By Samuel He
Photojournalist
samuelhe@sph.com.sg

 

ONE NOVEMBER afternoon, I was in the offices of Mini Environment Service Pte Ltd (MES). The company owns and operates four dormitories in Singapore.

I was meeting Mr Shaik Mohamed, one of the directors, to sell him my pitch for a story. I wanted to rent a bed-space in one of their dormitories and document the real lives of these workers.

My previous attempts to convince other dormitory operators had been rejected.

One insider in the foreign worker business even told me to give up on my idea as dormitory owners would never risk their reputation on such a story.

MES was different.

"Come on in, we have nothing to hide" Mr Shaik told me confidently.

More often than not in my daily assignments at the newspaper, I find myself next to a public relations chaperone telling me, "Oh, please don't shoot that, its ugly," or "You cannot shoot this, We don't want that in the paper."

"We have nothing to hide," was new.

The foreign worker dormitory business is not known for being a spanking clean one, literally.

News reports I have been a part of usually featured crackdowns on unapproved dormitories.

On other occasions, I would be photographing a new dormitory that was breaking the 'norms' by not being another overcrowded facility in dire conditions.

Kaki Bukit was neither of those. It is on MOM's list of 33 approved dormitories. But being the first purpose-built dorm in Singapore, its walls are old and its beds tired.

My parents watch the news with my room-mates during their visit to the hostel. When I asked my father what he thought about my new pad, he said: "This is not a place for humans to live". SOURCE: Samuel He

The sight of its cramped badminton-court-sized rooms (that house about 24 workers each) will rile the average HDB-dwelling Singaporean.

MES risked criticism about his dormitories with an story like this. But he still agreed, in the hope that this would give ST readers "a better understanding of what lay behind the walls of the dormitory".

He added: "It would give foreign workers here an identity and allow people to see that they are no different than us".

Mr Shaik kept his word. I spent a full month last December, sleeping among over 3,500 workers at Kaki Bukit. I was granted full access within the dormitory's walls. Never once was I told what not to shoot by any dormitory personnel.

The result is a series of intimate pictures that I would surely not have obtained if I had someone dictating what I could photograph.

By living with the workers, they learnt to trust me more. Slowly, they began to share with me their stories and their time, something that I would otherwise not have the privilege of being a part of.

Close to midnight on Chinese New Year's eve, Li Quan, 37, smiles as he speaks his wife and mother who are in Qilin Province. SOURCE: Samuel He

Mr Vijay Munisamy,23, feeds his room-mate Mr Prasanth Pandi, 25 a part of his lunch on Christmas Day, as Mr Kumar Murugan,23, looks on. SOURCE: Samuel He

Muslim devotees pray at sundown on the roof. After several requests from the Muslim population, the hostel management set aside commercial space for their religious practices. SOURCE: Samuel He

While I feel that Kaki Bukit's facilities have much to improve upon (a plan to rebuild the hostel is on the cards), I have seen worse — dirty Geylang shophouses with more than 100 people sharing two bathrooms and dreary, converted warehouses in the Tagore industrial district.

I surprised myself that I could spend so many nights sleeping in such conditions and my temporary stay in their world taught me that we could really be friends.

I hope that Singaporean readers who hold negative views of migrant workers will reconsider them after seeing these images.

Also, I urge that authorities and companies involved with foreign workers to take a cue from Mr Shaik's bold and honest approach towards telling the truth about our new neighbours.

A self-portrait of the photographer in his bedspace at the foreign worker dormitory. SOURCE: Samuel He

Read Samuel He's Saturday Special Report and view more pictures here and in The Straits Times today