Update From Qatar

Here is another update from Jeremy (Our soldier in Qatar. It sounds like he is having a good time. I found it especially interesting how funding is allocated at the end of the year and the rules for land ownership in Qatar. Jeremy's full letter is after the jump...

Hello All!
Well I am sorry it has been awhile since my last update, but truth be told I haven't written because life is kind of dull around here. I get up around 0500 almost every morning, I workout until almost 0800 then I am at work around 0900 and then usually call it a day around 8 or 9 at night.

During the day at work I am busy working on reports, building databases and trying to find ways to improve the program here. Then just when I am ready to leave around 6 at night is when alot of the soldiers start to come in and hang around in our building so I am usually walking around finding out if there are ways I can help soldiers or ideas on how to improve the program. The days all kind of run together around here, it is kind of hard to remember what day it is. Sundays we have a nice church service at the chapel, and that's about the only difference that I see in my week. I technically have Monday's off, but that usually just means I come to work in civilian clothes instead of a uniform and I take off a little early to go get a hair cut. I picked taking Monday's off because I try to use it as a day to recover after staying up all night trying to watch NFL football, but I have reports that are due first thing every Monday morning, so I am usually not too successful at catching up on sleep.

I have had a couple of interesting days here. I have gone to two different Iftars. Right now Muslims are in the holy month of Ramadan and they fast the entire day. Then at night once you can no longer see a white thread they sound a loud horn all around the city and people have an Iftar which is the breaking of the fast. We work with two different companies that operate our off-post trips they are called QIT and QIA, and actually the two managers are cousins. So the first Iftar we went to was at the QIA manager's house and the QIT manager and his wife joined us there. It was wonderful food and it was a fun evening of visiting with the two families and learning more about their culture and religion. The men were not very religious and the wives were fairly devout, but they were also very progressive in their thinking about how women should be viewed in the Muslim culture. It was all quite interesting and fun to experience. The second Iftar we went to was to the manager of QIT and meet the rest of his family. He has VERY ambitious children. As his son enrolled in college in Jordan at the age of 16 and will be a fully licensed commercial pilot just after he turns 18. His daughter is a straight A student who hopes to attend Harvard Law school and is enrolled in sports year round and always enjoys a game of rugby!

Today we had five congress people come to our building. You would have thought the President was coming the way everyone was over-reacting. In the end it was all very anti-climatic. the congress people were here, they got a 15 min. briefing, they walked through our building in about 5-10 min. and they were out the door.

We had our much anticipated bowling alley open up a week or two ago. It has been in the construction phase for a little over a year because they had to keep waiting for parts to get through customs. but it is finally up and running and actually it is very nice!

I am looking forward to the next few weeks as I am expecting boatloads of new equipment and games to start arriving. I was told at about 6 PM one night that I had until 0900 the next morning to buy pretty much whatever I wanted for the R&R program. I ended up staying up until about 1 am that night buying all sorts of stuff for the program. Then a couple of nights later I got a frantic call on my cell phone that said I had to run down to the resource management office because they were having a end of the fiscal year spending spree, but it could only be for furniture. So luckily I happened to be right next door to the RM office, I walked in and the lady set a sheet of paper in front of me and said "write down any type of furniture you want for R&R" so I went ahead and went on another spending spree. A couple of minutes later I had other section heads coming in the door with cookies and treats, but since I am with R&R we always take precedence so we got first dibs on the left over money for the fiscal year. I don't feel bad about buying all this stuff because I know it's not for me and it really wasn't anything too excessive, it's all for the R&R soldiers and anything that I can do to make their few days here more relaxing and fun is just a small token of the appreciation we have for the hard work they are doing up north.

I have actually risked driving into downtown Doha a couple of times now and it actually isn't that bad. They have roundabouts EVERYWHERE but once you know the science behind a roundabout it is pretty easy to navigate through them. Doha itself is "reinventing" itself. They are tearing down many, many buildings and they have alot of skyscrapers that are currently being built. Doha is not only the geographical center of the middle east, it is now considered the "religious" center on all matters related to Muslims. It is quite a progressive city and some people say that it will overtake Dubai as the city to visit in the middle east by 2015. Of course the Qataris have VERY strict rules. The population itself is about 1/5 Qatari and only Qataris can own land. This means that 4/5 of the population lives on rented land - including the land that Camp As Sayliyah is located on - and by law the owner can reclaim the land whenever they want and the renter is out of luck. In fact the US Embassy here is in the same scenario and it is the only US Embassy in the world that is on rented and not owned land. They have made one small exception, they are building a massive island in the Persian Gulf and building a planned community there called "The Pearl" (Qatar is famous for it's pearls). Non-Qataris can purchase a 900 sq foot condo for right around 1 million Qatar Riyals (about $350,000).

Well, I guess that is about all for now. If you have any specific questions feel free to e-mail me. I hope everyone is doing well back home and that you are all still faithfully cheering on the Viking even though they are absolutely horrible and have managed to sign three quarterbacks that are all quite bad.

Jeremy