A new alert went out after a man plunged to his death from a footbridge over a busy Bahrain highway yesterday – the second to do so in three months.
Indian Ashokan Vamoora, 41, was killed instantly when he was run over by an oncoming car, as he smashed into the road from the bridge, near the Intercontinental Regency Bahrain, at around 4.30pm.
A witness at a nearby construction site said he heard a scream and a thud and the next thing he knew was traffic screeching to a halt.
“I did not see the man jump but I rushed to the spot after I heard the noise,†said the man, who would not be named.
Police said it appeared Mr Vamoora timed his jump so he would be hit by the car.
I have a suggestion, a crude one maybe, but a suggestion nonetheless; the authorities should either build a cage around the walkway so that no other moron throws him or herself off the bridge that was built to save lives by BKIC – which should be thanked for their endeavor – or do this:
I have no problem with morons who want to kill themselves; I say good riddance. The world is a better place for one less brainfart, but for God’s sake if they wanted to kill themselves, why should the cowards try to take other people’s lives with them too?
What, they need company even in their journey to hell?
And before anyone suggests or start hurling insults at me for being insensitive, save yourself the effort. I’m sensitive and humane enough, thanks very much, but people like these just do not gain any sympathy from me. I would have been more sympathetic if they hanged themselves from a ceiling fan, it’s their choice. But killing oneself like this is akin to blowing yourself up in a crowded market.
Maybe we should lobby for legalising euthanasia…
Cover the blood thing up, for God’s sake.
Comments
Its the second incident and just like you I don’t have any kind of sympthy with people committing sucide and killing other people with them.
But even if they build a cage around the walkway, will this be the end? I doubt. There are many bridges in Bahrain and the same thing can happen in another place.
The question is: Why Asians and mainly labour commit suicide in Bahrain? What makes a person so hopeless to the extent that he want to kill himself?
now we’re talking…
Is there any numbers out there for suicidal rate in Bahrain? and specifically between immigrants? that would be interesting since we hear about one every now and then.
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ok, so how bout instead of wasting man hours/money etc on that witchcraft laws, we invest it in some psychological evaluations and councelling?!
i think i’ll considering going back to uni and doing some more psych courses… might be a lucrative career path! 😉
Sorry…I have a question…why does this “Global Voices Online” thing have to copy or report every single one of ur entries…just out of curiosity? :angel:
No problem, may be you are right. Nonetheless, I fully agree, what’s more important is:
Let me make a guess. At the going rate, Bahrain will turn to be a leading contemporary place for suicide rather soon. The evidence is all over the place, and amongst the most ready-to-observe evidence/observations incluse bad ethics and systematically and structurally unjust distribution of income.
I concur, a study should be conducted as to why this is taking
place.
Also, they should enclose that walkway. I drive under it and always
look up to make sure that no one is landing my way.
Sandrine – I’m curious too.
sorry mahmood. despite your disclaimer, you are either insensitive or ignorant. as someone who has suffered and experienced the extreme pain of depression and suicidal thoughts, i find your post extremely offensive.
it would have been okay with (but i still would have disagreed with you ) if you had calmly made your point about the caged walkway. but you didnt do that. instead you started insulting these people, calling them “morons”, “brainfarts” and “cowards”. instead of asking the cause of their suffering which makes them takes such extreme measures, you say “good riddance”.
they are human beings. they dont want to kill themselves for a cheap thrill. they experience extreme pain and suffering. mahmood, i pray that neither you or your loved ones ever have to experience the pain of depression. and i hope that if (god forbid) one of your children ever attempts to commit suicide, you can give better advice than “good riddance”.
as a parent and as a member of society, please learn about the symptoms, causes and effects of depression and suicide. there is plenty of literature available on the web, so please look it up, for you children’s sake.
but as butterfly notes, why is it that low-income asians migrant workers are the ones who doing this the most? is it because they are genetically “cowards”? please think about it the next time you go for a drive in your porsche to pick up your children from their private school.
YOU should be concerned about these suicides not because they might occasionally inconvenience you, but because those workers are human beings just like you. they dont do it to achieve any political or religious goals. they just want to end the extreme pain. working in a foreign land land, they have no one to turn to for help because people like you call them cowards, so thet jump off a bridge.
i really hope you never have to go through the pain and suffering of depression mahmmod. but please learn about the issues before writing such childish insults about our fellow human beings.
