Ngui prepares to dive. Photo by Giorgio Taraschi

Ngui takes one last breath and disappears with a tiny splash. Tunnelling through the turquoise waves, he dives past brightly coloured fish and coral, until he reaches the sandy bottom of the seabed, 20 metres deep, where he begins scouring for tonight’s dinner.

He wears no mask, no fins, and no diving tank. He prefers sarongs and button-down shirts decorated with seashell and starfish motifs but the most startling thing about him underwater is his eyes. They are wide open.

Ngui, 30, belongs to the Moken, a nomadic, seafaring tribe of hunter-gatherers who live in the southern seas of Burma and Thailand. Little is known about their origins, but it is believed they descended from migrant Austronesians who set sail from southern China around 4,000 years ago. Spending eight months of the year at sea, the Moken roam in small flotillas of kabang – boats fashioned from a single tree and shared by a nuclear family – and return to land only to barter fish and shells for essentials such as rice and petrol, or to wait out the monsoon season in temporary shacks. It is a way of life that has existed, unchanged, for centuries – but one that may not last for much longer.

The 2004 tsunami greatly depleted the source of the Moken’s only livelihood: the ocean’s once-abundant array of seafood. International fishing boats are now wiping out the little that’s left. Those Moken who have moved ashore are often forced to take dangerous jobs for menial pay. Those who stay at sea are sometimes arrested for lacking papers or permits. Others return to land after months afloat only to find their huts destroyed and luxury tourist resorts built in their place.

“The sea has changed and life has changed,” explains Ngui’s father, Jao. “Things we used to do we can’t do any more. Places we used to go we can’t go any more. Life isn’t fun any more.”

It would be difficult to find a family that represents the changes wrought on the Moken as well as Jao’s. He was born on a boat and spent his childhood at sea. He married at 16 and nearly pursued a traditional, aquatic lifestyle – until he and his wife decided to settle on land.

“Life was hard being illiterate,” says Jao in the cramped house in Kuraburi they now share with a 13-member extended family. “I wanted my children to go to school and have options.”

Education is still a relatively new concept to the roughly 2,000 Moken who live in the waters around Burma and Thailand, most of whom are stateless. A recent push by various charities and the Thai government to issue Thai identity cards has granted some access to state-run schools and healthcare, but claiming full-blown citizenship – by proving that they, or a parent, were born in Thailand – is a complex issue for a nomadic people who hardly use numbers and mark the date according to the tide, not the Gregorian calendar.

Even getting children to school can prove trying, said Sumana Sirimangkala, headteacher at the only school on Koh Lao, an island of 50 Moken families on the Thai-Burmese border. “Moken lack supplies like clothes, food, stationery, textbooks, shoes, raincoats, lifejackets, umbrellas – all the things that are necessary for children to come to school,” she says.

“Moken can’t afford any of these things, so the school has to provide it all – otherwise they don’t want to come.”

Moken children regularly drop out to help their parents earn money, students say. Some boys as young as eight are sent to work in construction, while others help their mothers dig for shells – backbreaking labour in the hot sun.

Nearly all the men on the island are hired by Thai fishing boats to plant explosives on the seabed, or to dive for expensive and exotic rarities such as sea cucumber. Sometimes they are sent down with air run through thin plastic tubes hooked up to a spluttery, diesel-run compressor; other times they dive without any air at all. Many succumb to decompression sickness (the bends) from ascending too quickly; some don’t return at all.

“I’m afraid of being killed, it’s so risky,” admits a 30-year-old Moken who has just returned from a fish-bombing expedition. “We wire together four to five dynamite sticks, connect another explosive wire that hooks up to the boat, and then I dive down to the bottom of the sea. When I come back up, the sticks are ignited with a battery.”

Sitdit, a Moken elder whose son died from decompression sickness during a job in the Nicobar Islands, says risks such as these are increasingly part and parcel of a new way of life.

“We are running out of resources, so our skills have to be adapted to the new challenges,” he says simply. “Sometimes the big boats get caught by the Burmese military and Moken are arrested. I had four relatives arrested by the Burmese military and they all died in jail.”

Apart from a handful of researchers who had studied their language and customs – notably the French father-son anthropologist duo Pierre and Jacques Ivanoff – the Moken were a relatively unknown lot until the tsunami, when headlines described the mysterious “sea gypsies [who] saw signs in the waves“. Charities and religious groups poured in with free supplies – food, petrol, boats and building materials – at such a velocity that some communities were left bewildered by the handouts.

