Indian Workers
In most Western newspapers, this would be a huge story. Here, they don’t even name the company who has created this problem! (?)
Here is what the Dubai Press said:
Indian workers refuse to release colleague’s body
Saturday, 14 October , 2006, 13:27
Dubai: Rebellious workers are refusing to release the body of an Indian, who died in a squalid camp housing 1,300 labourers held captive by an influential contracting company in Kuwait.
Bino Stephen died on Friday in the desert camp where men hailing from India, the Philippines and Egypt are being held.
No government action has been forthcoming despite media reports on the appalling living conditions in the camp.
”We want to find a solution to our dreadful situation by having our living conditions improved or have us repatriated back home,” said Mohammed, one of the workers.
Four other inmates have been ill since last week because of suspected malaria and the water supply is unfit for human consumption.
An official of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour told the Kuwait Times that the death of one person in the camp could not be termed ‘disaster’.
He said if there is a complaint, it has to be registered, and the complainant should come personally to do so in order to take action.
When asked whether the ministry would send an inspector to the camp to check the conditions there, the official said he cannot take the risk in case the inspector falls sick or gets infected.
Here is what the Kuwait Times says:
Ray of hope for workers
By Nawara Fattahova
KUWAIT: The condition of a group of workers who protested against unfair living conditions in their camp has improved after Kuwait Times published reports about their plight over the weekend. The workers received promise from their employer that they will be shifted from the camp by the beginning of November after one of the workers died early this week. Also four sick workers were taken by ambulance to get medical treatment.
The workers were recently shifted to a camp in the desert and they refused to stay there and went on strike. They were then imprisoned at the camp, and later a worker died and four others fell sick. The workers sought help, and it was difficult. Then one of the workers got advice to call the emergency number 777. “After calling the emergency, they sent an ambulance, which took the four sick workers to the hospital,” said Mohammed, one of the workers at the camp.
“After we got the promise to be shifted from this place, and saving the sick workers, we decided to go back to work. Although we don’t trust the employer, we hope he will fulfil his promise and let us live in a normal place,” he added.
The Kuwait Times will be following this case, and will inform the readers whether the workers left the camp or are still living in the hard and terrible conditions.
John Milton and Freedom of the Press
John Milton wrote the Areopagitica in 1644, in protest of a law passed in England which required all books and pamphlets to be OK’ed by a group of censors before being published. He believed that if England allowed licensing of books – who could be printed and who could not – it would be an attempt at controlling what the people were thinking. Milton is not easy reading, but I still get a thrill reading his defense of freedom of the press.
This comment on Milton is from the St. Lawrence Institute:
“While knowledge of this context is important to an understanding of the nature of Milton’s passion in writing this pamphlet, it is not essential to a modern appreciation of its contents. Milton’s words are just as powerful today in their call for freedom of thought as they were in his own. The issue he is addressing is still with us: the debate between legitimate societal control and freedom – whether of printing, speech, or thought – is on-going, and will continue to be of central importance in our media-dependent culture.”
This is John Milton’s most often quoted paragraph:
“And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”
If you are looking for a challenge, you can read the whole Areopagitica here:
From the Sacred to the Profane
You won’t find this in the Kuwait Times – a book review in yesterday’s paper by Kimberly Marlowe Harnett on a book called Indecent: How I Make it and Fake it as a Girl for Hire by Sarah Katherine Lewis, a sex worker (the cleaned up job title for those who offer sex for hire). This reviewer got my attention. She wrote this:
“When Lewis’ customers are not utterly repulsive, they are profoundly pathetic, paying serious money to women who loathe them and who perform canned routines with an eye on the clock.”
The book’s author says conventional jobs pay less.
Opposite World
I need to write this post while I am freshly back home, because it wears off, you forget the sharpness of the differences . . .
You have to think about how you will manage your bags when you get here, because there will be no willing men with carts to do it for you.
Getting on the highway . . . people are so polite. People drive exactly at the speed limit, or maybe up to 4 miles over. If you put on your turn signal, they slow down and allow you to enter their lane. No one weaves back and forth, no one gets on your tail and insists you get out of their way. Traffic flows smoothly, predictably. People are wearing seat belts; their babies are in baby seats and their children are buckled in the back seat. It’s five lanes, and it’s all very tame. Our testosterone drivers in Kuwait would find it very very dull. I didn’t see a single accident, or single wrecked car all the way home, about twenty miles.