Yes, I understand that depression is the killer. I understand too the suffering of these migrant workers. Yes their situation is bad. Yes society and government should do more for them. Yes ending a life in any manner is abhorrent.
But how is two guys jumping off a pedestrian bridge my responsibility? Don’t you agree that they could have easily killed many others by their action?
I hold a firm belief that ending one’s life in any way is cowardly. Ending it while endangering others is even more so.
And don’t speak on my behalf, I could do that quite adequately myself. And envy won’t get you anywhere.
I would be more conservative regarding the tone used in the post but I totally understand Mahmood’s point of view and liked the way he spilled out what is in his mind.
Solution from my point of view is that an indication of there are some sort of people in our country who need help and they are trying to reach out.
A serious psychological screening system should be applied by the Ministry of Health to workers and labourers. That’s my initial solution to the problem or this I am afraid would turn to a phenomenon that would continue to happen.
No shame in asking for help directly. No need to cry for help or try to reach out. Even the best of us need some psychological advices for the least and easiest problems such as a simple tension stress.
Right, i’ll start brushing up on my freudian therapy now!
That’s 150 BD per freudian hour… which is 50 minutes… for listening to someone talk… not too bad! (that will be for the poor guys in their porsches)
So lets start with Mahmood, you have some misplaced hostility?
I would tend to agree, you were a weeee bit harsh in the post, but I also agree, if you got those suicide tendancies, why do you have to drag ppl with you?! Or leave them with a life of disability!!! at the least you’ll end up damaging their car and leaving them with a psychological scar!!!
For gods sake, i nearly drove over a cat on the street once, and THAT still bothers me… can’t imagine what having someone fall right under your wheels would do to you! :dizzy:
“Yes ending a life in any manner is abhorrent”
it is abhorrent. but before you wrote: “I say good riddance.”
“But how is two guys jumping off a pedestrian bridge my responsibility?”
of course its your responsibility! they are part of our society!! they build our houses, build our streets, sweep our streets, take care of our children, mow our lawns, and much more. there is something wrong with our society if it is causing people to end their lives in such alarming proportions, so we are collectively responsible for trying to resolve the problem
“Don’t you agree that they could have easily killed many others by their action?”
yes, but the solution is to address the systematic problems that are causing these people to jump in the first place. that will save many more lives than building a cage. telling people to kill themselves somewhere else is not a solution.
“I hold a firm belief that ending one’s life in any way is cowardly.”
the suicidal tendencies don’t appear by choice. attempted suicide happens when someone is unable to repress those suicidal thoughts. the problem is that our society calls suicide cowardly, and so people with these thoughts feel ashamed about speaking to a friend or professional counselor (if available at all) about them. so the suicidal thoughts continue being repressed, and the problem grows and eventually they act on those thoughts.
“And envy won’t get you anywhere.”
what are you talking about?
Costa Guy, I don’t think an initial psychological screening of foreign laborers is the solution here. I think we need to get to the root of the problem which goes a little deeper. These people migrate over here, leaving their families behind to make money but instead they arrive and are often times ripped off by their sponsors or one these “recruiting agencies”. They are now most likely in debt because of the cost of just getting themselves over here. Their sponsors don’t pay what they promised if they pay on time or at all. It is likely that they live in deplorable conditions, often worse than what they live in back in their countries and to top it all off, suffer from verbal, physical and even sexual abuse at the hands of their sponsors or some stupid kids who think it’s funny to beat them up.
I don’t think these people come here with psychological problems but inherit them after being subjected to horrible treatment. You don’t see happy housemaids who are treated like they are part of the family hanging themselves from ceiling fas or jumping off of bridges.
Maybe the sponsors should go through psychological testing before being issued a work permit for their workers to determine if they are suitable to employ people without depriving them of their basic human rights.
The sponsors here too need deep psychological screening to prevent Sadistic ones from bringing in poor labourers and screwing up their lives and making them miserable. :angry:
That’s indeed a very good question.
There much more where this came from at http://www.migrant-rights.org
Okay Van Gogh, it was in bad taste and I apologise for phrasing the problem with insensitivity. I agree that should a cage be built on this bridge, a person desperate enough to contemplate suicide will take his life elsewhere and in another form.
It was unreasonable of me to suggest that at that stage in their life that they think of others as that is probably the furthest thing in their minds. What drives a person to the length of choosing such a horrific way to end his or her life is beyond my imagination.
