A mother is the most important member in every family. Especially if she is a ‘stay-at-home’ mother who binds everything together in a household. But what if the roles were reversed? What if it’s the fathers who stay at home to take care of the family while the mothers go out to work?
Yes, you read that right. There are certain places in Eastern Indonesia where almost every young mother has gone abroad to earn a living while the fathers stayed back to take care of the children. The Indonesians call these communities ‘motherless villages’.
Wanasaba, in East Lombok, is one of many such villages where it is believed that mothers should work abroad to give their children a better upbringing.
Here the young mothers often leave their children in the care of their husbands or extended relatives to work as domestic help abroad. Most of the men who remain in the villages are farmers or labourers who earn a fraction of what the women earn overseas.
The process of going overseas for work started sometime in the 1980s.
PNN/Agencies