This year I finally decided to join the adult world and write a Christmas letter. I guess a quarter of a century of living merits an interesting enough life to tell others about it on a yearly basis, right? I made a .pdf but can't upload it, so I'm copying and pasting the text into this post. Pictures were in there too, but they are all the same ones on my Picasa account. It shouldn't be any new information to regular readers of this blog, but enjoy anyway!
Dear Friends and Family,
Warm winter holiday wishes to all of you! This year as I was feebly attempting to help my parents with my portion of the annual family Christmas letter, I realized it was probably time to start writing one of my own. The only hitch with diving into the whole Christmas correspondence culture is that I need to have a legitimate and permanent mailing address, something that seems to have eluded me as of late. It doesn’t help that I don’t have mailing addresses for the vast majority of all of you receiving this... Thank goodness for email! The last year has been quite a busy one for me as I’m now in my 3rd year working at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. Life these days in the Office of Student Activities never falls short of chaotic, but I’m loving my job as much (if not more) than ever. I’ve seen the student population of this tiny campus in the Arabian Gulf almost double in the last 3 years and I gain great excitement and motivation out of knowing that the programs we set in place now will fuel the future of the campus and the region. The best part of my job is that I get to pour my attention and time into the things about which I’m most passionate – leadership and outdoor adventure. This past March I was fortunate enough to share my love for hiking, biking, and mountain climbing with a group of students from the university by taking them to do all 3 of these things in the mountains of Morocco (top picture).
Contrary to popular belief, active endeavors abound in Qatar for expats and Qataris, men and women alike. That’s fortunate because, as most of you might guess, I would have a very hard time living in a place where that isn’t an option. I continue to play for the only women’s rugby team in Qatar (traveling to Kuwait and the UAE on a regular basis for tournaments) and have now started playing Gaelic Football, a sport primarily played in Ireland which is a bit like soccer except you can play with your hands – fantastic for a former goalkeeper like myself! I still battle against the wind most weekends on my bike with the newly formed expat cycling group, Qatar Chain Reaction. And most recently I’ve been suckered into running across the width of Qatar (35 miles) in early February with the Dean of the University at which I work. I say suckered because really, I can’t resist a challenge!
Speaking of challenges, this past summer I took on quite a significant one with a few friends from college – climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro (above picture)! We spent 3 weeks in Tanzania total. The first of which was spent suffering from various manifestations of altitude sickness on the mountain - who knew how much 5,895m of elevation could take on the human body. The 2nd we spent with our heads sticking out of one of those old-school Land Cruisers looking at various wild animals in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater. And the 3rd we spent mostly enjoying the sun and culture and food of Zanzibar with a small but not-so-minor bout of food poisoning. What’s a trip to Africa without a little dysentery?!? For those wondering, we DID all end up making it to the top just as the sun was cresting the Eastern horizon – a scene that’s permanently ingrained in my memory.
This past fall we were fortunate enough to benefit from 2 consecutive Muslim holidays, Eid Al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan and Eid Al-Adha over what Americans know as Thanksgiving weekend. Over first Eid in September I took off with my father (who also lives in Qatar with me and works for the Qatar Foundation) to Thailand. We spent a few days in Chiang Mai and then headed down to the province of Phuket, where I spent 5 days sea kayaking around the beautiful Phang Nga Bay (picture on previous page), with a little snorkeling, mountain biking, and rock climbing on the side. The second Eid was a bit shorter than the first so I decided to stay local and take a 5 day trip to Lebanon with a few colleagues from the university. We spent a short day in Beirut but had really traveled to Lebanon to hike through the famous El Shouf Cedar Reserve in the South, home to some of the oldest trees in the world. Seriously, one of them was 3000 years old, which means it would have been a sapling right around the time King Solomon would have been taking parts of its forest to build his temple in Jerusalem. To anyone thinking Lebanon is a dilapidated, dangerous, and war-torn country, I highly suggest you spend some time up in the mountains. I’ve never met more hospitable people in my life.
Sorry to bore you all with details but I know it’s been quite some time since I last corresponded with many of you. I hope to keep this Christmas email update an annual thing so please keep me up to date on your email addresses and whereabouts! You can also keep up with my adventures on the blog that I try to keep updated on a regular basis: http://darbiabroad.blogspot.com/. I also post the best of my pictures on my Picasa account: http://picasaweb.google.com/darbi.roberts.
I hope to hear from all of you at some point this holiday season. Merry Christmas, Happy New Years, Happy Chanukah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Festivus, and have a safe and healthy 2010!
Best,
Darbi
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