As the Kingdom forges its way forward, fortifying its physical infrastructure and building top-notch higher educational facilities, there is one rule of thumb that is necessary for resolving some of the difficulties of daily life: ingenuity reigns. This comes to mind in light of the situation that developed at the Al-Ahsa Maternity and Women's Hospital when a woman who was 23-weeks pregnant and in severe pain was refused admission to the emergency room because she did not have a photocopy of her family registry card. She did, indeed, have the original with her but was unable to make a photocopy at the hospital because the hospital's photocopier was on the blink. While hers may have been the most critical of the cases refused admission, there was a line of other patients experiencing the same delay for the same reason. We admit that we don't have a ready solution to the problem, but it seems to us that someone at that hospital should have come up with one that did not demand that someone drive around the city for an hour looking for somewhere to make a photocopy. The husband of the pregnant woman finally found a copy machine at an Internet café. Cumbersome bureaucracies are universal today, and the Arab world certainly holds no monopoly on bureaucracies that sometimes stretch into the absurd. And, certainly, the workers at the Al-Ahsa Maternity and Women's Hospital were following both written regulations and the orders of their superiors when they refused to admit the patients without the photocopy of their family registry card. But what would have happened if these were life-and-death cases? What if these were gunshot wounds? What if someone had been seriously injured and needed immediate treatment? One hopes that the rules would have been bent if a life were really on the line, though there are reasonable doubts that such would be the case given the experience of the pregnant woman. A bureaucracy is thought to be a largely inhuman structure, one peopled by mindless automatons. But that is not the case. The human beings who are part of that system must not lose sight of their own abilities to solve problems. A bureaucracy should make our lives better. Unfortunately, in Al
