A post by Cassandra Tan

A post by Cassandra Tan on 20 November 2016 at 14:31

https://www.facebook.com/casgal/posts/10210342133885313

My first passenger today brought me to tears and I had to hold it back till I dropped him off.

At 5.46am, I got a booking from Bt Timah Road. It didn’t state what number, just the road name. I called him, he said he didn’t know what number or where he was. He just said he was sitting at a bus stop at Bt Timah Road.
Bt Timah Road is so long. I asked him to describe what he saw nearby. He said cars, trees, at a bus stop. I asked him to look for the bus stop number, I got silence and muffling sounds.
Sensing something very wrong,
I said…just sit there and wait for me. I will find you!

From where I was, I thought…if the booking came to me. He must be at the few bus stops nearest to me, but Bt Timah Road was left and right. So I tried the right side first.

There he was… a lone Indian foreign worker sitting at the bus stop, looking around aimlessly.

I stopped my car, asked him if he had booked a car. He nodded. He opened the front door and asked if he could sit in front politely as he will vomit if he sit behind(his words).
He got in, I offered him a plastic bag and a sweet which he politely declined.

I confirmed his dropoff address, he nodded. He was upset. So I drove on, leaving him to calm down.

Halfway through, I asked him if he was okay. He nodded.

So I asked why he was at that bus stop (very quiet corner) so early that morning. He said he walked there.
I said from where.
He said from home.

Apparently home was where I was sending him now….very far from where he was.

So I casually mentioned…. wow that’s a very long walk.

So the talk continues…

Me: So where are you from?
He: India.
Me: U ok?
Silence.
Me: U work here?
He: Ya.
Me: How long?
He: 6 months now.

I then offered him some tissues and he took to wipe his tears…

Me: It’s ok. You can talk.
Silence then…..then he spoke.
(After this, I was quiet for a long time while he spoke)
His next words:
my wife die after born my baby girl.

In that little bit of English that he could speak….
He went on to say he and his wife were orphans at an orphanage and grew up together and fell in love.
They had to “betroth”(his word “sell”) their baby girl to a family in their village so they had money to pay for doctor visits for her pregnancy. The baby was supposed to be turned over to the family at age 12.
His wife died during childbirth and the family had claimed the baby girl after the hospital turned her over to them.

This man sitting next to me now will never have the chance to see his baby girl or even put his wife to rest.

After I dropped him off, I declined to take his fare and even wanted to give him money for an airfare home.
He simply refused to take it and said no use go home.

He just said “Thank you for hear me” and left.
He probably needed to be alone now.

4 hours later when I finished my driving…. as I was clearing my things, I found 2 $10 notes in a slot on the passenger door. He had stuck them there after I refused to take his fare.

I tried calling him on the same number…. it has been off the last many hours.

My dear friends, give your kids and partner a good cuddle and many kisses today please!

*Update* 21/11/116

I managed to call through the phone this morning. It was picked up by another Indian man who said the phone is actually his and the man (his friend) had left this morning for home.
I asked how?
He said “Boss give money send”.

He told me also….no call here again.

I hope he will be blessed and find peace within himself soon.

I didn’t expect this post to go viral but thank you to everyone who shared to let people know what some of our foreign workers face.

Thoughts for FYP:

Is it possible to draw responses from Singaporeans about their reflection, thoughts, experience about/with migrant workers?

Existing solution: MWAW Lunch Tag and ICOON

• MWAW 2016 • Lunch Tag #1 & #2

Have you ever wondered how a genuine conversation with people who helped built the infrastructure of your home will go? Do you want a chance to meet people you would otherwise pass by, and actually interact with them?

The two Lunch Tags allow two people who would have never otherwise met to sit down and connect over a simple lunch. RSVP here: http://tinyurl.com/rsvpmwaw !

Lunch Tag #1
31st Jan, 9am – 1pm, at Yale-NUS College Elm Dining Hall
This will kick-start with a friendly lohei decoration competition involving both participants and migrant workers. After which, everyone will be paired up to have lunch together at the Yale-NUS College Elm Dining Hall.

