I've been operating in the Middle East for ages and have been around multiple countries and met and befriended many people from multiple nations here, one of those places being Bahrain. I haven't kept the closest contact with the people I know there but when I last spoke to them, they said Bahrain had privatized it's electricity and water to a foreign company and now their bills have gone up, while salaries (and job prospects) are not great.

A lot of people are struggling over there; Bahrain doesn't have an economy that can compare with its neighbors. With privatization, people are struggling even worse, and though there's been some terrible friction between the shias and sunnis living there, there's certainly folks saying that they're both probably going to end up cooperating in this struggle. Other Arab countries apparently do send monetary aid to Bahrain but corruption tends to lead to much of it evaporating.