Addendum

[qatarperegrine]

In the comments, Genesis pointed me to this excellent blog post by a Qatari girl about "Dialogue Distress: The Gap Between Qataris and Foreigners." It said a lot of what I was trying to say, but failed, about the misconceptions between Qataris and [Western] expats.

Comments

[roseandsigil.livejournal.com]

The sentence in this I find most fascinating is "I bet if they [Westerners] had servants and drivers, they wouldn’t bother with cleaning and driving, would they?"

This just strikes me as a complete inversion of the Western position, which, I think, is that it is lazy to have servants in the first place.

No moral judgment here, I just think that this is another place where one side isn't seeing the other's point of view.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

It did strike me as an odd comment when she's just pointed out that some Westerners earn more than their Qatari counterparts. One could thus infer that I could afford servants and drivers if I wanted them; I just don't want them.

(Full disclosure: we do have a maid come in once a week, but she's someone we know who asked us for the work, so that seems slightly different.)