Lunch Tag #2
3rd Feb, 11.30am – 3pm, at Botanic Gardens
In the style of a picnic, this Lunch Tag will take place out in the nature at Botanic Gardens. There will also be games where participants will interact with foreign domestic workers from the HOME Shelter in a different setting than what we usually do.

https://scontent-sin6-1.xx.fbcdn.net/t31.0-8/12622326_1110041615702747_8802435550716071044_o.jpg

Through a meal, people could have a more personal conversation to know each other. How would my FYP be different from this existing event is that:

It would not be a big event. For a meet up, there will only be 3 locals and 3 migrant workers.
I will document each session in the form of either photography, audio, or video, to be later be compiled for my installation.
I will design a set of conversation starters, accompanied by English and Tamil or Bengali translation. If needed, I will also design pictograms to help the conversation flow seamlessly.

http://www.icoon.eu/images/frontimages/editions_communicator/icoon-bildwoerterbuch-communicator.png

News coverage of migrant workers in Singapore

Efforts that have been taken to improve the lives of migrant workers in recent years, as compiled by TODAY:

http://www.todayonline.com/singapore/big-read-making-singapore-better-place-workers-who-come-afar-0

Through her interactions with the foreign workers, Ms Sim notes that many have sought help from the NGOs (non-governmental organisations). “The Government, the unions, and NGOs have done their fair bit,” she says. “So (now) it’s for Singaporean individuals to know what role they can play… to show basic respect for another individual and better co-exist together.”

An MOM (Ministry of Manpower) spokesperson says the ministry is “heartened by various efforts from the different groups showing their appreciation towards these workers”.

She adds: “Some Singaporeans have also reached out to some of these workers in their own ways through various ground-up initiatives throughout the year, or by volunteering their time with NGOs.”

Stories of migrant workers:

http://www.todayonline.com/singapore/big-read-searching-good-life-miles-home-0

Thought for FYP:

How to encourage the public to have more respect towards the hardworking migrant workers? What are the ways to do so?

Solution from a Visual Designer

What I potentially make for my FYP is an installation featuring:

A video or photo of a migrant workers telling their storiesInspiration: Singapore Dream by Sean Cham
Bashar came to Singapore in 2008, and has worked in many different companies, but mostly as an electrician and engineer. He was born in Bangladesh, and left for Singapore after a few months of studying in Medical School at a young age of 20. Bashar has four other siblings, one of whom is his twin brother. They have grown up together since young, doing everything together. When Bashar left for Singapore to work, his twin brother felt lonely and joined him in Singapore a year later. He left Medical School to support his family, as they were facing financial difficulties and his father was ill. His father passed away two years after he left for Singapore, due to blood cancer. He was given a choice to go back to Bangladesh to visit his father, but he chose not to. He had to work hard to pay hospital bills, amounting to S$10,000, and worked even on weekends to earn money for the family. When he isn’t working, he will spend his Sundays at East Coast Park or Kallang River with his twin brother, enjoying a quiet and peaceful stroll. His dream now is for his younger brother, age 19, to complete his degree in Medical School and be a doctor. Bashar, together with his twin, works to pay for his younger brother’s education, in the hope that he fulfills the dream he never had the chance to complete. Source: http://www.nvpc.org.sg/newsletters/-/asset_publisher/qxyfn1XUjh5T/content/singapore-dream-a-photography-series?inheritRedirect=false

2. A pair of migrant worker’s shoes for the visitors to walk in.

Inspiration:
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus explains to Scout that “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (36).

3. A booth for people to write their heartfelt gratitude towards migrant workers.

Inspiration:

#migrantmail was a collaboration between Geylang Adventures and Waiting for Lorry. They went around collecting handwritten letters and taking polaroids of migrant workers with the objective of curbing homesickness by sponsoring the letter back to their hometown.

The collected letters might be collated in a book or uploaded to a website. It should be translated to Bengali, Tamil, Mandarin, etc. so the migrant workers can read them as well 🙂 Published by The Young Entrepreneur Mastery, 2004
It contains heartfelt letters from youth.

5. Make a visual journey of my finding processes. It would feature the photos that I take.. The email excerpts..

6. Visualizing the population of migrant workers in Singapore. The map can contain: places of work, residence, entertainment to show how close are they to us in daily life. I hope to encourage people to be more friendly to the migrant workers, everywhere they are.

Inspiration:

World Processor 1988 2014 Igo Günther © Knechtel Photography.

Journal: International Migrant Workers’ Use of Mobile Phones to Seek Social Support in Singapore

International Migrant Workers’ Use of Mobile Phones to Seek Social Support in Singapore

by Arul Chib, Holley A. Wilkin, and Sri Ranjini Mei Hua

Abstract

International migrants often need social support to deal with an unfamiliar environment and reduce stress caused by prevailing attitudes in their host country, as well as that induced by distance and separation from their family. This study investigates whether mobile phones facilitate or inhibit migrants’ ability to seek the social support needed to reduce the stress they experience in their host country. Further, gender differences are examined and discussed. A quantitative survey of men (n 56), primarily Bangladeshis working in blue-collar occupations, and women (n 60), primarily Filipina domestics, was conducted in Singapore. For women, mobile use alleviated stress by increasing social support; emotional support had the greatest impact on their psychological well-being. Male migrant workers were more likely to experience stress the more they used their mobile phones and when receiving increased emotional support. This finding is in contrast to traditionally held assumptions about the beneficial impacts of mobile phones. We caution against treating immigrants as a homogeneous group, and recommend inclusion of variables such as gender to understand the role of technology-mediated social support in alleviating migrant stress. We further propose that policies and programs facilitating transnational communication for low-income migrants need to be examined carefully in terms of their unintended impacts.

