CHAPTER 6
Sri Lanka: In the Shadow of the Philippines
Like any mother whose daughter is about to travel abroad alone for the first time, Nirosha looks worried. Will twenty-one-year-old Atab be safe or will she fall victim to scammers? Can she defend herself in case of a physical attack? And what country is the city of Turkistan in again? Atab is getting her papers to qualify as a domestic worker in a place that neither mother nor daughter knows anything about.
I’m standing outside the Colombo headquarters of the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), a government-created clearinghouse for new and repeat local workers seeking job opportunities almost anywhere in the world. I decided to visit the SLBFE a day ahead of an official appointment with a civil-service representative to get a sense of the place from the outside in. A local researcher told me to keep an eye on the hordes of people standing outside the building’s walls and at its security checkpoint. “They’re supplicants, not applicants.” She meant it partly in jest, but it betrayed her frustration at her government’s level of bureaucracy.
While seasoned cab drivers struggled to find some of the research centres I visited in Colombo, the two who drove me to the SLBFE in the Battaramulla district could have done it blindfolded. Everyone in Colombo knows how to get there if they want to get out. Sometimes they head there to complete their own paperwork; other times they’re helping a relative—usually a son or daughter who can’t afford to skip a day or two of work—with their overseas employment adventure.
Nirosha is no stranger to the building or the long waits outside it, having completed a seven-year stint as a caregiver for an elderly woman in Tel Aviv. She picked up most of her English there and saved enough money to take up part-time work in Colombo when her Israeli contract and employer expired. I do the math in my head and realize that Atab would have spent her teens without her mother, a fact that becomes more startling when I remember she’s the family’s only child. The mother-daughter reunion must have been brief; it’s time for Atab to pay her dues and keep this small family afloat. “She needs to earn money. . . . As a mother, I’m worried and I will miss her.” Nirosha says Atab has to learn how to become independent, and this is something you pick up not from a mother’s advice but on the job, in real time. I ask if she’ll consider taking up a caregiver gig in Turkistan or somewhere nearby so that at least the two can see each other more often. Nirosha smiles and suggests that she’s too old for that kind of work now. She’s in her early forties—a senior citizen in terms of domestic work, which is dominated by women in their twenties and thirties.
Lasantha, a sturdy man in his mid-twenties who is also waiting outside the SLBFE building, cites the chance to reconnect with family as one reason among several for his imminent departure for Saudi Arabia. His older brother, a machine operator on construction sites, has lived in the capital, Riyadh, for five years and has secured a contract for Lasantha. The younger brother has heard stories of workers’ abuse and knows that conditions on construction sites can be, to put it mildly, unforgiving. But the promise of a paycheque of US$1,500 a month helps him rationalize the negative. Even if he could find the same kind of work in Sri Lanka, he’d be lucky to make US$500 a month. He demonstrates the difference in pay by joining three fingers and waving them in my face repeatedly. It’s his way of making sure I get the point: triple, triple, triple. (The driver I retained for the afternoon thought Lasantha was about to hit me, such was the force of the young man’s body language.)
Other workers milling outside the building share similar stories with me, though they are less animated than Lasantha. No, they say, reports of workers suffering physical and mental abuse or not getting paid don’t scare them off. Family separation is a genuine concern, but so is being unable to feed your children and other dependents. (Dependents often show up in brown societies, where extended families live off a single income.) Yes, they wish the government would do more to protect its workers abroad, but the monetary rewards outweigh the physical or emotional risks. If the answers seem consistent, it’s because the applicants have been rehearsing them on their own and with their family members.
I’ve heard variations of this before, of course, from Filipino people in Manila and several other nationals during a short visit to Dubai the previous year. Brown labour migration is hardship migration. It’s less about thoughts of self-improvement or return on investment and more about an instinct to escape economic degradation and political chaos. But perhaps it’s the extent of the hardship in Sri Lanka and the instability of its political situation that make its migration stories more shattering to hear.
