On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (27 page)

While $850 a month sounds abysmally low, in Saudi Arabia the government provides free health care (admittedly often slow and low quality), free education, and subsidized water and electricity. Furthermore, gasoline costs only about fifty-three cents a gallon, one-fifth the average price in the United States and less than one-tenth the average price in Europe. The poor and even many middle-class families exist on rice and chicken, both relatively cheap staples. And housing, the major shortage in the kingdom, can be affordably obtained by sharing a room with extended family. Government social payments coupled with charity help the truly poor survive. Still, daily life for the poor is a constant struggle.

Many Saudis were unaware of this poverty in their midst until then crown prince Abdullah, briefed on the Ministry of Social Affairs survey, brought the issue into public view by paying an unprecedented personal visit to the shanty homes of poor Saudis in southern Riyadh. His nationally televised tour shocked many Saudis, who never venture into neighborhoods of such squalor or see filthy, barefoot children. Abdullah’s visit led to a spurt of government spending to assist the poor and efforts to draft a so-called National Strategy for Social Development and Plan for Poverty Elimination. As so often is the case in Saudi Arabia, this grand plan sits unfinished. Meanwhile the number of poor continues to grow.

Not surprisingly, women represent a high proportion of the poor. Most of them are women without a husband. Umm Turki, a chubby woman with dark skin and sad eyes, has a husband but might as well be a widow; her husband is serving a five-year prison term for selling drugs, so he contributes nothing to her or their three small sons, who live a short commute from his prison on the outskirts of Riyadh. Her home is completely bare except for a large bed that she and the three boys share. To hide their father’s criminality from the boys, she tells them he is traveling. Each month she spends some of
her meager money on a taxi to visit him and provide a phone card so he can call the boys to maintain the myth that he is away on business.

Umm Turki means “mother of Turki,” her eldest son. (Women are all known as mother of their firstborn son.) She receives 1,700 Saudi riyals each month (roughly $500) in government welfare called “social security.” She spends half of that on transportation to get her children out of this poor neighborhood to a better school thirty minutes from their home. Even the very poor want better education for their children. Transportation for her children and money for her husband—who threatens to divorce her unless she gives him 500 riyals a month, with which, she fears, he buys drugs in prison—pretty much consumes that meager welfare payment. To feed her children, she works as a security guard at the girls’ section of the school she considers too rough for her sons to attend. A neighborhood Pakistani grocer allows her to buy food on credit and waits for her to pay when she saves a few riyals or receives charity from individuals.

Despite her poverty, she welcomes visitors and brings out a plastic pot of hot Arabic coffee and another one of hot tea along with a small dish of dates. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her empty living room, she lays out her sad and austere life with no self-pity. Born in southern Saudi Arabia, the poorest part of the country, she came to Riyadh with her husband, hoping to separate him from his drug habit. Instead, he was arrested and imprisoned. She kept his arrest secret from her employers at school for fear of losing her job. One night as she returned from visiting her husband in prison, another security guard at the school reported her to school authorities for coming home late. Confronted by authorities on her religiously inappropriate late-night travel, she pleaded, “
I need this job. I can’t beg at the stoplight or do wrong to earn money. It is not my way.” The school retained her.

Her home is in an alley of dirty buildings in a grimy industrial region of southern Riyadh, nearly an hour’s drive from the gleaming skyscrapers of the central city. Inside her front door is a lavatory for washing before prayer. Like her living
room, her tiny kitchen is bare but for a small refrigerator and a butane burner for heating food and water. There is no table or chairs. The cell phone always in her hand or on her lap is the only trace of modernity.

As Umm Turki speaks, her boys, ages four, eight, and nine, who have been scuffling with one another in the adjacent room, suddenly grow quiet. Clearly they hear the pain in their mother’s voice, even though they cannot see the tears in her eyes. Locked into this limited life by her inability to afford more than the occasional taxi to prison to visit her husband, Umm Turki nonetheless seems largely oblivious to her poverty. “It is my reality,” she says. She once traveled through the wealthy neighborhoods of northern Riyadh but was frightened by what she saw. “I saw women with their faces uncovered. I was so shocked, I feared an earthquake. I am very religious. I don’t like to see things like that, so I fled.”

