Far and near

There’s always a bit of culture shock when traveling abroad for the first time. Foreign tastes, aromas and sounds assail the senses. These unfamiliarities can even strike students of the same university when its campuses are in distant countries — such is the case at Virginia Commonwealth University, which has branch campuses in Richmond, Virginia, and Doha, Qatar. Yet none of these sensory differences proved the biggest shock for one VCUarts Qatar junior visiting Richmond this fall.

Rather, Tayseer al Gailey was most amazed at how often Westerners take the stairs.

“Americans love stairs,” the art history major said with a laugh. “You love walking, you love stairs. We don’t have people walking. We always use the elevators. We’re lazy people. … We choose to take the elevators.”

Al Gailey was one of about 20 students to travel the roughly 7,000 miles from Doha to Richmond last week as part of VCU’s Qatar Leadership Exchange Program. Richmond students similarly visited Doha a few weeks earlier. Through the annual program, which is open to undergraduates as well as graduate and professional students, student ambassadors from each campus host the other’s delegation, getting to know each other in the process and what it’s like to be a student on the other side of the world. Each delegation tours its host campus, meeting with various student groups and faculty, while also learning about the surrounding city and culture.

Zaid Shaikh, a junior in the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering in the School of Engineering, was part of this year’s Richmond delegation visiting Qatar. As a freshman member of the VCU Emerging Leaders Program — a selective one-year scholarship program that recognizes and supports the development and engagement of emerging student leaders at the university — Shaikh had heard of the benefits of the leadership exchange program, but was not accepted the first year he applied.

So he stepped up his involvement in university activities and applied again.

“I really changed what I was doing at the time,” said Shaikh, who joined more organizations and volunteered with TedxVCU and the Office of Sustainability. To earn a spot in the exchange program, he knew he had to show he was involved on campus and cared about the community in addition to earning good grades. “[You’ve got to] make sure that you’re really going above and beyond the bare minimum of what’s required for your major,” he said. Participating in this year’s Qatar exchange program meant the world to him.

“The hospitality, the culture and the sense of going somewhere new and experiencing leadership and [different] constructs than what we may have here — it’s a different life,” he said.

But not as different as he expected.

Shaikh said that before the trip he had “bought into” the media’s depiction of the Middle East as a patriarchal society that doesn’t care about women.

“It really surprised me that that’s not the reality, even though that’s the depictions that you might get from the media here,” he said. “They had such a strong focus on women’s empowerment and they’re building this whole Education City. We heard from Qatar Foundation and they were saying the idea is to empower women at top universities without having to leave the country … just to provide access to higher education for their women.”

Touring Education City, the academic campus in Doha that comprises satellite campuses of eight international universities, was a big draw for Andrew Edward Bell, a graduate student in the School of the Arts.

“Amazing things happen anytime someone puts that much money into an educational initiative,” Bell said. “The Qatar government has created gorgeous K-12 schools that feed into an extraordinary amalgam of universities including Georgetown, Weill Cornell [Medicine], Northwestern and VCUarts. I was really excited to see this educational utopia, and I was not disappointed.”

Richmonders also had the opportunity to tour the Qatar Science and Technology Park, which provides office space, co-working spaces and business incubation for the companies on site.

“Not only does the government have such great educational initiatives, they have created a business park for fostering innovation and economic growth,” Bell said. “[The park] really blew me away. It was exciting to see that they not only promote education, but they are also thinking about what happens beyond graduation.”

While in Qatar, the U.S. delegation presented a VCU Richmond Day, the equivalent of the annual VCU Qatar Day held on the Monroe Park Campus.

Instead of kebabs and rice, Richmond Day featured hot dogs, hamburgers and pizza, said Sarah Faheem, student activities and engagement officer at VCUarts Qatar. Richmond students also handed out VCU face tattoos and taught their counterparts some Ram cheers.

In Richmond, the Qatari delegation held a special preview event called Majlis on the MCV Campus the day before the Qatar Day celebration. The smaller event, meant to include health sciences students in the celebration, featured authentic Mediterranean food, calligraphy, live music and a pair of falcons, which throughout the Middle East are embedded in the tradition of hunting and hawking and are considered extremely valuable.

The next day, Qatar Day featured the same attractions, as well as an annual fashion show, henna tattoos, Arabian perfumes and a photo booth where attendees could have their photos taken in authentic Qatari garb.

“I’m excited for having people come to learn about the Qatari culture and realize that we’re not very different from people here,” said al Gailey, who manned the perfume table at Qatar Day.

VCUarts Qatar students Steffi Braganza and Zaki George also worked different stations during the celebration. This was the first trip to the United States for both students.

Coming from a conservative family in India, Braga wasn’t even allowed out of her house alone before attending university. Convincing her parents to let go enough to allow her to attend school in Qatar was a huge step, she said.

Now a sophomore studying graphic design, Braga has found the leadership exchange invaluable.

“This is my first trip to the U.S.,” she said. “This is my first trip alone, without my family. So that’s what I was looking forward to — to get to this self-independent stage. … The experience is amazing and people come back changed with a lot of wisdom.”

George said the trip cemented his plans to return to Richmond after graduating to pursue a master’s degree in art history. The Qatari delegation’s visit coincided with the seventh biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art. The visiting students were able to attend the VCU-sponsored event, which returned to the United States after 13 years, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Widely considered the preeminent conference on Islamic art and culture, the three-day international symposium featured leading scholars and curators of Islamic art and architecture, and dynamic contemporary artists from around the world.

“The art symposium, I’m sure, will be helpful for my studies,” George said.

This year’s conference, “Islamic Art: Past, Present and Future,” addressed a range of topics, including the ways in which Islamic art engages with contemporary politics, global capitalism, gender, religion and history, and how Western museums have approached collecting and curating the arts of the Islamic lands.

The symposium, which came at the tail end of the Qatari students’ trip to Richmond, provided a fitting bookend to this year’s Qatar Leadership Exchange Program, itself an educational opportunity that helps participants view and understand the world in new ways.

Reflecting on her experience, Anusheh Zaman, VCUarts Qatar SGA president, said the exchange allows students to hone their leadership skills and become better individuals in the process.

“Don’t stick in your field,” she said. “Go beyond borders. You can learn so much from that.”