“We had to become Christian to qualify for a boat, so I became a Christian – I even became a church leader!” explains Sitdit, his charity-built, two-room stilt house facing the “church”, an empty wooden structure with a simple roof. “All we had to do was follow the gospel and sing songs. But then the church [group] cheated us, and now nobody goes to church any more.”

Today, a different kind of communion is going on, one where Moken women in sarongs while away the afternoon heat with card games and whisky so strong it makes the eyes burn. When the men return from their jobs at sea, they too take to drinking and gambling.

“There’s an issue with their drinking a lot of alcohol – it’s everywhere,” says Jitlada Rattanapan of Plan Thailand, a charity working to support Moken children.

At Baan Tung Wah, a Moken village of around 70 families in the mainland resort town of Khao Lak, children with snotty noses and dirty T-shirts beg for sweets while elders take shots of strong drink. Most of the parents are away doing menial day jobs – working in construction, spraying insecticides, or scavenging for recyclables along the beaches and streets – leaving the children to play among puppies and chickens in the rubbish-filled streets.

“Everyone in this village drinks – they hit their kids, too,” says a shopkeeper, Kong Kwan, 35, who spends all day selling sweets and crisps to Moken children and petrol and whisky to Moken elders. “Sometimes the police come, but they can’t be bothered to deal with it.”

The community’s 20-year-old youth leader, Big, says that life in the village can be stifling, forcing many youths to look for a way out.

“We’re restricted to living in this area only – about five acres [2 hectares] – and because of the influx of hotels and resorts around here, the sea has been polluted,” he says. “That makes it difficult to go fishing. So a lot of young people just choose easier jobs, like working in hotels or at 7-Eleven.”

Big adds that the Moken youth have pretty much “assimilated seamlessly” into Thai society, so much so that “whatever ‘bad Thais’ do, Moken do now too”, he notes. “Drugs, stealing, marijuana, glue-sniffing. We never saw this before, and it’s getting serious.”

The village is trying to counter such behaviour by offering classes in Moken language and customs to the children, many of whom are unaware of their traditions. Other classes, directed at teens, offer training as tour guides.

The community leader, Hong, who heads the classes and created the village’s Moken museum, hopes that turning Baan Tung Wah into an ecotourism destination may help get people back on track.

“Moken are supposed to travel, to be nomadic, to travel freely. So if we cannot travel freely, we are dead, culturally at least,” he says. “Moken children use mobile phones, study English and choose to be educated. We’ve abandoned our old traditions so much we risk losing them entirely.”

While many charities working for the Moken promote education and citizenship as giving new “options” to such a vulnerable group, Narumon Hinshiranan – a cultural anthropologist at Chulalongkorn University who speaks fluent Moken and has studied the group for the past decade – says this kind of “one-size-fits-all development … limits their nomadic background”.

“I don’t see education as an ‘option’, I see it as integration into Thai society – so that they are essentially cut off from their roots.”

Those who have pursued this new kind of life – such as Jao’s 23-year-old daughter, Kang, who is so far the only Moken to have graduated from university – may determine what choices the Moken make next.

“I see myself as a bridge between the Moken community and the outside world,” says Kang, who this month starts her first job, as the only Moken teacher at the school on Surin island.

She will be living with her brother Ngui, along with some 200 other Moken villagers, but they will be parallel lives in what seems like a parallel world.

“I like to be out doing things,” says Ngui, thrusting a hand out to the sea to explain why he chose not to stay in school. “I dive to collect seafood, gather it up bit by bit, and sell it to shops. It’s enough to make a living for now.”

The Moken

• The Moken are one of many sea gypsy tribes across south-east Asia: there are the Orang Laut of Indonesia; the Bajau of Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines; and the Salone (Moken) of Burma

• Thailand is home to an estimated 12,000 sea gypsies, divided into three groups: the Moken, the Moklen and the Urak Lawoi

• A 2003 study by Lund University in Sweden found that the underwater vision of Moken children was twice as good as that of their European counterparts

• Food sourcing is subsistence-based: men traditionally spear fish, or use nets or traps, to find seafood, while women catch crabs and oysters by hand, or dig for shells. They also engage in basic agriculture

• The Moken are often described as sincere and peace-loving, preferring to flee trouble than engage in disagreements

