A Day in the Life of Bahrain is Longer Then A Day Where We Come From

Before I get into the meat of things, if some of you were hoping for more pictures of the area that I am in and so forth, one, I've been pretty slack with the camera, but hey, I've only been here less then a week. And two, the sands gone down but its really windy outside. So those will come later. Mmmmmk? I don't know if I wrote this in the last blog, but its quite strange, I haven't been hugely over warm as of yet, though I have been cold. Everyone has AC and some people like it cooler. I never thought that I would be cold while I was over here. Strange stuff.

Onto the meat of things. In my last post I said that people have a different mindset about work and their work habits are different then the ones that most of us hold. Well, as it was said to me: "people come to Bahrain to make money". Which I kinda realized and knew in the back of my head. But how it is done is just a little nutty. There are many Indians and Pakistanis and others here and they come here to work, and work they do. I'm talking about only getting about 3-4 hours of sleep per night and then spending as many waking hours as they possibly can working. I've been talking to this one fellow and his day starts long before mine, and I get up at a bit before 7. So I'll be talking to him in the morning and he's already worked what for us would be a half day. Then I'll talk to him later in the day, when I'm coming back to where I'm staying, and I'll be going back to kinda relax for a bit then go to bed, and he's only halfway through his work day! Its mindboggling! And this is no 4 day thing, its not even a 5 day thing. For most of them it is a 6 day a week thing and for many of them it is a 7 day a week thing. I am not kidding, everyday of the year, they work for 20 hours out the day if at all possible. No breaks, no vacations, none of that. And these people are doing it for years on end. They are doing it for decades on end. I am seriously not kidding. This is the life for many people. They run the gambit from the self-employed to the exploited. This just strikes me as ever so wrong. True, some of it is coming from my North American point of view where we just don't do things like that, and how we jealously guard our free time and leisure. But there is more to it then that. More then that, it just strikes me as such a waste. It is a waste of families that suffer because the parents are never home with the children, they are never with each other, and people suffer for that. It is a waste of lives, as people strive for 'success' in our human created economy, seeking money that in the grand scheme of life, is pointless. They pour out their lives, and even more then that, shorten their lives (that little sleep and that much stress isn't good for you) in this never ending quest to gain more and more and more. Now I can see where it comes from. They send the money back home and they wish for their children to have better lives then they have. And back home I'm sure some of their lives are downright in the crapper. But there is some part of me that yells that the standard of living brought by monetary wealth can't bring what community and family can. This may come from the fact that I don't know what it is like to live in poverty. To live on the raggity edge of destitution. But it still strikes me as so wrong. Then I get angry at a system that allows entire nations, entire peoples to live on that raggity edge, so that the entire culture becomes obsessed with work and seeing work as the most important and greatest thing that a human can do. Striving for wealth seems to bring suffering and pain instead of pleasure and satisfaction, as a rule. It pains me to think that this is how we humans have become... We have become foolish in our thinking, and have been for a very long time, though I guess I should not be surprised... for we did have a Fall. But this mindset is something that is a challenge to the church. It makes it so it is hard to minister to people. At the end of the workday they are tired and do not want to be involved in ministry, and they do not want to go to another event (though not all, for there are many enthusiastic and dedicated volunteers and leaders in the church, just some downright fantastic people). It makes it hard because some people have it set up in their lives so they do not have time for any spiritual matter, and I can't even imagine at the sheer number of people that the church can never even make an impact on, because of work. Though I hear the Friday service is full to overflowing, so that gives me hope, and I think once I see it, I'll be filled with even more hope. And it cannot be hopeless, people around here are just too enthusiastic for that, and they have been around for a while. But I think we need to take this as a warning for ourselves in North America. Work is something that we should do so that we can have enough monetary support to support ourselves and our families. It should never become something that becomes too important in our lives. We need to make sure that our priorities are something that would be pleasing to God. Now to some reading this, you may dismiss it as a youngster who doesn't realize how the world works, and I would respond that your someone who has gotten the world so beaten into your head that you have lost sight of what is important and how the world may not work, but should work. And we can model it in our own lives. We can live by example, we can stick it to the man and live in a way that is counter-cultural, counter-cultural to whatever culture you can find on this planet. Man does not live to work, we live for a much higher calling then that.