And yes, in this particular case it might be symptomatic of the problems migrant workers suffer from at the hands of their sponsors, the community and our government which is – at best – lackluster in offering them the support and protection they require.
Other than the migrant workers’ protection society here in Bahrain, do these people have any other avenue to turn to, do they even know of the society’s existence?
Mahmood, I really don’t think they do. They don’t have any obvious options, so many resort to running away or suicide. This happens across the region, from Lebanon to Syria to Bahrain to Dubai, there is really no influential NGO that truly enforces any laws concerning these individuals. It’s very worrying, and even though I would personally love to help I don’t know how and where to start. There are too many cases and the least we could do is report them, but I really hope to see an improvement.
So our right to criticize this was already taken away when you posted it!
Provacative speech provokes, that’s exactly what it does. Don’t consider them insults though, Mahmood, more like criticism. Unless you think the words you used “moron†“brainfart†and so on were meant to insult- then no- we are only voicing our opinion.
I do agree with Van Gogh and others who comments on this post- I did find the post rather insensitive. I appreciate your annoyance at him endangering other people’s lives, but your choice of words was rather extreme and lacked any consideration for the other person. As a matter of fact they were so extreme that you warned people ahead about calling you insensitive- which you were.
I won’t rant on and on about the conditions of Asian labourers in Bahrain, I think that’s a whole deal on its own.
Fair enough.
It may have been insensitive, but the guy who jumped DID endanger the lives of others by using a bridge across traffic to jump. Despite any depression, what if he had killed someone? What if he hit a car full of people, that swerved off the road and killed some bystanders, or caused a several car wreck? I wouldn’t be very sensitive then either. IF you are going to kill yourself, try methods which don’t endanger other people (gun, noose, a swim out to sea, pills, or a blade to go “down the road” not “Across the street”).
Still, if this is such a problem there, like Mahmood says, add a cage. I’m sure a very attractive, or even a very ugly option can be easily found. We’ve got a pedestrian walkway in town which crosses a main road here. It’s been there since the 1970’s and is as ugly as Communist architecture. The cage consists of a chain link fence which is about 12 feet high, and arches over on both sides to prevent people from trying to climb up and over it (the gap between both sides is only a foot or so wide). I suppose someone who wanted to could scale the side of it, but I am sure there are other options (on freeway signs here, to prevent grafitti “artists”, they have coils of razorwire or barbedwire looped around any access points).
How cruel of you Ya Mahmood, have u ever felt any pain, did u fall sick
you are born with diamond spoon man
Have you bothered to check if laborers wages are paid, Ya rab months pass by with date 01/2007 .
well you tons of dinars to waste on F1 but not a penny spared for poor souls
My eyes will never shed any tear for your country
Well, I remember that one man once killed himself in my Alpine village by throwing himself in front of a train while the son of my neighbor and several dozen pupils and students stood there waiting. A thumb fell just in front of the neighbor’s boy.
I can understand the annoyance of Mahmood and I am pretty sure that these guys (the one on the bridge and the one in front of the train) wanted to get attention as well as killing themselves.
They do not care for others and possible shock or injuries of innocent people they do not even know.
We are not responsible for depressions of other people. It is their responsibility to ask for help, as there are institutions in any country which will gladly assist by any means possible.
I have had a boyfriend who was manic-depressive and you cannot help folks who are not able to ask for help or realize they are suffering from a depression. They have to come to understand that they are acting irrationally and ask for help – be it through medication when needed or some counseling if necessary.
Amira, we don’t need nor have asked for your tears. In Bahrain we believe in common sense and a lot of hard work. Keep your tears to your own country and work with it to fix your own migrant labour problem.
Iris, Barry, I guess the others are talking from theoretical and romantic perspectives, is what I was thinking on the drive home…
Romantic?
Romantic in the sense of “everybody can fix the whole world if we try hard”.
ÙÂThanks Iris. Exactly!
Impractical too.
No.
I realize what you meant but still, that is NOT what we meant. Not what I meant at least.
Choosing one’s words with consideration is not romantic.
Refraining from calling people brainfarts and morons without consideration to everything else, is not something out of reach- not the last time I checked anyway.
It’s very practical too, espcially not to have people firing back at you and calling you insensitive when you be one.
