Former foreign workers become village misfits

JAKARTA (JP): Families and village life are likely to change as more women leave for foreign lands in search of work, sociologists say.

Many women become more independent, assertive and self- confident after leaving village life behind.

Rianto Adi, a researcher at Atma Jaya University studying women who worked in Saudi Arabia, said these workers balk at returning to the same roles they had before they left.

They have become risk-takers and entrepreneurs who know what it's like to be successful at earning money. Many of them wish to open small businesses, become more active in the PKK and even teach Arabic.

But Tati Krisnawati of Women's Solidarity said the women's newfound worldliness and money management skills often go to waste because the traditional villagers do not support them.

Krisnawati said the women are considered village misfits, regardless of whether they had a positive or negative experience abroad. If the woman had a bad time and returns without much money, she is blamed. If she was successful at earning money overseas, her husband and other villagers are frequently jealous.

There is also the danger that the family will begin to see the woman as an economic tool whose labor can pay for weddings or other special expenses. "The woman who migrates is like a machine for money," Krisnawati said.

With separations sometimes lasting several years and the woman changing so much, many marriages suffer.

Measuring how many of these marriages end in divorce, how many are effectively over after so many years of separation and how many couples still view themselves as man and wife separated by economic circumstance is difficult, sociologists say. It is complicated because many villagers don't bother to go through the expense and formalities of divorce when they want to terminate a marriage.

Nonetheless, many marriages do disintegrate because the husband takes a mistress in his wife's absence.

Utami Munandar, a psychologist at University of Indonesia, is concerned about the welfare of children when one parent works far from the village. "It's not a broken family in the sense that they separate because they don't like each other, but the effect is the same on the children."

But the fallout from the mother working overseas is mitigated by the extended family of the village. Sri Sunarti Purwaningsih, a researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) studying childcare strategies of Javanese families with mothers working overseas, said fathers, grandmothers and other relatives assume a greater role in childrearing while the mother is away, but childcare reverts to the mother when she returns.

Mothers often feel guilty about abandoning their children while they're away, Sunarti said. "But they tell themselves that at least they'll have money to compensate them and improve their lives." (Becky Mowbray)