Making her Voice Heard

She used to be a domestic worker for rich families in Hong Kong, one of many faceless migrants from Indonesia to go overseas in order to earn a living to support her family. Now Sit Miriam Ghozali is a published novelist and has written poetry and short stories inspired by her own life and the lives of other migrant workers under her pen name is Maria Bo Niok.

The full story is in the Jakarta Post at http://www.thejakartapost.com/yesterdaydetail.asp?fileid=20060428.S02.

Her website is at http://geocities.com/gunkudus/mariam/ - her writing is in Indonesian so unfortunately, I have not been able to read them.

This is a wonderful personal story to come across, especially following on my post on Global Migrants last week. It’s easy to overlook the individual in those thousands of people gathered in the streets on May Day. It’s easy to forget that the people who do the hard, dirty work around us - domestic workers, road sweepers, office cleaners - are just like us, with their own hopes and dreams and personal struggles. Maria’s voice is a much needed addition to world writing which is often dominated by, well, people like me - middle-class and educated. And thanks to the internet, she can showcase her writing on the web and her story is more easily picked up by a global audience.

All that is needed is for her work to be translated into English to help the world to appreciate it.