Dorothy in Doha
Notes from a (sort of) war zone
Today, Doha is supposed to get more rain than it normally sees in an entire year. Tornadoes are in the forecast. In the past week, we’ve had three thunderstorms—a record, apparently, not just for the season but for any year on record in this desert city.
Lately, I’ve been feeling like Dorothy. The storm, the cyclone, the strange land where nothing quite follows the rules I arrived with. New friends and foes in unexpected configurations. A recurring sensation that very little of this is mine to control. And underneath it all, that small, embarrassing admission: there’s no place like home.
Life here continues to have a COVID-lockdown quality to it—shelter-in-place orders are nominally in effect, though no one wags a finger at you for breaking them. There’s a low simmer of stress that runs through the day like a second heartbeat, and it spikes when the alert goes off on our phones: a cranking, insistent sound signaling an imminent threat. Usually, a few minutes later, another alert follows. This one informs us the threat has been eliminated. As you were, it says, and you’re supposed to go back to whatever you were doing.
Most of the time, you do.
We’re in a semi-ceasefire right now—a few days of relative quiet that have let us breathe a little. It’s Eid holiday. My husband Jack and I should be in Sri Lanka this week, taking a slow train past the storied tea plantations and eating giant crab with our hands on the beach. Instead, Qatar Airways is running a limited schedule, our flight was cancelled, and we booked massages at a hotel spa—an exchange that made perfect sense at the time. Today, I find my shoulders are back up near my ears. Not all the way, but inching.
The dreams have been something else.
Our house in Ivy, Virginia, reduced to rubble by a bomb—though in the dream, Jack and I weren’t in it, which my subconscious apparently felt was sufficient comfort. One zombie apocalypse, complete with a vampire assigned to protect us who was, by every available metric, useless. And most recently, something dark and formless chasing me through a dim kitchen, from which I eventually escaped by crawling into my parents’ bed like a four-year-old.
I don’t need anyone to interpret these for me.
I miss my kids. I miss my dog. I’m glad to be with my husband. I’m glad to be okay.
There’s something else underneath all of it, though—something harder to name than fear or weariness, something that doesn’t move, even when everything else does around it. I grew up hearing about war from my parents and grandparents. Czech stories, Cold War stories, the particular texture of living through something you didn’t choose and couldn’t stop. I always wondered, in the abstract, how I would fare. I’m finding out—though “war” might be a generous word for what I’m actually experiencing, which is more like living adjacent to one. Close enough to feel the pressure change. Even hear the bombs and see their trails above my neighborhood. Not close enough, yet, to lose anything concrete—but close enough to imagine it.
When I say grace before meals now, I mean it. The words aren’t ritual anymore. They’re something I’m actually asking for.
I’m aware, with a specificity I didn’t have before, that I love our house in Ivy and the apartment here in Doha—this temporary home with its view that has been, in the truest sense, our sanctuary. I’m aware that I’m alive. I’m aware that I’m well. I’m aware that these are not small things.
The forecast says today will be violent. There’s still a chance we’ll be evacuated—a thought I keep setting down and picking back up.
I know ceasefires hold—until they don’t.
Praying your dreams don't catch up to you! Many blessings,
Deb H