The country has been on the wrong side of history more than once since independence from the British in 1948. The thirty-year separatist armed conflict between the Tamil rebels and the Sinhalese government ended in 2009, just after the global recession dragged down world economies. Even with six years (and counting) of relative stability and the worst of the economic slump behind it, Sri Lanka continues to send out, on average, 247,000 workers a year. (The country has a population of about twenty-one million.) In 2013, the total rose to just over 293,000. In the same year, remittances from migrant workers reached US $6.4 billion, or 9.5 percent of Sri Lanka’s GDP. Remittances took the top spot in an analysis of Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange earnings during the five-year period ending in 2013 (the peace years), consistently outranking tourism and exports like garments, tea and rubber. Current estimates put the number of Sri Lankan nationals working abroad at one million. Experts suggest that the number is actually higher, given how many are off the books.
In the Philippines, exporting local workers (and ensuring their protection) has evolved over many years into a regulated, if far from perfect, industry. Sri Lanka, by comparison, is struggling to find a balance between the economic windfall of sending labour abroad and the reputation damage that comes from workers being abused by employers and recruiters. People in East Asia and the Gulf think of Sri Lankans as the poor, distant and darker-skinned relatives of Filipinos. Death, imprisonment and execution of workers in the Gulf provide fodder for Sri Lanka’s thriving newspapers and talking points for its nationalist politicians, who believe the government can do more to protect its people.
Most Sri Lankans I’ve met sigh at the mention of Rizana Nafeek. Like Flor Contemplacion, the Filipina maid who was convicted of a double murder and executed in Singapore, Nafeek has become a symbol of the violence that working Sri Lankans face abroad—and the inability of their government to protect them. In 2013, Saudi Arabia beheaded Nafeek, a domestic worker, after she confessed to smothering an infant in her care following an argument with his mother. Documents suggest that at the time of the incident in 2005, Nafeek was only seventeen, and many human rights organizations complained that trying her as an adult contravened the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. She insisted that her confession was made under duress, but all appeals to King Abdullah for clemency from Nafeek’s parents, and diplomatic efforts from the Sri Lankan government, failed. According to a BBC report, Sri Lankan opposition MP Ranjan Ramanayake captured the racial overtones of the execution and the widespread discrimination against workers of brown and black skin when he described the rulers of Saudi Arabia as dictators who would execute only Africans and Asians, and never people of European and American descent.
While the death of this domestic worker does reveal something about the brutal and colour-based justice system in Saudi Arabia, it also highlights the dilemmas that the Sri Lankan government faces every day as its people sign up for foreign employment—often without much training or thought given to what they might do at the end of their contract. So many people want a way out, and it’s in the government’s interest to keep shipping them out. But at what cost? When does the dignity of the brown domestic servant trump the dollar signs her government sees in her? Call it a battle between the greenback and brown survival. Are brown Sri Lankan workers destined to lose this one? Or are there signs that they’re at least pushing back?
HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, SRI LANKA was always a land of migration. For much of the nineteenth century, when the country was under British rule, Sri Lanka hosted thousands of migrant workers on its tea and rubber plantations. The majority came from the Tamil community in India and were brought over to what was then Ceylon by colonial administrators. Following the country’s independence in 1948, the new government barred these workers from obtaining citizenship. About 330,000 Tamils were repatriated to India over two decades starting in 1964, when the two countries signed an accord. You can argue that the country was built on the foundation of migration to it.
Migration from Sri Lanka for contract or long-term work began in the late 1970s, with 1977 and 1978 as transitional years. Nisha Arunatilake, Priyanka Jayawardena and Dushni Weerakoon, authors of the Sri Lanka chapter in editor Saman Kelegama’s book Migration, Remittances and Development in South Asia, argue that government economic reforms relaxed the rules on the flow of foreign currency out of the country and in general made travel easier. This liberalization of Sri Lanka’s monetary laws coincided with an insatiable demand for unskilled or low-skilled workers in the oil-rich countries of the Gulf. To date, almost 95 percent of migrant Sri Lankan workers end up in one of the countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman). Israel, Lebanon and Jordan also host a steadily rising number of Sri Lankan domestic workers.
