[Picture from same article - copyright guardian.co.uk,
4/12/2012 – Image Karim Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images]
4.12.2012.
We were the only two people on the bus from the UN climate talks on the edge of
Doha. He was the driver – let's call him a Nepali, but he wasn't – and he
handed me a tattered picture of his home village. It was in a lush valley, the
very opposite of the baking, stony desert we were driving through.
He
wanted to talk. He was exhausted from working 13 hours a day on average, seven
days a week. He had not had a day off in a month. He slept in a room with five
other men. In a good week, he could earn about £75, some of which he sent back
to his son.
But
he said he was better off than others. Some, arriving in Qatar from Nepal, Sri
Lanka, Bangladesh and the Philippines, were earning only about £20 a week. He
had paid a middleman nearly £700 and gone into debt to get the work, but was
getting less than he thought he would when he signed up. Now he could not
change jobs because of his contract and he longed to go home next year. The
company he was working for was owned by the Queen, he thought, and run by
Americans.
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