Qatar Traffic Safety Week

Sunday 29 March 2009
2000

Last week was a very interesting week. I’d have written about it sooner, but among other interesting things I managed to get sick, and for the past week I have been doing nothing outside of work but lying in bed alternately sleeping and coughing convulsively. I finally seem to be recovering; although I am still coughing, I can at least think straight and have a modicum of energy. So I finally get write about the cool week I had!

Back at the beginning of March (Tuesday March 3d, to be exact), my commander called me into his office and said that he had a request from the Interior Ministry of Qatar to support the Traffic Safety Week exhibition they were sponsoring with the Gulf Cooperation Council. This is a large public exhibition held in downtown Doha, designed to showcase safety technologies, the various government agencies and private enterprises involved in traffic safety, and to promote safe driving practices.



With the second highest per-capita income in the world, why not have a Ferrari for a police car?

My commander wanted me to obtain a motorcycle safety training simulator that the USARCENT Safety Office had bought and installed at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. The idea was to bring it down to Qatar with someone to operate it and showcase it at our booth, along with other suitable driving safety training materials.

The overriding purpose of the effort was to help improve our relationship with the host nation government ministries. As you might imagine, our presence here in their country does not meet with universal approval among the population and also is not popular with all of Qatar’s neighbors. For this reason the installation commander’s role is often as much diplomatic as military, and anything we can do to help our Qatari hosts or to demonstrate our support for their priorities is a good thing.

Traffic here is not quite as out of control as it was in Kuwait, but they certainly have more than their share of crazy driving. Motorcycles in particular are a problem. Apparently many of their young men get the most powerful sport bikes they can, hop on, and zoom down the road at top speed. Their basic response to any traffic situation is to swerve or accelerate, often at the same time. They also have a fondness for popping wheelies. There are a large number of fatalities and very serious injuries, and the government is very interested in helping to curb that trend.

The U.S. Army also has a problem with motorcycle accidents, particularly among soldiers redeploying or going home on leave after long tours over here. They have been away from their bikes for months or years, and the first thing they do is take it out of storage and go out for a ride. There are a number of tragic stories about young men surviving a year at war and getting seriously injured or killed shortly after arriving “safely” back home. On U.S. installations, they must take the Motorcycle Safety Foundation’s Basic Rider Course to get their license, but there has been little in the way of refresher training for redeploying troops. This is why the Commanding General of USARCENT directed that these trainers be acquired and put to use. The idea is to train soldiers before they go back home, and thus to re-sensitize them to the safety concepts they already learned in the BRC. The Navy has recently ordered 65 of the simulators to put on ships for the same purpose.

So back to my story. The catch was that the show started on Saturday 14 March. So I had ten days to make this happen. Challenging, but not impossible. The first thing I did was to contact Kuwait and start to figure out how to get their trainer down here. First problem – yes, they do have a trainer, but the people who were trained on how to use it had all rotated home and nobody up there knew how to operate it. So it’s a big paperweight. OK, fine. I’ll keep working on getting it down here, but I have to find a trained operator someplace else. I could detail it out step by step, but let me just summarize by saying that several days and many, many emails and phone calls later there was simply nobody available to come. And oh, by the way, we did not have the simulator on a military aircraft to Qatar yet and time was running out.

By Monday 9 March it was clear we were not going to get someone and it was too late to get the trainer down from Kuwait anyway. The Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF, http://www.msf-usa.org/ ) had been engaged with us for several days, however, and their senior leaders were discussing how they could help us. They made the offer to send a very senior person (their managing director) over to support and train us, and to send a simulator along with him which we could purchase if we wanted to. They had really jumped through hoops to make this possible, canceling three speaking engagements he already had on his calendar. All we had to do was come up with funding to support it.

Sounds simple, right? Well, have you ever tried to get the government contracting system to do anything quickly? It is like pushing rope, or maybe more like trying to swim through molasses. Since the MSF guy had to fly here with the thing in tow and arrive on Friday, I had to have a contract in hand no later than Thursday. We knew what we wanted, and I knew how to do the paperwork. But it required the assistance of a lot of people, and getting a lot of approvals and signatures. So I set about doing it. Long story short, it got done. My commander told me later that he hadn’t thought I could do it. And in retrospect it is kind of amazing that we pulled it off.

On Friday evening (13 March) I found myself at Doha International Airport waiting for Al Hydeman from the MSF (someone I’d never seen) to get off the plane dragging several large boxes containing the simulator. After waiting for well over an hour, we discovered that his flight had arrived early and we had missed him outside where he was waiting in the throng. So we lost some time that evening, but that was the only real hiccup in the process.

We got to the exhibition, where our booth was already set up with posters, safety materials, etc, and unpacked and set up the simulator. We got everything put together, tested, the boxes cleaned up, and then came back to Camp As Sayliyah and got Al checked in to his quarters just before midnight.

The next day we went out to the show and started several days of demonstrating the simulator. It’s really pretty cool. Made by Honda, it consists of a stationary frame with a seat, handlebar assembly, and foot controls just like a real motorcycle. The foot controls and handlebar assembly are connected to a computer that runs the simulation software. It is designed to take the riders through a variety of traffic situations, monitor their performance, and then give them grades on how they reacted to various safety hazards along the way.

http://www.motorcycle.com/how-to/honda-smartrainer-86756.htmlm/how-to/honda-smartrainer-86756.htmliner-86756.html




The simulator is really cool, but you really need a trained operator who understands the MSF safety concepts as well as the simulator to operate it. Al Hydeman was definitely the right guy. He’s a seasoned rider who averages about 500 miles a week on his bike at home, and he’s a natural instructor. We had an amazing variety of people come up to the booth, and he could read them like a book.