From its earliest phases, Sri Lankan migration revolved around domestic workers, women with virtually no education and little training. For almost two decades (from 1988 to 2007), women consistently outnumbered men in the total number of migrants. In 1995, women accounted for 73 percent of all Sri Lankan migrants. The number has trended down since 2007, with 2012 being the first year in the country’s recent migration history when women’s share fell below the halfway mark, to 49 percent. Broadly speaking, this reflects the increasing global demand for skilled (mostly male) workers in the construction, manufacturing and service industries. It also shows the effects of Nepalese, Thai and Indonesian domestic workers entering an already crowded marketplace, edging out the less educated Sri Lankan women.
Gender plays another part in the migration story of Sri Lanka. Spouses who are violent, have alcohol issues or have abdicated their financial responsibilities can be the impetus for women to leave their own families behind. Others travel to escape unhappy marriages, even if temporarily. About 90 percent of Sri Lankan migrant women find employment as domestic workers, increasing their chances of ill treatment. Labour laws that protect workers on, say, a construction site or in a factory don’t apply to the home sphere, where women face challenges ranging from overwork and verbal abuse all the way to physical violence. The United Arab Emirates does not consider a household a workplace, and the people who hire domestic workers can’t by law be called employers. The very idea of assigning home inspectors to check on the domestic workers’ physical and mental well-being sounds preposterous to many Arab families.
Early Sri Lankan migrants struggled with the additional disadvantage of not speaking Arabic or English, making daily communication with the families for whom they worked difficult and frustrating for everyone. Only in the last decade or so did basic language training for would-be migrants become mandatory—at least for those using official channels of employment (as opposed to informal or unregulated recruitment agencies). Proficiency in English has given Filipina domestic workers a competitive edge over Sri Lankan women, and that in turn has led to a discrepancy in pay between the two, even when they’re performing identical work. On average, a Sri Lankan domestic can expect to be paid about one-third less than her Filipina counterpart.
As economist Bilesha Weeraratne points out in her study of Sri Lankan domestic workers in the Middle East, many women fall victim to what is referred to as the “double contract” system—they sign one contract in Sri Lanka before departure but find another one waiting for them in their destination countries. The second contract often differs from the first, especially when it comes to benefits and working conditions. The low level of literacy among these women leaves them ill prepared to negotiate contracts written in legalese, and sometimes in Arabic. Weeraratne’s study suggests that whether women find foreign employment on their own, through referrals or family connections, or through agents or sub-agents, they face the same chance of exposure to “violence, violent threats or having to work where there are potential health risks.” The system fails Sri Lankan women almost by design, since expectations from official recruitment channels are set so low.
On average, 771 to 800 people leave the country daily, and the numbers are projected to rise in what some call a vicious circle: the more people migrate, the more follow in their footsteps. When would-be migrants learn of the salaries that can be earned abroad, they tune out the horror stories (or at least assume that their experience will be different).
“You can’t stop migration,” declares Myrtle Perera, vice chairperson of the Marga Institute Centre for Development Studies, when we meet in her Colombo office. “Dead bodies are being brought home daily.” Located in a charming but hard-to-find corner of this busy city, the Marga Institute strikes me as more of a retreat than a think-tank that engages in Sri Lankan labour policies. The gentle facade of the soft-spoken, white-haired, guru-like Perera conceals her frustration and anger at the mistreatment of Sri Lankan workers abroad.
The best course of action that the Sri Lankan government can take through its various labour agencies is to reduce the harm and suffering of its workforce abroad, she says. It starts with better regulation of recruitment agencies and stronger oversight of sub-agents who draw from the rural areas, where education levels are low and desperation levels high. Sri Lankan women have to change their mindsets as well. Over the years, Perera has met many domestic workers about to board flights to the Gulf, and she says their appearance factors into their eventual mistreatment. I’m not sure I understand what she means by this. Is it their darker skin? The exposed parts of their bodies, which some Muslims may find offensive? No. “They go like slaves and beggars,” Perera says, describing how rural women in particular dress for their flights. I suggest they don’t have a huge wardrobe to choose from, but Perera believes many of them exaggerate the impoverished look to gain sympathy from future employers. Filipinas, she says, dress up for their flights so they will be taken seriously; Sri Lankans dress down, way down. “[Filipinas] are very well groomed. . . . Grooming has very strong connotations. They go to rich people houses. They are maids and not domestic workers.”
