Bangkok. Authorities and relief workers in flood-hit Myanmar are rushing to provide aid to thousands of people after weeks of heavy rains that have killed at least 21 people this month, aid agencies said.

Seasonal rains since late June have inundated large swathes of the country, while heavy winds and rains on Thursday and Friday battered Rakhine and Chin states, bordering Bangladesh.

President Thein Sein said the worst-hit areas were four areas in the northwest and west: Chin State, Magwe Region, Sagaing Region and Rakhine State.

Myanmar authorities say 21 people died in July, and that between 67,000 and 110,000 people were “severely affected” by the floods, according to an update from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

“I’ve never experienced such a terrible flood in my life,” Thein Tun, a 57-year-old retired teacher, said by telephone from Mrauk-U in western Rakhine state, one of the worst-hit areas that has yet to receive aid. “The entire town has been under water for a few days.”

OCHA spokesman in Myanmar Pierre Peron said the road to Mrauk-U and nearby townships north of the Rakhine capital, Sittwe, had been cut off, adding that the best chance of reaching these areas was by boat when the weather improved.

OCHA staff are also assessing damage at camps around Sittwe for some 90,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) – most of them Rohingya minorities who were forced from their homes by sectarian clashes in 2012.

The teams had not yet reported back because phone lines were down, Peron said.

Rakhine State’s chief minister, Maung Maung Ohn, said Mrauk-U was covered by floodwaters.

“Even when food and other relief items are airlifted by helicopters to the flooded town, there is no place to store these goods and no roads for the trucks to drive on,” he said in an interview with Myanmar’s MRTV.

Nearly 525,000 acres of rice paddy fields have been flooded, the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation said.

The Myanmar Red Cross has deployed 244 volunteers to help local authorities to evacuate victims and distribute items such as mosquito nets, tarpaulins, toiletries, cooking sets and water purification tablets, said Araceli Lloret, disaster management coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross.

The Myanmar Red Cross and international aid groups are due to meet on Saturday to set up a more comprehensive plan, she said.

The World Food Program has dispatched food aid for 10,880 people and will start distributions of food rations and high energy biscuits early next week in two townships in Sagaing, the OCHA update said.

The Myanmar Department of Meteorology and Hydrology is forecasting further heavy rains and strong winds in the coming days across much of the Southeast Asian country, it said.

“The situation therefore remains dynamic and more people are likely to be affected by flooding and strong winds over the next few days, in particular in Rakhine state,” it said.

Thomson Reuters Foundation

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Bangkok. The US government is setting up a course to train officials in the Asia-Pacific region in the basics of preparing and financing projects to help communities weather climate change, experts from the USAID development agency said on Friday.

Financing needs for climate change adaptation – efforts to adjust to extreme weather and rising seas – are estimated at tens of billions of dollars per year in developing countries.

But in 2013, only $25 billion in public resources went to adaptation around the world.

Rich countries have promised to mobilize an annual $100 billion by 2020 to help poor nations adapt to climate change and develop their economies on a low-carbon path.

The key challenge is channeling money from large donors to small, poor communities that are hardest hit by climate-related disasters, experts said in an online discussion supported by the Asia Pacific Adaptation Network.

Most international funders cannot lend directly to smaller communities, and have to go through national agencies, such as finance ministries, said Peter King who works on USAID’s Bangkok-based Adapt Asia-Pacific project.

“Not only do [local authorities] have problems in implementing projects,” King said, “in our experience they have difficulty in designing projects too.”

King suggested embedding experts in local governments to provide technical assistance and on-the-job training. Adapt Asia-Pacific is developing an adaptation training course tailored to urban areas, he added.

The course has been piloted at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia, with 20 officials working on urban infrastructure and climate change, said Bikram Ghosh, deputy chief of Adapt Asia-Pacific.

“The training was well received – it was clear that local-level officials want more information on basic climate science and adaptation measures before they can make the leap to project development,” Ghosh said.

The course, which will be conducted through regional organizations and universities, is being fine-tuned and tested in the Philippines and again in Indonesia, before being rolled out by November, Ghosh told the online discussion.

King said it was also critical to have a roster of experts available to help design and implement adaptation projects.