• Traditionally animist, the Moken perform a large spirit-offering festival in the fifth lunar month and celebrate death by singing, dancing and drinking

• Though the Moken give themselves only one name, the Thai monarchy has created surnames for them, among them “Klatalee” (“brave person of the sea”)

• A bucket of sea cucumbers, which the Moken dive for, earns about $10 a day. A small dish of the stuff sells for $30 or more in Taiwanese restaurants

• Moken are often called “dirty islanders” by Thai people, a phrase that has encouraged many Moken youth to adopt Thai fashion and haircuts to fit in

• Surin island, home to a large Moken settlement, was turned into a national marine park by Thailand in 1981, rendering illegal traditional Moken activities such as fishing and logging (in order to make boats)

• Burma has been rumoured to be looking to permanently resettle many of its Moken and has already turned one Moken island into a military base.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/13/moken-nomads-leave-sea-gypsy-life

Malaysian Muslim Ishak Md Nor and his two wives, Aishah Abdul Ghafar, left, and Afiratul Abidah Mohd Hanan, who are members of the Obedient Wives Club. Photograph: AP

A women’s group that aims to teach Muslim wives how to “keep their spouses happy in the bedroom” is taking root in south-east Asia, prompting outrage from Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

The Obedient Wives Club (OWC), which has chapters in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore and intends to open in London and Paris later this year, says it intends to curb various social problems, including prostitution and gambling, by showing Muslim wives how to “be submissive and keep their spouses happy in the bedroom”. This, in turn, would lead to more harmonious marriages and societies, it says.

“In Islam, if the husband wants sex and the wife is not in the mood, she has to give in to him,” the Singapore club’s co-founder Darlan Zaini said recently. “If not, the angels will curse her. This is not good for the family.”

The OWC, which launched in Jordan this year, opened a branch in Malaysia last month and in Indonesia last week. In Malaysia, it caused a furore when its international vice-president, Rohaya Mohamad, declared that, by becoming a “good whore … to your husband” and serving him “better than a first-class prostitute”, women could help “curb social ills like prostitution, domestic violence, human trafficking and abandoned babies” – all of which she attributed to unfulfilled sexual needs.

In Singapore, however, where a hodgepodge mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian residents actively aim to maintain what the nation’s “founder”, Lee Kuan Yew, has termed “racial harmony”, supporters are hard to come by.

“It’ll never work here,” said 43-year-old technician Ramli bin Katyo. “Wives already know what to do to make husbands happy – and husbands, wives. They don’t need classes.”

Facebook groups, such as the Say No to the Obedient Wives Club in Singapore coalition, stress that “women are equal to men and we, in Singapore, should keep it that way”.

Local rights organisations, such as Aware (the Association of Women for Action and Research), have also expressed dismay at the OWC’s seemingly regressive stance on women’s rights. “What the club signifies is a regression, a moving backwards, in [what] women and other progressive men – Muslim and non-Muslim – are trying to do for gender equality here in Singapore,” said its vice president Halijah Mohamed.

A recent gay and lesbian-friendly event called Pink Dot, attended by 10,000-odd supporters – many of them openly gay Muslim men and women dressed in pink hijabs – demonstrated the progressiveness of much of Singaporean society.

Even the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore denounced the club’s views as myopic, and said in a statement: “Happiness in a marriage goes beyond receiving sexual fulfilment from one’s wife.”

Defending the OWC’s controversial stance, Fauziah Ariffin, the Malaysian chapter’s national director, said: “When we said that husbands should treat their wives like first-class prostitutes, we were not putting wives on the same level with prostitutes.”

“We are talking about first-class elite types, not street hooker types … Ordinary prostitutes can only provide good sex, but not love and affection, which only a wife can provide,” she told the Malay Mail.

“If we provide our husbands [with] more than a prostitute can give, then he will not go out looking for it.”

But the Malaysian women’s minister, Robia Kosai, dismissed the OWC’s views as “nonsense”, and said the club was “not welcome” in the state she represents, Johor, which borders Singapore. “Divorce – and other social ills – won’t stop just because the wife is good in bed,” she said. “Research shows that divorce in Malaysia is primarily due to economic factors, not because a wife hasn’t been ‘obedient’ to her husband.”

But with members already numbering some 1,000 worldwide, the OWC – whose umbrella organisation, Global Ikhwan, also started a polygamy group two years ago – aims to launch branches in London, Paris, Rome and Frankfurt in the near future.

