Download An estimated six million Indonesian women work overseas as maids and babysitters in wealthy neighboring nations like Singapore, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.
Most of these women come from small villages.
They go abroad for years at a time to fulfill their own dreams or those of their loved ones - to buy a motorcycle, to build a house or to put their kids through school.
They leave behind their husband and their children.
Esther de Jong went to the village of Cimanggu in West Java where the majority of the working women are overseas.
The mothers of most of these children are abroad, working as maids or babysitters.
Zikiri is one of them - his mother left him and his sister two years ago. He is nine and his sister is only three.
His father left, also, to work in the capital Jakarta, so Zikiri now lives with his Aunt Ai Syamsiyah.
“He has been with us for three months, because the other grandparents did not really take care of him properly. His mother only sent money once and that went to the sponsor who paid for her trip. So we take care of the kids, pay for his school fees.”
They don’t know exactly when she is coming back.
Most foreign workers go for two years at time - some for longer.
They sleep in cupboards or on the floor; many are given poor and insufficient food.
They are the first to get up and the last to go to bed.
According to the local rights group, Migrant Care, 20 percent of the female workers suffer abuse while abroad with cases of rape and physical violence.
Others are not paid.
Despite these horror stories millions of women are ready to take a chance.
Lotte Kejser is from the International Labour Organization.
“There is a common expectation I guess both among families and parents of migrant workers as well migrant workers themselves that this is an opportunity to realize yourself; to make a better start in your life. In that regard the hazards, the problems, the challenges, are usual downplayed. Who has an interest in promoting them? Not the families who want to get the money, not the charloi or the recruitment agency that are both also making money by sending the migrant workers overseas. And of course migrant workers themselves have high hopes; they think this is the make and break for them; they know that those kind of changes where the family provides the collateral from the family savings is not something that comes around everyday and the alternative is worse.”
44-year-old Sukaezi sands pieces of wood inside his half built house.
He chooses not to listen whenever there is a story about a badly beaten maid or raped servant in the news.
The house he is working on is being paid for with the money his wife sends home.
He doesn’t know exactly when his wife will come back from Saudi Arabia, but he hopes by the end of this year.
She left two years ago leaving him to take care of their teenage daughter:
“In the beginning it was quite hard, but I got used to it slowly. It is hard, I have to be a women and a man, I have to do it, but it is all for our dream, to finish building our house and to put our kid through school. If that dream is fulfilled then my wife stays at home.”
Remittances from migrant workers are Indonesia’s second largest source of income after oil and gas.
Yet it’s hard to find evidence of that money here.
Most houses in the village are on stilts with walls made of bamboo, the wooden floors bend when you walk on them.
There is no running water and some families share toilets and bathrooms.
Labor activist, Lotte Kejser, says often rural migrant worker families don’t know how to manage their savings.
“Because they have poor education and poor understanding of basic financial and economic issues they end up consuming at a higher level, not really investing productively and after some time of course the money runs out and they have to go overseas again and that becomes a cycle of dangerous and hazardous migration. Rather than, let’s say, building up the family assets and increasingly gaining the capacity of having a productive life in Indonesia for the whole family.”
Fifteen-year-old Siti Patima’s sits outside and plays with her three-year-old sister.
Her mother has been overseas for eight years.
I ask her who takes care of them.
“Siti does. It is really hard. I have to do everything alone in the morning, make breakfast alone and go to school by myself.”
Her mother is in Saudi Arabia now and will come back in three years.
Until then it is Siti who cooks, cleans and takes care of her younger sister.
“I really did not want my mother to go. I did not support that in anyway. If it was not for my dream I would not allow my mother to go away. I have a dream to go to school. I want to become a doctor to help people. That’s a very expensive dream and my mum does not want to destroy my dream.”