Thomson Reuters Foundation

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Migrant domestic worker Suay Ing, 31, wipes a window of a clinic in Bangkok, Thailand, on May 25, 2015. Ing was nine when she was first employed as a domestic worker, cleaning for a family and sleeping in their laundry room in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai for $10 a month. The eldest of four children of migrant construction workers from Myanmar, Ing was 14 when she was trafficked to Bangkok by a broker who promised her a job and abandoned her. Asia is home to 41 percent of the estimated 53 million domestic workers worldwide, most of them women who enjoy few rights, work excessively long days and earn far below the minimum wage, rights groups say. (Reuters Photo/Athit Perawongmetha)

Bangkok. Suay Ing was nine when she was first employed as a domestic worker, cleaning for a family and sleeping in their laundry room in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai for $10 a month.

The eldest of four children of migrant construction workers from Myanmar, Ing was 14 when she was trafficked to Bangkok by a broker who promised her a job and abandoned her.

Hungry and with no identification papers or money, the unkempt child finally found a noodle shop owner willing to hire her for 3,000 baht ($100) a month in exchange for working 12-hour shifts with three days off a month.

Over the next 14 years, he taught her to manage the shop, but also beat her, docked her pay and even denied her food.

“Even if my staff did anything wrong, I had to take responsibility for it. He would say, ‘How do you want to be punished? Do you want to be slapped? Do you want me to take your salary?’” recalled Ing, who is now 31.

Two years ago, she plucked up the courage to leave her abusive boss, turning again to domestic work, but this time, armed with greater knowledge of her rights, she got decent pay, days off and reasonable hours.

Over time, Ing began sharing her experiences with other domestic workers and she now offers advice on how to find safe, fair employment with the Network of Migrant Domestic Workers.

“I tell domestic workers to ask about their days off, about whether or not they will have their salaries cut if they go home,” Ing said in a voice that speaks to her determination to keep others from suffering hardship.

“If the domestic workers ask these questions, then the employers know they can’t take advantage of them.”

Asia is home to 41 percent of the estimated 53 million domestic workers worldwide, most of them women who enjoy few rights, work excessively long days and earn far below the minimum wage, rights groups say.

Under Thai law, domestic workers are entitled to at least one day off per week. Laborers have a right to an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of 300 baht a day, but these do not apply to domestic work, which is not considered formal work.

The MAP Foundation, a migrant rights group based in Chiang Mai, said most domestic workers it had surveyed are paid between 4,300 baht and 5,000 baht ($130 and $150) a month and work up to 14 hours a day.

“Thai society does not see domestic work as work, so the person doing housework is not a worker,” said Poonsap Tulaphan, director of the Foundation for Labor and Employment Promotion, a Thai organization that helped set up the Network of Migrant Domestic Workers and its Thai predecessor, HomeNet.

Migrant domestic worker Suay Ing, 31, poses for a picture at a clinic where she works, in Bangkok, Thailand, on May 25, 2015. (Reuters Photo/Athit Perawongmetha)

‘No rights at all’

The Myanmar domestic workers’ labor woes in Thailand reflect a wider problem across Asia.

Many migrant domestic workers come from the Philippines, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar, and work in neighboring countries as well as the Middle East.

Occasionally, cases of violence make the headlines, such as the 7-year-old girl from Myanmar who was enslaved for five years in Thailand, or the Indonesian maid, Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, whose employer in Hong Kong was found guilty in February of charges including grievous bodily harm.

Abuse and exploitation in the Middle East has been so extreme that Indonesia recently barred domestic workers from working in 21 countries, media reports said.

Activists say travel bans will only push women to migrate through illegal channels, putting them at greater risk of abuse.

The best fix is to persuade governments to protect their citizens’ rights, says Elizabeth Tang, general secretary for the Hong Kong-based International Domestic Workers Federation.

She said Asians have traditionally hired domestic workers from indigenous or ethnic minority groups, lower castes or poor families, and believe they are doing them a favor by doing so.

“Employers tend to think, ‘You’re so poor. If I don’t give you work in my house, you will probably die, you will have nothing to eat.’ These kinds of attitudes are deep rooted,” Tang told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Governments also need to tackle unscrupulous agencies that lure women into domestic work abroad and charge exorbitant fees amounting to six months of wages, Tang said.

With poverty at home, many women have no choice but to pay, putting homes and property up as collateral to pay broker fees.