I never said this wasn’t dangerous or that I thought it’s ok to endanger people’s lives, anyway.
How do you call people who are so selfish not to think of what harm they can do to others?
I mean, a suicidal candidate could kill him- or herself in the comfort of his or her home with some tablets, which is surely much more pain- and bloodless than throwing the body from a bridge.
Its their kind of retaliation on society if they have as many spectators as possible and they think everybody else is responsible for their problems, real or just existent in their imagination.
A guy who throws himself in front of a train for schoolkids to watch him torn into little pieces is a sicko in my own opinion, if not an ass.
Do you know how a depressed person on the verge of suicide feels? I do not and you sure don’t. However I did know a friend who commited suicide. I do not know why but I doubt she would do it if she didn’t feel helpless. If you don’t cause physical harm to people with your suicide, you will cause emotional harm to people close to you like parents and friends, and that is as harmful, if not more, than the physical harm. People who commit suicide don’t see their actions as selfish; in reality they think that with them being dead the world will be better. being the insensitive jerks you are, you probably would agree.
You are true imbeciles. brainfarts, if you will.
In Madrid, spain’s capital, they had the put a short of net in a walkway because it was the perfect place for sucide.
I think it’s a very selfish way of killing yourself, because, if one day I get a man falling into my car (and dies) I can tell you I would be very very sad, and it’s not fair…
I can understand why people sucide, although I would never do it.
Barry
You have no idea at all about how immigrants in Bahrain are treated because if you really know you wouldn’t say that.
A housmaid who get BD40-BD60 as a monthly salary is being treated like a slave. In addition to all the cleaning, ironing, washing, etc she is also a baby sitter, part time housemaid for the other family members who live in another house. she work is a gardener and she also wash the family members cars. She is performing five or six jobs and above all of this she might be raped or even treated in a very humiliating manner.
This housemaid paid already to BD400 approx. to the agent in her country in order to come and work in Bahrain and she should work at least one year to recover that money.
A labour who works for a contractor or any other company get a salary within the same range if more than by BD20 or 40 max. But for that few more dinars he should pay for his own accomodation, 6 or 10 or even 15 persons living together in a room to share the rent. All other cost of living and then they should save to send something for their families to live with!
The other day, I went to the cold store next to my house to buy something and I will never forget that scene .. a painter who was standing next to the counter to pay for a small strawbery milk pack and a piece of bakery, a lunch that is not edquate for a child and not an adult who spend half of his day in construction work. He was hiding the coins in his cigarette pack. This is when everybody else in the coldstore are filling their cart to the top.
Iris
Yeah, you are not responsible if you are not the one who caused him the depression, if it was not your harrasement, if it was not you who brought him to this country and treated him like a slave. Sorry to tell you that we don’t have the institutions you are talking about, we have the Ministry of Labour, police stations and embassies to solve all of these problems. They will not provide a raped maid with any kind of help other than sending her back to her country and if she lucky she might get some few dinars as compensation!
I am not trying to be ideal here, I am not trying to fix the whole world as you said but I am trying to be human.
If we can’t treat these people in a human way, if can’t provide them with basic needs then we should stop bringing them here and then fix the problems that we created.
Sorry people, I find your comments insensitive and offensive too!
and this makes it ok? try explaining that to the people who may be driving underneath and end up dead or worse, paralyzed for life. try explaining that to the families of the people in the car .. how much comfort will this give them, do you think? what crime did they commit to deserve this end? what responsibility do they bear?
how is this any different from blowing oneself up around innocent people? the motives may be different, but the result is the same.. endangering the lives of innocent bystanders.. deciding that the lives of others are worthless..
Can we talk:
Did i say it was ok? please show me where i said it was.
that is 100% correct. but how does the guy know that those driving underneath are among the inhuman monsters who mistreat their workers?
Just an interesting fact… most suicides from depression are committed when the concerned person is on their way to recovery… this is mostly because that is the time that the person finally has the will and energy to do something that they feel will alleviate their pain and suffering.
ironic, isnt it…
CWT,
It is not that I am justifying for them to commit sucide and kill other people and I believe I already said that in my first comment.
