Saudi Gazette

JEDDAH — Haroon Mohammed spends all the day collecting wooden scrap that fetches him around SR40. Instead of enrolling in school, he opted to support his father.

Neither the 16-year-old Pakistani boy nor his six siblings have seen the country they actually belong. None of the family members know much about their homeland because they spent most of their lives in the Kingdom.

Like Haroon and his parents, there are hundreds of other Pakistani families, mostly from a Baloch ethnic background, living in a sprawling shantytown known as Wadi Mariq, which is surrounded by a valley and mountains, in the suburbs of eastern Jeddah.

The place wore a somber look since July 1, when Saudi authorities began the implementation of a levy on dependents of expatriates.

Most of the Baloch expats lived in the Kingdom for more than half a century and many of them hardly visited their homeland in Pakistan. Some of them even do not have a passport. However, many of them were issued residency cards as a special category and they enjoyed many privileges, including exemption from the dependent fee.

However, there are many others who work in the private sector and are liable to pay the dependent fee. A few of them work in the domestic sector, too.

Mostly illiterate or semi-literate, these people have to come to terms with the new reality of the dependent fee.

Compared with their counterparts in the Eastern Province, Qassim or Riyadh, the Baloch community in Jeddah and other parts of western Saudi Arabia lags behind in all respects. They live in hand-to-mouth conditions, except a few who are fabulously rich.

Many of the Balochs in western Saudi Arabia are involved in agriculture and cattle herding hence it was natural that they chose the Wadi Mariq area for an abode. The neighborhood and its surroundings as well as the lifestyle of its people make a visitor to assume that he is in some remote area of Baluchistan in Pakistan, not Saudi Arabia.

All of them live with their large-size families. Some of the men have more than one wife. They live by doing all sorts of odd jobs of a self-employment nature. But they were hardly able to make their ends meet, as their earnings will not cross SR2,000 a month.

Haroon is one of seven siblings. Like him, there are numerous Balochs who face a grim situation amid the rising cost of living in the Kingdom. For the first time in their life, scores of these families are open to the idea of returning to a homeland they have never seen in their life.

Numerous families who hail from Sindh in Pakistan but live in the Kingdom also face a similar dilemma.

Numerous families who hail from Sindh in Pakistan but live in the Kingdom also face a similar dilemma.