The Recreation Room … Is It Excluding Qatari Girls?

Carnegie Mellon University’s recreation room was built for students to hang out during their breaks or after their classes’ time. It is equipped with many facilities like a table tennis, foosball, video games, a vending machine, a computer cluster that includes a printer as well, and a couple of couches for the students to relax or do their homework. However, if you’ve been there you will notice that a wide range of students uses the rec room except Qatari girls, you can barely see them hanging out there! In a response to a question I asked them, Ghaya Al-Sulaiti and Sara Al-Sulaiti, whom are both CMUQ students, expressed that among the places in CMU they mainly like to hang out in the atrium (The Majlis) or the library. ‘I had to go to the recreation room once for a book club meeting that was hosted there,’ said Sara.

In a deeper context, the Qatari girls are raised in a culture that forces them to have certain limits between them and the others (boys), but that doesn’t mean they aren’t socializing with others. The agents of socialization for Qatari girls are usually their parents. Their parents are raised in a community that doesn’t allow the interaction between girls and boys. However, the Qatari girls now are engaged in a constant balancing between modern and the traditional way of life; they don’t want to cross the “red lines” between them and the boys, as they don’t feel that they belong to this room, they need their own space. Thus, their interactions with others are commonly less, as they want for their identities to be known as protected ones.

 

On the other hand, Akhmed Sungorov and Khalid Allouba who go to the rec room everyday, think that the place is ‘fun and convenient’, as Allouba likes to describe it. ‘We sometimes see some Qatari girls in the rec room. They come only for either the vending machine or for the computer cluster,’ added on Sungorov. Khalid thinks that the reasons Qatari girls don’t come to the rec room is because it is loud, there are lots of guys hanging out over there and the girls don’t want to be around them. He also pointed out that he heard from some of the girls that the smell of the rec room is bad but he doesn’t think it is. Till this moment, it seems that there is no proper explicit answer for this question that continues on being raised every now and then.