An Eye-Opening Day

Yesterday I went see one of my extended cousins and it was the most eye-opening day in my entire life. I learnt about a lot of things that I didn’t know existed to this extent in this part of the world. My cousin invited me for brunch with her friends at her house; this was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss. So I went to work early and tried to wrap up what I had to do for the day. I got to her house around 11.30 am and there was food almost everywhere (which by the way I realized is the centre of attention in almost everything that goes around here but that just another posting). The women were sitting around talking about their children and lives; things that I could not really relate to but loved to hear and discuss about. We later on moved out to the park and this is where the conversation heated up.

My cousin is in her early forties and has 5 girls (oldest being 14 and the youngest somewhere around 5 I guess). Her husband married another woman without telling her after 12 years of marriage; this basically destroyed her and everything in her life. I was trying to comfort her and make her feel powerful by telling her that he (her husband) is not worth wasting her time thinking/worrying/crying over. But it was all in vain; she really wanted to but she would tell me it is impossible and if I was in her shoes, I believe it would be the same for me as well.

A little about her; she basically only graduated from high school and never continued her education. She got married and was taken to another city (being Abu Dhabi since she is originally from Dubai) by him and since then has in some ways not enjoyed her life to the max. She is very pretty and sexy but yet her husband went for an older and uglier prostitute (I came to that conclusion based on her description of the female; based on my previous encounter with some women since I got here). Her husband forced her to cover her face and rejected every request from her to finish her education. She was not allowed to work and will never be allowed as long as she is staying in his house. She wakes up early in the morning to get her girls ready for school and goes back to bed after she sends them off. She wakes up around noon if she doesn’t have friends over and basically tries to pastime by watching TV or cooking. She is not allowed to leave the house under any circumstances without telling her husband a couple of days in advance. She has to share her husband with his new wife; which also by the way means sharing the little income he gets. She doesn’t want to get a divorce because she basically won’t be able to live. She can’t work even if she wanted to since she has almost no qualification. She cannot stay at her parents’ home because she has 5 daughters and can’t drag them everywhere she goes. So the only option she has is to remain where she is and try to survive for the sake of her daughters.

After talking for hours, turns out she is not the only one. There are a lot of women who live like this (her sister being another culprit with her husband marrying 2 more and not just one). It’s not just about the husbands getting second wives only; there are women who after marriage have to leave everything else in their lives for the sake of their husbands. What I understood from them is that women do not have the power to say no to men. The government does not protect them and mostly stands in favor of the men. The whole time I was with them, I wanted to hit the men so hard so they couldn’t have erections anymore.

I felt very useless and felt that I had not done anything meaningful in my life. Questions kept running in my mind like; do we have these problems in Bahrain as well? Is it possible that we do and I never knew about them? Is it actually to this extreme? What percent of the women actually live like this? How can I help? What resources can I use to try and help these women? Why do the men do this to their wives? Why do they do this to their children? Can a father be that selfish?

There are a lot of thoughts and ideas that are running in my head at the moment. Mixed emotions at the same time.

Angry at how selfish people can be.

Frustrated because I don’t have any immediate solutions.

Sad because I feel sorry for the children and how they are being dragged in all this.

Happy that I got to know about this issue (better late than never).

Hopeful because maybe I can be of some help with some of the ideas I have that hopefully I will have time to work on them while I am here.

And much more…

This posting might be the worst to read since my sentences are either too long or too short and some of them probably make no sense at all. But I had to write about it and I had to write about it NOW.

And I thought I had problems!@#$&?%@%!?#@