Thomas Education

We have now attended the Anglican Center’s worship services twice.  We are impressed by the determination of so many people to attend worship, braving arcane traffic patterns and crowds and security scanners and very long walks in unshaded sunny heat.  What is officially marked as “Religions Complex” but unofficially called Religion City is the square mile reserved for all non-Muslim religions to build their houses of worship. The Anglican Center serves the Protestant community, with over 30 different groups worshiping in various parts of the building throughout the weekend.  One neighboring building houses the Indian Inter-Denominational Christian Church (the several branches of the ancient Keralan orthodox church), while the largest building is the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Rosary. Probably the two largest expatriate groups in Qatar are from India and the Philippines. Within the same complex are also Coptic and Greek and Syrian Orthodox churches. ...

The tourism council noted that the Faisal Bin Qassim Museum would be offering tours throughout this holiday, so we decided to try it.  From checking out fbqmuseum.org, I sensed that it was a very personal project, with a little-modified website evidently hand-built by his nephew.  The BookATour page link was dead, as was the GettingHere page link. So we traveled on, relying on google-maps: two frustrating hours later, through road construction and remote desert roads (with hidden speed bumps), we found a sign that pointed to “Museum” ! And we found a highway interchange not marked on google-maps; and we found a highway access road not known to google-maps… lesson: I should have followed my eyes rather than the computer. The Faisal Bin Qassim Museum is strangely anonymous, with few signs identifying the entry road, though the edifice is quite imposing and unusual in the neighborhood.  An old-fashioned unmarked gatehouse controls the driveway, and the entry roads, in f...

We are settling, in our apartment in Al Wakra, Qatar (yes, emphasis on the first syllable: QATar with a sort of soft initial K sound).  The apartment is spacious and solid, with good air-conditioning and reliable electricity and fairly reliable water. The school owns the building, so we know all our neighbors automatically, and we leave our door unlocked.  We are about 5 miles down the coast from the airport. Most of the teachers are US or Canadian, with a few Europeans and Middle Easterners in the mix.  Most of the students are local Qataris whose parents want them both to learn English and to go to a western university -- or at least one of the several university branches in Qatar.   Ours is a private school, owned by one of the family businesses in this suburb of the capital. The country offers its citizens a voucher system which pays parents when their children pass a school year--though our school is too new to qualify for vouchers.   The...