Qays walks toward the Metro station, watching the sun dive into the sea, and the verses of the poet Darwish come to mind: “I come from where the sea greets the land, where the sky embraces the horizon.”

He is especially fond of his city Doha at sunset, when the sky is painted in shades of pink and gold. Perhaps it is because it reminds him of a particular moment two years earlier, when, during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, an event changed his life: the inauguration of the Metro. He still remembers how he felt at the age of 16 when he realized that he would finally be able to move around the city on his own, no longer having to ask his father for a ride everywhere. He sends a voice message to his friend Omar: "Hey, I'm on my way! I'll be there in 20 minutes!" They were heading to watch Al Sadd, their favourite team. Thanks to the Metro, they could now see matches live at the stadium, just seven stops away, first on the Red Line and then on the Green Line. By now, Qays knew the line and all his favourite routes by heart.

As he rides down the escalator, he reflects on how that event, that World Cup, and that inauguration two years earlier may also have influenced his choice of university, a place he reaches every day by Metro. Just the day before, he had attended a lecture featuring Pino, an Italian engineer from FS Engineering, the company involved in the design of the Metro he used every day and that had changed his life.

The engineer had described the features of the Red Line North Underground project, a 13 kilometer section, approximately 12 kilometres of which run underground, with 7 stations stretching from Al Bidda to Legtaifiya, for which FS Engineering had developed the detailed design. Qays would soon become a transport engineer himself, hoping that one day his work might change other lives and shape other destinies, just as that Italian engineer - without ever knowing it -had helped change his own.