Unbearable demands: Broken promise

               အမိနုိင္ငံကေနမိသားစုနဲ.ခြဲခြာၿပီးေ၀းေၿမရပ္ၿခားမွုာအလုပ္လာေရာက္လုပ္ကုိင္ေနရသူ
ေတြအတြက္ပတ္၀န္းက်င္အသစ္နဲ.သဟဇာတၿဖစ္ေအာင္ေနရတာ၊လုပ္ငန္းခြင္စိတ္ဖိစီးမွဳ၊အလုပ္ပင္
ပန္းမွဳစတာေတြအၿပင္၊လူမွဳဆက္ဆံေရးနယ္ပယ္အသစ္မွာသူ.အႀကဳိက္ကုိ္ယ္.အႀကိဳက္ညွိနုိ္င္းေနထုိ္င္
ႀကရလုိ.သိပ္ေတာ.လြယ္ကူလွတဲ.ဘ၀မ်ဴိးမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။အထူးသၿဖင္.လစာနည္း၊ရာထူးမၿမင္.တဲ.သူ
ေတြေပါ.။ေနရထုိင္ရတာလည္းတစ္ေယာက္တည္းမဟုတ္ပဲအမ်ားသူငါနဲ.စုေနရတာဆုိေတာ.အစစ
အရာကုိယ္.အလုိအတုိင္းဘယ္ၿဖစ္မလဲ။ဒီလုိအခက္အခဲေတြအၿပင္ကုိမိမိနုိ္င္ငံမွာက်န္ခဲ.တဲ.မိသားစု
ေဆြမ်ဴိးေတြရဲ.မၿပည္.၀နုိင္ေသာေတာင္းဆုိမွဳေတြကပါထပ္ဆင္.လာတဲ.အခါစိတ္ဆင္းရဲမွဳမ်ားကုိမခံ
နုိ္င္တဲ.အဆံုးကုိယ္.ကုိ္ယ္ကုိေသေႀကာင္းႀကံရတဲ.အၿဖစ္မ်ဴိးေတြရွိလာတတ္ပါတယ္။
               အခုလည္းကမ ၻာမွာနာမည္ႀကီးေနတဲ.ဒူဘုိင္းေရာက္အိႏိၵယနုိင္ငံသားေတြရဲ.သူတုိ.နုိင္ငံ
ကက်န္ခဲ.တဲ.မိသားစုရဲ.အလိုဆႏၵေတြမၿဖည္.ေပးနုိင္ေတာ.လုိ.ေသေႀကာင္းႀကံသြားႀကတဲ.အေႀကာင္း
ေဆာင္းပါေလးပါ။အိႏိၵယမွမဟုတ္ပါဘူး၊ဒီလုိအေၿခအေနမ်ဴိးဆုိယင္ဘယ္လူမ်ဴိး၊ဘယ္နုိ္င္ငံသားမဆုိ
စိတ္ဖိစီးမွဳ၊စိတ္ဆင္းရဲမွဳမ်ားလာယင္တစ္ခုခုေတာ.လုပ္မိႀကမွာပါ။ၿမန္မာလူမ်ဴိးေတြကေတာ.ဟုတ္
တာမဟုတ္တာအပထား၊ကုိယ္.ကုိယ္သတ္ေသယင္အဖန္ငါးရာခံရတယ္ဆုိတဲ.အေတြးနဲ.မလုပ္ႀကတာ
မ်ားလုိ.ေတာ္ေသးတယ္မွတ္ရတယ္။
                တကယ္ေတာ.လည္းသူသူကုိ္ယ္ကုိယ္နုိင္ငံၿခားေရာက္ၿပီးဆုိယင္က်န္ခဲ.တဲ.သူေတြကအ
ထင္ႀကီးႀကတာပါပဲ။ဟုိမွာအဆင္ေၿပေနႀကၿပီလုိ.ေလ။ဒီမွာဘယ္လုိေန၊ဘယ္လုိစားႀကရတယ္ဆုိတာ
သူတုိ.မွမသိႀကပဲ။သူလဲသူ.အထြာနဲ.ေရာက္တဲ.ေဒသကေစ်းနွဳန္းနဲ.သံုးႀကရတာပါပဲ။ရတဲ.လခပဲၿမင္ေန
ရုံနဲ.မရေတာ.ဘူးေလ။ဒီႀကားထဲေနာက္ဆံုးေပၚစက္ပစၥည္း၊အ၀တ္အထည္ေတြကုိမ်က္ေစ.က်လုိခ်င္
ၿပီးစိတ္မထိန္းနုိင္ယင္ေတာ.ေယာက်ၤားေလးဆုိလခမစုမိေတာ.ဘူး၊မိန္းကေလးဆုိယင္ေတာ.ကုိယ္.
ကုိယ္ကုိမထိန္းနုိင္ယင္၀ယ္ေပးသူေနာက္လူမ်ဴိး၊နုိင္ငံသားမေရြးပါသြားႀကတာပါပဲ။အဲဒီအခါက်န္ခဲ.
တဲ.သူေတြကုိေပးခဲ.တဲ.ကတိေတြဟာသဲထဲေရသြန္ၿဖစ္ႀကရတာပါပဲ။အေႀကာင္းအမ်ဴိးမ်ဴိးၿပၿပီးၿဖတ္
ႀက၊လမ္းခြဲႀကတာေတြၿဖစ္တာပါပဲ။
               တစ္ခ်ဴိ.က်ေတာ.မိသားစုကုိယ္တုိင္ကအလြန္အကြ်ံေတာင္းဆုိလုိခ်င္ႀကတာပါ။ဒီေဆာင္း
ပါးထဲကလူတစ္ေယာက္ဆုိေနမေကာင္းလုိ.ၿပန္လာတာေတာင္မွအိမ္အသစ္ေဆာက္ၿပီးတဲ.အထိဆက္
မလုပ္နုိင္ရပါ.မလားဆုိၿပီးဇနီးနဲ.သားသမီးေတြကအိမ္ထဲေပးမ၀င္တဲ.ေႀကကြဲဖြယ္အၿဖစ္ဆုိးကုိေတြ.ရ
ပါတယ္။အဲဒီအတြက္သူ.ရဲ.ေနာက္ဆံုးေၿဖဆည္ရာကႀကဳိးဆြဲခ်ေသဆံုးခ်င္းပါပဲ။
                ၿပည္ပေရာက္အလုပ္သမားမ်ားဒီလုိအၿဖစ္ဆုိးမ်ားနဲ.မႀကံဳေတြ.ေအာင္မိသားစု၀င္မ်ားက
ဂ၇ုစုိုက္နုိင္ႀကပါေစ။


