I was going to post the next part in our Athens vacation recap, but instead I want to show you a bit more about what's going on near us. So I'm going to talk about rain again. It might seem strange that the only weather I talk about here is the rain, but it's because it has a huge impact on the people here in Saudi Arabia.
It rained again on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning here. It wasn't really worth updating about, because for us, it had little negative impact. The leaks we had last week had been fixed, and held tight this time, so the only inconvenience was having to ride our bikes home in the rain.
Sadly this was much worse in Jeddah. Here are two videos of the flooding. I saw the first one on Facebook from another student on campus, and the second one was posted at Susie's Big Adventure.
As much as I wish I could say this was a one time weather catastrophe, it wasn't. The same thing happened in November 2009 and left Jeddah in much the same state. Promises were made to improve the infrastructure, but in Saudi fashion, 14 months later, little has been changed. What makes this sting even worse is that as part of WEP, a Saudi businessman came to speak. He talked about how Saudi Arabia has benefited by avoiding investing in foreign countries. He expressed how much better off Saudi Arabia was because they kept their money working at home. Clearly there is some disconnect when keeping Saudi Arabia's money in the country can't even provide a safe city for it's people to live in.
In other news, there have been huge riots in Cairo and throughout Egypt about the recent elections. Considering that we were just there a few months ago, it was shocking to see places we recognized filled with angry protesters.
So that's what's going on in our little part of the world. We'll be back tomorrow with more pictures from Athens!
No comments:
Post a Comment