year-old Ali Al-Umda could be the longest-serving postman in Saudi Arabia, having been a fixture in the life of the 10 villages on his beat in the Baljurashi region for over 30 years. It took a while for Postman Ali to arrive at his calling however, having been taken in the care of an uncle after his father died when he was only four and left in charge of tending to sheep and fields in the farmland of Baljurashi. When he was a little older his uncle decided it would be best for him to go and seek work in Jeddah. “Me and a relative arrived in Qabil Street (the main market thoroughfare in Al-Balad) and found work cleaning houses for 20 riyals a month,” Ali said. Still an innocent child for the first time in the “big city” of the rather large village that constituted Jeddah in those days, Ali was asked by the head of one house to fetch some things from the market and was given a couple of coins to make the purchases. While strolling down the street, however, he accidentally dropped the money and lost it, and was so scared of returning to his employer that he instead went to his relative. “He took me to the man's house and explained the situation, and fortunately he forgave me, but still I decided to look for work elsewhere,” Ali said. After that, Ali found employment at another house, but was to return to his homelands in the south when the harvest season arrived. Once the harvest had been collected, and with Ali now in his tenth year, he returned to Jeddah to seek his fortune anew. “I worked at a tea shop for five years until I managed to save up 2,500 riyals,” he said. At the age of 15 he went to Madina to work for a relative, and after a year and a half took a short break to return to Baljurashi and get married. Ali then went three months without work and it was in 1959 that he had his first contact with the postal service. “I saw an advert for cleaning jobs at the post office and went and applied. They paid me 190 riyals, which wasn't enough even in those days, so I went back to work at the tea shop for a bit, and then worked as a builder's laborer for some Syrians who gave me three riyals a day. Life was starting to get harder, and everything more expensive.” After a brief spell back in Baljurashi without work, Ali returned to the post office in Jeddah, and one day asked to work along with a group bringing in post bags that had arrived from abroad after hearing that they earned 300 riyals a month. “The boss said he didn't need any extra help there,” Ali said, “but said he had something better for me, and when he got out a postman's bag and registry book and offered the same wage as I was asking for before, I accepted straight away.” “I used to stay up all night sorting out the letters to be delivered the next day. Sometimes you couldn't read the addresses properly as the writing wasn't clear, and occasionally it might take me up to ten days to find the correct destination for the letter!” After ten years as a postman in Jeddah, Ali returned home to continue being the bearer of tidings both bad and glad in his home region of Baljurashi. “The job is not always easy,” he said. “Sometimes when the winds are high a letter might be whisked out of your hand and carried off across the mountains,” he said. “Once I chased a letter nearly two kilometers but couldn't catch up with it, and eventually lost it,” he frowned.
