On Monday I met Carly at school so I could see the American school of Doha. I took an uber through the dusty streets trying to find the gate where I would meet Carly. To avoid international fees, we had to come up with some creative ways to communicate. I had Carly’s phone and I could email her from her phone to her laptop. Finally I found her outside the gates, laptop in hand, still connected to the wifi. I traded my passport for a visitor’s pass and walked through the metal detectors into a haven of green grass. Carly said that sometimes the people from the military base will come visit and they’ll roll around on the lawn, their first contact with nature in weeks.
She showed me around the campus which was much nicer than any public school I had ever seen. The theatre/auditorium had nice seats and amazing technology. Carly’s classroom seemed like it didn’t have enough seats for the kids, but the class sizes are 20-1. After teaching classes of 35 in Denver, 20 students felt like half the class. Both Carly and Ben said they loved it because they could actually teach rather than doing crowd control. There was even a prep room for the teachers where they had their own desks for planning.
We left the school and tried to go to the firehouse where there was a gallery and a cafe, but it was closed, so we headed for a mall so Carly could pick some things up for school. As we sat in Doha traffic Carly saw a big cloud form behind us. She thought it might be rain. We searched the internet for an updated weather report but didn’t find anything. Carly said that last year it rained one day. Today might be the day! The cloud came closer and we realized it wasn’t rain, it was a dust storm! Slowly the skyline of the big city disappeared before our eyes. It only occurred to me later that I should have gotten out my phone and taken a video.
I thought the sand storm was very exciting. There was lightning and thunder which I wouldn’t have guessed would be part of the experience. Carly would have preferred not to drive through it. The visibility still seemed better than some snow wind I’ve driven through in Wyoming. We found our way to a mall which was very nice and very empty for its capacity. We saw maybe 4 or 5 other people at a time. After we got her school stuff from the nicest dollar store I have ever seen, we had a Doha adventure to find food to take home to Ben for dinner. He had gone golfing but the sand storm ended the game early. After checking out a few different places, we got a bunch of Turkish food and headed home.
On Thursday, the day after I left it rained. Apparently it was a huge rainstorm and the school and the compound flooded (Doha was not built to accommodate it’s annual one day of rain). School was cancelled. Carly said that the water was so high in some areas that it covered cars! I would have loved to have seen that but I’m glad it didn’t cancel any of our adventures.
Sand Storm!