Chow hall workers

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the chow hall (also known as “the dining facility” to civilians, and “the galley” to marines and sailors). Some of us have been having to do extra duties such as counting people as they enter, or securing the area. Any duty at the chow hall is extremely boring, but the people who work there are interesting. As most support operations here, the chow halls are run by private contractors and staffed by people from South Asia.

The contractor that operates the chow hall here is Kuwait Pearls, which belongs to the Tamimi group from the United Arab Emirates. Every once in awhile we see a Kuwaiti manager, but almost all the staff is from southern India. Probably the only reason there are Kuwaiti managers is that by Kuwaiti law, local companies must hire a certain percentage of Kuwaiti nationals (a policy known as “Kuwaitization”).

The staff at the chow hall is divided between cooks, servers (or “waiters,” as they are misleadingly designated by Tamimi) and cleaners. They are almost invariably in a good mood even though they work thirteen hours a day, seven days a week. They only get a two-month vacation every three years, and their contracts vary from three to ten years. Most of the cooks have been through a two-year school in India and get paid $350 a month. The servers make $200 a month, and the cleaners $190 a month. The ones I talked to had to pay a non-refundable $2.000 to an Indian “agent” who provided them with a plane ticket, a Kuwaiti sponsor for the visa, and some paperwork. For the cleaners and servers, that means that they have to work for a year just to pay off their agent, and then they are still not making much moneyeven by Indian standards. Many of them hadn’t been told that the job would involve near complete isolation in a dusty desert camp, far from any kind of city. Most of them are from the tropical state of Kerala, and some are from adjoining states such as Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. I suspect that the reason why they are recruited mostly from Kerala is the state’s high standards of education. Kerala is, interestingly, a democratic communist state where the standard of living is rather high in spite of an unimpressive economy.

The servers are the ones we have the most contact with: they dish out the hot food, and they keep a “parallel count” at the entrance so as to avoid conflicts of interest. They all speak English, but they speak Hindi and a Keralite dialect called Malayalam to each other. Many of them have learned a few American catch phrases from soldiers, and a couple of Spanish greetings from our Puerto-Rican helicopter pilots.

On the bird-watching front, I found a desert warbler (Sylvia nana), two common whitethroats, two woodchat shrikes, an isabelline shrike, an Acrocephalus sp., six squacco herons, a harrier sp., a common redstart, European bee-eaters, Blue-cheeked bee-eaters, various wheatears, and a common snipe.

I just received my flora of Kuwait, so the next few blog posts are probably going to be heavy on plants.