Dear Moderator,

I believe your readers will be interested in the attached article, published in
The Daily Star, July 04, 2005.
Thank you.

Mahfuzur Rahman
---------------------------------------------------------------

Graduating from camel jockeys to housemaids?

by Mahfuzur Rahman

There was a time, probably not entirely bygone, when it was commonplace to see
Bangladeshi children as little as seven years of age being used as jockeys in
camel races in Arab lands for the pleasure of oil-rich sheikhs. The children
weighed little, cost little, and earned a great deal more profit to their
employers than more mature jockeys. We are told, under sharp criticism from
human rights groups and some normally fussy liberals, this variety of child
labour for pleasure is being phased out. There is as yet no evidence that it has
ceased throughout the Arab world.

The use of child camel jockeys is among the worst kinds of servitude. It looks
as though we are now actively substituting one kind of servitude for another for
our citizens abroad. We are about to send Bangladeshi women abroad to do
"household jobs' or, in plain language, to work as maid servants. According to
news reports, the first batch of women will leave for Saudi Arabia soon. One
supposes others will follow, and will be destined for other Arab countries as
well.


The women in question who are going abroad to work as servants in households of
the rich are not entirely on their own. They are being organised in groups and
groomed, with the active support of Bangladesh government. They have been
trained in household work at an "academy" in Bangladesh where the curriculum
also includes hygiene as well as the English and Arabic languages. A high level
inter-ministerial meeting was recently held to discuss, among other things, the
terms and conditions of their employment and their welfare in general. Perhaps
the most striking aspect of the project is that these housemaids have been
designated Ansars, or helpers in Arabic.

This does call for some deep reflection. Since the idea of sending our women to
foreign lands to work as housemaids has the underpinning of state policy, I
believe this warrants introspection at the national level too.

At least some of us, though certainly all, are familiar with the term "dignity
of labour." The venerable term implies that no form of honest human labour
should be deserving of contempt. It should not be beneath me to carry my own
suitcase at, say, a railway station. Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar demonstrated this
well when he carried the luggage of a babu who was clearly dying of shame at the
prospect of having to carry it himself. I have seen petty officials using peons
and servants to carry their tiny little briefcases. An elementary appreciation
of dignity of labour would have induced them to carry their own briefcases.
Neither is cleaning one's own toilet anything to be ashamed of.

I call attention to the concept of dignity of labour for two reasons. First,
many of us, especially our own babus and elites, are plainly contemptuous of it
when it comes to doing the manual labour themselves. A typical government
functionary will be horrified at the thought of dusting his own living room.
Second, if individuals in our society frequently deny the dignity owed to their
own labour, the denial is even starker when it comes to work of the housemaid.
It will be readily recognised that "you son of a housemaid!" is not an uncommon
term of abuse (I refuse to use the authentic Bengali expression here). We simply
do not care about the dignity of the housemaid's labour. Trumpeting the equality
of all human beings in the eyes of God would make no difference to our ingrained
disdain of the profession of the housemaid, never mind that life in a typical
well-to-do Bangladeshi family would grind to a halt if by some magic this breed
of servants were to disappear.


The work of maid servants in our country is plain servitude. Individual
decisions to work as housemaids are not open to question. An individual should
be free to choose whatever profession she or he likes. But in the present case,
a national decision appears to have been taken. The question then arises: if the
work of the housemaid is so looked down on in our society, as well as in other
Asian societies, why are we getting ourselves organised to send out Bangladeshi
women to work as housemaids in the Middle East, and being excited about it? A
good answer will be hard to find.


But there are a number of good reasons why sending of Bangladeshi women to work
as household servants in the Middle East should be reconsidered. The first thing
that comes to mind here is that, given our national attitude to domestic
servants I mentioned above, it is plain hypocrisy to glorify the work of those
who are being sent abroad. And we are glorifying the work. The prospective
housemaids are being sent to Arab lands as "Ansars." Historically, that term was
applied to the people of Medina who made enormous sacrifices to come to the
assistance of the Prophet (SM) of Islam and his companions when they migrated to
that city from Mecca in dire straits. There are few episodes of Islam's history
that carried greater significance for the nascent religion. The use of the term
for a batch of women we are sending abroad to help in housework is certainly
tendentious and seems to mask some ulterior design.


But there are other, and equally weighty, considerations as well. Will these
women be treated with the respect that the concept of dignity of labour
warranted? Will they be treated any differently in Arab lands than maid servants
are treated in our own?

Given the social attitudes and mores in most Middle Eastern countries, it is
highly unlikely that they will.

The women to be sent abroad are being trained in hygiene, housework, and
language of the householders. Who is training the employers? Of course, no
programme of training of the members of the household on how to treat servants
exists. Such a programme is not even practicable. Without a radical change in
social attitudes, it is impossible to visualise a typical rich Middle Eastern
family treating its housemaid with the respect that comes with acceptance of
dignity of labour as a major determinant of human relations. Societies there,
and elsewhere, have still very far to go for that to happen.


Neither is there any reason to expect that these women will return to their home
country as better members of the society. It might seem strange that one needs
to point this out from time to time: Bangladesh is culturally as rich as it is
economically poor. Despite our many faults, the country's democratic
institutions, its faith in individual freedom and secular ideology that spurred
its independence movement, and its literature and music, have no equal in many
countries in the world. In the present context I must point out in particular
that the role of women in our society stands head and shoulders above that of
their counterparts in Middle Eastern societies. Need I mention that not only do
our women vote, and give evidence in courts of law, as equals of men, they do a
host of other things, from driving a car to being prime minister of the country?
There is a lot that still needs to be done to improve the status of women in
Bangladesh. But compared to the position of women in other Muslim majority
countries, the role of women in Bangladesh is something we can be proud of. Why
must we send our women, with a national seal of approval, to societies where the
place of women is distinctly inferior to that in Bangladesh?

And yes, a sense of national pride should have stopped all those whose design it
is to send our women to servitude in foreign lands.

The international standing of Bangladesh is not high. Dakar, capital of a small
African country, is more often found on international maps than Dhaka, capital
of a country of 140 million. Kolkata, a provincial capital, is more often found
on maps of Asia than the capital of sovereign Bangladesh. Sending housemaids to
Arab lands is hardly a way to lift our standing abroad.


Let us continue sending our troops on peace keeping missions abroad, where they
have done a great job. Let us keep our women in. We owe it to them.


Mahfuzur Rahman is an economist.