Wahab Must Be Resting A Little Easier Now
First of all, thank you. All you generous people who got in touch after reading my previous post. I had hoped to raise S$300 for Nasrin. I now have S$720. Thank you. So much. We will send Nasrin the S$300 she needs for sewing lessons and a sewing machine, and donate the rest of the...
An Appeal, And A Thank-you Note
Women in Bangladesh are a cloistered lot. Most look after the house and take care of kids while their husbands go out to work. Some husbands, we’ve discovered, leave and never return. Or they leave and come back, dead. Or they leave, come back, and die unexpectedly. What happens then? Some women fall apart, get...
A Little Bit Of Hope
Three months ago, I wrote about a Bangladeshi worker who left his village for a job in Singapore, and returned home in a coffin. His widow, Maloti, was a mess when we met. She had sent her two older children to an orphanage. And she could barely take care of her youngest. Amazing how the...
Would You Accept A Job With No Annual Leave?
Insane, but true. Of the 170,000 foreign domestic helpers currently working in Singapore, more than half do not get a regular day off. Imagine being on duty round the clock, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Imagine the relentless stress. No weekends to look forward to. No time or space to just chill....
Wahab Goes Home
In the end, the pressure of going home proved too much for Abdul Wahab. 26 days after touching down in Dhaka, he died. His wife says he had heart problems. Wahab had been stressed out and depressed. Unable to deal with the loansharks who hounded him constantly. He withdrew into himself. Lost weight. And it seems, eventually, lost hope. His story sounds...
The High Commission
The Bangladeshi High Commission in Kuala Lumpur sits on a leafy road near the Petronas Twin Towers. It’s a posh-ish area, for posh-ish people. No wonder officials feel compelled to call in the police whenever they see too many workers camping just outside their gate. All those grasping people. What would the neighbours think? They’ve...
The Shelter
The first thing you see as you walk up the stairs is a pile of bags. Suitcases, rucksacks nylon carriers, a few plastic bags. Worn, torn, battered. Like the souls of the men you eventually meet. There are nearly 80 of them huddled inside two rooms on the top floor of a three-storey shophouse just...
The Story Of A Sex Worker
We meet her on a humid afternoon, in a shelter for abused domestic helpers. It’s not exactly the right place for her, but she has no choice really. Let’s just call her T. Her story isn’t so unusual. She was lured from her home country to Johor Baru more than a year ago. By a...