At the grocery stores, there are places for inviduals to put their grocery carts back – and they really do. There are also enough parking places. The cashiers also put the groceries in a bag for you, but there is no one who carries them out to your car.
The streets are immaculate – not because we have hoards of people to pick them up, but because people here have a horror of littering – and huge fines that discourage the rare few who would toss a kleenex out a window.
Service providers are more helpful, and less servile. There is a sense of interchangeable rolls – the guy behind the counter at Starbucks might also be a full time IT student at the local university, just piling up a few barista bucks to pay his way through school. (There is always a tip jar in every Starbucks – Have you ever noticed there are no tip jars at the Starbucks in Kuwait?) The gal behind the counter at the grocery store might live just up the street from you. The guy at the Half Price book store has kids at the same school where your child goes to school. It’s different when all the workers are part of the same community.
The health care worker living with my parents to take care of my father is treated like family. He’s from Ghana. I watch him watch us as we gather. I imagine some of it is very familiar to him – the way women communicate when family gathers, laughter, tears, family business, making plans and arrangements. And I imagine some of it is very . . . foreign. I would love to read HIS blog!
There are seasons here. You need to have socks with you to keep your feet warm, and closed-toed shoes. There are trees that were green two months ago, and are now a flaming red, or orange, or yellow. I need a sweater outside, over a shirt. It’s cool, but not yet really cold.
Part of the transportation system here is ferry boats. People take them to get to work. My home town is, like Kuwait City, on the beach, but the water is not jade green, but a deeper, colder blue.
We Make a Difference: Incremental Change
Here is what the experts have told us:
Germany and France can never live in peace with one another.
Northern and Southern Ireland can never live in peace.
Germany reunite? Unthinkable. They are too far apart.
Black and white will never be able to live together in South Africa.
The Serbians and the Moslem Croatians will never find a way to live in peace.
The European Union will never work.
The Soviet Union is impregnable.
Kuwaiti women will never get the vote.
There will never be peace in Lebanon.
These were not lies. The experts who told us these things were wise people, making their best guesses. When experts say things, we tend to believe them.
And here is what I saw – before the fall of the Soviet Union, things didn’t work. Toilet paper was rationed. There were no lightbulbs in the lamps. There were no hangers on hotel closets. In the market was only cabbage, sausage and tuna fish. The people were told that the West was failing, and that the supermarkets and stores were fakes, “Potemkin” villages, special effects to fool good Communists in a desperate attempt to make them think Democracy was working. But in every hotel room, when you checked in, the TV was already on – the chambermaids watched CNN, and then went home and told their families what was REALLY going on in the world.
And word of mouth, the truth spread.
There are some wonderful things happening in the world, technologies that could be used for good or for evil.
Cameras. Video cameras. Cell phones. Cell phones with cameras and videos. Google Earth. The Internet. It’s hard to cover up the truth when people can freely share information.
With these tools, we can hold ourselves, our leaders and our society accountable. Keep your cameras handy. Blog. Share your thoughts, your suspicions. Hold your leaders accountable for their actions. Read the news, and read the blogs from other countries. Refuse to believe there is no hope in appearantly hopeless situations, no matter what the “experts” tell us.
Here is what some experts are telling us today:
There is an imminent clash of cultures between East and West.
The Palestinians will never live in peace with the Israelis.
We can’t do anything about global warming / There is no global warming
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
There are small things we can do, right now, to make incremental changes. Pick up a piece of litter. Buckle your seat belt, and buckle up your children. Give an enemy the benefit of the doubt. Smile at your neighbor, and greet them. Stop and help that poor man broken down by the side of the road. Feed a stray cat. Donate clothing to the poor. Do one small thing, every day. Hold ourselves accountable in small ways, and the overall effect tilts the balance in larger ways.
