6 - Travel Abroad: Recollections of Domestic Workers

Summary

In April 1999 I met Leli, a girl from Bajawa, kabupaten Ngada, who had just completed a two year contract working as a maid overseas. She had a stopover to visit her brother, a Catholic priest in Makassar, before catching the next ship to travel back to Flores. During Leli's two-week stay, she frequently visited my boarding house which I shared with her acquaintances (teachers from Flores). I made her a cup of tea, putar teh, and we chatted for hours on end. Leli was a shy, petite 20-year-old woman, the youngest of a farming family of seven children. It was obvious how her brother adored Leli, saying how special and good she was to work abroad for the sake of raising the family's income. The term he used, rela berkorban or ready to self sacrifice, which is commonly used for an Indonesian war hero, is considered appropriate because she is known for remitting most of her monthly earnings. But, from Leli's perspective, her travel symbolized the beginning of widening roles through personal autonomy. “I know now I can go and do things by myself,” she said proudly, summing up her experience of travel abroad. The three of us — Leli, her brother, and I — parted at Port Makassar when we took her aboard the PELNI ship sailing for home in Flores.

Different spaces and subject positions

Unlike this vignette which indicates the importance of subjectivity in the young woman's travel abroad, much research on domestic workers has documented problematic relations between employees and employers in the place of employment (Meldrum 2000, p. 3). Other recent research has highlighted how migrant domestic workers have been subordinated not only by their employers but also by their urban host society (Momsen 1999, p. 1). Among others, Robinson (2000a) has studied Indonesian women working as domestics in the Middle East, pointing out the inadequacy of binary frameworks in understanding the complexities of this transnational movement.