Intersections

It took me nearly an hour to drive home from work here in Manama last night. It's a trip that usually takes me 10 minutes. The chaos was partly caused by a road being closed, and exacerbated by people continually blocking intersections. In fact, blocking intersections is very common here. It's not uncommon at all for a car to sit blocking an intersection, holding up lanes of traffic from the other side, while a policeman or two sit impassively on the corner observing it all, yet doing nothing. The police just can't be bothered to do anything to help the situation. As I sat in traffic observing all of this, I got to thinking about Bahrain and its culture. Here you have a country that imports most of its labor from South Asia and the Philippines, to the point where non-nationals outnumber nationals.

Taking that thought a little further, we Americans are nothing more than imported labor as well. Driving or walking around, no one here really pays me any mind. I'm just another imported worker from abroad. What's my role? I'm here to help prevent this country and some of the other Gulf States from being overrun by the Persian hordes. When we think of Iran, many of us might think that only the US, Israel, and a few European countries take the Iranian threat seriously. Not so - the Gulf States, to include Bahrain, are quite wary of Iran as well, and I have no doubt that fact helps explain our presence here. The United States might not export a lot of tangible things these days other than agricultural goods, but we still do export our culture, and more relevant to my situation, war. (We'll call it 'security'.)

So if you're Bahrain, at the national level the decision has been made that allowing in all these foreigners is desirable, since with their presence you don't have to do those jobs yourself. As for the jobs you do have to fill with citizens, such as police officers (presumably), if the people filling those positions aren't able to take the initiative and make much of a positive contribution, you'll just live with the results and chalk up the resulting inefficiencies to culture.

Inshallah.