booming economy. The pictures were almost all taken either on the construction site (endless pictures of heavy machines with men posing against them as if they were hunting trophies) or at the local shopping malls, glitzy places that might as well have been İstanbul’s Cevahir for all they betrayed any signs of ethnic individuality.

But what was most interesting of all was what C had to say about his fellow workers. Had he had to learn any Arabic? Had he, hell! Virtually everyone on the site had been either Turkish, Filipino or Ethiopian, and C, born in an Anatolian village of but 2,000 people, was able to introduce me to a whole multicultural panoply of fellow workers whose common language was not English, as one might arrogantly have assumed, but Turkish. Of course that made perfect sense since the spur to his odyssey had been a teacher at Nevşehir’s vocational high school. “He’s from Gülşehir. He’s from Kırşehir,” C recited as we romped through the images. It was an intriguing glimpse into our intensely globalized new world.

C begins his military service next month, but already he has his sights set on the years to follow. “Maybe I’ll go back to Qatar,” he said. “Or maybe I’ll go somewhere else with the lads.” He had hair-raising tales to tell of desert sandstorms and fatal industrial accidents, but in his eyes I could see that lust for adventure that is always so wonderful to behold.