Learning points:

Migration stress that Migrant Workers face is related to:

Poor mental health that manifests in anxiety, depression, apathy, feelings of isolation.
Homesick and loneliness.
Discrimination in workplace and society.
Financial constraints on social and self-improvement activities.
Interpersonal relationship issues.
Language barrier.
Financial difficulties.

*I need to pin down one issue that I will work on.

2. Despite many organizations that are available to help migrant workers, such as Transient Workers Count Too and HOME, the migrant workers can’t access the service due to restrictions enforce by their employers or a general lack of awareness.

3. Bangladeshi construction workers are more difficult to integrate to the society due to their coming from lower socioeconomic brackets and not a good command of English. They are commonly known as “unskilled” manual laborers.

* They might be my main subject of research.

Deeper on the Migrant Topic

This afternoon, I had a phone conversation with someone from StandUpFor.SG

What’s interesting about the conversation was he helped me to dig deeper why I want to work on this topic about the relationship between migrant workers and Singaporeans.

Now, I know how it feels like to be powerless knowing other people gossiped about me. I know how sad it is to not be able to defend myself.

Let’s look back at my previous post about the incident of a bus driver scolding a foreign worker for talking on his phone.

Sheryl Chen, 22, Sharing Her Encounter with Xenophobia

Everyone on the bus was silent seeing the scene, except Sheryl Chen who stood up and defend the foreign worker. Why were they being apathetic?

Because it is a way to avoid sadness from being empathetic, by being numb. (I will do more research about this).

And how do foreign workers avoid being sad, receiving such bad impression from other people in the society? By not talking to them.

If people are avoiding each other, there will be no conversation. Therefore, the problem would not be solved.

Luckily, there are some initiatives being done to foster the conversation. One of them is Human Library SG. I am thinking to volunteer as a sub-committee to delve into this society problem deeper 😀

[IMPORTANT]

The diction of my future FYP Result is important. Instead of using negative world, like “Don’t be suspicious towards others”, I should use more affirmative words like “Let’s build trust”.

A new light in my FYP progress

I met Tong Yee, who is the director of The Thought Collective in The Social Wave – Flagship Panel Series Discussion by NTC and NTUES. I told him about my FYP project about kindness, and he connected me to Khoon, who oversees Little India trails.

What is interesting about Little India is, it contains people from different nationalities as well as locals. From our discussion, I learned that as the space is quite small, suspicion is increasing among strangers living there.

What I could potentially be the directions for my FYP are:

How to connect people from different cultures? What kind of universal kindness language that could help dissolve suspicion among people?
What is stopping someone from trying to have conversation with strangers, and how could we solve the problem?

There has been an initiative happened as a response to this issue, called Kapor Chatparty by Octopus Residency. I will contact the person involved soon to know about Little India community better, and see how I can contribute to the society using my FYP.

Difficult to be Kind

After our first FYP Meeting on 12 August 2016, I had a lot of input to improve my FYP topic from Angeline and my friends. Previously, I thought of encouraging university students to be kind to others. However, the urge does not feel too urgent to be implemented on university setting. There is no real problem there. Moreover, the idea of making an app for people to indicate that they need help, could be misused easily by robbers, for example.

Hence, I needed to look at kindness from another angle. During the discussion, we felt that sometimes it is hard to help strangers. There are suspicion that this stranger might not have a good intention. We might be used, etc. On a larger context, this bad assumption also happen worldwide, especially in Europe where a lot of migrants, unknown people, come to the countries.

Therefore, I will look closer on this issue this week and come up with refined keywords for my further research.

Kindness Idea

This evening, I brainstormed with my boyfriend about how to bring this kindness value into action.

The idea is to create an APP. For now, my target users would be university students first.

University students can use the app to help each other. For example, Lydia needs a help from someone to buy her a food from canteen because she is sick. She can request for a help from the help, and the students with the app active nearby will receive a notification. Then, someone could buy her food from the canteen and deliver it to her location. The helper then, could receive a point, which then can be used to ask for help from others as well.

With this app, I hope that more friendships can emerge, and people become kinder to each other.

FYP Project: Kindness

Another topic that interests me is about kindness. I aspire to be a kinder person as I grow older. By being kind to others, I hope that the people around me will be affected, and they can spread the kindness to other people as well.

By the way, I did a project about sharing love to others, targeted to university freshmen back when I was in year 2. Check out the project here: Bud: share love to each other

lydialex

A documentation about my creative journey

General brainstorm