We've been back in Doha for one week.
What normal looks like during a war and why I told a delivery driver I was from London.
We landed back home seven days ago. Two days later, the ceasefire came into effect. The city exhaled. The girls went back to school today. I went back to my desk. Life, in the way that life does, has resumed.
I did not expect how good it would feel to just be here again. In our routine. In our home. In the place that actually belongs to us in the way that only the place you have chosen can belong to you.
The last piece I wrote was about leaving. About the evacuation, the US Embassy messages, the airport being closed, and the pizza on the kitchen table. About booking our flights back from London, and the people who asked why we would go back.
This is the other side of that story.
What normal looks like here
The kids are in school. The shops are open. The restaurants are full or fullish. The city is doing what cities do when the worst doesn’t happen: it continues.
But it is a quieter normal than before.
About ten children left my daughters’ schools to repatriate to their home countries. Some families who left have not come back. Some will not come back at all. You feel those absences. In the classroom, in the neighborhood, and in the WhatsApp groups that are a little less active than they were three months ago.
When it first started on Feb 28th, we had Al Jazeera, CNN, or BBC on all day. I could not stop watching. And then I started paying attention to the gap between what was on the screen and what was outside my window, and the gap was significant.
What was being shown on mainstream news in America was not a true representation of what was happening on the ground here. I have said this before, and I will keep saying it. The Middle East portrayed on Western television is not the one I live in. It never has been.
What I live in is a city that is genuinely beautiful. A culture that is warm and generous in ways that took me by surprise when we first arrived and continues to take me by surprise. A place that was, before all of this, finally starting to appear on people’s radar in a different way. People were putting it on their vacation list. They were not afraid to visit. They were curious.
I believe everyone should experience this part of the world at least once. Not because it is perfect, nowhere is, but because the version of it that most people carry in their heads from the news bears almost no resemblance to what is actually here.
That saddens me. That is one of the things this conflict has cost that nobody is counting.
“What is your president doing?”
Someone asked me where I was from recently.
When I told them, they looked at me and said, “What is your president doing?”
My immediate instinct, and I mean immediate, before I had even finished processing the question, was to say: he is not my president. I did not vote for him. I have not lived in that country since 2015.
I am embarrassed to be American right now.
I do not say that lightly. I built everything I have in America. My mother is there. My history is there. I have spent years being careful about how I talk about the country I am from.
But how do you watch the leader of the free world publicly say he is going to eliminate an entire civilization, after saying he started a war to save them and give them freedom, and feel anything other than shame?
The impact one person can have on the world through a single social media post is something I am still processing. That this is the reality we are living in, that the trajectory of a region, of lives, of how the world sees itself, can shift because of what someone types on their phone, is genuinely difficult to sit with.
Before we left for London, a delivery driver asked me where I was from.
I told him London.
The summer we won’t be going
We have canceled our plans to travel to America this summer.
I sit with that sentence for a moment because it still feels strange to write.
Part of me is sad about it. Genuinely sad. There are people there I miss. There are things I was looking forward to. And there is something particular about the sadness of choosing not to go to the place you are used to; it is a different kind of loss than simply not being able to go.
But I believe it is the right decision for my family right now.
I was also due to travel for a business trip next week. But replaced myself with a team member. It was not a difficult decision, but it was not a comfortable one either.
I know I am not alone in this. I have spoken to other people I know personally, who have made the same call. Canceled summer trips. Rerouted travel. Quietly deciding that right now, in this particular moment, America is not where they need to be.
I fear what will happen if this does not end soon. Not just to the people most directly affected, though, that fear is the largest and the loudest. But how Americans are seen and treated everywhere else in the world. To what it means to carry that passport. To the long work of rebuilding something that is being dismantled faster than most of us can track.
The world will not be the same after this period ends. That is not pessimism. That is just what I can see from where I am standing.
I do not have a framework for you today.
I do not have a lesson, a next step, or a pillar of the Global Citizens Framework that neatly applies.
I just have this. What it is like to be here, right now, in this week, in this city that is quiet in a way it was not before.
Stay safe out there. Wherever you are.
— Sonaya