Archive for the ‘Foreigners’ Category
Sepak Tak-roar
At an open field near Kallang Stadium, construction workers take a break from work to play Sepak Takraw. The temporary court is made from plastic poles and tapes.
Stick them in
God is everywhere
Moment of Peace: A Bangladeshi worker breaks from road-paving work to say his afternoon prayers at a void deck. A sarong, a cloth mat and an accurate sense of direction is sufficient to facilitate the religious ritual practised five times a day by traditional Muslims, regardless the location.
Urban cricket
Catch no ball: Indian foreign workers of Toh Guan dormitories enjoy a game of cricket at a nearby open field. A sandy patch has emerged in the middle of the field, like a man-made Mediterranean sea, after years of cricket games at the same site.
The world is my playground
Bring it on: A foreign worker from Toh Guan dormitories retrieves the ball during a Sunday football game on an open field nearby. The Sunday kickabout has brought together foreign workers of many nationalities, including Malaysians, Thais, Myanmese and Chinese, who enjoy a great time despite the unkempt condition of the field.
One last juggle: The players strip their football gear in preparation to return to their dormitories. Meanwhile, a few continue to monkey around with the ball as if they have not had enough fun for the past three hours.
Magic Sunday Bus
Rush to wait, wait to rush: Foreign workers of Jurong Island gather at a field near Jurong East Central. They are waiting to board the shuttle buses which will ferry them back to their dormitories. Working and living in a restricted area means a schedule of limited leisure activities for these workers, who only get to shop for groceries once a week on Sunday when there is shuttle bus service to the mainland. Outbound buses leave the island at 9:30am, while inbound buses leave Jurong East Central at 7:30pm. Bound by the infrequency of transport, it is impossible for workers running quick errands to return to the dormitories earlier. On the other hand, they cannot travel too far, for fear of missing the last bus. Many of them thus choose to congregate near this ferry point as evening beckons – reading, drinking and chatting – while waiting to catch the earliest bus home.
Will work for p(l)ay
Mr. Mahabubur Rahman goes fishing in his free time in India, not here though, with the lack of rivers
Us and Them
And after all we’re only ordinary men
Me, and you
God only knows it’s not what we would choose to do
- Pink Floyd; Us And Them
Rent
They came and they conquered Geylang Lorong 4
Hey there mister can you tell me what happened to the seeds I’ve sown
Can you give me a reason sir as to why they’ve never grown
They’ve just blown around from town to town
Till they’re back out on these fields
Where they fall from my hand
Back into the dirt of this hard land
- Bruce Springsteen; This Hard Land
*
Some of them, they’ve been here for four years, others, perhaps a decade. “There’s one thing I still don’t understand,” Mahabubur Rahman takes an unpeeled fruit out of the plastic bag, both of us waiting for each other’s revelation – I, his question and he, my answer.
“Why all the old people here, alone?”
“Alone?”
“Yah lah, like, the son is working in big company, stay big house, then the mother sweeping the roads, stay small house. She so old already, you know?”
The fruit cracks open.
“In Bangladesh, all of us sons must look after our parents. Everyone lives together. Parents cannot work so hard, only children. Old people here, not good life.”
To this well-built worker, the older generation here are living worse off than the foreigners themselves.
I’m now reaching out for an old exercise book, the kind a Singaporean kid bulk-buys in primary school. The back cover narrates a splendid script of Our Shared Values.
Family as the basic unit of society.
Community support and respect for the individual.
Along a row of old shophouses that are living quarters for foreign workers, this sign was especially poignant to me
All the text, they’ve been drilled into us as if we are blank sheets aligned and pressed perfectly around the spool of a typewriter. The hammerings of the keys give a permanent black but the words are barely alive when on paper. Oh, this theory nation.
“When I was working at Seletar, I used to notice a family. The old couple doing their own things. Go to work separately then come home separately…”
Mahabubur is still confused. I’m not helping much, apparently.
“The boy also alone!”
I used to think that we acquired our foreign workers only on a “rent” basis. Temporary, transient – they will come and they will go. But this seems to apply to us as well. Do we temporarily occupy a certain home, only to leave and upgrade ourselves to elsewhere later on? Do we forsake past relationships entwined in the previous spaces we had grown up at, and now, grown out of?
Are even our families “for rent”?
Is there a difference between a Singaporean who toils here, only to see his relationships and family fade, and a foreigner who works just as hard in a land where he has no kinship?
“In my village, everyone knows one another. Four or five families come out, makan together all the time. If you are my brother, you’re always my brother. Here, nobody talks to each other lah.”
While the debate at Serangoon Gardens goes on, it has been a breath of fresh air to hear what a foreigner himself thinks of Singaporean society. Nary a murmuring of malice despite the odds he faces here, Mahabubur pondered upon a puzzlement that I hope I would eventually have the answers for.
“Where is Chomp Chomp?”
With regards to the foreign workers housing saga, click here to listen to the views of the Residents’ Action Committee Expelling Extremely Smelly Trespassers, or RACEES for short.
Courtesy of www.mrbrown.com
Foreign workers and their contest for space
The recent uproar from a group of Serangoon Garden Residents over foreigners moving into their estates really highlights this contest of space that we have been looking at. In all senses, foreign workers hardly have any space in this country — be it a space to stay, a space to play and even a space to say. Thus, it will be very interesting to see how they handle this lack of space. While we are working on what we have, let us keep a lookout for this too.
On another note, I feel disappointed at how xenophobic many Singaporeans are. How different is a “foreign worker” from “foreign talent”? Both are here to make livings, but simply because the latter has much more money, we give them the spaces they can afford. Moreover, it’s not as if we don’t need foreign workers because they take on the jobs that few would want to do. Beyond just xenophobia, this contest has a hint of class discrimination too. Just because foreign workers are poor they are more likely to resort to crime? The issue of foreign workers devaluing the value of their assets was the most selfish one I felt, we suddenly forget that these workers were people too!
