INT'L MIGRANTS DAY/ BANGLADESH:
Wives at Home Worry about Husbands' Fidelity
Qurratul Ain Tahmina
SIRAJGANJ, Bangladesh, Dec 18 (IPS) - Hamida Begum (not her real name) of
this district in northern Bangladesh has a startled look about her. She
barely raises the veil from her face. The timid eyes look too prominent on
her thin and sharp face.
The women gathered at the office of a non-government organisation here
are rather ruthless in describing Hamida's misfortune. They mean sympathy,
but their lack of tact must hurt.
Mosammat Sahana Begum is a young woman, whose husband, like those of the
others, works in Malaysia, which draws the second biggest number of
Bangladeshi migrant workers after Saudi Arabia. There are more than 100,000
skilled workers in Malaysia, but the figure could rise to 300,000 if
undocumented workers are included.
"Our occasional worries about the fidelity of our husbands pale in
comparison to her woes," Sahana points at Hamida. "Her husband is always
straying."
"It would be 13 years since he first went to Malaysia," Hamida says.
"About three years back he came home and stayed for about a year and a half."
"This time he sent some money regularly for about a year," contemplates
Hamida. "But then on I haven't heard from him."
Hamida knows that her husband had married a Malaysian girl on his first
trip. "I hear he is no longer with her," says Hamida. "But I do not really
know what he is up to now."
Hamida has three sons and three daughters to take care of. "My eldest
son, still quite young, works as a handloom operator," says Hamida.
"Another son, about eight years of age, works as a helper. We have to
manage with the money these two bring."
Sahana's husband first went to Malaysia in 1995, at the peak of the
exodus of migrant labour to Malaysia. He came home for four years and went
again in March 2002. Two of Sahana's four children have been born and
conceived during his stay in that South-east Asian country.
"We women in Bangladesh observe 'purdah', but there men work side by
side girls," says Sahana. "The men who are smart are easily swayed to bad
directions." Sahana's comments cause a ripple of laughter in the group.
SHISUK, a non-government organisation working with the Sirajganj migrant
workers and their families since 1999, has so far organised 18 groups of in
total 180 women. More than one-third of the group members are wives of
migrant workers.
"They say that while at home their husbands demand sex even before the
bleeding period of forty days after childbirth is over," says Mosammat
Jobaida Khatun, a community organiser of SHISUK. "And they often wonder if
their husbands frequent other women while abroad."
"We hear accounts of men marrying there, even having children," Jobaida
says, although not all are like that.
Now that the Malaysian government has resumed taking Bangladeshi workers
after a suspension of seven years - the two countries signed a labour
agreement in October - among its major concerns is that of male workers
getting married to Malaysian women.
The Malaysian government included in the accord requirements that
Bangladeshi workers be aged from 18 to 40, be able to speak Malay or
English, have no criminal record - and cannot get married in Malaysia. The
men's contracts would be terminated as soon as he marries a Malaysian woman.
"We got to ensure that our men do not cause any social disturbances in
Malaysia," says Daliluddin Mondal, secretary, Bangladesh's Ministry of
Expatriates Welfare and Overseas Employment.
Sakiul Millat Morshed, SHISUK's executive director, agrees. "The workers
must have some accountability," says Morshed. "They are going to Malaysia
for working for a certain period only and not to get married and set up
homes."
"Previously when they had stopped taking our workers," says Mondal, ''we
were informally told that next to recruitment-related problems, such
marriages were the major reason for the 1996 freeze (on hiring of
Bangladeshi workers)".
Thanks to mobile phones now available in villages, the women can now
talk to their men abroad. But not all men call home regularly, often caught
up in the insecurities and hassles of an undocumented migrant's life - and
sometimes absorbed in new affections.
"There are constant pressures from home to send money," Mohammad Abdul
Khaleque, another of the NGO's community organisers and himself a returnee
from Malaysia, says, trying to explain the situation. "At one point some
(migrant workers) begin to feel deprived and used as a machine for earning
money."
"Frustrated, together with friends they then seek sexual pleasures,"
says Khaleque. "And often men form attachments while working together with
women."
Moina Begum's husband confessed to her that he gone with women several
times during his first stay in Malaysia of nearly five years. "This time
when he went back, he promised to me that he would not do it without
seeking my permission first," says Moina, not her real name.
"He now often tells me over phone of his desperations at weak moments,"
says Moina. "I advise him to pray in such moments. I say, I do not have
such thoughts, why should he?"
Aware of the emotional, physical and social conditions of migrant work,
SHISUK is also promoting condom use. The women here in Bangladesh are
informed about HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. "Prior to her
husband's coming home, a woman contacts me," says Bedana. "I then give her
condoms and show her the proper way to use those."
Abdul Mannan, a returnee, talks about a fellow worker who had kept up a
long relationship with a migrant worker from Indonesian. "All he earned in
seven years was spent after this woman who eventually left him for another
man."
While in Malaysia, Ainul Kabir had been prudent and regularly sent money
home. "I never took that path because I could see that friends who kept
girlfriends needed to borrow money every month,'' he says. Men too stress
that not all of them do this.
"Our men marrying there is certainly not a general phenomenon," says A Y
M Mosharraf Hossain, who was the labour counsellor at the Bangladesh High
Commission in Kuala Lumpur from 1998 to 2002. "I don't think it's on any
alarming scale."
But still, this causes reintegration problems, says Khaleque, who is
also a leader of the Migrant Workers' Welfare Forum in Sirajganj: "The
women there are fair and pretty and a returnee often makes comparison and
finds his wife unattractive,'' says Khaleque. ''These overt or subconscious
cravings create tensions between a couple."
"The husbands sometimes complain that we are too thin," says Mosammat
Maloti Begum. "We then tell them that what do they expect? In their absence
we have to run the families. Not that they send home huge amounts of money!"
Mosammat Bedana Khatun, SHISUK's programme organiser for the female
spouse groups, says the opposite is also true: "Often during the long
absence of the husband, the wife may leave home for another man."
(END/2003)
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