As for the tenuous future of the OWC in Singapore, the club may very well have to open under a different moniker. “OWC is too controversial,” Zaini was quoted as saying. “We can use a simpler name like ‘Happy Family’ or something.”

[published by The Guardian 6 July 2011 http://gu.com/p/3vccb]

Malaysian police line up in front of water cannon trucks near Independence Square in Kuala Lumpur on Friday. Photograph: Vincent Thian/AP

Malaysia is bracing for an Arab spring-style stand-off on Saturday, when activists angry at “dirty politics” are expected to rally in Kuala Lumpur despite draconian government efforts to nip the movement in the bud.

Tensions have mounted in this normally staid state, often called “Moderate Malaysia”, after a group of 62 non-governmental organisations known locally as Bersih 2.0 proposed a peaceful protest, dubbed the “Walk for Democracy”, against alleged vote-rigging and other electoral abuses in a recent state election.

But the government last week declared Bersih – which means “clean” in Malay – illegal, and has warned that anyone wearing the yellow colours of protest will be detained. It has already arrested more than 200 supporters and organisers on charges ranging from the promotion of “illegal assembly” to “waging war against the king”. Some are being held for an indefinite period without trial.

Although Malaysia’s next general election is not until 2013, polls could take place as soon as this year – with many speculating that the incumbent Barisan Nasional (National Front) may not fare so well.

Headed by the prime minister, Najib Razak, Barisan Nasional has ruled Malaysia since 1955. It suffered a major setback in 2008 when it lost more than one-third of its parliamentary seats to Pakatan Rakyat (People’s Alliance), a coalition of opposition parties.

Despite government accusations that they are actively threatening national security, Bersih’s leaders have been adamant that they are pushing solely for electoral changes.

“We are calling for a government through free and fair elections, not street demonstrations” like in Egypt or Libya, said Bersih’s chairwoman, Ambiga Sreenevasan.

After calling Bersih illegal, the government assented to a rally in a stadium. Opposition groups expect as many as 300,000 supporters to turn out. Police, however, have refused to grant Bersih a permit for the rally – a requirement for any gathering of five or more people – and have said they will work with the army to disperse Saturday’s crowds.

Earlier this week police held a military exercise in which soldiers held up banners reading “Disperse or we will shoot”.

Najib threw his endorsement behind local silat – or martial arts – groups, including one that has openly vowed to “wage war” against Bersih. “If there are evil enemies who want to attack the country from without and within,” Najib said this week, “you, my brothers, will rise to fight them”.

Bersih organisers say they have received death, bomb and gang-rape threats in recent weeks, which they claim police have not investigated.

“It has been challenging personally,” said Ambiga. Nonetheless, Bersih “understand our responsibility in holding the line on behalf of all of you who want nothing more than a clean electoral system and a better Malaysia.”

While no one is entirely sure what to expect on Saturday, the lead-up has already caused mayhem. Extensive roadblocks have caused near standstills in Kuala Lumpur and many businesses will be closing. Widespread mobile phone and internet disruption is expected.

Despite it being a supposedly peaceful protest, many are expecting violence.

“This is the formula now, all around the world – in Libya, Egypt, it’s all the same – there will be violence,” said Mohamed Rayak, 32, a hotel manager. “But no one knows if it will be coming from the government or the opposition. If it’s from the government, then they can say it all got out of hand, and [the rally] has to be stopped.”

Thousands of supporters have aired their views on Facebook and Twitter, with many of them, such as Thomas Chai, tweeting directly to the prime minister. “Beneath this YELLOW there is an idea, Mr Najib, and ideas are bulletproof,” he wrote.

Bersih supporters in other parts of the world are expected to hold similar rallies on Saturday in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, France, Switzerland, the US, Canada and the UK.

[published by The Guardian 8 July 2011 http://gu.com/p/3ve3c]

Domestic workers from the Philippines in Singapore who are lucky enough to get a day off socialise at a shopping mall. Photograph: Kate Hodal for the Guardian

If you’re a domestic maid in Singapore, there’s no such thing as the weekend. Since employers are not legally bound to grant days off, the weeks never end.

In the country that officially works the longest hours in the world, where one in six families has domestic help, the legal right to a day off has long seemed unthinkable for maids.

But a government minister’s suggestion that a mandatory rest day could minimise stress has reignited a long-standing debate in Singapore over workers’ rights.