But instead of building cages we should look into the roots of the problem, why do they commit sucide? find some solutions ..
you didn’t say it was ok, but you made it sound as if people should be more understanding because of it the explanation you mention. they may be reasons for the depression, and they may be terrible but that does not excuse treating the lives of other innocent people with disdain and making a choice to risk them too.
again, i agree that the reasons have to be investigated and there should be support centres where these people can get advice and help. i think that it would also be a good idea to vet people before they are allowed to sponsor workers and if they mistreat their workers they should not be allowed to sponsor anyone else. i also think there should be a law that makes it a crime not to pay salaries on time every month, and penalties collected from those who break the law.
we should also have laws making sure housemaids and employees get days off. the way people here drag their housemaids with them everywhere they go and thinking that this is a treat is inhumane. when i asked a group of people why they don’t give their housemaids time off to go where she wishes i was shocked to hear the response “how do you know where she goes?” as if it is any of their business.
maybe families who bring employees from abroad should also be given an orientation course so they understand the rights of the employee and do not merely blindly follow in the steps of others.
but there will always be people who fall through the cracks and because of that you also need to have barriers to stop them from throwing themselves off bridges and endangering the lives of innocent people.
@Dana: My cousin-in-law tried to “kill” herself with pills of her dad’s pharmaceutical wholesale on Christmas Eve 2 years ago (4 days after finishing university) because her boyfriend wanted to split up after some drama she made.
She had us all sitting in the hospital for hours, where they were emptying her stomach and of course the boyfriend went back to her.
She had just taken enough pills to have to be brought to hospital, but not enough to get herself killed – this was just plain blackmail!
At 23 hours she was sitting at the X-mas table and eating happily while everybody else didn´t feel like celebrating.
@Butterfly: Here we also have maids who do the same job, usually for 200 USD/month when they are Mexicans. Illegal Central Americans, mainly from Nicaragua are also abused monetarywise, they sometimes do not get paid and have nowhere to go, and no matter of which nationality, maids are often raped by the sons of the family where they work or at least get pregnant because the boys promise the girls a Cinderella fairytale.
Sometimes you can see low class workers with light skin, light brown hair or eyes and you can tell that they are the result of such an “encounter” as the racial differences between social economic classes are pretty big.
A worker makes maybe 5 USD/day in Mexico City, which is about the price of a Venti Caramel Macchiato with an extra shot of espresso. Life is just unfair. One should do charity and help, if one is able to do so (I am engaged in a Humane Society in order to help to spay feral cats and dogs and in a boarding project for street children to learn a profession), but one cannot be held responsible for everything that is going on in our world.
Obviously, since Iris’ cousin-in-law was a selfish attention seeker- according to Iris- then all people who commit or attempt suicide must be selfish attention seekers as well.
Butterfly, well said! We made a site concerning these workers at http://www.migrant-rights.org and I hope more people would get involved. It’s really a huge problem, and if we don’t face it now then when? This is slavery in every sense of the word and we should not allow it to take place in our country.
Mashalla you are very active Esra’a. I was trying to remember the name of the society and now I got it from your site, Migrant Workers Protection Society. I met few members of this society during some cheque presentations and donations made by my employer and was very impressed by the idea. The only thing that they need to work on is to make migrants know about this society and to seek help when they need it.
Butterfy:
First of all, that part was addressing how to prevent people from jumping off of the bridges. That is ALL. If that’s insensitive then I’m sorry, but I wasn’t addressing WHY people are jumping off of them, I was addressing a means of stopping at least THAT kind of action.
Also, before you assume I sit in my ivory tower upon my golden throne, I certainly DO understand how those workers get treated ALL over the middle east and even parts of South East Asia. I’ve got friends whose relatives from the Philippines ( a major source of labor) have gone to various countries in the middle east and brought back terrible stories about being treated like dirt, worse than how some of the Mexicans *HERE* in California get treated who come across the border for work (what do you know of that?) If one of my cousins were to want to work over there, no offense but I’d tell them to not even try it because I know how badly they can be treated in your part of the world.
In essence, many people who hire my fellow Filipinos think of them as dogs to be paid shit wages and treated like scum. Read up on Flor Contemplacion and Sarah Balabagan.
