And my father sees butlers in the water holding canapé trays in full tuxedos, waist-high in the water. They’re on this luxury boat heading toward the island. The guy who invited them had access to a private island, somewhere near Bahrain or Kuwait.
One day, my father was invited to a conference of regional accountants from hotels in the Gulf. Once, one of my classmates told me he was staying in a hotel for a week because his parents were having columns of solid gold installed at home. I thought it was the norm to grow up in a gated compound of luxury villas, where I could step out my front door and have access to an Olympic-length swimming pool at any hour. A middle-class existence in a place like Qatar is like being in the 1% in the West. If you could turn a blind eye to the fact that everybody had a cook, a housemaid and a driver. If you could look away from the endemic racism, and all of these fancy buildings and hotels being built by people from India and Pakistan and the Philippines, who were afforded no rights whatsoever. If you could turn your soul off, if you could turn off your conscience, it was the easiest life in the world. I was part of this incredible mixture of human beings from elsewhere in the world. My best friends growing up were a Somali guy, an Italian dude, and a Pakistani guy. The country was in hyper-development then, and still is, because of the oil and gas reserves. Because of a coin flip at an airport.Īt the time, the Sheraton was the only luxury hotel in Qatar, and that’s where my dad got a job. So I ended up growing up in Qatar instead of Libya. A little while later, he got a job offer in Qatar, which I think eventually became one of the richest countries on Earth.
So we get taken in, we missed the flight, the job offer was revoked. My father has an incredibly common combination of names and, as we’re waiting at the airport, we learn that there was somebody on the terrorism watch list with his name. After an altercation with a couple of soldiers where he was lucky to get away, my father decided we couldn’t live in that kind of precariousness. It was not hyperbole to suggest that you might “be disappeared” one day. The elites were people who had effectively owned all of modern Egypt, and you couldn’t complain about it too loudly because you could veer into criticism of the government. Unless you were in the 1%, you couldn’t make much money, no matter what work you did. Things in Egypt were awful - politically, economically - but by the time I was five, things were especially bad.
He specialized in hotels, so worked at the Cairo Sheraton for a while. I was born in Egypt, in Giza, which is like the Mississauga of Cairo. Wealthsimple makes powerful financial tools to help you grow and manage your money.
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