Many Sri Lankan migrants end up living in a big city for the first time in their lives. Challenges begin on their first day on the job. Most of them, for example, have never seen or used an electric stove, a vacuum cleaner or a dishwasher. In the early years of Sri Lanka’s labour migration, some women were transported from their mud homes in the countryside to high-rises in Jeddah or Kuwait City without any training in how to use modern appliances or basic lessons in food safety and fire protection. Many Sri Lankans remember hearing stories about domestic workers in the Gulf who nearly burned down or flooded their employers’ homes when using stoves or washing machines for the first time.
Even though migration transforms these women from economic pariahs into breadwinners, the centuries-old culture of the submissive female still travels with them. These gender norms and the country’s class-based hierarchies also explain why many Sri Lankan women remain silent about verbal and physical abuse. Defending your rights can be a tall order for women who have been told all their lives that their role in society is to churn out children and obey their parents, husbands or social superiors. Employers in some Gulf countries routinely “lend” their domestics to other family members for cleaning or cooking duties, creating fifteen- or even eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. By the time someone blows the whistle, it can be too late. What Perera calls “jumping the wire” happens only when a woman begins to fear for her life. Then she will leave her employer’s home to seek shelter in an agent’s house or at the Sri Lankan embassy or consulate.
Only the better informed make it that far, however. Many domestic workers don’t have a notion of the diplomatic service or grasp its role in protecting Sri Lankan citizens abroad. And once a woman gets to a safe house, her chances of satisfactorily resolving the conflict dwindle significantly. The best-case scenario is a new contract in another household; the worst is that the employer withholds the domestic worker’s documents or files fake theft charges against her. According to Perera, some domestics even end up in prostitution rings run by criminal elements connected to the recruitment and employment agencies. Many are deported from their host country with nothing but the clothes on their backs and whatever cash they have hidden in their bosoms.
What happens to them when they return to Sri Lanka remains under-researched and under-reported. Local journalists have a morbid fascination with stories of hardships abroad, but they lose all interest in the workers once they come home. If I want to know more about this, Perera tells me, I should talk to Nisha Arunatilake, a fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) of Sri Lanka. In 2014, she co-authored a seminal report titled Returning Home: Experiences & Challenges. With her PhD in economics from Duke University, Arunatilake represents the other extreme of Sri Lankan women in the workplace, but her academic research and personal interests lie in the area of migration and labour of vulnerable female and male workers. Within twenty-four hours, I found myself in her office at IPS’s building in Colombo’s Independence Square, but our conversation quickly went beyond the experiences of returnees. There can be no returnees without there first being outbound workers.
THE STORY OF THE returnees can be summed up as one with some good news and a lot of bad news. As Arunatilake and her co-authors argue, returnees bring home new skills and capital in the form of personal savings, which can be invested in their communities and add to local job growth. But there’s a catch even to the good news. The perceived gains can take place only if the funds are “properly directed and integrated to the economy and the society of the home country.” That’s a big if. The report suggests that most returnees find social and economic reintegration into Sri Lankan society a challenge. On the economic front, many can’t access or don’t know how to make use of existing information on starting small businesses or investing life savings. On the social front, returnees face the hardships of weakened ties with family and community. Migrants who have left their hometowns for a decade or more find that social dynamics have shifted. Husbands have to adjust to the more independent wives who have emerged as the decision makers of the family in their absence. Similarly, female domestic workers whose employment has been free from abuse return home more independent and less beholden to gender norms that give men the run of the family home.
Although the report suggests that both skilled and unskilled workers experience reintegration problems, the latter group poses the greatest challenge to Sri Lanka’s migration culture in general. “The least skilled get into the most problems,” says Arunatilake. In part this reflects the very reasons they chose to work abroad in the first place—out of desperation and not in pursuit of career enhancement or a shot at social mobility. “They are trying to escape difficult situations, from unhappy marriages to abusive partners. Sometimes the job opportunities in rural areas are not that great.” Commuting to and from work, especially for women in rural communities, can be both unsafe and time-consuming because the public transportation network, such as it is, doesn’t cover all regions. Many women find it easier to go abroad and live in their employers’ homes than to commute from villages to nearby towns. To escape, many poorly educated men and women fall victim to ruthless recruiters who charge them upfront, forcing the migrants to borrow money to cover costs. Many get into debt before they even leave home and must direct earnings from their first years of foreign employment toward paying it off.
