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PEOPLE ask me about the Saudi people. The world seems to have a strange love-hate relationship with them and with their country; strange because it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that no other country has benefited the poor population of the world as much as this country and its people have. However, it is the nature of the one who receives to hate the one who gives. And so we hear some expats, for example, talk disparagingly and critically about the extravagance of the palaces and villas, the fact that many ordinary Saudi citizens are not very well-educated, that women are not allowed to drive or to work in most normal managerial, sales or secretarial jobs, that Saudis like to eat out a lot and so on; forgetting that if it were not for precisely these things, many of them would not have been working here, doing the jobs and running the businesses that they do.