from my other blog: thelineinbetween.posterous.com/human-rights-the-great-maldivian-joke
"Bondhu Apartment Building in Male' City"
Imagine 40 guys , sleeping together in 1 room. Pretty Gay huh?
Now imagine this! 40 expat workers sleeping together in a single 8x8ft room. Still gay? No! That is called violation of Basic Human Rights.
Maldivians, have always been known to the outter world to be calm, friendly and sensible people. The good, peaceful kind of people!
To those who feed the national economy with Green Paper, YES! To the poor expats working their ass off just to earn enough to feed their sick old parents, wife and children back home, NOT REALLY!
Maldives might be paradise on earth for tourists. Maldivians are taught to respect, and 'be nice' to the "europeans". However, when it comes to the foreign workers here in the Capital City of Male' and the islands up and down, they are treated like animals. Hell! I'd say even animals are treated better here in the Maldives.
But why?
Aha! There my friend is the big question! Why? Because Maldivians since long, have been trained straight from birth to hate and fear them. To treat them like they mean nothing. Like they arn't humans like us. Like they don't matter.
When I say this, I do know that there is a very less percentage of Maldivians,(thankfully myself included) who treat these foreign men and women like any other human being.
The problem is with the population that, lives in houses built by these 'bondhs', wears clothes tailored by these 'bondhs', eat food sold, sometimes even delivered to the doorstep in the hands of these 'bondhs', leaves their newborn babies in the hands of a 'bondhu' maid (who also cooks the food they eat), and yet complain about these 'bondhs'.
See? The problem with us is that we think we are a super human race. We think we should have all the 'Human Rights' that could ever be listed. We think the only people who deserve these rights are us.
The problem is that we fail to see how many human's rights we have stolen away before we raise our hands for our rights. The son of a sick old father fails to realise that he is depriving his father off his rights, when the son stays out the whole day. The mother of a newborn baby fails to see herself depriving her baby's rights when she goes out to parties and Human Rights rallies leaving the baby in the hand of the 'bondhu' maid we talked earlier about.
Until we give those Human Rights to the Humans living under our shelter, as our labors; we have no right to fight for our rights.
* 'Bondh or Bondhu' is a local term used to decribe a working class human from any Asian country.
Photo Source: Google - flickr.com/photos/ennovativethinker