If there’s a silver lining to this narrative of desperation, it’s been the shift over the past few years to a more demand-driven model, Arunatilake says. As the East Asian and Gulf economies have rebounded from the global recession, the need for migrant workers in the construction and domestic-service industries has returned to pre-2008 levels. The more competition for brown workers, the more employers are willing to pay agents to find them, thereby absolving migrants from recruiting fees.
It didn’t take long for me to meet a returnee—and one who sounded like the model of reintegration and business savvy that researchers like Arunatilake would love to see more of. Arun, an independent car driver, worked for seven years as a supervisor in a textile factory in Amman, Jordan, before returning to Colombo to start his own small business. I don’t normally chat up or rely on taxi drivers as sources in reporting—but it’s impossible to avoid that scenario in Colombo. Almost every hotel or private car driver I met in the city was either a migrant at one point or in the process of becoming one. Upon seeing my brown face and Arabic features, some assumed that I was in Sri Lanka to recruit workers for the Gulf countries. Those who have spent time abroad are usually looking for their second opportunity, driving cars until such time as a job offer comes their way. Arun bucked that trend, however, and Colombo’s gridlocked streets, even in the relatively early afternoon, gave me some time to hear his story.
A Colombo native, Arun left his family and friends behind in 2004 for his first real work experience. Unlike the majority of even skilled workers, he had completed his high school education by that point and showed a knack for the English language. Through a local employment agency recommended by the SLBFE, he landed a job in an Amman textile factory that already employed migrant workers from other parts of South Asia. It didn’t take long for managers at the factory to pull him from the ranks of floor workers and promote him to supervisor. The outgoing Arun struck me as someone who would do and say the right things to set himself apart from the masses. Our conversation was interrupted by his regular criticism of almost every other driver we encountered. (“No one knows how to drive here” seemed to be his mantra.)
The promotion in Amman meant that Arun had to become more ruthless and demand a high level of productivity from an overworked labour force, but it also led to the kind of financial windfall that no young man without a post-secondary education—from a lower-middle-class family at least—could turn down.
Ultimately, his conscience won. After about six years in the taskmaster role and with a few thousand American dollars saved—Arun estimated his salary at about US$1,000 a month for most of his time in Amman—he decided to terminate his contract and return to Colombo. Early business schemes went nowhere, but his luck changed once he started running his own private car service. His Indian-made Tata Motors vehicle now doubles as his office and his major investment.
Arun tells me that he puts the time-management skills he learned in Amman to good use in his own business and entertains no thoughts of working abroad again, especially now that the country’s civil conflict is over. What if he’s offered a better-paid contract in the Gulf or Southeast Asia, where he can make double what he did in Jordan and probably four or five times his earnings in Colombo? His answer remains a firm no. Having seen and read how Sri Lankan workers are treated in many such places, he doesn’t intend to join the ranks of the abused and helpless.
No doubt there are many Aruns—people who turn their migration experience into success back home. But reports suggest that he’s in a small group of returnees. In her study, which draws on a purposeful sampling of 1,981 returnees, Arunatilake writes that only 47 percent find employment at home. Among skilled workers, only 28 percent report any kind of improvement in the family’s economic situation after they return. Institutional programs to help returnees have reached only about 10 percent of the sample demographic in the study. Once again, experts look to the Philippines as a model of smart labour management, before, during and after migration. Reintegration education for Filipinos begins before a migrant even leaves his or her home, Arunatilake says. Workers and their families are encouraged to draw up a list of goals to be achieved during the migrant’s absence. The returnees’ economic needs do not overshadow their psychological ones; they’re offered services such as family counselling and stress debriefing. Representatives from the Philippines Overseas Employment Administration regularly visit workplaces with a high concentration of Filipinos to advise them of business or investment opportunities back home.