Dharfur: We can No Longer Pretend We Don’t Know
Today, in his blog, Ogle Earth, which discusses new developments with Google Earth, Stefan Geens says the following about the new hi-res maps of the Sudan made public today in Google Earth:
Those circles aren’t animal pens. They’re burned-down gottias, circular mud huts that had straw roofs, and they’re what’s left of Dalia, a village in Sudan’s Darfur region, one of hundreds of villages that have been destroyed by the Janjaweed in a program of depopulation that has killed perhaps 400,000 civilians since 2003.
Today, Google added recent high resolution imagery of Darfur to Google Earth, taken by DigitalGlobe in January-March 2006. It serves as an unequivocal indictment of the Janjaweed, and of the Sudanese government whose implicit support it has enjoyed, because in these new images each and every burned-out gottia is visible. This is the kind of evidence that puts paid to the claims still coming out of Khartoum that the ethnic cleansing is not widespead, and that accusations of genocide are a mere pretext to wrest sovereignty away from Sudan with the deployment of UN peacekeepers.
Read the blog entry for yourself here.
He goes on to say “we can no longer pretend we don’t know.”
He’s right. It’s there, in high resolution, for all to see.
Props to the hard working young man at Google Earth who has been slaving to get all the detailed maps together. It’s a fine mission, ibn uckti, and we are all so proud of you and the hours you put in to make this possible.
Mining the Kuwait Times: 4 October 2006
Ya gotta love the Kuwait Times. I admire their spirit so much, I forgive their weak editing and poor grammar.
Six KAC Officials Quit
Six officials were transferred from their posts by the operations manager at Kuwait Airways, so they submitted their resignations, which were accepted without any investigation, so says the Kuwaiti Times (and also the Arab Times). Appearantly, they were transferred because they refused to recommend for promotion two unqualified candidates for captain, and were horrified to discover that these assistant pilots were promoted – verbally – to full airplane captain flying A310 aircraft in spite of most of the training officers having (previously) rejected this decision.
(This is actually a compilation from both Arab Times and Kuwaiti Times. They seem to be saying these six men resigned because unqualified pilots will be flying planes they are not qualified to fly, and the Director of Operations and his deputy know this and promoted them anyway. Arab Times adds that the director and his deputy are also jeopardizing KAC’s reputation in the international community when they refuse to investigate technical flaws found recently in some KAC aircraft. )
Think I’ll pass flying Kuwait Air for a while . . . .
Driving Sheepish
I actually speak English fairly well, and I don’t have a clue what “driving sheepish” is. The article states:
Policemen suspected a motorist driving sheepishly in Kabd. They ordered the Kuwaiti to stop his car and found a hunting rifle and a number of drug tablets inside. Police registered a case and referred the man to authorities.
Non-Halal Meat
“While residents of Kuwait are still reeling from shock, where cases of contaminated fish imported from Iran were allowed in by the municipality’s food imports division, a new scandal has just appeared on the horizon, reported Al-Seyassahl. A report indicates that one of the officials in the same department tried to cover up a crime he was involved in, by permitting some local foodstuff companies to import frozen meat without being slaughtered in accordance to the Islamic law. They presumed they could get away with the deceit, as, since no one was aware of the fact, could get away with murder.”
This is buried way down near the bottom of page 4. In most countries, it would be at the top of the first page, and heads would roll.
And last, but not least, to the tune of “La Vie en Rose” . . . French Smokers Fume as Public Ban Looms
My husband and I hate breathing second hand smoke so much that we will request another table in a restaurant if someone should be so gauche as to light up near us, disregarding the no-smoking signs in a restaurant, or pay our bill and go. It just isn’t worth it, not for our health, not for our state-of-mind. And all the same, it is very hard to imagine a France with a smoking ban in public places.
French cigarettes just smell different. French smoke reminds me of early mornings at the flea markets, picking up a cup of cafe au lait and a fresh buttery croissant, watching the early risers through a haze of smoke tossing back shots of Pernod to get their day started. I guess, because they are French, I can forgive them just about anything.
Building New Kuwait
I have a thing about safety. When living in Doha, we watched buildings go up with no discernible regards to building codes. I don’t even know that codes exist, or perhaps they are still being written. At least one construction worker per week “fell to his death”. Workers worked round the clock, trying to get the skyscrapers up before a deadline. People who scouted buildings for major corporations would shake their heads, and turn buildings down with serious foundation problems, girding problems, unbelievable structural faults.