Now, before you talk to me about understanding what happens to them there, do YOU know why they are compelled to go to your country? The reason why they go to your country and here to the US is because compared to the Philippines, Bahrain and the US look like promised lands. Here’s a pictorial of the incredible grinding poverty in the slums of Manila:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/06/world_manila_slum_life/html/1.stm
The average poor person in the Philippines makes less than $1.00 (USD) per day. The rates you gave indicates they get about $106.00 (USD) per month. So a Filipino working in Bahrain, getting BD40 a month is getting almost 4 times the BD11 they get per month back home. Hence the reason why they keep coming. Also, culturally, some Filipinos have a pervasive attitude in which they believe that no matter what abuse happens to them *eventually* a sort of retribution will come back to them, which results in complacency and the lack of speaking up against abuses, so they take it.
many of their stories are not true, though. i found out an ex-housekeeper of mine was going to the neighbors when we were all out and asking them for food because “we weren’t feeding her” even though we were actually paying her an allowance to buy her own food and she was also helping herself to our food and our stuff. a lot of horror stories are true but a lot of them are also plain lies.
Did I say all of them were true, no? I said I know how badly they CAN be treated. There’s a difference there, Can We Talk. It’s just like here, not all Mexicans are treated as poorly as some would say, but there are also those who ARE treated as poorly as their stories go. This isn’t a black and white situation no matter where it is.
Add to all what you guys said about mistreatment of workers, the shitty kids who mock and shout at a poor laborer while peacefully walking down the street, they might end up beating him up if heaven forbid he just tells them to leave him alone. Then if the poor soul just lifts his arms to block their hits their fathers come and beat him up as well because he “raised” his hands on his precious children.
Always put yourselves in these poor people’s shoes. One day our oil WILL run out and times WILL change, so treat people the way you want to be treated or suffer revenge, revenge should not happen but will happen because of anger and frustration.
Good discussion. The essence of the problem is:
1. how to treat them fairly
2. how to provide them adequate support structure
Both of which – I strongly believe – will be answered by the forthcoming Labour Reforms in which the government will make it more difficult for employers to employ foreign workers by forcing the level of wages on aggregate to equate to that they have to pay a Bahraini!
I had wished those reforms will also include maids, but unfortunately due to the huge backlash – by parliamentarians as well – that got shelved or canceled. The maids should be happy enough to be included in the Labour Laws in the first place, let alone be considered for the Reforms too. Unfortunate, but that’s a battle that must be fought by the government.
But that’s a post for another time.
I actually witnessed the aftermath of everybody gathering round just to see what the heck was going on. It took me 55 minutes to drive from Diplomatic Area to King Fahd airport in Eastern Province, and then 4 hours just to get back from Saudi to the Diplomatic Area. FOr once the delay was not from the causeway, but rather traffic back-logged all the way to the Burger King flyover. The most annoying thing is that the suicide was on the other side of the road, and drivers were just slowing down to see the action.
Building a cage round this walk-over will not prevent future suicides, I’m sure anybody determined will find another location.
At the same time, I truly believe that our Indian friend could have been possibly dissapointed with life, and only Allah knows what went through his head.
Who has the guts to take his own life????? Again, if somebody wants to leave this life (please be my guest), but please !!!!!!!!!!!!! Don’t get other involved in your mission.
The first guy that actually jumped from the bridge, fell on my relatives car, and till this day his wife can’t seem to get over it… The guys foot slammed her in the chest, she has serious medical issues and is afraid of driving or being driven.
What can we do…..
It’s really strange Mahmood that you take the approach to this matter the way that you did. It’s barely been 24 hours since the worst massacre in American history, where a young man who deserves more than all the epitaphs you have used has done far worse than this poor painter.
He took the lives of 32 people and then his own, leaving 30 more lives in the balance. As it turns out, this chappie’s parents live less than 20 miles (30km) from me. Some of his victims could be my neighbours.
Some of you may have heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech, ironically a school that I STRONGLY recommended that my brother attend. Life took him on another path, thankfully, but it doesn’t spare me the “What if?”.
In any case, the issue is that this painter’s suicide at worst adds up to an inconvenient annoyance for most of us, stuck in traffic or worried about splatter on the wax job on the Beemer (put on by another 3rd world laborer with a name few, if any of us bother to learn to pronounce right).
