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In olden times slavery looked like this:

Today you do not see men in shackles, modern slavery is invisible to the human eye.

In my country, The Kingdom of Bahrain, slavery is executed in a different manner.

This is a short story of a brave man who goes by the name of Faisal Alkhazmiya.

Born and raised in the country of Bangladesh, Faisal is 20 years old, he is currently working in Bahrain, his working hours are from 4am to 8:30pm, thats approx 16 hours of labour.

I ask him why do you do this? In reply he says; In my country, there are men who work for 8 hours a day and receive only 100 Taka (Taka is the Bangladeshi Currency) you can buy a large Pepsi bottle for 70 Taka, so basically there are men in Bangladesh who work for 8 hours a day for a large bottle of Pepsi and some potato chips.

He continues: I don’t give a damn if I have a life or not, as long as my mother and my little siblings have food on the table it is fine with me if I have to sleep 4-5 hours a day and work for the rest. (Basically he works in Bahrain and sends his money abroad to his family, the Bahraini Dinar has more buying power than the Bangladeshi Taka)

In Bahrain there are 125,000 Bangladeshis(1) I wonder how many of them have to lead a life which is similar to Faisal’s.

Leaving the poor aside, what about the middle class citizens? Very joyfuly they go to work every day from 8am to 5pm, they have no personal life, their children don’t know them, their neighbours don’t know them, they don’t have time to socialize, they don’t have time to do the things that they enjoy doing; basically their souls are dead. Why do you believe all of this to be true? Because time is the fundamental resource, which every human possesses equally. No man has more time than any other man. We all have the same amount of time. Now I could be wrong by what I’m about to say, but from my experience I came to learn that nothing can be improved without giving it your time. you can not improve your relationships with your loved ones if you dont spend time with them. No art can be mastered without the habit of practice. (To practice you need time)

You have 24 hours a day, 6 – 8 hours you are asleep, 9 hours you are at work, that’s an average of 16 – 18 hours that are sucked out of your life everyday, whats left of your time? 6 hours? 8 hours? You think that you are a free man because you have 6 hours to spend everyday? You know whats worse? Even though you think that you have 6 hours of free time everyday, those 6 hours STILL dont belong to you, you have chores to do, buy food, go to the laundry, do your home work, take the kids out, pay your bills and this and that. Those 6 hours?………. GONE!

Do you see why slavery exists my friend?

Think with me for a moment , can it be possible that the middle class corporate employees are happy with their jobs? I don’t think so. I do not see any fun in staring at a p.c screen all day. There are very few who actually enjoy their jobs.

People are blindly following the norm, there is a system that is played out for you, you are nothing more than a battery. You work yourself so hard throughout the week and when the weekend comes, you recharge yourself and get prepared to be used in the next week. And when you have enough hard earned money – that is stained with your own blood – you escape your harsh reality by traveling to a tourist friendly area, where you spend all of your savings. You come back, freshly charged, very motivated to work, a month passes by and your esteem is hitting the ground again.

But what can I do?

My advice to you is this;

If you have a higher purpose or a goal that you want to achieve that might bring happiness and contentment to your heart or a purpose that might change humanity for the better, then it is completely fine to be patient and endure this sort of slavery. But if you find that there is absolutely no reason for you to suffer, then grab a paper and pen and start writing your thoughts down, what are you good at? What do you enjoy doing? How can you serve others? What makes you happy? Think my friend!

Note: Do not ever think that you can achieve great measures of success without hard work! That is a fundamental truth. All I’m saying is that if you are going to be a slave…. then be your own slave.

1 “New Bahrain rule may end labour exploitation”, The Daily Star, 2009-05-09, retrieved 2009-05-14