DURING the Second Gulf War I met a German journalist and we subsequently became great friends. Once while on a visit to Germany he invited me to dinner at his home, and it was only when I arrived that I discovered that he, in fact, came from a wealthy family. His house wasn't so much a house as a small palace located on the outskirts of Frankfurt where his father worked in a senior position at one of the city's major banks. What caught my eye though was not the splendor of the mansion itself or its many rooms which housed my friend, his parents and two brothers, it was something more important than all that. It was the fact that this magnificent mansion was served by only a single lady. Just imagine! A seven-room mansion, owned by a man of wealth living with his wife and children, with only one servant! The “servant”, I should clarify, was in the European understanding of the concept, in that she was responsible for handling the mail and handling telephone calls and invitations. She did not iron, nor wash, nor clean! To be fair, the cleaning was done by a woman who came three times a week, but the ironing, tidying of rooms and making meals, even the washing up, was done by everyone in the family themselves. The wife would cook, the children iron their own clothes, and everyone would pitch in to lay the table and wash the dishes, the father included. And at that dinner I saw each one going about his or her task, and after eating they took the plates to the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. For a moment I was tempted by the thought that the father was a miser, and wondered deep down why they didn't hire the services of a servant to take care of all this and relieve the family of these tasks, as they do us in our homes in Saudi Arabia. The father, however, was by no means stingy, for I'd seen the trappings of spending all over the house, in his sons' clothes, and their cars. It was only later I learned that the reason for all this was that the father wanted everyone in his family to be dependent upon themselves, to be responsible for their own lives, to make their beds, do their own cleaning, even wash their own clothes. As I left my friend's mansion I recalled a relative of mine who lives in a modest home with her husband who has an average job in Jeddah. They have one child, and two maids. Why two you might ask? Maybe it was one for the husband and one for the wife, meaning that it was only the baby that didn't have one, but why shouldn't he? For surely he is no less important than the neighbors' baby, or the neighbors' neighbors' baby, or indeed the entire population of the Arabian Peninsula.
