Children and Family
The main reason why most Indonesian women leave their home to work as domestic workers in another country is to provide their families and their selves with a better future. For those who have children, migrating for work means being separated from their children for long periods of a time, trading emotional support for financial support. To put this in perspective for those of you reading this who have children yourselves, imagine leaving your 1-year-old to go work in a foreign country for two years - yes that means not seeing your toddler for two years - and then going home for a couple of weeks before having to return back to work for another two years! Of course there are many employers who are understanding of this separation process and will allow their domestic workers to go home once a year, but it is far more common for domestic workers to do a two year stint before they are able to visit home. In addition to the physical separation experienced between mothers and children, many employers in Singapore do not allow domestic workers to maintain contact through cellular devices, and have a strict rule in which the women can only call home once a week or once a month using the landline with the employers present during all conversations. There are also many employers who are not like that and support the maintenance of the bond between their domestic worker and her child(ren). During my time in Singapore, I met employers from both ends of the spectrum – individuals who enforce strict rules about social contact with both family back home and neighbours and friends in Singapore; and others who allow domestic workers to invite friends over to their houses for get togethers and provide their domestic workers’ children with money and luxurious gifts. There was even one employer who went to Indonesia to attend the wedding of her domestic worker’s child.
For the domestic workers in my study who had children, the geographical distance was an obvious struggle for maintaining the mother-child bond; however, a consistent finding was that those women enjoyed working for employers who also had children because caring for the children of others was a coping mechanism for their inability to care for their own children. Bonding with employers’ children was also a coping mechanism for a few of the women in my study who did not have good relationships with their employers. Because many domestic workers do the cooking and feeding, food was central to the relationship that they have with their employers’ children. Because many of the Indonesian women in my study come from impoverished families, when the women talked about their food security, they always mentioned concern for what their children and family members were eating while they were working in Singapore - despite how limited their own access to food may be. In fact, when the women had an abundance of food, they often worried more about their family’s food intake, and actually felt guilty for having access to so much food because they were unable to share it with their families. Though mothers were constantly worrying about their children, they knew that the sacrifice to earn money for their children’s schooling was worth the loss of being apart. |