Neither Perera nor Arunatilake will go as far as saying that the darker brown skin of Sri Lankan migrant workers and the lighter skin of Filipinos explain the harsher treatment meted out to the former and the relatively softer one to the latter. But both researchers suspect colour is an element in a more complex process, with training, education, government oversight (or lack of all three) and personal choices determining the path each country has followed in labour migration. The more Sri Lanka prepares its migrant workers for what awaits them in the world, the less likely they’ll come home penniless or in body bags.
So it all comes down to the training, or what is commonly referred to as the National Vocational Qualification, a seven-level program that all migrants are required to take. The minimum level for a work licence abroad is three (housekeeping), while seven qualifies graduates to work in more skilled positions (hotel clerks, drivers, carpenters, factory supervisors, etc.). I wanted to know more about this program and others like it, so I arranged to talk to one of its architects at the SLBFE. This would give me a chance to get past the security check of this fabled building—fabled among Sri Lankan migrants, that is—which either facilitates or impedes a national dream to work abroad.
IF THERE’S A PUBLIC face to Sri Lanka’s migrant policies, it’s Mangala Randeniya. The deputy general manager for the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment appears in almost every media story about migrant opportunities or strife abroad. Writing about the dangers of illegal migration by workers who enter host countries on a visitor’s visa? Randeniya will offer some harsh words to his sneaky countrymen and -women. Need a response to the accidental deaths or murders of Sri Lankan workers in the Gulf, conservatively estimated at three hundred annually? Count on Randeniya to provide a breakdown in which death by natural causes accounts for 69 percent of fatalities, traffic accidents 27 percent and suicide a mere 6 percent. When reporters want to know why the number of female domestic workers has been going down year after year, Randeniya tells them it’s all part of the SLBFE general plan to discourage women from this risky line of work. Randeniya has emerged as the go-to man for Sri Lankan migration, and I have one hour on a Friday morning to get into his head.
But first I have to get to his office. The interior of the SLBFE looks more like a maze than a standard government building. Work seekers have to navigate pathways and halls that divide the different departments within the bureau: training, legal, document certification, etc. Branches of the National Savings Bank and the Bank of Ceylon can be found on the ground floor, alongside Internet and photocopying services. Many workers in their twenties and early thirties will open their first bank accounts here to facilitate the repayment of loans or to send back remittances. The place echoes with the din of men and women arguing with bureaucrats behind glassed walls. No employees are in sight in the hallways.
I know that Randeniya’s office is on the second floor, but which part of it? After I interrupt a young man’s telephone conversation with a plea for help, he walks me to where I can find Randeniya. I’m already ten minutes late, but I’m told not to worry because he hasn’t finished his morning meeting yet. There’s nothing for me to do but wait and watch while four or five rows of public employees go through paperwork in a choreographed scene that looks straight out of a gritty Indian or Egyptian movie about the soul-crushing nature of bureaucracy (or a Modern Times set in an office instead of on an assembly line). It’s a familiar scene in brown countries, where the public sector has to absorb the many graduates promised a job at the end of their university education.
At twenty minutes after eleven, the employee seated closest to Randeniya’s office tells me to knock and walk in. I hesitate but take her advice. It works. As soon I remind him of our appointment, Randeniya dismisses his two co-workers and we start our conversation.
“What do you want to know?” he asks me, indicating that he can provide answers to any question I may have about migrant workers. A good place to start, I suggest, is with an overview of migration reforms. When did Sri Lanka begin to regulate its people’s employment abroad, in particular in the Gulf, and what prompted the move? Randeniya says that if he has to pick a single turning point, it would be 1985, when Parliament passed the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment Act. Between 1977, when large-scale labour migration began, and 1985, when the act came into effect, there was no government oversight, he says. After 1985, “you couldn’t send a single person abroad without licence of the SLBFE.” I pretend to know nothing about unofficial migration channels and just let him talk. With his encyclopedic knowledge of the country’s migration history (and his six-foot-two body), I’m not exactly a match.
