I was being driven to my home by Dr. A, yes yes, Mr. Q and Dr. A, Questions and Answers, Qatari and…. Axpat… ok that doesn’t work; and was marveling at the huge sky scrapers in westbay and wondering when they’d start building a bit out of westbay and into other areas when I suddenly started to think about what we don’t see.

Qatar is indeed a land of variety. You get a variety of nationalities, ages, religions, and classes. On one end of Doha, you’ll find broken up roads with holes large enough for the ozone to fall in to; on the other end, you’ll find luxury apartments, amazing roads with greenery and trees, and shopping malls underneath towering cranes. Alright, you’ll find this everywhere, however what makes this food for thought is that this isn’t caused by natural evolution.

Laziness from people who can make a difference causes lack of maintanence and degradation. Rich tyrants use labourers as slaves to make them richer. Authorities are complacent about enforcing some of the more basic but fundamental laws.

I was thinking about the labour camps of Doha. I visit a couple of the hidden ones behind high walls. I felt as if I was walking into a prison yard. One of my most prominent memories was when ILQ participated in aiding the fire victims. We walked into the camp and looked around to see faces emerge from the tiny streets, from their windowless windows and from behind scraps of metal. They all looked at us as if we had found them in one of those huge shipping containers you see on tv when the smuggle Mexicans or Chinese in the US.

How difficult or costly would it be to set up a microvillage made OUT of those shipping containers? Steel costs too much? Fine, how about using those temporary office spaces as accommodation? They’ll last! You want them to take care of it? Here’s a plan, how about giving them a little speech telling them how they need to take care of the home they live in. How about giving them some basic farming tools and tell them that a bonus will be given to the best garden in their unit? See how productive thinking works?

Forget the expensive Barwa project, this environmentally friendly and quick alternative could create an amazing labour village. The difference? It could be finished in months.

It’s all about education. Educate the public as well as the labourers. They’re smart enough to build a skyscraper, I’m sure they’ll be smart enough to start a productive community.