Global COE Program - Kyoto University - In Search of Sustainable Humanosphere in Asia and Africa

Abstract:
Since the mid-1990s the number of migrant nurses and health care workers from Myanmar has been on the rise in Singapore. The majority of these health care workers are tertiary-educated single females, which reflects the non-marriage trend in Myanmar. The percentage of tertiary-educated females remaining single in Myanmar is 41.3 percent at age 35-44 and 34.1 percent at age 45-54. (Jones 2004) This paper focuses on the value of remittances not only to those who receive them but also for those who send them. A large part of the voluntary remittances are sent back to support the education of siblings, health care expenses for the elderly parents and relatives, as donations to temples, or to support ordination rituals of younger male relatives. By doing so, it seems that the ideology of women as ‘nurturing mothers’ in the Buddhist value system is symbolically sustained and reconfigured despite their unmarried status and the fact that they are far away from home. Thus, by extending the concepts of ‘family remittances’ and ‘global chain of care’, this paper argues that while these Burmese migrant nurses are employed to care for the elderly and sick abroad, at the same time it enables them to symbolically practice “nurturing” roles for the people in their home country without actually getting married.

The research findings of this paper is based on the survey questionnaire (n=412) among foreign health care workers for the elderly in Singapore, in-depth interviews with Burmese health care workers in Singapore and the opinion survey (n=552) on late marriage and family relations in Myanmar conducted in 2006-2007.