I have to say though, the experiences in my first post notwithstanding, it was a pleasant ten years for the most part, because being the children of an engineer father and a schoolteacher mother, we were shielded from such behavior on a daily basis. Engineers were paid well, a rung below just the doctors, received great housing etc. The ones who bore the true brunt of local cruelty were the laborers.
I happen to have seen what a labor camp is like. How I managed to catch a glimpse of it is a long story, but it is worth writing.
We lived in a great apartment, but not too far away was a walled compound, housing laborers. My father and I would attend Friday prayers at the mosque in the camp, because it was the closest one. The mosque would be packed to the gills with laborers, not because they were particularly religious, but because, and they told us this, it was the one place in the entire camp that was air conditioned. Those guys attended all five prayers without fail.
The night I got to see the rest of the camp, I was 10 years old. It was late 1990, the Gulf War raged, and it was whispered that the royal family had fled the country and were living in Switzerland, because none of them were seen on TV for months. Usually the news began with what His Highness the Emir had been up to during the day, followed by what His Highness the Heir Apparent did, and so on. Not so during that war.
We were leaving for the supermarket that night, and on the way we saw a laborer, an elderly Pashtun, trudging along the deserted road. We got to the supermarket, spent a good bit of time there, and we saw that laborer again. He carefully picked out one apple, one orange, and one banana, and then checked how much cash he had, to make sure he had enough. It was well-known that the laborers in the camp had not been paid for close to six months. These guys were in debt anyhow, having paid small fortunes to "agents" back home to get to work in the Gulf. Once they arrived, their passports were confiscated. So here he was, this laborer, in debt, not paid in six months, and without a passport to be able to call it quits, having to count his money to make sure he had enough for three pieces of fruit, which was probably to be his dinner.
My father offered him a ride back, because the camp was so close to our apartment. He hesitated, but acquiesced, probably because he didn't want to turn down his compatriots. When we stopped outside the camp, he said one word. "Fruit," he said, left the bag with the apple and the orange and the banana in the car, and practically fled into the camp. To this day, I marvel at the largess of the man. He didn't turn down the ride, but he felt he must repay us for the favor, and had decided to forego his dinner before he got in the car.
My father took me with him as we went into the camp to look for him. The residential quarters were past a compound, and we knocked on door after door before we finally located him. The laborers were packed like sardines, with barely enough room for any of them to lie on the floor without part of their bodies being on top of someone else. We opened one door, which turned out to be a miserable little toilet, and there were two guys resting on the floor. Their faces were despondent, their eyes were dead, their bodies limp with crippling tiredness.
We did eventually find that elderly Pashtun laborer. He said he would never forget our kindness (the fact that it was a mere car ride didn't matter), and that the fruit was the humble thanks, in his words, from "one Pakistani brother to another." We did prevail on him to take the fruit back, but not without having to cajole him for several minutes.
Its been twenty-seven years, but I find myself thinking about this experience to this day. It taught me that such magnanimity and graciousness in times of acute personal distress are commodities that you will find in spades in our country, and that these traits cannot be bought with billions upon billions of the Gulf Arabs' filthy petrodollars. One look at how those laborers lived in the camps was proof of that.
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