Not all the poor are as stoic as Umm Turki. In the Al Aziziyah district of southern Riyadh, a divorcee sits alone, cross-legged on her floor, hunched in anguish like a round black boulder. In her late fifties now, she divorced her husband more than a decade ago, only to lose her eldest son two years later when his car hit a camel. Her other son refuses to visit her or provide her any help, a stinging rebuke in a country where the mother-son relationship is almost always among the closest in life.

Indeed, there is a hadith from the Prophet Muhammad on the love due one’s mother. A man asked the Messenger of Allah, “
Who among people deserves that I be most dutiful to?” The Prophet replied, “Your mother.” The man asked, “Then?” “Your mother,” the Prophet replied. “Then?” asked the man. “Your mother,” responded the Prophet for a third time. “Then?” “Your father,” said the Prophet.

As the divorcee recounts the woes of her life in the gathering darkness of her sparse room, she lifts the black shawl that covers her head and chest to wipe her eyes and nose. “
I pray to God to return my son,” she says. “Perhaps my son is punishing me for divorcing his father.” Without a husband or
son, she is largely confined to this apartment, going out only to attend Koran classes in the neighborhood. Clearly regretting her divorce, she says she advises her daughter, who lives far away in northern Saudi Arabia, to stay with her husband regardless of what he does. “Even if your husband burns you, stay with him,” she advises her daughter.

As dusk arrives and the apartment turns dim, she continues to sit in the dark rather than turn on the small fluorescent lights on her wall. Although she lives what can only be described as a depressing life, essentially a prisoner in her home, surviving on government welfare, she says she is better off than she was as a child in her hometown of Hamis Mushait, in southern Arabia. “Life is better now,” she says without hesitation when asked to compare her childhood with the life she now lives. Certainty about even a miserable existence, compared with the uncertainty that poor Saudis faced before government social programs were instituted mostly since the 1960s, has left older Saudis like this woman grateful to the Al Saud.

Next door lives a widow who is similarly deprived but much less resigned to her fate. At thirty-four, the widow is responsible for five children all under fifteen. Her husband died four years ago in a car accident also with a camel. “
My life with my husband was good,” she says. “I felt on top of the mountain. Now I feel like I am falling, and no one helps me. I just keep falling and falling.”

The widow, who asks to remain nameless, is literate and clearly intelligent beyond her tenth-grade schooling. Dressed in a long blue-and-white cotton shift with long dark hair pulled up in a ponytail, she exudes a strength and determination that is at odds with that of most other poor women I met. She sheds no tears telling her story and voices a determination to find some way to get a job and escape her current situation—no thanks to government, she makes clear. Asked if her life is better than when she was a child, she immediately and emphatically says, “No!” Knowledgeable about life in other Gulf sheikdoms, she wonders why Saudi Arabia, with all its wealth, cannot provide the standard of living of
its Gulf neighbors. (This is a growing refrain among Saudis, as the Internet and more openness in the press reveal to them life beyond their borders.) She laughs, recounting her visit to a dentist at one of Riyadh’s large clinics, where she was told to come back for treatment in one and a half years. She clearly has developed a strong cynicism about government.

Asked what she would like to do when she completes her home study of English, she cheekily responds, “Be prime minister.” (The title is now held by King Abdullah.) Her children laugh at the absurdity of a woman occupying a prominent government position. What would she do if she were prime minister? “I would look after the people,” she says. “If they knew anything about us, they would too, but they don’t know. Without
wasta
[connections], you can do nothing in this country. Even a cook in the palace of the king is better off than we are. He is seen. We are unseen.”