“In Cambodia and Indonesia, they have no rights at all and earn about $30 to $60 a month. This is the main reason they have to leave their countries and go abroad, even if they don’t know what will happen to them … because what they earn at home will get them nowhere,” Tang said.

Migrant domestic worker Suay Ing, 31, wipes a window of the clinic where she works in Bangkok, Thailand, on May 25, 2015. (Reuters Photo/Athit Perawongmetha)

Organized and informed

Many migrant domestic workers land in their new countries of employment unable to speak English or the local language, and with no friends, family or money.

Organized networks — such as the ones the Filipinas, Indonesians and Thais have set up in Hong Kong — have helped to give women support and information to protect themselves.

In Thailand, for example, the Network of Migrant Domestic Workers says about 15 of its 75 Burmese members have at least one day off each week. About 80 percent of them work with Westerners, who tend to pay more.

Now they are trying to expand their network to assist women who are younger, unable to speak Thai or English, and more vulnerable.

“We are domestic workers, too, we aren’t doctors, we aren’t lawyers. If they need help, we have to learn, too, what rights we have, how we can access those rights and be ready to help others,” said Champa, who belongs to the Network of Migrant Domestic Workers.

“I have worked as a domestic worker for 20 years, but I never cared about rights because I never met anyone who told me that I have rights … I just wanted money, and thought I had to work to earn money. But … then I learned my rights.”

Thomson Reuters Foundation

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Bangkok. Resettling asylum seekers who are among the thousands of boatpeople in temporary shelters in Indonesia and Malaysia will prove “extremely difficult” due to the mounting refugee crises around the world, a United Nations official says.

Responding to international concern about thousands of migrants adrift at sea, Indonesia and Malaysia on Wednesday said they would offer shelter to 7,000 migrants, provided they were repatriated or resettled in third countries within a year.

“Those places are very, very precious. There are perhaps 100,000 people a year who manage to be referred for third-country resettlement,” said Alistair Boulton, the assistant regional representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

“Syria alone has four million refugees, including massive numbers of people in acute crisis, with unbelievable trauma,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview in Bangkok.

The UNHCR estimates more than 87,000 migrants – mostly Rohingya from Myanmar and Bangladeshis fleeing persecution and poverty – departed between January 2014 and the end of March this year on smugglers’ boats across the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea to Malaysia and Indonesia.

They are starved, constrained and beaten, and may be held in Thailand for ransom before being granted onward passage or killed.

Many migrant boats have been pushed back to sea by Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia this month. The UNHCR estimated on Friday that some 3,500 migrants were still stranded on boats with dwindling supplies, and repeated its appeal for the region’s governments to rescue them.

Repatriating people on the boats identified as Bangladeshi economic migrants would not be a problem, with Bangladesh willing to take them back, Boulton said on Thursday.

However, resettlement outside the region for those identified as refugees or stateless may encourage more people to join the exodus, he said.

The UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime – the three agencies invited to a regional summit on May 29 in Bangkok to address the crisis – have shared with the governments involved a 10-point plan of action.

The plan is similar to one recently drafted for the boat crisis in the Mediterranean, Boulton said.

It calls for rescue at sea, disembarkation to safety, attention to humanitarian needs such as food and medical attention, and an evaluation of the individuals to determine whether they are economic migrants, refugees or stateless.

The final point of the plan urges Myanmar and Bangladesh, the source countries of the migrants, to address the root causes of the problem, including the issue of citizenship, which is a problem for the Rohingya in both Myanmar and Bangladesh.

There are about a million Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, and between 200,000 and 500,000 in Bangladesh, living in makeshift shelters or among the population with no formal status, Boulton said. There are also 32,000 formally recognized Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

Myanmar’s Rohingya are not recognized as citizens, and have long complained of state-sanctioned discrimination and persecution including forced labor, restrictions on movement and marriage, and land confiscation. Myanmar denies discriminating against the group. It also refuses to recognize the term “Rohingya,” referring instead to the group as “Bengalis.”

Boulton urged the international community to consider solutions to the crisis through regulation of migration as a way of meeting labor demands in destination countries.

“If you look at who’s going where and why – is there a way to formalize that, document people, bring it out into the light so it’s a regularized movement?

“You cut the smugglers and traffickers out, but you provide people what they need, you provide states what they need, and the protection is alongside that.”

Thomson Reuters Foundation

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