No place to call home

This week we have to bring a story to class. This is the story that I did when I was in Thailand in 2005. It was published on Vietnam Investment Review.

No place to call home
Update: 18-7-2005
Tempted by the prospects of a better future, numerous females choose to leave their own country in search of work in a foreign land, while others unwittingly fall victim to the cruel trade of human trafficking. Either way, Nguyen Thi Cam Thuy finds out that life for a female migrant worker in Thailand is dirty, dangerous and degrading.

Burmese migrant worker accommodation in Thailand
“I want to go home.”
This is the dream of 23-year-old Thi Ai, a slim, long-dark-haired Vietnamese woman, who left her family in Daklak, a province in the centre of Vietnam for Ho Chi Minh City to look for work when she was only 16 years old. She was trafficked to Malaysia for one year as a sex worker, and her job was to serve men at six tables for 10 hours a day without any pay except for tips from customers. She was arrested in Thailand after escaping from Malaysia. Now she is living in the Home for Girls, in Pakred Island, Thailand.
Hers is not the only tragic story of a young girl being trafficked. In the far north of Thailand, in the village of Pong Hai, Mae Aye District, though only 37 years old, Nauui Yamsauuat, a small, pale-faced woman does not have much time for dreaming. She has been infected with HIV/AIDS which she contracted after leaving her family in a poor mountainous area to look for a job in Chiang Mai in 1986, and was tricked to work as a prostitute.
Chiang Mai is a destination for both Thai people and foreigners. Living in a crowded, ramshackle shanty with other Burmese workers toiling on construction sites, Ma Nan Mu Khan, a 36-year-old woman is expected to do the same amount of work as a man, but she is paid only 135 Baht ($3.27) per day in comparison with 180 Baht ($4.37) for men.
It is not only in Thailand, but also in all over the world, that migrant women are among the most vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, mainly because they are outside the legal protection of their homeland and because they work in jobs, such as domestic servants, prostitutes, entertainers, and contract manual labour, which are not covered by labour legislation. Their situation is made worse by the fact that they are usually young and poor, live in fear of losing their jobs, do not speak the language of the host country; are unaware that their rights are being infringed and normally do not know where to go for help.
Many also end up in a situation of debt bondage, having borrowed money to pay for the cost of obtaining an overseas job or having being duped by unscrupulous agents or employers, according to a research by International Labour Organisation (ILO), which was updated in 21 Feb, 2005.
In 2000, an estimated 175 million migrant workers, permanent immigrant, refugees and their dependents were living outside their country of origin or citizenship, according to ILO’s statistics. By the year 2005, this number rose to 185 million, according to recent statistics by the International Organisation of Migration. Women account for an increasing proportion of international migrants, from 47 per cent in 1960 to 49 per cent in 2000, reflecting the rising importance of family reunification, especially in more developed countries, according to ILO’s research.
In Thailand, there are at least two million migrant workers, 89 per cent of whom are from Burma, 55 per cent of this number are women. Most of them work in seafood factories or at construction sites. Women constitute only 25 per cent of Cambodian migrant workers, but among Laotians, more women than men are migrant workers, according to 2004 statistics from the Migrant Action Programme (MAP), an NGO based in Chiang Mai. This is due to the fact that Laotian men are not skilled at fishing – an industry occupied by many migrant men, according to Raks Thai Foundation. Most migrant workers who were asked about their motivation for migrating said they wanted to earn more money.
“My parents opposed my decision, but my family was so poor at that time. My father was sick; my mother had injured her leg. We needed money,” Nauui said. A couple persuaded her to come to Chiang Mai to work as a bar waitress, but trafficked her as a prostitute. She earned 1,500 Baht ($36.39) per month in Chiang Mai, but her savings were only 600 Baht ($14.55) per month due to the 2,000 Baht ($48.49) her owner had to pay police each month for her not having an ID card, she said.
