Curse of greener pastures

The price of the prize

“Saudi has always taken our beloveds from us!” cried one of the mourners when the dead body of her husband arrived home, after the nerve-racking wait of a fortnight. She, a widow with five children, had a lonely life ahead which became more cumbersome by the way her husband chose to die. With every passing day, she grew more and more depressed, cursing in her heart, not the husband at fault but, the monarchy that did not look after its labour force. The government refused to pay any compensation, rather the paperwork involved in taking custody of the corpse and shipping it off took a toll on the relative who agreed to handle the proceedings.

Let us flip the coin. The deceased, who was a plumber, lived downtown and often travelled around. Where he stood, he needed to hire a taxi to go across the road, but crossing the road on foot would have saved him a dime or two so he did what any of us would have done in Pakistan: crossed the road vigilantly. There was no zebra crossing, no signal; one moment he laid his foot on the road, the other a high-speed car hit him so hard that he died on the spot, causing damage to some vehicles and a massive traffic jam. Investigation was carried out only to find the dead man guilty.

We know how the man got killed but what killed him? Was it ignorance of the traffic rules? No, he knew what he was doing. Was it carelessness, over-confidence or a financially over-burdened self? May be all of these. Such incidents would continue to happen as long as we continue throwing our illiterate or under-educated, unskilled or poorly-skilled teenagers straight into the jaws of harsh, hostile lands of opportunities that pay more money but give less relief to the unfortunates.

The frustration that homeland imbibe in the unemployed, under-paid youth usually gets compensated with the sense of relative achievement each have in terms of relatives and friends, not to mention the cathartic effects of easily and rigorously practiced physical violence; however, the fatigue along with the inferiority complex that a foreign land harbingers for one is unprecedented as the sufferer finds no way to vent out his pent-up emotions, no compensation in terms of homemade food and usually kill time by taking turns on an empty stomach in bed.

The rift between classes is so prominent in the cities of great riches that the good-for-nothing layman would only crumble in the absence of haves. Their only solace is returning home, after an unfulfilling experience, to get their visa renewed to further enjoy bad experiences. Unfortunately, their families also expect their visits only for business; otherwise they have silently agreed with the fact that the boys are breaking their necks for running their lives and must be left alone to do the job. There they can compensate their wounded ego by boosting of the unseen, unheard wonders of the world that is visited only by the luckiest for dropping the jaws at home, a proof of which could be seen in their especially bought for the occasion cheap, often vulgar, clothes accessorised with things that are otherwise surplus, not to forget the one cent shop from where they gather cheap gifts for the whole clan.

The pretenses of sending our boys abroad are many: he does not work here; he earns less; he has great potential; he knows how to drive; if her son can go, why not mine; his sisters have yet to get married; and so on. The good-for-nothing lads are sent to the harsh lands where they are bound to work thrice as hard as they would have worked in their homeland only to get greater income in a highly uncomfortable environment where following rules and regulations (that were foreign to them in Pakistan) are more important than breathing. Otherwise, they get heavy fines.

Those who remain failed to acknowledge, with overwork, the loan that their parents took to buy them a visa are sent back dishonoured and shattered only to experience, for the rest of their lives, a march back in time, i.e., Dubai returned. Unfortunately, those who stay suffer more as before going home, after years, they need to collect hundreds of thousands for which they save every day from the basic expenses (since their salary packages are not very hefty), i.e., living and eating. They sleep less, live shabbily, eat poorly while glaring the world of luxuries swirling around them. (Interestingly, to these foreign lands only men go; women, although doubly marginalised, are mostly saved from the hardship of earning the bread abroad. However, they do marry nationality holders for the better prospects of living.) While the men are suffering in choking, suffocating heat of deserts, their wives suffer both sexually and psychologically in a society where one lifts the burden of a dozen.

Lately, two videos of such labourers got viral. In the first video a man is cursing those who come overseas with high hopes and work under inhuman conditions for long, tiring shifts, instead of working dedicatedly in their own homeland. It nullified the hypothesis that one can make enough abroad as the guy in the video had, after two years, yet to pay back the money that his family took in his name. The second video is of a good-humored man plucking money off a tree, sarcastically pointing out how hassle free it is to make money. Both men looked poor and miserable. Their accents stood for their educational background while their dialects reflected their underprivileged background. (Obviously the lads of the more stable families eye Europe, America, Australia and now Canada for work/study purposes.)

From 1971 to 2015, 8.7 million Pakistanis worked in foreign lands while the Gulf countries entertained 84pc of them. 4.3 million, i.e., 49.9pc, Pakistanis went to their hot favourite destination, Saudi Arabia, from where their motherland received maximum foreign remittance, USD2.89 in the last six months of 2015. The second most important destination has been UAE where, from 1971 to 2015, 2.8 million Pakistanis found work.

Shockingly, the end of 2016marked the deportation of 39,000 Pakistanis from Saudi Arabia for the violation of residential and working rules. Besides, 131,643 labour migrants were sent back from 2012-15.From 2005 to 2006 and from 2014 to 2015, Jeddah deported the maximum number of Pakistanis 882,887. The world needs human resource but the useless lot is not required; only the highly-skilled or highly-proficient work force is desirable which in return extract maximum satisfaction from its job.

Those who have been to Dubai would agree that most of the Pakistanis there are either taxi drivers, sweepers or even worse. The administrative jobs, the desk jobs, even the salesman, the jobs that involve effective communication, are not given to us not because the authority is biased but because of our incompetence. Even the places where these people live and eat are the cheapest parts of the city where the only visible creatures are from lower middle class, be it Indians, Bengalis, Sri Lankans and others.

Middle East is a land of opportunities for those who are highly-educated or at least well-versed in English. Those under-educated people who go overseas with unrealistic expectations of working in a high-profile environment have less chances of thriving, and end up frustrated being chauffeurs of the high salaried educated staff or being taxi drivers of government agencies. This uprooted labour class is compelled to make stupid mistakes under the crushing burden of surviving abroad while supporting a huge family at home. Little can be done in educating and grooming the rural families of these victims. They must not be treated as ATM machines but mellow beings who need recreation to feel normal. However, the ministry of overseas Pakistanis must play its role in saving the doomed. It must not only find ways to get our boys hired but also ways to keep them calm under pressure, to propose ways to let the emotions out, to counsel the uprooted beings and their wounded pride.