Here in Kuwait, maybe things are minimally better. I had to stop shooting these workers when they started waving and only holding on with one hand. They are standing on a plate of glass being taken up to be installed.
I love these scaffolds. I hope you can see how this one curves in and out as it scales up the building.
The high tech joints close up:
DWP – Driving While Poor – to Be Outlawed in Kuwait
I’ve been watching the blogs, and I haven’t seen a mention of this, not a whisper. In yesterday’s Kuwait Times, front page, is an article about the proposal that all cars over ten years of age be taken off the road. The intention is to reduce congestion on the road.
I am guessing this will not apply to collectors of classic cars. I imagine this is aimed at the poorest of the poor, driving what they can afford, and holding their car together with prayer, shoestrings and chewing gum.
If Kuwait had a good public transportation system, this might be part of a solution. As it is – do you ever see a woman on a public bus? Taxis are available, but expensive. Domestic workers tell us that when they have any control over their transportation, they only go with a driver they know and trust.
I would guess that most of the cars 10 years and older on the road are owned by people who really need them, to get their children to school, to get to work, and to get groceries, etc. Legend has it that all these old cars on the road were brought in after the 1st Gulf War and sold – at great profit – to people who previously had been unable to own cars. For the working poor, cars give a smattering of dignity and luxury to a life full of scraping by and saving as much as you can. Yeh, the POS car puttering along in front of you is inconvenient, but have a heart – people need their cars, unless there is a good, reliable, decent and reasonably priced public transit system available to men and to women, which there is not.
I am also hearing friends telling me about the rules about driver’s licenses being enforced – you must be working, or you must have a college degree . . . but it is only applied to some, not to all. . .
We Need to Talk About Kevin
This morning on BBC, as part of the coverage on the horrorific murders in the peaceful Amish country of Pennsylvania, they interviewed Lionel Shriver, author of the award winning book “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”
This is not a recommendation. Shriver’s book, which has won several awards for literary excellence, is not for the faint-hearted. It is a tough, muscular, bleak examination of a similar, fictional incident, written after the Columbine High School massacres.
My best friend and I read this book at the same time – it was a book club selection, paired with another book on a similar theme, “Early Leaving.” We ended up exchanging horrified e-mails every morning, discussing events in the book as if they were a part of our daily life, and speculating on where this was all going.
It is from a mother’s point of view, written to her husband, from whom she is separated after . . . .something . . . We don’t know what that something is. The book unfolds steadily and relentlessly. You want to stop. Truly you do, I am not exaggerating. The book rolls on, so dark, so ominous, you know it is leading up to something truly horrible. You don’t want to look. And you can’t stop reading.
“Why are we reading this???” we asked each other in agony. And we didn’t stop.
“Why did you want me to read this?” your friends will say, as you pass this book along, and then, shell shocked, they will come to you to discuss it. Most often, I didn’t even recommend the book, but friends would overhear other friends talking about it in hushed, horrified voices, and would insist.
The book is the scariest, most real book I have ever read. It hits at the heart of every mother’s secret fears – what if we have done something wrong while raising our child? What if our child turns into a monster? Do we ever really know anyone – our children? Our husbands? Ourselves? We are all so vulnerable in our mothering skills, so quick to blame ourselves for our children’s failings, and this book bravely explores that fear, that vulnerability, without taking the easy way out and giving easy answers.
If you read this book you will find yourselves talking about it months – even years – after you read it. It is a terrifying book.
And after you read it you will understand why my heart is breaking for everyone involved in this unthinkable killing in Pennsylvania. Were I some superstitious person, it would be so easy – it is clearly the devil’s work. I can’t imagine what this man could have been thinking, but he chose his victims – young, innocent girls – with purpose. My heart aches for his wife and children, who will bear this shame for the rest of their lives, and for his parents, who will wonder where they went wrong. My heart breaks especially for the peaceable Amish, revered throughout America for their simplicity and commitment in living their faith, who must try to find a way to forgive the man who took their innocent daughters’ lives.
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