What am I doing here?!

I know, I know! It's been forever since I last wrote! Thank you all for your patience and for your e-mails telling me you want to read the next installment of this blog. To say that I've been busy since I last posted anything is an understatement... but it hasn't all been work that's kept me preoccupied. I also went to Vienna for the Eid Al-Adha week of vacation in mid-November and I had a FABULOUS time there!

See how happy I look? This is me at Schoenbrun Palace, with Vienna in the background. Schoenbrun was absolutely my favourite palace of the three I went to, but that's another blog altogther ;-)

What I wanted to write about today is my new workplace, the College of the North Atlantic - Qatar. So many of you have asked me for more details about my job here, what the campus looks like and what type of students I teach, that I've decided it's time to sit down and tell you about that, rather than the excellent vacation I had in Vienna. Did I mention I really enjoyed my visit there?!! ;-)

First of all, the college is a satellite campus of the College of the North Atlantic, the trades college of the province of Newfoundland. The State of Qatar (at the urging of the Emir's second wife, Sheikha Mozah) decided that it wanted to open a vocational college in 2000 and received submissions from many educational institutions eager for a foothold in Qatar. The College of the North Atlantic was chosen due to the similarities between Qatar and Newfoundland: an economy originally based on fishing and recently enriched by the discovery of petroleum resources, as well as a relatively small population and traditional society.

At least, that's the story I've been told several times since I got here!!
Whatever the case, the college started operations here in 2001 and has been growing ever since! The instructors are all Canadian citizens, with a large proportion of them coming from the Atlantic provinces. My Bluenoser (Nova Scotian, for those of you who aren't from the Maritimes!) accent has come back full-force after 22 years of living away. Sometimes I don't even feel like I'm in the Middle East as I listen to the conversations flowing around me on campus ;-) There are also support staff from Canada, India and, most importantly, Qatar. The most salient fact about the college for me is that it was the first co-educational college or university opened in Qatar. Schools in Qatar (except the ones catering to the foreign population) are strictly divided along gender lines, so new students to the college are usually encountering students of the oppposite sex in their classes for the first time. When you read about my first class here, you'll understand how significant that is!
The current campus was built only a couple of years ago and is comprised of about 20 buildings, so it feels quite intimate as you stroll around.

There are some beautiful water features, as well as trees, flowers and benches that make it a welcoming place.

The water features threw me at first: water flowing the desert?! But then, that's Qatar: full of contradictions. And again, that's the subject of another blog entry! Once I get back from my Christmas trip to Hong Kong, I'll have to catch up on all the things I've wanted to blog about... stay tuned!
Anyway, this is the building my office is in:

It used to be strictly for the School of Engineering, but as the School of Language Studies and Academics has ballooned in size to take care of the English-language needs of the student population, we've encroached on the facilities of other departments. And not all of them are happy to be sharing ;-)

And this is me at the door to my office:

My dad asked me to have this photo taken, as he's so proud of the fact that I'm finally working for an institution that recognizes the value of my education and years of experience :-)

We've been told to make our offices as welcoming as we can, which is why there are many pictures of my family and the important places in my life on the bulletin board:

It's really hard to make a concrete box into a warm environment, especially when the air conditioning is blasting! I've done my best for this session; probably next session I'll do what some other instructors have done and buy a lamp so I don't have to turn on the ugly fluorescent tube attached to the ceiling. And I might even get myself a small coffeemaker because the cafeteria is a bit of a walk and the coffee they make is... cafeteria coffee!!

"But what about your students, Jennifer?" I can hear you asking me. "Stop talking about yourself!"

Gladly!!

To give you an idea what they look like, here's a photo of me with my first class of students, taken on the last official day of classes on December 7th:

Aren't they handsome in their thobes (robes) and gutras (head scarves)?!

The observant among you will have noticed that all my students are male. My class this session was in the Trades Preparation Program, with all the students in that program being male and overwhelmingly sponsored by their companies to study at the college. After being tested to find out their level of English ability, the students are put into English-as-a-foreign-language classes to study the type of language they'll need to succeed in their trade program. There are three main trades programs offered: process, mechanical or instrumentation engineering. Suffice it to say I've learned a bit about each trade, but not a whole lot! My primary task is to get the students speaking and writing English better. After graduating from the College with a certificate in their trade, students may be chosen by their employer to study overseas and get an engineering degree.

Now back to the reason why having mixed-gender classes is such a big deal in Qatar and the impact it had on my males-only class. My guys were aged between 17 and 26 and for the most part have had very little unsupervised contact with girls or women. The fact that there weren't any girls in the class didn't mean they were any less of a distraction to my guys. Quite the opposite, in fact! For the first few weeks of the session, every time a girl in an abaya (black robe) would walk past the glass panel in the door, all ten male heads would swivel in perfect synchronicity to watch her walk past. I had to cover that glass panel after awhile, just to keep their attention on the lesson! There was nothing I could do about the large glass windows at the back of the class, however; when one particularly eye-catching girl walked past wearing an abaya with a sparkling red design on her head covering, the code word the guys used for Qatari female became "strawberry"!!

To sum up my experience this first session at CNA-Q, I have to say that it's been a fun and fulfilling challenge. Which is exactly what I wanted when I decided to leave Montreal in August, 2009. The challenges didn't always turn out to be what I'd imagined, but now that I've got one session under my belt, I'm looking forward to the winter session... after my vacation in Hong Kong! 

Well, I hope that this entry has satisfied your desire for more information about what I'm doing in Qatar. If you have more questions about the college or my work, just ask! And I promise my next posting won't take so long to appear!

In the meantime, have a most Merry Christmas!