Home Sweet Home...Kuwait

I got this as an e-mail, and I thought I might share....it's so true...well I think so:

"Most people I know here came back to Kuwait after college...to the Promised Land, for maximum two years, or "to make enough money" and hopefully go back and pursue a masters. Countless Falafel and Shawarma sandwich years later, they are all still here, grayed quite a bit, but very much here.

Kuwait is like that. One starts off earnestly in a job, wants to work hard (and hopefully continues to do so). As time passes, you begin to get comfortable with the non-iron bedsheets and jam3iyas overloaded with easy to serve yogurt and long life milk.

By then your status has risen because you work in this oil-rich, highest per capita income Wonderland. Your mother beckons that they have found a "nice, homely" girl for you. You like your so-called "single" life...so you resfectfully decline. So you rent your own one bedroom apartment, put out few cheap "Banta" chairs, and blend in some Ikea "As Is" furniture just for it to not look so cheap. Few Friday market visits later, your house and heart are ready...life goes on with Paramount Channel, Cartoon Network, BBC News, and Kuwait TV masalsalat! Ramadan and Eid comes and goes and your MBA you well intended is long forgotten with the stress of how to ask the boss for a raise, and you can't cope with the installments for your new car...and used car in some cases. The raise never comes, yet you still here.

The luckier ones find fresh opportunities and move up the economic ladder, but never out of Kuwait. You upgrade your car and home, and generally grow to be a part of Kuwait, or rather Kuwait like a sandy desert spirit becomes ingrained into you, and fourth and fifth ring roads become your best weekend hangouts. Just because it seems the in thing to do, you apply for migration to a western country, knowing full well in your heart that you may never be able to start a new life in another strange land. The taxation everywhere else hurts. So do the residence fees here, but can you leave Kuwait?

Leave Kuwait, and miss the Houmos, Mutabel and Machboos and all the nteworking you built up, are you kidding? Life goes on, with bodies and souls flirting in and out of The Sultan Center, Souk Sharq, restaurants, all the new new malls that have sprung up like mushrooms. Soon one Thursday blends into another (another weekend, so quickly?) and next thing you know,time has flown, and you and your friends of yesteryears still meet occasionally, and discuss who has grayed more, and who's cholesterol is threatening.

The whole point of who "made more money" but never returned home is never brought up. Endless weekend dinners, get togethers, beach picnics, potlucks and problems, growing up pains, career ups and downs, friends who are like family, birthdays and anniversaries...Kuwait is home!

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