After inking a success story of 2,400 riyal (US$640) total from two year’s employment as migrant worker in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from 2000 until 2002, Nanik Suryani, now a 27-year-old mother of two children, went to work abroad again for the same profession in December 2003.
With sponsorship from a manpower supplying company PT Putra Alawaini in Jakarta, Suryani, a resident of Babakan Village, Limus Nunggal subdistrict, Sukabumi, West Java, flew to Oman and was employed as a domestic worker to a property business family with a monthly 500 riyal pay.
“Like the previous employment, I was employed as housemaid to help my female employer Fathimah to take care of her two children, do daily house cleaning and cook for the family.
“I began work at 5 a.m. to clean my employer’s apartment, bathe her children, escort them to school and accompany them to play games. After doing all my jobs, I usually go to sleep at 1 a.m. I had meals three times a day,” she said in an interview here recently.
Nanik knew she was overemployed as she worked more than 20 hours a day and seven days a week without any extra-time pay. But she did not object and had a healthy working relationship with her employers, She also appreciated the family for taking her on a pilgrimage to the nearby Holy Land annually. “I felt uneasy when I was paid 500 riyal because the standard wage in the Middle East was 600. But I decided to continue working for the family who pledged to adjust the second year. And they fulfilled their promise.”
In her workplace, Nanik rarely met with her male employer who was a property businessman, dealing with work affairs through her female employer. “Everyday I communicated with my female employer and her children. I only met her male employer twice and I had to cover my face when he paid my monthly salaries at the end of the year.”
During her two-year overseas employment, Nanik regularly made telephone contact with her mother, husband and her three-year-old eldest daughter Agnes.
Asked what she could do if she encountered trouble with her employers, Nanik said she could not do much but make a complaint to the Indonesian Embassy in Oman and her sponsor in Indonesia. She said her passport and working visa was held by her employers and she had never seen her labor contract so she did not know her employment rights.
She knows about the better industrial relations in Hong Kong and Taiwan because housemaids’s working hours have been limited up to 12 hours a day and they have one-day off each week. But she said she was not interested in working there because she prefers to working in an Islamic community.
“I can pray five times a day and I have never cooked pork.”
On the eve of her two year’s, she was taken by her female employer to shopping malls to buy clothes and accessories for her and her relatives in Jakarta. “I was also presented with 600 riyal in additional extra-pay in the hope that I will come back to work for the family after vacating in my hometown. I knew at that time I would not come back to the family and seek jobs in other countries for more experience.”
Upon arriving home, Nanik spent a part of her income on building a house and purchasing a plot of land for her husband she married in 2010. “I spent Rp 20 million (US$2,000) to build a house, purchase 0.5 hectare of land worth Rp 10 million, gave Rp 15 million to my mother to help send my younger brother and sister to senior high school and Rp 4 million to my husband to start a small business while farming.”
Nanik worked for the first time for a Saudi Arabian family in Riyad with the monthly wage of 600 riyal in January 2000, only three months after she gave birth to her oldest daughter. The success story, which allowed her parents to renovate their house and send her younger brother and sister to school, encouraged her to work overseas in 2003.
Nanik expressed her sorrow regarding her father who died when she was working in Riyad in 2000. “My mother was gone when I was in Riyad again in 2007. So I was not there when they died but God knows I worked overseas to support them and their children and develop my own family. I realize my family and I are nothing without overseas employment.”
With the sponsorship of PT Aulia Putra Bersaudara, Nanik is waiting for a calling visa from the Saudi Arabian visa to work again for a third time in that country.
Asked why she prefers to work overseas, Nanik, who dropped out of elementary school in her home village in 1995, said her village was not well developed and most women in the village worked in Malaysia and the Middle East.
