Housing thousands of workers

Meet Mike Keep, a former hotel manager who runs the worker’s village at Pearl GTL and takes care of their welfare from food to cricket:

Contractor staff have come to Qatar from more than 60 countries to build the GTL plant. They live in the Pearl Village, a vast network of straight streets with neat rows of temporary air-conditioned dormitories 10 minutes’ drive from the construction site, but still within Ras Laffan Industrial City. But they don’t just sleep here. This has to be a full-fledged community that makes the contractors feel at home.

Al Muntazah recreational area, in the heart of the Pearl Village, boasts sports fields (cricket, football, basketball, baseball, tennis), an outdoor movie theatre, food stalls, shops, Internet cafes and shaded seating areas. As the sun goes down at the end of another working day, the place — whose name means “the park” in Arabic — is buzzing with people.

Pearl Village is a melting pot of cultures. Visit one of the mess halls just before lunchtime and you can smell a range of national dishes being prepared that would rival any cosmopolitan downtown restaurant zone in one of the world’s big cities: cooking smells familiar from Kolkata to Manila and from Kathmandu to Istanbul.

Worker welfare

It takes a huge workforce of over 1,800 to keep everything up and running in the village, including almost 500 cleaners and over 1,000 kitchen staff. There is also a 250-strong volunteer group that supports a small welfare team that organises events such as basketball competitions, quiz evenings and even a charity fun run which attracted over 1,500 runners.

The welfare team meets each morning to generate new ideas and activities. Village “mayor” Mike Keep, a former hotel manager employed by the overall project management contractor in charge of running the site, developed the welfare programme. “It is an accumulation of my experiences on different building sites and living quarters around the world,” he says.

Uncles, aunts and imams

The realities of life away from home for long periods — often a year or more at a time — can cause stress. However, a network of “uncles” and “aunts”, made up of volunteers working on the project, provides support and guidance to those who need it.

And during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in September last year, a group of six imams, Muslim religious leaders, visited Pearl Village to lead prayers for the many Muslims among the contractors. Health and safety adviser Isa Arslanoski helped facilitate the imams’ arrival from Doha at very short notice.

Arslanoski was one of the first Shell people to work on the Pearl GTL site. “It was just sand everywhere,” he says. Arslanoski knows many of the contractor staff, and if he doesn’t, he stops to shake hands and have a quick chat. “Often we don’t speak the same language, but that doesn’t matter. For me it is about being visible, taking responsibility and looking after the people who work here. They are building our plant, after all.”