Woes of joblessness haunt a young boy

Desperate Ansar is without a job, he wants a job of any kind. The 22-year-old has applied for dozens, all without success. And eventually he was left demoralised and depresed.

In the space of just 10 weeks he tried for almost 30 jobs. But most of his applications failed to generate even a courteous response. He felt put down with no self-worth. In April last year he lost his position at a private organisation kitchen when they started down-sizing. When he was laid off, since that time he spent the best part of that period pretending to still being employed. After that he never held a steady job again.

“I derived most of my sense of self-worth and achievement from my ability to bring home the bread and butter. The flip side is that getting laid off dealt a devastating blow to my self-esteem, and I concealed the fact from my wife and parents,” says Ansar.

“I still get up early, put on my clothes, and leave for work. Sometimes I falsely even complain how exhausting office life is when I come home at the end of the day. I will just drift about, desperately pretending to be one of the gainfully employed, until my lies come crashing down with ugly consequences,” he adds.

The poor fired guy was afraid of telling his family that he had run out of money and survived on borrowings from friends, while still pretending he's going to his old job. Ansar is the kind of boy who is industrious but too proud to tell us if anything was wrong. One day his mother gave him money for the travel home and instead he walked the five miles home and saved it for something important. This is the kind of boy he is, hardworking and with so much potential.

After a long struggle he finally succeeded in finding a temporary job as a construction worker with a building firm, but one day had a fall from the scaffolding and received serious head injury. The contractor he was working with refused to provide him best medical treatment and as a result he remained out of work for a long time because of his ailment.

He still leaves home daily to find work, as he is eager to earn a living, but returns feeling demoralised. “I lost my job, and now as a stopgap arrangement I'm selling toothbrushes door-to-door. I am too ashamed to tell what kind of work I am doing at the present, so I am always reluctant to go home and face my wife,” says Ansar. How long Ansar’s state of joblessness will continue? Nobody knows.