Etik Nurhalimah

SNA (Taipei) — Like many of her fellow Indonesians in Taiwan, Etik Nurhalimah works for a family caring for an elderly relative. During her time as a migrant worker, she has also managed to fulfil a lifelong dream: gain a degree in English literature, while also winning a literature prize and having her story made into a film along the way.

She says that while many migrant workers are low-skilled, she wants people to see them as people who are not just the sum of their education so far. “We want to improve ourselves, like they do,” she said of people in Taiwan.

Nurhalimah shared her story with the Shingetsu News Agency against a backdrop of growing discrimination in Taiwan against migrant workers from Indonesia.

They are the largest group of migrant workers in Taiwan, numbering more than 260,000, or about 1% of the population. Most work as caregivers and domestic helpers, while others work in factories, as laborers, and as fishermen. Currently, however, there is a ban on the recruitment of Indonesian workers after a spike in the number testing positive for Covid last year, with around 6,000 waiting to come.

Caregivers and other migrant workers are important to Taiwan, an aging society with one of the lowest birth rates in the world. But they have long faced discrimination, including being paid below minimum wage with little time off. Now Indonesian workers say they are facing increasing discrimination on two fronts. The first stems from a fear that Indonesian migrant workers are bringing Covid into Taiwan, and the second from a perception that they cost more to hire because of demands by the Indonesian government that Taiwanese employers pay broker fees.

The fear around Covid was sparked by an uptick in imported cases late last year, including a surge in the numbers of infected people arriving from Indonesia, which has the largest number of cases of Covid in Southeast Asia. Dozens of migrant workers had arrived carrying documents showing that they had tested negative for Covid, only to test positive in Taiwan. Taiwan’s government said in December it was temporarily stopping the entry of Indonesian migrant workers because of the numbers of infected people arriving and a lack of cooperation from Indonesia’s government in verifying the Covid documents. The ban remains in place.

Separately, there is anger in Taiwan over a policy change by the Indonesian government to make overseas employers pay broker fees, plane tickets, and visa fees when they hire Indonesian domestic workers. Currently, migrant workers pay fees to agencies who find them a job in Taiwan, and complain these fees can be unfairly high and exploitative. Last October, representatives of Taiwanese employers held a rally outside Indonesia’s de facto embassy in Taipei, bearing banners that included the slogan Say NO to Indonesian Migrant Workers. The policy change was due to take effect in January, but has been postponed to July. The response has left Indonesians reeling–and fearing that employers won’t want to hire them in the future.

Nurhalimah, 36, is one of millions of Indonesians who left home to earn better money. At school, she won a scholarship to study at university, but couldn’t go because her family was too poor, she says. After stints as a domestic worker in Singapore and Hong Kong, and a divorce, Nurhalimah left her two-year-old son with her parents and came to Taiwan.

At the beginning, Nurhalimah was placed with a family in Taoyuan. Her contract said she was to care and cook for the grandmother of the house. But in practice she was expected to take care of the grandmother and grandfather, and cook lunch each day for fifteen people who worked in the family’s factory next door.

She soon found out that the carer whom she had replaced had run away from the house. Nurhalimah said she didn’t want to run away, because she was a single mother with a young son to support. “I thought ‘I have to be strong here, I don’t want to run away. If I run away, if I get an even worse employer, how can it be?,’” she said. She was finally able to switch employers after eighteen months when a representative from her agency visited and she told her about her work conditions.

Nurhalimah then moved to Taipei, where she began living with and working as a carer for a 92-year-old grandmother, who is now 99.

She says not only do caregivers have to adapt to a different culture and environment, some also have to deal with demands from employers to do the gardening, clean the house, and sometimes several houses depending on whether the elderly relative goes to stay with different children.

“Some of (the employers) are like, ‘I give you salary so you have to do what I want,’ they ask the migrant worker to do this, do that, everything; sometimes they don’t let the migrant take a rest,” Nurhalimah said. “Some people, they get depression and they get sick because they don’t have a good standard of life. They work hard and then don’t have enough sleep,” and this is something people don’t think about when they decide to move and take up a job, she said.

Her passion is reading and writing, and, over four-and-a-half years during fifteen hour days, she carved out time to study for a BA in English Literature from the Indonesia Open University. She earned her degree in December, and is now continuing to study online for an MA.

In another achievement, she won a Taiwan Literature Award for Migrants in 2017 for “Merah” (or “Red”), a short story about the relationship between an Indonesian woman and the Taiwanese grandfather she cares for. The story was also the inspiration for a short film that was broadcast on a platform of Taiwan’s independent Public Television Service last year.

Nurhalimah says she has managed to change her life because she had a chance to write and study while in Taiwan. “If I was not a migrant, I would not find my passion,” she said. She regrets that she left her son when he was two years old, and he is now eleven.

“But I also (wanted) to reach my dream,” she said. “I want to finish my education, because next time when I go back to Indonesia I won’t go back as a migrant any more, I want to (do more).”

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