We had several young men who just wanted to go fast and were basically unteachable. Al referred to them as “dead men walking”, as they will most likely become statistics. We also had quite a few who were obviously intrigued by it and tried to do their best. We had one young man who came back three days in a row trying to improve his grade until he got straight A’s. He was a perfect example of the MSF theory that the challenge of beating the machine (and each other) will motivate students to pay closer attention to safe riding – it’s not a race, but safe riding practices that get the high scores.

We also had a steady stream of visitors from Qatari driving schools and various government agencies, including some very senior officials including the Minister of the Interior and the top General in the Qatari Traffic Department. This was where we really made our best impression. We also got some good publicity from the event, which was covered in several local papers.

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=280042&version=1&template_id=36&parent_id=16

http://www.qatar-tribune.com/data/20090323/content.asp?section=nation5_1

I guess I didn’t really realize how big of a deal our presence there was until the night of the official closing ceremony. We went into a large banquet tent along with our liaison person (to help with translation and protocol). We sat near the middle of the room and observed the proceedings. It was an interesting cultural event all on its own.

It started off with the Islamic version of an invocation. Some sort of cleric stood at the front and sang/chanted a prayer or some verses from Koran, I’m not sure which. That lasted quite a long time – five minutes at least, I’d estimate, perhaps longer. Then there were some speeches, and people started to be called up to receive various mementos and certificates of appreciation. Somewhere towards the end of this we were called up to receive one as well. We had brought a certificate of our own for our hosts and I presented it, with the attendant smiles, photographs, etc. (I should say at this point that normally our installation commander would have been the one at this event, but he was busy with a prior engagement so I had the privilege of attending as his representative).

When the presentations were over, we were just beginning to wonder if it was an appropriate time to get up and go the buffet line when an official approached our table, tapped me on the shoulder, and motioned for me to go with him. I looked at our translator/protocol guy and he shrugged and said “go”, so I went. The official led me to the head table and seated me on the right hand of the top Qatari General at the dinner. This was quite an honor – the whole table was full of generals and colonels from the various military and civil agencies concerned with traffic control – The Special Forces, Ministry of the Interior, Military Police, etc. Of course you wouldn’t know it because they were all in very similar white robes and headdresses, but although everyone pretty much dresses alike you can definitely tell who’s in charge by the deference they receive from those around them.

So instead of going through the buffet line I was served a succession of delicious entrees and had literally a tableful of side dishes to nibble from. It was really a trip – I wish I had photos of this part but it just wasn’t appropriate. But I certainly will never forget it. My host spoke excellent English and was very gracious. He told me of having gone to college in Washington State (Spokane) to study urban planning, and about a long geology trip he had taken around the Rocky Mountains. Those who know me will realize what this meant to me – we had a shared love and talked for some time about the Rocky Mountains and the places we had both been. We also talked about some of the traffic problems they face, and I had the opportunity to explain how we were planning to use the motorcycle simulator to raise the safety awareness of our redeploying soldiers.

I was doing my best to be alert to signs as to when it would be time for me to get up and go. At one point I thought it was time to make my exit, but he stopped me and motioned for me to stay. Dessert was served and I talked some more with him as well as some of the others at the table for awhile. When the General asked me for my card and thanked me for coming, I knew I was being dismissed, albeit very politely. I thanked him for his hospitality and took my leave from him and his colleagues.

About the only way it could have been any cooler was if we had been seated on cushions a la “Lawrence of Arabia” (you know, the scene near the beginning where T.E. Lawrence [Peter O’Toole] first meets Prince Faisal [Alec Guiness] in his tent). But it was very cool just as it was, and I count it as the high point so far of my visit here.

I did get one souvenir of the event – for that last evening our protocol guy brought along an equivalent rank insignia that I could wear on my uniform to make it easier for our hosts to tell my rank. Many other countries follow a fairly comprehensible system in their rank insignia using a variety of pips, crowns, leaves, and other symbols to designate rank by how many of each there are. Compared to this, our insignia are quite obscure. (Of course they seem obvious to me, since I spent hours and hours memorizing them from the World Book Encyclopedia when I was a kid). I decided that my Qatari rank insignia would be a nice souvenir of the event, so I “forgot” to give it back to protocol:

Qatari Army Insignia for Lieutenant Colonel

After our return to CAS we had one remaining task – to train up some volunteer instructors before Al had to leave. We had exactly two days to do this, and it presented its own set of challenges. But we managed to get that done, too. Now Camp As Sayliyah boasts the first three certified MSF SMARTrainer Coaches in the world:

Now I have the task to integrate the SMARTrainer into our redeployment process and facilitate the training of people who are headed back to CONUS. That is also well underway – like everything else it will take some work to get it together, but I think it is well worth the effort.

Oh yeah, I also got another coin out of the deal – an MSF Safety Coin!

It was a very busy two weeks, and it went by in a blur. But I learned a lot about motorcycle safety, enjoyed a fascinating cultural event, and even got some pats on the back for making it all happen. And now we have a chance to help avert potential accidents for our redeploying soldiers. All in all, a very worthwhile undertaking.

Mood: Tired but happy
Music: Mozart String Quartets