The dreams of middle-class Asian expatriates are losing their sheen as they quietly toil away and battle with the rising cost of living in Dubai. Meeting the great expectations of their families and relatives is causing great anguish to many.
This struggle to satisfy the demands of their people back home is leading to great distress for many expatriates – in some instances even forcing them to take extreme steps.
Family suicide

On September 17, a middle-class Indian family of three jumped into the Dubai Creek, apparently burdened by financial debts and unable to face humiliation back home.
And this is not an isolated case.

From January to September this year, an estimated 109 Indian nationals living in the UAE – or 12 of them per month – reportedly committed suicide.

Breadwinners offering crucial support to their families back home are walking the proverbial tightrope as the demands on them keep growing.

Expatriates are expected to remit more money back home to enable their dependents to maintain their lifestyles amid spiralling inflation. Folks back home expect state-of-the-art mobile phones or iPods as gifts from their kin living in Dubai. Relatives and friends, too, are prone to nudge expats for loans.

"‘Dubai mein rah kar ke, goli de rahe ho (Staying in Dubai, the land of prosperity, you are telling us lies) is what a friend in Mumbai told me when I expressed my inability to give him a loan of Rs50,000 [around Dh3,850]," said Syed Rahim, an accountant with an IT company.

The names of these expatriates are also prefixed with the term ‘shaikh’ in light banter to pander to their egos. The so-called "Dubai syndrome" has placed them on a pedestal – albeit one with weak support.

Friends demand the choicest mobile phones and laptops, he said. "They think money grows on trees here."
Mohammad Arshad, from Chittagong, Bangladesh, has been working in Dubai for the past six years and is currently with a radio station. He regularly remits money to support his parents and a sister. "Life for me as a bachelor is very difficult. Bachelors can be comfortable only if they have no family to support back home," he told XPRESS.
Another Bangladeshi man requesting anonymity said he has been forced to sub-let his rented home to paying guests to fulfil the needs and desires of his family members.
"I am thankful to Allah Almighty that I have been used as an instrument to support my family and share the responsibility of my parents to bring up my three brothers and three sisters," said Waqar Ahmad, 53, a senior executive in Dubai for the past 33 years and eldest in his family, hailing from Jhelum in Pakistan.
He said all his brothers and sisters were educated, had good jobs and were married.
Saiful Islam, 22, a Bangladeshi national from Mohammadpur near Dhaka, works with an airline company. "I have been in Dubai for the past six years, but more than me, it is my elder brother who has been supporting our parents, two brothers and two sisters back home," he said.
And inflation at home is adding to their woes.

