JEDDAH, 15 March 2005 — If a cold wind blows, you try to take shelter in your tiny blanket. When you get hungry, you wander off to beg enough or scavenge enough to end the hunger. If you need a place to sleep, you curl up on the ground. This is the plight of Riyadh’s homeless residents, and there seldom is a bright spot in their hardscrabble existence.
A number of Saudi citizens are using Riyadh public parks as a place to live, Al-Watan newspaper reported. They sleep inside these parks during the night because they have nowhere else to live. They wear tattered rags for clothing and subsist on the charity given to them by people. Al-Watan located a number of homeless people living in the public park near the Riyadh Medical Compound in the Al-Shemaisi neighborhood of central Riyadh. Most of the homeless were between 25 and 50 years of age. They beg for food and money from pedestrians and at traffic lights. At night, they sleep over pieces of paper or carpet and use small blankets that barely cover their bodies. Winter or summer, that’s all they have.
Some say they’ve ended up in the park because of financial or family reasons. Some of simply don’t have a place to stay, and some are jobless. Others are released convicts who’ve been rejected by their families, and some are old and feeble, oftentimes abandoned by their families and unable to remember why they are sleeping in a park.
Fahd Muhammad Al-Mukaibeel is a young Saudi who was a government worker. Half of his salary was spent on taxis that take him to and from work. He decided to leave his job and buy a taxi, hoping to be a driver. He was unsuccessful in the business and suffered a huge financial loss. Unemployed, he doesn’t even have the wherewithal to find a place to stay, and that has been his life for the last two years. Muhammad Obaid was thrown out of the house by his father after he was released from prison. Some people donated clothes and money to him, but he still has no alternative to living in a park. Sadly, that’s the easy part.
“In the morning, I hide my sleeping blanket and some of my clothes in the park and go outside searching for something to eat,” Obaid said. “I have more than five friends who are homeless and sleep here in the park.” For the young, it is an arduous existence; for the old and ailing, it is devastating.
Marzooq Al-Dossary, a 58-year-old homeless man, said that he doesn’t know where his family is or why he is sleeping in the park. He was in terrible health with an appearance to match.
“Some of the families invited me to live in their houses or to take me to a home for the elderly,” Al-Dossary said. “I refuse to go with them because I am comfortable living like this.”
Yahya Al-Muhammad, who works in the hospital near the park, says he sees the suffering these homeless endure everyday. “These people look terrible. They beg for money everyday at the traffic lights, and some of them don’t have clothing to wear,” Al-Muhammad said. “I have seen some people selling drugs and liquor to them. Some of them are addicted to sniffing glue.” But the hospital worker still empathizes with the plight of those who sit on society’s sidelines.
“I urge the proper authorities to look into their situation and put an end to their suffering,” Al-Muhammad said. “Elderly people should go to elderly homes, and the youth must be rehabilitated and returned to their families.”
