Word: normawati
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...women raising the boy hope he never learns about his mother - let alone his real father. The stigma of such a birth is so heinous that Yunus' mother gave him up to Normawati, 50, and her close friend Ibu Herlina, 53, who describe themselves as Yunus' adoptive grandmother and mother, respectively. However, the child's situation is not unique, and Normawati (who like many Indonesians goes by a single name) is not unused to it. Indeed, the campaigner for migrant-worker rights and her daughter are raising several children of half-foreign parentage who were abandoned by raped migrant mothers...
While cases of death at the hands of overseas employers are relatively rare, Normawati says she has seen countless pregnant Indonesians coming through the gates of Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport after working abroad. She says the most disturbing of experiences can be heard again and again from the lips of different women: "The boss tells the woman, 'You must be with me.' Then rape...
...many cases, Normawati explains, female migrant workers are raped and then dumped on the streets by their employers, who refuse to give them their passports after discovering that the women are pregnant. The women are then arrested by police and placed in jail. Sometimes they are deported before the child is born. Herlina claims that airport officials have called her to ask what to do with the babies who are left behind by mothers...
...Normawati says there are dozens of children who were abandoned by migrant workers in homes throughout Jakarta and surrounding areas. "I'm in my house one or two days a week," she says. "I travel to see my grandchildren" - as she calls the abandoned infants. Normawati and Herlina sustain their wards by way of donations as well as assistance from the families of some of the children, who are nevertheless too ashamed to raise the children themselves...
...biological mothers are often married and have other children, she says, and the husbands who stay in Indonesia while the women work abroad are often not the type to welcome another man's offspring. It is rare for a biological mother to contact Herlina after giving away her child. Normawati agrees that many men are "sensitive" about such issues. "If the migrant worker takes her baby [to raise herself], three things could happen," she says. The first is the most common: "The husband gets angry and wants a divorce. The second one is [the woman] doesn't go home," abandoning...
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