The first order of business, Randeniya explains, was to regulate the recruitment agencies, which, as the gateway to foreign employment, could make or break a migrant’s job search. A shoddy agency meant trouble for workers and hassle for the government, which was expected to rescue them. The SLBFE stipulated that all agencies had to own or rent offices of at least five hundred square feet; they were also required to deposit up to a million Sri Lankan rupees (just under US$7,000 at current exchange rates) as a guarantee before they were issued a licence. For the first time, a criminal record check became mandatory, effectively sidelining a number of agencies that had served as fronts for money laundering or organized crime, especially human trafficking.
Although the SLBFE Act addressed some of the challenges of preparing migrants for work abroad, its provisions were largely ignored by recruiters and government officials alike. It wasn’t until 1995 that Randeniya, then a newbie at the SLBFE, and some of his colleagues initiated a few training programs to address complaints from employers in the Gulf about the poor quality of domestic workers from Sri Lanka. In 1995, the first training program became mandatory for female domestic workers who wanted to work abroad. It was an intensive five-day session that introduced applicants to the basics of cleaning houses, washing clothes in a machine, and handling gas and electric cookers. In 2000, the training was extended to ten days, then thirteen, then fifteen. Today, would-be migrants must complete a required twenty-one-day housekeeping program (level three of the NVQ, as mentioned earlier).
“I want to modify the housekeeper role,” says Randeniya, hinting at some shortcomings in the current program. His plan goes beyond the minutiae of which detergents and what temperature to use for white versus coloured clothing. “It should end with skilled, competent and empowered women.” Once he mentions the word “empowered,” the rest of our conversation revolves around its meaning to female domestic workers. Although Randeniya’s media training leads him to underplay the stories of physical and emotional abuse suffered by Sri Lankan domestics in the Gulf (he can’t criticize host countries too loudly or they’ll look elsewhere for workers), he claims the real problem is that his own country sends out workers who simply don’t know how to negotiate with their employers or how to ask for what’s legally theirs. Get that part of the training right, he says, and watch the number of problems slide down. “If a person is very skilled and empowered, you can prevent what may happen to [her].”
But how exactly do you empower women in their mid-twenties—the new minimum age for domestic workers abroad in general is twenty-three, and for those travelling to Saudi Arabia it’s twenty-five—who have been taught their whole lives to cede that power to men or other women in higher social positions? Randeniya acknowledges that a “certain maturing” has to take place before women are ready to face the challenges of work abroad. In his capacity as a supervisor of trainers, he knows that these women’s very lives may depend on how well they absorb the lessons in the twenty-one-day training. For some women, this will be their first time in a classroom since elementary school (if they got even that far with their education). For others, even those with a higher level of education, the content can be too racy. Part of being empowered as a woman (and the rules apply to men, too, Randeniya insists) is confronting issues related to desire, sexual advances and rape, in that order.
First comes desire, or in more informal terms, feeling horny. “The worker has to satisfy sexual desire with or without his or her partner,” says Randeniya. How does she satisfy her desire in societies where engaging in sex outside marriage is a crime? Randeniya tells the women that the answer is masturbation, or “self-satisfaction.” If that doesn’t address their sexual needs and intercourse becomes inevitable, women must be aware of the risks of STDs, including HIV. The class includes information on birth control methods, with an emphasis on condoms whenever the pill is not an option for cultural or medical reasons.
If and when men push domestic workers to have sex with them, women must change the dynamic so they don’t find themselves in a vulnerable position. Again, Randeniya uses the word “empowerment.” A woman who is the object of a man’s advances needs to know she is in the driver’s seat. I’m not sure I agree with this assertion, given that men (who can be recruiters, employers or other Sri Lankan workers) often hold the balance of power in a relationship. Randeniya believes my concerns apply only to the third stage of sexual interaction: harassment and rape.
Female workers, he asserts, “need to understand the rapist’s mentality.” If I understand him correctly, Randeniya is saying that the responsibility for avoiding rape falls largely on women’s shoulders. Women should not allow themselves to be in situations where a rape might happen—for example, they should not be alone with a man (or men) in remote or unattended areas. To my feminism-tuned ears, this sounds very much like victim blaming. But I realize it has to be seen in the context of a nascent conversation between migration officials and domestic workers about self-protection and, yes, empowerment. While the SLBFE can try to exert some influence on male workers—teaching them not to rape or attack their countrywomen—it has no jurisdiction over Gulf or East Asian employers. Many host nations simply deny that such things happen within their borders and accuse Sri Lankan women of falsifying accounts. Placing the responsibility on women makes some sense in this context.
