B A N G L A D E S H
Financial Gains, Emotional Pains
by Qurratul Ain Tahmina
DHAKA — Faruque Ahmed, a retired employee of the Bangladesh Army, went to take up a mechanic's job with Saudi Arabia's defence ministry in 1986, leaving behind his pregnant wife. Ahmed first saw his son two years later, when he came home for a month's holiday.
Soon after going back to work, he had kidney-related problems that required emergency surgery by a doctor at a Saudi Arabian military hospital, to which he had free access.
But since then, Ahmed has not been well, because he was given the wrong treatment. By the time he finally returned home in 1996, he was incapable of work and severely ill, and had not been compensated by his employer.
Overall, Ahmed says, he has been lucky to have a prudent wife who had used the remittances he sent over the years to buy land. "I sacrificed the best part of our conjugal life, hoping to gain financial comforts," observes Ahmed. "Now thanks to my wife's wise steps, I can survive and maintain my family."
Faruque Ahmed brought his story to an Asian conference on migration held in Bangladesh in October, which focused on health and well-being issues of migrant workers and their families.
An average of 200,000 Bangladeshi workers, mostly male, leave legally to work each year in more than 20 countries including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Malaysia and Brunei. The number of undocumented migrant workers is nearly equal, if not more, researchers say.
Official statistics say some 3.4 million people from this country of 133 million people have gone to work overseas. Their yearly remittances of two billion dollars a year make this one of the Bangladesh's chief sources of foreign currency earnings.
But, as people like Ahmed know only too well, this boon to the economy comes at a high cost to the workers' family lives.
The families apparently gain financially, but even that gain suffers when sudden crises, like summary deportations of workers, be it when they are caught without papers or found with sexually transmitted infections and HIV, happen.
Occupational accidents and diseases are also risks that can shorten workers' overseas stints, not to mention deaths related to work.
HIV testing is mandatory for migrants in many labour-receiving countries. When an HIV-positive person returns, his or her family is stigmatised, ostracised and the workers are left with nearly no means of survival.
The wives of migrant men often do not have clear knowledge of sexually transmitted infections. Even if they know about safe sex, they cannot negotiate it with their husbands in this patriarchal society.
Separation creates its own subtle complexities. "When I was in Saudi Arabia in the late 1980s, I had a friend whose son used to call him uncle," says Anisur Rahman Khan, secretary general of the Welfare Association for Repatriated Bangladeshi Employees (WARBE).
Likewise, "when I came home after a long gap, my youngest son wouldn't let me get near his mother!" he recalled. "I have seen in some cases," says Khan, "the wife developing an extramarital affair while the husband is away, and vice versa."
These stories are also familiar to activists and migrant workers from Sri Lanka and the Philippines, which send mostly women migrants.
Bangladesh has barred the migration of unskilled women at different times between 1991 and 2002. The latest ban was in 1998, from which nurses were exempted, and which the government is now considering lifting.
Despite the current ban, some 45,000 Bangladeshi women have left to work illegally in Gulf countries since 1998, unofficial estimates say.
Rita Afsar, a researcher with the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies who did a study among Bangladeshi workers in the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait in 2000, says women tend to bear double burdens in overseas work and worries about their families at home.
"When a woman goes abroad for work, she loses out if her husband is not faithful and dependable," she explains. "That's why women try to send money to her parents or relatives. If she leaves behind children, then too she depends largely on her own family for looking them after."
"When a man migrates," observes Afsar, "he usually leaves his wife and children with his joint or extended family". The wife's responsibility and burden increases because she has to manage her husband's activities, and "has to play the dual role of mother and father to the children".
Sheikh Rumana, a returnee and the general secretary of the Bangladeshi Women Migrant Association, cites cases where couples go through stressful relations that often lead to breakups.
But Afsar says that family breakups are more often the cause rather than the result of women migrating for work. "On the whole, though at the costs of her health and well-being, a woman gains importance in the family and some decision-making authority."
