1. “You cannot visit Cairo without visiting the Pyramids of Giza. Once through the entrance you arrive at the Great Pyramid and are left to wonder around the 3 pyramids yourself. There is little I can say to do them justice, most people will be aware of their history already, if not though I recommend to read about it before going as it will enhance the experience. As with all places in Egypt, there are people around the site trying to sell you items, or services (such as Camel Rides) even if they offer something for free (or offer to pose in a photo) they will expect money in return. It is best to avoid making eye contact and talking to these people, if one does approach though generally saying your not interested and not engaging in anything with them works well. They do deter from the experience, however you will have this in every place you go to in Egypt, its a country problem and not a attraction issue.”
2. “With 7000 tropical islands on my doorstep, all ripe for exploration, I find it easy to like the Philippines. Love, on the other hand, is borne of subtler things. Love is borne of long rooftop jeepney rides through the mountains of North Luzon; of a frosty San Miguel at sundown on a sublime slab of Visayan sand; of a fresh-fish lunch, followed by a siesta on an interminable bangka journey through Palawan’s islands; of friends with names like Bing and Bong; of phrases like 'comfort room'; of – dare I say it – karaoke. Now that is love.”
3. “Sex tourism, it is commonly noted, is fueled by the fantasies of white, First World men who exoticize dark- skinned ‘native’ bodies in the developing world, where they can buy sex for cut-rate prices. These two components- racial stereotypes and the economic disparity between the developed and developing worlds- characterize sex-tourist destinations everywhere.”
4. “In the Philippines, the current monthly minimum wage for domestic helpers is P800 (est. US$18.4 or 14.8 euros)… Both local and overseas domestic workers face common problems: long working hours with no rest periods, non-payment of wages, verbal, physical and sexual abuse and a lack of adequate accommodation. Child and adult domestic workers lack access to education, and are vulnerable to illegal recruitment, force labor, debt bondage and human trafficking.”
5. "From the government’s perspective, the issue of human trafficking is secondary to the more pressing question of illegal immigration from sub-Saharan Africa. According to a report published in 2007 by the U.S. State Department, of the 15,000 illegal sub-Saharan African immigrants residing in Algeria, about 9,000 were victims of trafficking, sexual exploitation, or involuntary forms of servitude. The report also found that the government did not adequately distinguish between human trafficking and illegal immigration.”
6. “Algiers (Al-Jazaïr) never fails to make an impression. This is a city of rare beauty and of thrilling, disorientating, and sometimes brutal, contrast. The country's turbulent history is writ large in the city's richly textured architecture: wide French-built boulevards and elegant apartments and villas, Socialist-era monuments and public buildings, and an enduring Islamic heart secreted in the steep, hillside Casbah. Labyrinthine streets spill down to the yawning big blue of the Bay of Algiers, sea and sky and green ravines glimpsed at every step. Though people often spend just enough time in Algiers to organise an onward journey, it’s a fascinating place well worth at least a couple of days’ exploration.”
7. “The Committee is concerned about the practice of sanctioning of women and girl refugees and asylum-seekers for illegal entry and stay in the country, and subjecting those persons to detention for protracted periods of time…the Committee is also concerned about the reports that some of the refugee women and girls have suffered from sexual and gender-based violence and abuse, and that those victims lack access to shelter, medical and psychological services and to justice.”
8. “Structural adjustment programs, for instance, though promoted as a means to economic recovery, have destroyed women’s livelihood, making it impossible for them to reproduce their families and themselves. One of the main objectives of SAPs is the ‘modernization’ of agriculture, that is its reorganization on a commercial and export basis. This means that more land is diverted to the cultivation of cash crops and more women, the world’s main subsistence farmers, are displaced.”
9. “By one recent estimate, women were the sole, primary, or coequal earners in more than half of American families. So the question arises: Who will take care of the children, the sick, the elderly? Who will make dinner and clean the house? …In an earlier phase of imperialism, northern countries extracted natural resources and agricultural products- rubber, metals, and sugar, for example- from lands they conquered and colonized. Today, while still relying on Third World countries for agricultural and industrial labor, the wealthy countries also seek to extract something harder to measure and quantify, something that can look very much like love.”
10. “…it is a dependency of a particularly intimate kind. Increasingly often, as affluent and middle-class families in the First World come to depend on migrants from poorer regions to provide child care, homemaking, and sexual services, a global relationship arises that in some ways mirrors the traditional relationship between the sexes.”
11. “…and on her last visit home, her son Clinton, now eight, refused to touch his mother. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘did you come back?’ "
12. “Around the world, cities are welcoming migrants and displaced populations like never before, with women and girls arriving in unprecedented numbers.”
13. “Migrations and trafficking networks are made, and they are made in response to larger economic constraints and opportunities. These include the destruction of traditional economies in the global South in good part due to IMF and World Bank restructuring programs aimed at modernizing and opening these economies to foreign firms and investors.”
14. “...that the remittances sent by immigrants constitute the main international monetary flow after the revenues of the oil companies, then the most important commodity that the “Third World” today exports to the “First” is labor. In other words, as in the past, today as well, capitalist accumulation is above all the accumulation of workers, a process that occurs primarily through immigration. This means that a significant part of the work necessary to reproduce the metropolitan workforce is now performed by women from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the former socialist countries…labor that is never considered in the computation of the “Third World” debt and yet directly contributes to the accumulation of wealth in ‘advanced’ capitalist countries.”
15. “…many of the countries with large exports of female workers to the service industry of highly developed nations hold large amounts of external debt. For example, the Philippines, a prominent exporter of domestic help and other caregivers to such countries as both United Arab Emirates (Dubai) as well as the United States, owes, 61.5 billion, while the Ukraine, another large exporter of domestic labor to the United States, holds 33.3 billion in external debt.”
16. “Official statistics on women’s migration from most countries are considered to be major underestimations because of the large numbers who migrate through informal channels and/or are working in irregular status…the gendered perception of WMWs [women migrant workers] as a ‘young, needy, pliable, portable and disposable labor force’ has meant that their demand is primarily in the domestic, hospitality, health and care, garment and entertainment sectors.”
17. "In response to the dehumanizing conditions that female migrant workers face (in foreign countries as well as in the borderlands), many activists have advocated for the guarantee of their human rights and/or for the ethicopolitical recognition of this population and their protection under a transnational regime of human belonging. Such claims on behalf of women unmoored by processes of globalization as well as war invariably invoke but also problematize humanity as a category of valuable life from which a growing global majority of people are systematically excluded. It is the violence that is inflicted upon, in order to construct, the expendable lives of female migrants that indexes and defines the condition of their exclusion from humanity. Violence and suffering become the constitutive traits of dehumanization, while humanity becomes equated with freedom from violence. It would seem that today “humanity” has become primarily a category of the protected, a status that accrues to fully-fledged subjects under the universal law of state sovereignty. Sold off by their own nation-states as commodified national natural resources, migrant women thus lose the universal guarantee of their humanity and are left exposed to the practices of violence that others engage in both to exercise their own claims to sovereign power and to ensure their own protected human belonging."
You Belong to Me
1952, written by Pee Wee King, Chilton Price, and Redd Stuart. Recording: Peggy Lee
Works Cited
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