Category: Daily Whatevers

Finally, my favourite game has arrived via air mail….1997 and still going strong..

Forget Harry Pothead…Baik Punya Cilok, or other movies that you see. If it isn’t an action movie, then I wouldn’t normally watch..except for some excellent ones such as Phenomenon, Michael, and Notting Hill.

Last night, I watched “Anak”, a Filipino movie about a foreign domestic helper who returned to Manila from Hong Kong, to a family that hardly knows her.

In reality, this is what is happening. These “maids” as we generally term them, leave their hometown, husband, sons and daughters, to find income they cannot normally find at their place of origin, even with the correct qualifications; even if they have to weather the abusive behaviour of some employers.

When I lived in USJ, my neighbour changed 3 maids in the span of 5 months. Every night as I sit facing my PC monitor, I would hear the maid scrubbing clothes before putting them into a washing machine, then hang the clothes to dry at around 2am. By 4.30am, she was up washing the three cars they own.

In another example, a maid was cruelly and physically abused by the employer’s wife until one day, the maid couldn’t bear it any longer, stabbed the employer’s wife to death.

We always forget that these “maids” are…human beings too…with physical limitations, in some cases, probably slower processing capacity than most of the employers. It is up to the employer to condition the maids into the routine and standards that we want them to have. We cannot expect them to know what we want them to be within a few hours of her stepping into the house. Even I still have trouble pressing the correct light switch at home after 2 years living there.

I do not dispute the fact that there are irresponsible maids too. As I said, they are human beings too. I’ve had one maid who spat into my stepson’s bottle (I gathered that in some Indonesian culture they do that so the child would grow up to listen to the person whose spit he/she drinks). I kicked that one back without hesitation. Another caused my wife and I to shop for food every month, and rack up a minimum of RM800 in electricity bill every month. Apparently she was a big eater, and would sleep in my children’s bedroom with the air-conditioning on from morning till evening when we’d come home.

But “Anak” gives a general idea about how families are broken up when these women have to migrate in order to give their children (and in many cases, husband) a better life, only to find that at the end of the rainbow is just another shattered dream.

If you have the time to watch the DVD, go buy it.

A team of musicians, filmakers, photographers, sound engineers have come together to produce a music CD and visual DVD album called Laya Project based on folk music of the communities affected by the December 2004 Tsunami.

If you love traditional music, please buy and help the abovementioned communities.

You cannot control where the wind blows….
….but you can adjust your sails….

It’s been slightly over a year now that the South Asian Tsunami struck 12 nations fringing the Indian Ocean. The earthquake that generated the equivalent to 60,000 Hiroshima A-bombs has all but been forgotten, especially by those whose lives were not directly affected by the tragedy. A year later we notice that the weather has gone awry, the sun sets slightly more to the northwest than on Christmas Day 2004….and asian tourists still shun going to disaster-affected areas.

Yes…not just that: even Malaysians shun beach areas. A friend of mine who runs a windsurfing school/facility in Port Dickson makes only around RM30 a month after paying his staff. He is now behind in terms of rent. That is Port Dickson…it was not affected at all by the killer waves that struck coastal areas some 400 kilometers to the north. Port Dickson that once commanded an average of 60% occupancy rate, fell to just over 30% early 2005. Among reasons cited was fear of tsunami. Even in the Perhentian Islands occupancy rate dropped in July 2005…again, fear of tsunami occuring there was the main reason. I suppose not many people liked high-school geography.

What about in Thailand? The number of tourist arrivals in the provinces of Phuket, Phang-nga and Krabi dropped from 2.9 million to 1.2 million over the same period, and corresponding revenue dropped from RM490 million to RM150 million. Again, superstitious Asians have shunned from going there, especially from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, whose numbers fell most precipitously. Asian people believe that it is not auspicious to visit places where there are a number of people who died.

Therefore it is up to divers like us to play our part in helping countries of this region to boost their tourism sales…by using our network of divers and nature lovers aggressively to bring in more tourists.

If we don’t help ourselves, no one else will…

ยุ่งน่า

I came to work today just to find out that my leave for the rest of the year has been approved. However, luckily I came to office today as the package of three music VCDs from Thailand had arrived. I bought a VCD of a concert by Jetrin Wattanasin for an old album called 108-1009 that was released back in 1993; another karaoke VCD of a group called U4 (a one-hit wonder) that existed back in 1994; and a karaoke VCD of a group called LoSo (Lo Society) for songs released mid 1990s.

Yes, I’m an old school person…conservative in some matters…not all though.