“By law, domestic workers in Singapore are entitled to one day off per week. Many spend it at church, or with friends. On Sundays East Coast Park, a long, narrow stretch of greenery by the Singapore Strait, is crowded with women laughing and picnicking together. But some forego the outdoors, and take a cramped, rickety lift in an unremarkable office building in an unfashionable corner of the city to spend their afternoon in a fluorescent-lit classroom.
Since last September, a group called Voice of Singapore’s Invisible Hands has been offering creative-writing classes for Singapore’s migrant workers (the country’s “invisible hands”). Another group, Singlit Station, organises poetry workshops. And for the past three years, Shivaji Das, a high-flying consultant with Frost & Sullivan who also writes art and travel books (his latest, “Angels by the Murky River,” came out in March), has staged poetry contests for Singapore’s millions of migrant workers. …”
Read the full report by Jon Fasman on the Economist’s 1843 magazine.