Article written by Rasheed Abou-Alsamh
I was talking to a female Saudi friend the other day and when I mentioned that I thought it was ridiculous that so many Saudi families took their maids with them on vacation to help take care of their children, she snapped and said: “What’s wrong with that? If they can afford it, why not?”
I replied that it was n’t a matter of whether or not Saudis can afford to have house help, but that the phenomenon of seeing Saudi families abroad with their maids was symptomatic of a much deeper problem that permeates all of Saudi society, that of helplessness which stems from laziness.
Another Saudi colleague reinforced the lazy characterization of many Saudis by telling me that when she went to the Durrat al-Arous beach resort near Jeddah for five days recently, most of the Saudis there slept the whole day, rising only at 4:30 p.m. to have their first meal of the day at 5 p.m.
“They spent the whole day sleeping and stayed up the whole night swimming,” she told me.What’s wrong with that, many will ask, especially in the searing heat of summer where it makes sense to limit daytime activities and do things at night when it is cooler? The truth is that the Saudi generation born after the first oil boom ended in around 1983, is an especially spoiled one. They have grown up with maids and drivers at their beck and call; have been spoiled by parents who gave them everything from expensive clothes to cars to make them happy. This is a generation that hasn’t known the deprivations of the pre-oil boom days when Saudi Arabia was a much poorer nation that did not have many luxuries.
And that is where my critics get me wrong. I’m not begrudging any of the luxuries that Saudis can afford now. Far from it. What I don’t like is to see a nation of spoilt brat men and women who feel that they cannot live without having a foreign maid around to boss around and do their dirty work for them.
“I’ve grown up with maids and I’m used to them making my bed everyday and taking care of me,” the angry friend told me. “When I’m abroad without a maid, I don’t make my bed,” she confessed.
But does Saudi Arabia really want to be a nation of people who cannot make their own beds, know how to wash their own bathrooms and clothes, or cook their own food just because they can afford to hire poor foreigners to do all of these things for them?
Many Saudis say they treat their house help like a member of their own families, and that their maids love traveling abroad with them as this is the only opportunity they’ll ever have to see the world.
To me that sounds like the colonial master-slave relationship, where some slave owners would treat their slaves kindly, even fathering children with them, but still not setting them free. Being a maid in today’s world is a modern form of slavery in my opinion, especially in this country where the women who come here as maids suffer from culture shock, are often locked up in the houses they live in, and don’t have family and relatives nearby to give them solace and support.
Everything is not bleak on the Saudi front though. We now have Saudi cashiers in supermarkets, working at Starbucks as baristas, and when a colleague of mine recently renewed his driver’s licence in Jeddah, he was pleasantly surprised at the efficiency of the traffic police, which enabled him to get his new licence within hours.
But the fact remains that Saudi Arabia is still a nation dangerously addicted to foreign labor. When Saudi children are brought up to clean up their own rooms, help their mother in the kitchen, take out the trash and go shopping for food at the supermarket, then we will have a new generation of Saudis that are not spoilt beyond belief, and who most importantly are self-sufficient and not helpless.
Having a maid and driver should be a privilege that we earn with hard work and effort, not considered a right just because we have the wealth that affords us the capability of doing nothing for ourselves and being utterly dependent on someone else to do things for us. Once we manage to change this warped mentality, Saudi Arabia will be on the road to a much brighter and better future. Until then, expect the spoiled brats to reign with their cluelessness which is so disappointing and sad.
Rasheed Abou-Alsamh is a Saudi-American journalist, writer and blogger. He is an opinion columnist for the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, and a correspondent for Al-Ahram Weekly.
He worked for 20 years as a reporter and senior editor at Arab News in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He was also the deputy opinion editor at The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates from 2007-2008. He majored in Political Science at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and currently lives in Brasilia, Brazil.
From 1993 to 2007 he wrote a weekly column called Manila Moods for Arab News and the website of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Inquirer.net. He worked as a correspondent in Saudi Arabia for Al-Ahram Weekly, the Washington Times, the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times from 2003 until 2007.
Source:
http://www.rasheedsworld.com/wp/2007/08/why-taking-a-maid-on-vacation-is-
absurd/http://arabnews.com/opinion/editorial/article372534.ece?comments=all
Source:
http://www.rasheedsworld.com/wp/2007/08/why-taking-a-maid-on-vacation-is-
absurd/http://arabnews.com/opinion/editorial/article372534.ece?comments=all
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