After all, who are we?

A couple of weeks back, there was a fire accident in Bahrain. A gas cylinder blew up in a building where more than 40 people are staying. Most of them are from my state, Andhra Pradesh in India. As soon as they heard the blast, they ran for their lives without taking care of their belongings. They lost their passports, money, mobiles and other valuables in the fire(this proves that we are humans and we care for nothing other than our lives).

All the people in the building are poor and all of them are dialy labourers. Most of them are run-away employees or people who came on visit visas and over stayed here. Almost all of them have large fines pending with the ministries.

As soon as we(TKS) got the news about this accident, our people rushed to the place and brought all of them to TKS premises(as they don't have any other shelter). Food was sponsored by some other NGO for them and our people took the responsibility of delivering the food. We collected clothes, blankets etc on war foot and distributed them to these 40 people immediatly. Thanks to many donors, we were able to fulfill the basic needs of those people(this proves that we are humans and we care about others too). It was heartening to see them scrambling for old clothes so that they have something decent to wear for work.



The first day was OK and then we asked them their details so that we can arrange for duplicates of passports, resident permits etc. But not many are willing to reveal these details as they are staying illegally here. Then we informed them of the possible difficulties they are going to face in the future because of their illegal stay and not a single one was interested to listen to those words. We also informed them that if they can leave Bahrain as soon as possible, we can try to nullify their pending fines, but still the response is the same(this proves that we are humans and we tend to take things lightly). They wanted to live like rats but don't want to go back to India. We don't know what problems they have in their home towns, but still it's better to leave than live such a miserly life here.

At first, they are manageable but after one day, they started demanding(kind of) instead of requesting. I was shocked by the following incident: We were distributing them some T-shirts sponsored by some other NGO and a couple of guys adamantly asked me to change the size as L size "may be" loose for them!!!!! Man, this proves that we are humans and always ye dil maange more.

Anyways, it's been two weeks since this happened and no one was ready to leave Bahrain till now. But the good part is they are back in to their normal lives and got into some other new accommodation. Long live, mankind.