By Lily Aw
Embarking on a life as an overseas worker….means entering a seemingly endless cycle of longing — forever reaching for your dream abroad and pining for the home you’ve left behind.
—-Aurora Almendral
Many FDWs leave their home and their family to work in Singapore out of economic necessity.
Home Away from Home?
The Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics, a voluntary welfare organization, has studied FDW psychosocial well-being and published the results in Home sweet home? Work, life and well-being of foreign domestic workers in Singapore in March 2015.
Several points from the executive summary are sobering reminders of the strain many of them feel they live under. For example, FDWs work an average of thirteen hours a day, and forty percent do not have a weekly day off. For over half of the FDWs, their passports are kept in “safekeeping” by their employers. Almost a third of the FDWs have had their employers searching their room, their belongings, or their cellphone records. Almost three-quarters of FDWs have experienced restrictions on telephone calls that they can make, or restrictions to the people they may talk to, and also restrictions on their physical movements around the home and neighborhood.
These are not easy conditions to work in, and are even more onerous if one is in unfamiliar surroundings, working for exacting employers that one may not be able to communicate smoothly with.
Leaving the Children Behind
The drawing shows a woman cuddling a baby, with tears streaming down her face. The woman is probably the child’s mother. Her bags are packed and there is an airplane in the background. This is a FDW going to work in a foreign land, leaving her young child behind.
For many people in developing countries, working abroad provides an opportunity to earn much more than they would earn at home, and therefore affords them the possibility of lifting families out of poverty.
No mother would choose to leave a helpless child behind if she could do otherwise. This woman is leaving her baby and heading to a strange new family, a different culture, and an uncertain community in a foreign land.
Will her child be well? Would the baby know her after two years? Will her husband take on a mistress? Will the money she sends home be wisely spent? Will she be exploited by her agent and her employer?
Lily Aw is the clinical lead for a Primary Care. Network. For the past thirty years, she has driven across town from home to her clinic to attend to her patients. In the past year, however, her journey has included a stop to play with her grand-daughter who has totally and irrevocably captured her heart!
The commentary and vignette were reproduced with permission from the book “Being Human, Stories from Family Medicine” edited by Cheong Pak Yean and Ong Chooi Peng and published in 2021 by the College of Family Physicians Singapore.
Pictures of illness experiences were drawn by NUS medical students in workshops conducted from 2012-2017 by A/Prof Cheong Pak Yean. Senior family physicians subsequently shared vignettes and commentaries based on the pictures.