Once again, the Philippines pushes its way into the conversation as the model to which Sri Lankan officials aspire. If a Filipina was solicited for sex, Randeniya believes, she’d probably demand to be compensated for it. Those women know how to negotiate extra pay for any work above and beyond the specifics of their contract, he says. “Sri Lankan women are not at that stage yet.” Filipinas also take advantage of their relatively light skin colour, which makes them both more desirable and more empowered.
Like Perera and Arunatilake, Randeniya believes skin tone is part of a larger package that influences how Sri Lankan workers in general are perceived outside the country. “Skin colour is first impression,” he offers, suggesting that in some parts of the world, it places Sri Lankans at an instant disadvantage. But a person’s body and face determine what happens next. Facial expressions that show disrespect or body language that signals a defiant or unprofessional attitude can be detrimental. It’s not that Sri Lankan women are raised to be arrogant or inconsiderate, Randeniya explains; it’s just that they don’t understand how others read their body language. “Sri Lankans are socialized in a different manner,” he says, adding that misunderstandings or even animosities arise from time to time among the country’s different ethnic groups. That includes discrimination by lighter-skinned urban Sri Lankan women against workers from more rural areas, who tend to be darker from prolonged exposure to the sun. In his days as a trainer, Randeniya encountered several examples of women from different levels of society accusing each other of harassment and discrimination based on skin tone or geographic origin.
It’s almost twelve thirty and my time is up. Given how generous Randeniya has been with me, I push to see if he’ll let me sit in on one of the training sessions of the NQV program. As it happens, the centre near his home offers Saturday classes. He agrees to take me there to show me what his trainers do. Language will be a problem, since the trainers use Sinhalese—in Manila, all training was in English—but he’ll show me where the instructors teach would-be migrants basic words in the host country’s language (Arabic, Hebrew, English and even Greek and Italian). I wonder if Atab, Nirosha’s daughter, received some training in Kazakh or Russian before leaving for Turkistan. I make a mental note to ask the next day. “Call me early in the morning and we’ll make arrangements. Maybe you can come to my house, too,” he offers. I’ll be in touch around nine in the morning tomorrow, I assure him.
On the way out I notice that the large crowd waiting outside when I came in has thinned out. I recognize at least two faces from the day before, when I lurked outside the SLBFE. They’re still supplicating, I guess. Lasantha, the Saudi Arabia–bound construction worker who likes big hand gestures, sees me coming out of the building and asks if I have any connections on the inside. He’s been here almost every day this week. Because he has secured his contract privately, the SLBFE wants him to jump through more hoops than those using government-approved agencies. At least the bureaucracy is intended to protect him, I tell him, and I wish him good luck. He nods, telling me that he expects to wait outside the building for most of the following week as well. I wonder if he’ll eventually become an Arun, a returnee success story, of if he’ll be one of the three hundred Sri Lankans who come home in body bags every year.
ONE MINUTE AFTER NINE on Saturday morning, I try Randeniya’s cellphone. He doesn’t pick up and no voicemail kicks in. I wait fifteen minutes and try again. Same thing. I try every twenty minutes and send an email in case it’s easier for him to respond with a quick note on his smartphone. Nothing. At around noon, I finally get through to his voicemail and leave him a message to call me back or email me. Still nothing. It’s my last full day in Colombo and I suspect I probably won’t get another chance to visit a training centre. I’m disappointed, but I know that my exploration of the lives of Sri Lankan migrant workers will resume in a few weeks, when I visit Doha, Qatar, home to an estimated 150,000 of them (in 2013). For now, I leave Sri Lanka knowing that despite a late start and an abundance of trouble-prone unskilled workers, the country is finally taking steps to rewrite its migration narrative of exploitation and abuse. There’s still a long way to go. And it can always keep looking to the Philippines for policies to borrow or steal. Sri Lanka may not be able to compete in the skin-tone department—fair is fair, so to speak—but it can divert attention from that by focusing on what the rest of its workers’ bodies and minds can do.