A new book on life in Qatar written by a former Australian expatriate can serve as a guide for future travellers turning over old images of the country, hailing a long list of successes over time, and narrating his personal experience of a three-year-long stay in Qatar.
Titled God Willing: How To Survive Expat Life in Qatar, the book entails the experience of a westerner who worked and lived in the country from 2012 to 2015. It is timely body of work as more and more western expatriates are expected to arrive in the peninsula in the wake of FIFA World Cup 2022.
To begin with, Mikolai Napieralski, a writer, editor, and digital marketing specialist, had little knowledge about the country which he presumed to be a drab place. However, that view changed drastically and his book speaks about the incredible progress of Qatar, primarily using its oil and natural gas wealth for the development of infrastructure, social uplift, and cultural openness.
Community got in touch with the writer for a tete-e-tete.
Can you please tell us about your journey, especially the time spent in Qatar?
I’m a writer, editor, and digital marketing specialist by trade. I published my first magazine when I was 12, and went on to run a small publishing company throughout by 20s. It’s just something I’ve always done. Over the years, I’ve had my work published in countless magazines and newspapers.
I was working as an editor and lecturer in Australia when I heard from an old friend of mine — he had landed a job in Qatar looking after the digital media for a government department. He said they were looking for someone to help with content, and about 12 months later, I found myself on a plane to Doha with no real idea what I was getting myself into.
I joined Qatar Museums at the start of 2012 and was eventually, promoted to Head of Marketing at the Orientalist Museum. I left in 2015 when the international oil crisis saw projects being cancelled.


What actually led you to the idea of writing a book?
I started writing this book a few weeks after I first arrived in Qatar to try and make sense of the place. Coming from Australia, the culture shock was very real, and what you have to understand is that back in 2011 and 2012 no-one in Australia had ever heard much of Qatar. The only information available was a ten-year-old edition of Lonely Planet (which did not have much of a flattering account), a Wikipedia page, and that was pretty much it.
So I was pretty much going in blind. And my expectation was that Qatar would be a really dull place where I could earn some money and fast-track my career. It turned out I was very much wrong. Qatar from 2012-2015 had this amazing energy and pace. There were all these huge world class exhibitions (Murakami, Damien Hirst), new hotels were going up everywhere, major infrastructure projects were being green-lit, and all these amazing people from all over the world were arriving to help the country fulfil its ambitions.
It wasn’t what I expected. And I realised that the rest of the world had this very limited understanding of Qatar, and what was actually going on here. So I started writing the book to make sense of it all, and also to document the country’s transformation for future generations. Plus I figured that with the FIFA World Cup in 2022, there would be a new surge of expatriates and they could benefit from a more accurate depiction of Qatar than they’d get from Wikipedia or Lonely Planet!


How do you see Qatar now?
I’ve always been fascinated by the Middle East, and wanted to see it for myself. I was actually born in Poland; then, lived in Germany before my family eventually settled in Australia, so the idea that you could work and travel in different countries wasn’t that big a deal to me. When I was given the chance to come and work here I immediately accepted.
I still remember the plane coming in for landing at the old Doha Airport back in 2012; it was around dawn, with the sun breaking over the desert landscape, and it looked like a postcard.
I have huge amount of respect for Qatar, its royal family, and the people. What has been achieved in such a short period of time is remarkable. The rest of the world could learn a lot from Qatar, especially the way the wealth from oil and natural gas has been reinvested in the people, the local infrastructure, and a long term vision for the country.                         


Tell us about the publishers…
The book was published by Amazon, it’s currently available as a digital download for Kindle and in paperback edition (available for delivery to Qatar).


If you were to turn adviser to potential expatriates coming to work in Doha from the West, how would you make the case?
Your first couple of months in the Gulf will be surreal. If you’re anything like the typical western expatriate, you’ll have found yourself giving up a ‘comfortable’ apartment and public transport in favour of a five-star hotel suite and having a driver chauffeur you to work.
You will ‘humbly’ brag about this on social media, even as you try and get your head around this strange new life you’re inhabiting. Whatever your expectations may have been, watching the sun dip over the desert horizon as the evening call to prayer rings out is an amazing scene. At least for the first couple of weeks…
Around the three-month point things will have settled into a routine. Your work probation will be drawing to an end, and you’ll probably be looking at purchasing a car and moving into long-term accommodation. All of a sudden, the Gulf isn’t some abstract adventure, but your reality for the next couple of years.
The other thing you’ll start to realise around the three-month mark is that contact with your old friends back home will have significantly diminished. While your Facebook messages back home were initially met with enthusiastic replies, those same messages are now starting to go unanswered. Text messages to friends are disappearing into a void, Skype dates are getting harder to organise and you start to feel that people are maybe forgetting about you.
The thing is, your friends back home will be oblivious to this. They’ve got their own lives to live, people to see and problems to deal with. To them, you’ve become an abstraction; a Facebook feed of exotic photos, strange stories and updates about dust storms. They assume you’re having the time of your life and don’t realise just how important those calls, messages and Skype sessions are.
In the meantime there’s not much point catching emotions or getting depressed. Accept your new life, think of the experiences you’re accruing and go out and meet people. You didn’t travel to the other side of the world to sit in a hotel room and watch MTV!



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