Blog posts about my experiences at Qatar Academy, before, during, and after my twelve-day incarceration in a Doha jail in May 2013 for allegedly insulting Islam.
In addition to inflicting emotional, mental, and intellectual pain and suffering, traumatic experiences change and transform you, whether you want it or not. Consequently, you live and view life in ways that you didn't in the past and in ways others around you don't. Initially, you may not even be aware of it. Coming to terms with and reconciling this change takes deliberate steps and actions.
I made it through a period of years of emotional and intellectual turmoil following a traumatic experience because I recognized and understood a lot of it, and, more crucially, I knew the steps to take.
I share the details in this blog post with the hope that it might help someone else.
Back in May 2013, based on the word of a 12-year-old I was held in police custody in Doha, Qatar for allegedly insulting Islam. The 12-men-strong board of directors of Qatar Academy, where I was teaching at the time, did NOT push back against the charges brought by the child's father. But, after 12 days in custody, on the 12th of May, I was released from Al Rayyan Police Station.
Now in May 2025, 12 years since the incident, I have something else to report!
Eleven years since the most harrowing and traumatic twelve-day experience of my life in Doha, Qatar, for allegedly insulting Islam, I can say I have finally recovered.
However, it wasn't until after eight years of struggles with the fallout that experience, in September 2021, that I realized I was finally on the road to recovery. and shared that fact on social media. This is a reproduction of that post including some additional information.
Challenges of recovering from an unjust and traumatic experience while living and working in one's own country, repatriating after having lived abroad for most the twenty-five years prior to that.
Change helps.
Two of the many questions I had when contemplating returning to Nepal: "Will Nepal have me?" and "Am I even for Nepal?"
Having lived in as many countries outside as I had, I felt I could be accepted by any place and people. But will I be accepted in Nepal and by the Nepalis?
What one does in life must be for oneself...not in a selfish way, of course. That is, the justification for and the drive behind one's most important decisions, actions, and values must be intrinsic.
In Feb. 2013, I turned down a, international teaching job offer to follow through with my plans to return to Nepal for good, after more than two decades abroad. I had many reasons for doing so. One was to see if Nepal was still my home, and, if not, if I could make it my home.
Music stirs you, in ways and for reasons one might not even understand. It had been stirring me since my traumatic, despair-filled days in Doha jail, except I didn't know why. Thanks to a welcome address given by a musician, describing how and why music does stirs you deeply, I do now.
Following a traffic accident, when the other party, unable to get their way, though they were at fault, lodged a "case" against me with the police. When I was told that, I was scared. I didn't know that the trauma of incarceration in Qatar had also engendered another feeling: fear of police cases and the the police.
A few heart-warming messages from Qatar Academy and a very surprising communication from the student whose father got me fired from my job and incarcerated.
