While among the world's wealthiest, the citizens of Singapore have very little to do with the day-to-day operations that keep their small city-state bustling and operating as amongst the world's most efficient.
Indeed, nearly one-fifth of Singapore's unofficial population is made up of foreign domestic laborers, mainly from Bangladesh, India, and the Philippines.
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| Singapore: Largely not made by Singaporeans. |
I say unofficial because Singapore has a long history of not counting the over one million workers who stay on long-term work visas as members of the population. Saying these individuals are second class citizens would be a compliment, as they are largely ignored, shunned, or abused by the locals as a means of cheap labor. Females are required to live with their employer, often with abusive conditions, while males live in cramped, slum-like dorms spread throughout the city, or in "nice" dorms in remote areas that some say is a form of apartheid.
While they may come from economically struggling countries, these maids and construction workers and garbage collectors and hotel cleaners were often once engineers, doctors, lawyers, educators, and writers back in their native land, now forced to work for menial wages to send back home to support their family.
The physically harsh and emotionally draining conditions don't stop Singapore's migrant workers from channeling their creative spirit into poetry. As Australia's ABC News details, the Migrant Worker Poetry Competition is now in its third year, with a large number of submissions that now needs to be whittled down to 17 finalists, for which an evening is reserved by organizers at the National Gallery, and those finalists read their poems to raptured crowds.
Ramaswamy Madhavan, a site engineer at construction sites throughout Singapore, told ABC that such events and writing competition brighten the workers' spirits. "It gives us more energy to write."
And maybe more energy to survive, to live, to thrive.
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