I mean let’s be honest, his suicide won’t change much. Maybe we’ll get a fence around all the overpasses in the kingdom. Which, for what it’s worth, is the right thing to do. Not only to further frustrate the hopeless, but also to save the clumsy, the careless and the drunk from themselves; not to mention the cheeky who have yet to discover what endless possibilities a can of paint or other sundry objects could present. But at the end of the day, very little will change for the working poor in Bahrain, those with a pittance of an education, few meaningful opportunities; those who HAVE NO CHOICE but to make do with the crumbs that fall off of our tables. The same people who will be cleaning up his splatter off the highway, will go back to being invisible. I’m not trying to be condescending, I’m just telling you the truth. I’m no saint in this department. They’re merely functionaries to me, who on occassion deserve a little bit of my sympathy or respect. Of all the people that worked in our households, I can only remember the name of one guy who cleaned our house part-time. That too only because we complained about the quality of his work so much. My father would routinely slip a dinar to the guy who washed cars in our neighborhood, mostly out of sympathy. I don’t know his name at all, but I remember some of the less than pleasant things that my friends and schoolmates would jeer at him from their cars. That’s their lot in life, I suppose.
And they sit and take it, without complaint, holding back the tears, disproportionately grateful for any tiny act of kindness, be it an extra dinar or two on Eid, or just that fact that you did not give them any grief today.
I’m sorry for rambling, I’m just really bothered by what’s happened in the last day. Here we have a young man, who immigrated to the US, (I have no idea what his family situation is, but it was good enough that he could afford himself the opportunity to attend a good university), and he decides, premeditates, plots even to go on a shooting spree. Of course rather than ban guns, the response here will be to ban immigrants, or Koreans, because:
“Guns don’t kill people, Korean Immigrants kill people!”
(I do have to chuckle that in all the melee, the only thing a Palestinian was shooting was the video footage famously aired by CNN, Good on you Jamal Barghouti)
Compare and contrast, two disaffected people, trying to make a life for themselves in a foreign environment, clearly distressed, and unstable enough to do the heinous and the shameful. They’ve got our attention. Where do we go from here?
@Dana: Of course they seek attention or want to make a statement. Their despair is so great, that they feel the need to make a point – in public or alone. Actually they do not really want to die, but it’s a bigger cry for help.
The people who kill or try to kill themselves publicly have a different psychological profile than the introverted ones, who do it at home – they are usually men, not women.
About maids from Eastern Asia: They are in essence much more submissive, as I have experienced when I was a teenager in Malaysia and Singapore, and it comes along with extreme poverty and lack of choices as well as poor education. To treat them respectful is a matter of education on the side of the employer’s family. It should be paramount to teach our nieces and nephews or cousins or children that these workers do an important job, without which we would lead much less comfortable lives or couldn’t go to work without feeling guilty about the kids not getting a decent lunch or walking the dogs. I couldn’t do without my “pearl” as I work full time and sometimes have to go to events concerning my job at night.
When it comes to amok, young people channel their frustration out wards, against a hostile environment, as they see it. It is very sad that always innocent people get killed indiscriminately, they do not target certain people, but an institution – be it a school, a college or a workplace. I wonder if there were signs of frustration to be detected on this guy or not. I haven’t had the chance to read the news today, so i am unaware of the recent findings.
Well, in Eastern Asian societies suicide is not considered shameful, rather a deed of honor, as they will not tarnish the name of their parents and ancestors because they couldn’t meet the standard.
That is why in Japan and in Korea there are many cases of students killing themselves if they do not pass tests for a good university, but they usually don’t run amok.
Where do we go from this perspective?
May be ..
Are you serious? He is throwing himself off a bridge, do you think that when he thought of it he expected that he will survive and he will get the help he wanted!
DIB, I’m sorry for your community’s loss. It is horrific and tragic to say the least. My condolences to the bereaved.
Everyone, I’m not psychologist so I will not be able to psychoanalyze these situations; you will forgive me for taking a completely layman approach to this problem, thinking about it with my logic. If I err, then I shall accept corrections.
My point of view, to make it plain, is that I do not condone suicide. That is not and never will be a solution to me. To my layman’s way of thinking, I think that people desperate enough to do so are also cowards who have given up the fight to solve a problem, no matter how bad that problem is. I also recognise that suicide situations are not exclusive to a societal class; high and low do it.
You will notice that in my post I did not discriminate nor did I specifically single-out migrant workers, in fact, I did not even mention a nationality, job description or income level. That was intentional. Some people obviously misread it and assumed wrongly that I did.
Solutions, I don’t have any at the moment, but shall think of some. One immediate thing that comes to mind is to immediately fence off that pedestrian bridge. That should not cost too much and should prove at least as a deterrent to people considering ending their lives in that manner.
