They Lost Their Jobs…

I finally met him in a cold and cloudy morning. He was pale and looked older than his age. A year ago, when I last met him, he looked, as usual; very energetic, happy and younger.

I could recognize his face among tens of people in a crowded market. No sooner than my eyes noticed his face, than his name and alias were ready to leave my mouth:

• ‘Ham the singer!’
• ‘Oudra my friend!’ Said he, with a half smile that found all the hardness in the world to get drawn on his lips.

Thousands of questions conflicted with one another on which to be asked first, but I prevented all of them from being uttered and talked to him about my news. It was clear that he was unable to speak openly, let alone to answer my questions.

After some seconds of that surprising meeting, he asked me.

• ‘How is your work’?
• ‘I am doing well in it. I will not complain.’
• ‘Whoever has a job should never complain. I lost mine and I find it hard to find a new one. A job is the best gift one can ever receive from the sky.’

When he was talking that way, sadness dominated the tone of his voice. He was unhappy to the extent of letting me hear his words with my heart, before my mind could decipher them. He continued:

• ‘When you have a job, you have some power. You can do something for humanity. You can do something for your country. You can buy a gift for your beloved people. You can purchase something you like. You can help penniless people. The absence of all those actions actually makes my life worse. I envy you. Thank God for it!’

Nowadays, with the harms caused by the financial crisis, there is no worse than losing one’s job. All over the world, hundreds of thousands lost theirs, or their revenue shrank. Others just no longer get promotions and bonuses. The financial crisis killed a lot of dreams. Some people were living a decent life, but out of the blue, they found themselves jobless and sinking in debts. A lot chose to put an end to their lives, sadly.

What was, and maybe still, unclear is the future of their children. In some countries there are still insurance and health programs for children who are at school. Yet, the majority of international scholarships became more difficult to obtain. Some scholarships disappeared and have not been launched again since.

In my city, Rabat, for example, the financial crisis put an end to a big project. It was in its start when the financial crisis emerged. The project was designed to create over thirty thousand permanent jobs, let alone tens of thousands of temporary and contracted ones. All had gone with the wind. In terms of schooling, a lot of master degrees and new departments were not given birth to, due to the shortage of funding.

Among all such hard situations, you HAVE a job. You still can pay the bills and buy food and clothes you like. You can still rely on yourself. There is still something for you; a job! A job that is being looked for and hunting for by millions around the world. If your job is offering you the minimum standards of living, you are ‘luckier’ than you think. This is enough to like it, no matter how hard it is, no matter how your ideas are, no matter how you ‘suffer’ from it.

In Detroit city, which was one of the leading places in car industry and one of the dream cities in the U.S.A., not only thousands of people have lost their jobs, but a whole culture is being removed from history. The whole humanity is losing an important city. It is really sad to see how tens of thousands of people who used to live a decent life are getting thrown into poverty by the crisis. Those people are moving elsewhere. This results in changing the schools for children and it is not easy for them to get separated from their friends and hometown.

To have a job is a prestige in a lot of places. The prestige I am talking about here is that of having the chance to do something for humanity. We are not living just to eat, sleep, get married and have children. We are born and grown up to add a true value to the world civilization. When we are healthy, millions dream of the health we have.

We have enough knowledge, millions are seeking it but have no access to it and always wish they have been as knowledgeable as we are. Now that you have a job, millions are losing theirs, and there is nothing more difficult than one’s losing his job and finding it hard to get another one.

Whenever you feel that you do not like your job, just communicate with anyone who has lost his. Only then you will see how lucky you are.