Similar to Nauui’s case, Thi Ai (not her real name) was told to come to Malaysia to work as a housemaid with a salary of thousands of dollars per month. “I have never dreamed about such large amount of money,” she sadly smiled. Her mother died when she was only 6 years old. Her father got married to another woman. She decided to leave her family to live on her own in Ho Chi Minh City. She left her job as a bar waitress for Malaysia where she was trafficked to work in a karaoke bar without any salary for one year. “I have to fulfill my debt of $3,000 to the karaoke owner for giving me a job. I get tips of 2,000 – 3,000 ringgits ($520–$780) from customers each month, but I use it up for meals, accommodation and cosmetics,” she said.
However, some women said they migrate for other reasons than money. Mar Mar, a single, university-educated, 44-year-old Burmese woman has a different story to tell. In 1989 she opened an art gallery in Mandalay, a central city in Burma, with friends in 1989. The government then closed the gallery and arrested some of her friends, accusing them of being communists. After that, she opened another gallery in 1993 in Tachileik, a Burmese town near the border of northern Thailand, but it was closed again in 1996 because of fighting between the Burmese Army and the Mong Tai army. She decided to move to Chiang Mai to open her art gallery again. “Living and working in Chiang Mai is quite comfortable,” she said.
Mar Mar is a special case in Thailand. Almost all migrant women work in the agricultural sector, domestic jobs, entertainment, food processing, garment factories, sex service, or even in construction, according to “Untangling Vulnerability: A Study on HIV/AIDS Prevention Programming for Migrant Fishermen and Related Populations in Thailand” published by the Raks Thai Foundation.
Migrant workers are often relegated to the “three Ds” jobs – dirty, dangerous, and degrading. Jobs that national workers reject or are not available for, according to ILO. Ma Nan Mu Khan is living with her family in a crowded camp for Burmese workers at construction sites in Chiang Mai. More than 10 cramped cottages without bed, table, kitchen or toilet are crammed into about 100-square-metres (sqm). Forty residents share one toilet and an outdoor place in front of their accommodation is set aside for bathing and washing clothes. A woman living there earns only 135 Baht ($3.27) per day while a man with similar kind of work can earn 180 – 200 Baht ($4.37 - $4.85) per day. This is because women cannot work as hard as men, as some Burmese men and women at a construction site in Chiang Mai believe.
Most migrant women suffer in unhealthy, sometimes abusive conditions. “I had to work from 5pm to 5am every day,” Thi Ai said. “I was locked in a 20sqm room with about 16 women, most of them Vietnamese and Cambodian.” They were not allowed to go out. Meals and drinks were brought in when needed, she said.
“The first night with an American man was really terrible for me.” Her voice became softer. “I was very scared and cried a lot. The karaoke owner threatened to beat me if I did not satisfy that man.” She was asked to use ecstasy by a customer so that she could fully satisfy him. “That made me impossible to sleep then,” she said.
Some women are even sexually abused. A 14-year-old Burmese girl who works as shrimp peeler in Samut Sakorn, a southern province near the sea, was raped three months ago by a shrimp factory owner’s son, according to San Tun from Raks Thai Foundation.
Health is another problem for migrant workers. The Thai public often regard the over one million migrant workers in Thailand with illegal status as the source of many diseases. Yet these migrants and their dependents are not allowed easy access to health information and medical treatment, according to Raks Thai Foundation.
Migrant women suffer some serious diseases of the skin, stress related disorders, lung disease, malaria, dengue fever and elephantitis. By necessity, many migrants are forced to live with up to 10 or more people in close quarters, which creates conditions that spread contagious diseases like tuberculosis.
One of the most dangerous diseases that women migrants face is HIV/AIDS, said Jackie Pollock, Project Coordinator of Migrant Action Programme.
Nauui, from Pong Hai, knows this risk very well. “When I knew that I was infected with HIV, I was horribly desperate. In my work place in Chiang Mai, 30 had already died of AIDS-related diseases,” she said.
“Another four have AIDS and remain alive - including me,” she added.