The migrant worker team at the competition
TWC2’s dragon boat team made a splashing debut earlier this year on the sparkling waters of Kallang. This success comes after two years of physical training and instruction, organised by a team of dedicated volunteers. But why would these workers, who toil for six days a week, want to paddle hard on their rest days?
Training hard every Sunday is a bigger commitment than most people realise, especially for a migrant worker on a Work Permit or S Pass. I speak to a long-time member of the team, Rajesh, to find out what motivated him to pick up the paddle, week after week.
Rajesh worked as an electrical technician on an oil and gas project around Jurong Island. He was on an S Pass in a team of 12 to 13 men, and they stayed in Westlite Toh Guan dormitory, near IMM. Most of his team members were from Myanmar and the Philippines. He was the only Indian worker. Meal times were lonely, he tells me. Other colleagues would take turns to cook dishes from their homelands and share it within their groups. But Rajesh cooked for himself, twice a week.
Despite working in Singapore for a total of 8 years, he never made any friends with whom he caught up with on weekends. It is difficult to have lasting friendships, when you are a transient worker here, and people come and go with the rhythms of their companies. So in 2022, when he saw our Facebook post inviting workers to join our dragon boat team for free, he jumped at the chance.
“I love to doing dragon boat because I feel alone to Singapore,” he spills. “So when I join, I feel like (part of) a good family with the dragon boat team.”
Water training was especially alluring for Rajesh, because he was a fisherman back in India. Fishing boats, he tells me, are not that much different from dragon boats, except that they use two paddles instead of one. Being on the water, and in the green beauty of the reservoir, lifted his spirits.
Committing to weekly trainings at Bedok Reservoir was no easy feat, however. At the start, when training sessions used to be at 10am, he woke up at 6am, same as on his work days. He would hop onto the train and spend 2 hours travelling across the country. Training sessions eventually shifted to 2pm on Sundays, which was better, he says. He could wake up at 9am and enjoy breakfast before heading East. After their team dinner, he would spend another 2 hours travelling back, and reach his dormitory at 9.30 or 10 at night.
“Your company allow you to go every Sunday? They don’t make you work on Sundays?” I ask, because this was a great stumbling block to the creation of the team. Distance aside, most workers tell us they are unable to train regularly because of unpredictable work schedules, and the obligation to work at short notice on Sundays.
“Only sometimes special work on Sundays, but I talking for other people to do,” Rajesh laughs.
At the end of 2023, however, things were not as smooth sailing for him. He had returned on a month of home leave to get married, but when he asked to come back earlier than expected, he was abruptly told on the same day that the company would cancel his S Pass.
“They tell me, not enough quota so I should transfer to another company,” he laments. It was a nightmare. All his belongings were still in Westlite Toh Guan, but he couldn’t come back to collect them. Finding another company was also difficult on such short notice.
He came back briefly in the month of February 2024 to try out another job, but that fell through quickly for reasons we shall not go into here. Needless to say, when his team took to the waters for their first ever competition, he could only watch their success from afar, despite the amount of dedication he had shown them.
The success of the dragon boat team is dependent on so much more than the right funding. Without the right legislation to ensure that migrant workers get better job mobility and to correct the structural imbalances in the relationship between workers and their bosses, being able to sustain a migrant worker dragon boat team is very difficult. The whole idea is almost as illusory as clouds reflected on water.
But there’s a beauty to it.