"Chicken Eggs For The Workers"

After we passed medical exam from ministry of labour, we can start to work. Every morning wake up at 5.30 AM, to get the truck to go to so call office, and change another truck to go construction site. Sometime truck arrive near our house early, so the driver don’t want to wait for us. He don’t like us, because we are not the same company and in addition, we are from Burma.

The driver used to play with us, (playing catching up) he pretend do not see us and always drive away. And he stop and wait for us, after near him he drive away again. And he came down and said, “hay Burma, you cannot wake up - don’t work, go back to Burma”. We become hate each other. Every morning is become dirty morning for each of us.

At the time, a few people from Burma came to work in Singapore. Mostly are from Thailand, Bangladesh, India and Malaysia. We cannot speak English or Chinese to communicate in Singapore. Singapore Senior citizen are mostly they speak Chinese and Malay language. So this driver uncle speak only Chinese and Malay language. Really super poor English. We always cannot communicate each other, like chicken and duck’s talk.

Why we always rushing at morning was, we eat breakfast at our house and prepare lunch box. Normally no one do that, unless very low salary worker will do it. Because need to save money for sending back home. If not we have not enough to save about $500 to send. At the time, 10 eggs was only 70¢. We only used $50 for the whole month, the rest we used to send everything back to home.
At the time, one coffee cup was 40¢ and one meal was only $2. Breakfast will be only about $1. Singapore was the most expensive country to smoke and drink. But at the time, one 20 sticks Marlboro box was $5. For all we can’t effort to have because our salary was only $20 a day. We are depending on overtimes, especially Sunday is gold for us. Because we got double pay.

As a young adults, at first, we do not know how to cook, so we used to cook every day, fry eggs, boil eggs, tea leave salad and canned food. I am surprise that the rice are so good in Singapore, it not like the same from our country. Everything are easy to get at super market.
A few week eating of eggs every day, after come back from work, we try to cook something else, so we go and buy chicken and start to cook. Half left for fry and half to cook curry. We try to recall all the idea that how our family member cook at home, but not successful. We try to eat, but we decided to throw away, because of fish phase and tomato was not cook properly. At night, we still continue to fry chicken and prepare for next day lunch box.

On Sunday, we decided to visit our friend’s house, it was 50KM away from us to get the recipe for a few dishes. At the time, we don’t have any hand phone or pager. Only boss or rich people can effort to have hand phone. Some people have pager to receive the message for missed called. We only effort to used public pay phone. Lucky that our friend’s house have house phone to contact to them.

They teach us how to cook and what to buy at so call wet market. At the time one pig head was only $1, because no one know how to eat. Chicken legs, stomach and liver can get free, if you buy something from them. All this tips was really helpful to us for saving money. For the Pig head we try to boil with black soya souse, ginger garlic and eat, it can last for more than a week. And we learn some recipe from our Malaysian housemate. It’s become easier and testier foods.

To Be Continue.....

GO WELL....(By: PatrickSanLin)

Photos credit: Google Image