Mayuresh Tanpure, from Mumbai, recalls that after getting employed, he had to repay a bank loan of Dh70,000 taken for funding his education at a Dubai college.
Now, his job as a market analyst with a leading hotel chain here has its perks as well as compulsions. "When relatives from India visited me recently, they saw me living comfortably in a one-bedroom apartment provided by the company and perhaps got the impression that I was well off. But I have the responsibility to get my sister married and also want to save to go to Australia.

"The Australian visa is going to cost me Dh6,000 to Dh7,000. The cost of living is also up. On a salary of under Dh10,000, I used to remit Dh1,500-Dh1,600 a month earlier, but now I have to remit the equivalent of Dh2,000 home to compensate for the inflation there," he said.
For Binoo Varghese, another hotel executive, , sending money home to India is not critical support, but is aimed at helping his father invest in mutual funds and shares.
But he can afford to do this only because his wife is also earning Dh10,000 as an IT specialist. Shiromi, a school teacher from Sri Lanka, has been a resident of Dubai for 10 years.

"I used to save and send money to my mother in Colombo to enable her to buy medicines, but she passed away some years ago. My brothers and sisters are working there and are not supported by me, but I do take gifts for them, like electronic appliances," she told XPRESS.

Shiromi and her husband together earn Dh20,000.
They are luckier than most.

Premlal Vijayan, a sociologist at Dubai Academic City, narrates the tragic tale of how a cleaner from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala worked in Dubai for 20 years to build a house and educate his son and two daughters.
Shock in store

Three years ago, he wanted to return home as his health did not permit him to stay on.
"But his wife and son did not want him to return as they wanted to convert their single-storey house into a multi-storey building on the strength of his earnings and the loans he could mobilise from Dubai," said Vijayan.

But due to failing health the cleaner returned home. However, an even greater shock was in store for him as he was not allowed to enter the house which was registered in his wife’s name.

The poor man took refuge in a temple there and the next morning he was found to have hanged himself from a nearby tree.
"Everybody in our neighbourhood knew the real story," Vijayan said.
Sociologist and social worker’s views
Premlal Vijayan, a sociologist at Dubai Academic City, said 90 per cent of Asians in the UAE were taking loans to satisfy the expectations of their families and relatives back home.

"The higher their salaries, the higher the expectations from them, particularly as Dubai is perceived as having reached a high stage of development," he analysed.
K.V. Samshudheen, Chairman of Pravasi Bandhu Welfare Trust, a welfare group for overseas Indians in the Gulf, said debts racked up by expat Indians to meet family expectations were driving them to commit suicide in the UAE.

During a recent visit to three districts in Kerala, he interviewed 500 dependents of breadwinners in the Gulf. Of the 500 interviewees, only two even bothered to ask about the living and working conditions of their benefactors.

Uma Padmanabhan, a social worker, said several middle-class Indians in Dubai are paying monthly instalments on car loans
taken by their family members or relatives back home.

"If the instalment is, say, Rs5,000, they think their Dubai brother or sister has to just pay Dh500 from their salary," she said.

Moreover, low-wage earners among Indians making Dh900 per month are expected to raise Rs100,000 (Dh7,495) to Rs200,000 (Dh14,990) for weddings in their families.

Since they don’t have that cash, they end up taking loans in Dubai at high interest rates from private sources. As debts pile up, so do depression and tension, ultimately causing heart attacks, paralytic strokes and other ailments.

These people are often single breadwinners supporting seven to eight people back home.

Suicide facts: Indian suicides in the UAE
2008: 109 (from January to Sept); 95 in Dubai and the northern emirates; 14 in Abu Dhabi

2007: 130; 118 in Dubai and the northern emirates and 12 in Abu Dhabi

2006: 135; 109 suicides in Dubai and the northern emirates and 26 in Abu Dhabi