They are Human Beings As Well

Monday, 19 June 2006
By Sabria S. Jawhar
The Saudi Gazette

UNLIKE any other country, more than one-third of the population in Saudi Arabia are foreign residents, who hold jobs that range from maids and drivers to doctors and engineers. Yet despite efforts by the government to have better work environments for them, few expatriates go home with good memories about their stay in the Kingdom.
Some go so far as to describe their stay as a nightmare – something that I had no answers to, only more questions, as to why someone would think so ill of my beloved country. I wondered why anyone would hate a place, where they spent a period that can sometimes reach half of their life. A place, where an expatriate earns a living to improve the situation of his family back home.
I had no real answers until three days ago, when I was on my way back home from work. That day, I stopped at the gate of the building where I live to say hello to Ahmad, our “Haris,” the doorman, who I had not seen for the last two days.
Ahmad knows what I do for a living and wanted to tell me something urgent.
It had nothing to do with rent or an electricity bill.
He asked me to wait and went to his room. He came back with his friend, a Haris at the building next to the one I live in.
I have seen Ahmad’s friend before, as he has often courteously helped Ahmad with my groceries.
But when I saw him that day, I did not immediately recognize him, until he spoke.
The man’s face was battered black and blue, and one of his eyes was buried deep under a swelling. He could barely peek at me with his other eye.
Ahmad, pointing at his friend’s face, asked me a question that shames me to this very day, as I write this column.
He asked me if I approved of having his friend – a brother away from his family in a foreign country, a Muslim brother – being beaten up like this. Struggling between mixed feelings of shame, anger and curiosity, I asked him what had happened. He told me one of the Saudi tenants had beaten him for no reason other than a problem that he had nothing to do with. He hit him for the shortage of water as if that poor man was the Minister of Water and Electricity.
“It was not my mistake,” Ahmad’s friend told me. “I always fill the building’s water tank at night so the residents find enough water in the morning before they go to work, but that night I was sick.”
At that moment I felt truly ashamed and I was lost for words. I was speechless and could barely utter a word, other than to say “sorry brother” for the behavior of Saudis.
I told him that Saudis are not proud of having such a monster amongst them.
After that I went up to my apartment, boiling with anger asking myself what had made the inherent dignity and humanity so cheap to us, that we thought we could enslave and humiliate them? How could we be so mean and cruel to these people, people who had crossed oceans to serve us and raise our children?
There is not a week that goes by in which we do not read a story about a domestic worker, especially a woman, who has committed suicide or jumped out of a window. What makes a person, who came willingly to this country, want to end his/her life? What living conditions force these poor and mostly silent people go through, as they live amongst us, to choose to leave our country in wooden caskets?
I have never seen a civilized country, where maids are locked behind doors and kept working for more than 12-hours a day, seven days a week.
We need to give them more humane working conditions, where they have a proper day off and come and go freely to see their friends and relatives, and even celebrate holidays like we do. They are human beings, who have feelings, and yes, they get sick too.
Even nurses and female doctors, who offer us relief from our pains, are often punished with the locked doors of dormitory-style housing, which, if anything, are more like big prisons.
Why do we dare to impose our own values on others? Why do we always think badly of people, who are simply different from us?
It is high time that we reviewed the rules that govern the living conditions of this portion of the society and impose rules that guarantee them dignity and freedom.
We need to encourage them to address the authorities and complain when their rights are violated, without the fear of reprisal or losing their jobs.
I think that we have to at least start an awareness campaign that covers all civil institutions, including schools, and teach our people how foreign and domestic workers should be treated.
Saudis need to wake up and realize that foreigners are just as human as they are.