Umm Muhammad, forty-six and a widow, refuses to be unseen. Seven days a week she stands from noon to ten p.m. outside the Al Merjan Mall in Jeddah, in temperatures that in summer rise regularly to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, selling cheap items from her small stand to earn the money to support her seven children. She is a tiny woman swathed entirely in black. Only her eyes are visible through a narrow slit in her veil. Her hands are hidden in black gloves, even though the temperature on this spring afternoon already is approaching 100 degrees, made more stifling by the rain-forest humidity of Jeddah.

Like so many poor women, Umm Muhammad is widowed and uneducated—her father refused to allow her to go to school. But unlike most poor women, she is determined to support her family without government help and to maintain her independence. She insists she takes nothing from the government and that neither her elderly father nor her brothers help her. “
I don’t want people to see me as weak,” she says. “I want to prove I can take care of myself and my family. I want my children to be proud of me for looking after them and not leaving it to others.”

Umm Muhammad has demonstrated enormous grit and
perseverance to get to this point. After her husband died, she sold small items like
ouhd
(the incense so popular with Saudis), scarves, and
abayas
in her neighborhood. When that didn’t produce sufficient earnings, she began to sell in front of a Jeddah shopping mall to be nearer to large crowds. But shop owners complained of her presence, and the municipality responded by forcing her to stop selling near the mall. Determined to find a way to maintain her business, she went to the Kadijah bint Khuwailid Businesswomen Center at the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce to ask for help. Basmah Omair, director of the center and a tireless advocate for women, helped Umm Muhammad secure a loan from Bab Riqz Jameel, a charity funded by wealthy Jeddah businessman Abdul Latif Jameel, which provides loans to the poor for small entrepreneurial businesses.
The chamber of commerce also helped secure permission from the municipality to build behind the Al Merjan Mall a group of small stalls with shaded covers where Umm Muhammad and other poor street sellers now operate. One small victory for women and for entrepreneurship.

Umm Muhammad says she earns each day about 50 Saudi riyals’ ($15) profit. With her monthly rent totaling 750 Saudi riyals or some two weeks’ profit, she says she can’t afford to give herself a day off as she would lose one-seventh of her weekly income. “I would like to relax sometime, but I don’t have a chance,” she says. If she could have one wish, “it would be to own a home.” She has learned to read by using her children’s schoolbooks and continues to hope she can secure government permission to open a car repair shop. Her late husband taught her to repair car engines, but so far the municipality of Jeddah has refused to grant permission for her to open such a business because she is a woman. The authorities seem oblivious to the fact that she could earn more and in greater privacy than she does selling items outside a shopping mall.

Poverty, of course, is not confined to women. Abdullah is forty years old and has subsisted all his life on government welfare—either his parents’ social security or food and board
in prison. Unemployed and uneducated when his father died, he began to steal cars to escape the boredom of home and his responsibilities, as the eldest son, for his mother and seven siblings. His family lived on social security from the Ministry of Social Affairs. He began supplementing their small government allowance by selling stolen tires, tape decks, and used cars. Soon he began to use the income he earned for “special things” for himself. Special things, he finally admits, is a euphemism for alcohol and drugs.

One day he stole a car and let a friend use it for joyriding. Unfortunately for Abdullah, among the joyriders was another Saudi man who recognized the car as belonging to a friend of his. He and his friend followed the driver of the stolen car to Abdullah’s home and held him until the police came. After a brief interrogation, Abdullah was jailed and sentenced to two years in prison and four hundred lashes. It wasn’t his first time in prison (he was in and out several times over the past decade), but he insists it will be his last. At forty, he now has his first job ever—as an expeditor, someone who carries papers to different ministries to secure the endless permissions that tie up the daily lives of every Saudi who doesn’t have either influence to circumvent the permissions or money to pay an expeditor like Abdullah.

“
There are a lot of unemployed men like me who suffer from nothing to do,” he says, with no hint of irony that there are plenty of jobs he could do if he were only willing, jobs that doubtlessly would pay much better than his position as an expeditor. But his willingness to do a job that keeps him going in and out of ministries and office buildings rather than one that would pay better but require physical labor simply underscores the resistance of Saudi men to manual work.