What I do object to, as I have stated in the post is the collateral damage associated with this particular situation; it is as if the person has given up and ceased thinking of others, the only thought in his or her mind is to end their lives which they feel will end not only their, but their families suffering, or any of a myriad other factors. My issue with this – other than an illegitimate ending of human life – is the attempt of taking others with them, intentionally or not. It is this collateral damage which I find very objectionable, hence my likening the method to that of a suicide bomber in a market place, or even a drunk driver killing innocents.
I am not against migrant labour. I know the suffering they go through.
I do not understand deep or clinical depression and hopefully will never experience it at the level that these people might have, nor do I wish it even on my enemies.
The issue, again, that I have with this is the collateral damage. Just imagine for an instant what your feelings might be if it was you who happened to run him over after him dropping right in front of your car.
Would you be able to survive the scars for the rest of your life?
Thanks for the clarification, Mahmood. I can’t find fault in your hypothesis, except perhaps this. We live 6 billion to this tiny planet, a big blue marble which yields only so much in habitable land and useful resources. Just about anything we do, comes at expense to one or the other. I agree with your point; whatsoever ye do, do with the least footprint and inconvenience to others. I speak for myself here in saying that on a deeper level, perhaps in the light of a greater tragedy, that issue does not seem as significant. No matter, it is simply a matter of perspective, we are all equally entitled to have and share an and all of them. And indeed, most of us are here because we are enriched by the diversity in perspective. In fact, that much I can even celebrate.
As an aside, I am sorry if any of my comments seem inappropriate; if any of them require an apology or further clarification, I will be glad to address them as requested.
Let me share with you a personal story. I was a young lad, I honestly can’t remember how old I was, perhaps a pre-teen or a young adolescent at most. My family was returning home from a small party at friend’s house in Zinj. I’ll tell you exactly where it was, an intersection from which you could see Mothercare on one side and Salmaniya Medical Center on the other. It was pretty late at night. This memory is both vague and vivid in my head. A car a little ahead of us pulls onto Shaikh Isa Al Kabeer Avenue (I think) making a left turn. They’re not even a few feet into the intersection, when they are sideswiped by a drunk driver.
Everything that follows is a blur for me, except for the indelible image of a young bearded man in a black t-shirt and black slacks (which leads me to suspect it was around the time of Ashoora, but again I can’t be sure); he has pulled out a young girl, probably not much older than six or seven, as could hold her in his arms. He picks her out of the wreck, gets into another car and speeds off around the bend to the health center.
Within a week, the intersection gets a traffic light. Case closed. I couldn’t tell you what happened to that child or to her family.
In May of 1991, a very close family friend and associate of my father’s was taking his wife, his daughter and his 4 year old only-grandson to Water Garden. They had just parked their car across the street, against the old Ministry of Health building. A pair of Kuwaiti youths driving toward Salmaniya roundabout, decided to turn around and rather than negotiate the roundabout, they would instead jump the median (at the time, it was but a pile of dirt, the curbs and sidewalks came shortly after this incident). Only they lost control and slammed into some idiot’s double-parked pick up truck. The pick up truck, in front of which our dear friend had parked, slammed into his car, crushing him and his grandson against the next car. This is difficult for me to talk about. His son-in-law was away at the time, flew into the country immediately. I have only seen him break down and cry but once. Since then he and the mother, moved halfway across the world, have had two more boys and have built a very solid middle class life in North Carolina. He once told me that the grief and sorrow alone drove him to leave and to succeed. If I am not mistaken, they have yet to travel to Bahrain again. I will tell you that everything they have accomplished in life they will trade away in an instant.
Maybe in light of all of this, I should agree with you in blasting the selfish and cowardly act of this painter (I could scroll up to check his name; but I am not doing that to illustrate the point I made previously). Maybe I am more interested in ensuring that crap like this doesn’t happen again.
Like I said, maybe the damage of seeing a dumb painter jumping off a bridge onto traffic pales in comparison to psychological damage of surviving the slaughter of a campus madman intent on willful carnage and waste.
Butterfly, this was told to me from a befriended psychologist. I guess, he must know of these things.
I have to say, I didn’t realize that just two months ago, another laborer had accomplished the same feat at the same place. Fence the damn thing up! It may not prevent further suicides, but it will help encourage the use of ceiling fans.
That is until it leads to the collapse of another poorly constructed overcrowded laborer shack.