Halimah Yacob, Singapore’s minister for community development, health and sports, says domestic workers need one day a week to “rest and recuperate”. The government has said it is “studying the suggestion”.

But no legal right to a day off isn’t the only problem for Singapore’s 201,000 domestic workers, for whom there is, perhaps not surprisingly, no minimum wage either. It’s the attitudes of their employers – and indeed the country at large – that stands in the way of progress.

“Are maids really that overworked?” asked schoolteacher Low Ai Choo,in a letter to the local Straits Times. “My maid has a day off once a month. Every time she comes back from her outings she appears even more tired and listless, and needs to recuperate from her outing.

“My maid is the one who goes to bed by nine every night and my husband and I are the ones still up way beyond nine to tuck in our children and catch up with school work.”

Low is one of many employers reacting angrily to Yacob’s suggestion, which came after the International Labour Organisation (ILO) agreed last week to give domestic workers a day off every week, as well as other basic labour rights. Singapore, along with the UK, was among 63 member states that abstained from the vote.

For some domestic employers such as Choo, the real issue lies in Singapore’s “workhorse” mentality, whereby everyone – not just maids – could do with more time to relax.

Singaporeans work the longest hours in the world according to the ILO, clocking up an average of 46.6 hours a week.

New parents often struggle with the work-life balance, as statutory maternity leave in Singapore is limited to 16 weeks and there is no right to paternity leave. In the UK new mothers can take up to 52 weeks’ maternity leave and fathers up to two weeks.

Many domestic workers in Singapore are hired as live-in cooks, cleaners and nannies, and some agencies, such as Best Maid, capitalise on Singapore’s strong work ethic. “In Singapore, [a] maid is not a luxury, but a necessity,” reads the company’s website.

But not everyone can afford domestic help. On top of the salary, employers are required to pay a £2,500 security bond on their maid, as well as a monthly fee of around £135 throughout the standard two-year contract.

Such rules can encourage employers to be less concerned about the welfare of their workers than “getting value for money”, says Vincent Wijeysingha of the charity Transient Workers Count Too.

“Unlike more liberal countries where your rights are protected by law, here it all comes down to the personal goodwill of the employer, he said. “Many think, ‘I already pay so much for her, I don’t want to let her out of the house where she might find a boyfriend, get pregnant and make me lose my security bond.’”

While physical abuse of domestic workers has decreased in recent years, psychological abuse is very common, says Bridget Tan of the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics, which counsels some 1,000 runaway domestic workers every year.

“Newcomers usually have their mobiles taken away, aren’t allowed to communicate with family or neighbours and get no day off. The working conditions here are making people go crazy.”

Domestic helpers – nearly one-third of which come from the Philippines – work an average of 14 hours a day, with only 12% given one day off per week, according to a new report.

Employers negotiate contracts directly with their workers, with many offering a monthly payment of around £25 if no rest day is taken. Salaries range from around £125 to £350 a month, although many workers receive no pay for the first six to 11 months of their contract due to agency fees.

Mandatory rest days are already enshrined in employment law in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and it seems Singapore’s domestic employers may soon have to follow suit in allowing their employees some relaxation time, says Edmund Pooh of Universal Employment Agency. “It will be difficult for them to attract good workers if they don’t.”

For Filipina worker AJ, 40, who uses her weekly day off to attend computer classes and socialise with friends, more time to rest can only be a good thing.

“I came here for a better life – we all did,” said the former agricultural worker.

“But you cannot work from 6am to 9pm every day with no rest and so little pay. Sometimes I really do think they just consider us a commodity, like we are for sale.”

[published by The Guardian 8 July 2011 http://gu.com/p/3ve4f]

More than 20,000 supporters of the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections took part in a rally in Kuala Lumpur as part of a campaign for electoral reforms. Copyright Lai Seng Sin/AP

Malaysia’s top opposition leader has warned the government that it may face a “hibiscus revolution” unless activists’ demands are met for electoral reform and an end to “dirty politics”.

Anwar Ibrahim’s comments came a day after an estimated 20,000 people took to the streets to protest against alleged vote-rigging and other electoral abuses, defying a government ban and widespread use of teargas and water cannon filled with chemically laced water to deter the crowds.

More than 1,400 people were arrested and 12 injured — including Anwar — as clashes between police and protesters broke out in Malaysia’s biggest protest since 2007.

Speaking to a small group of young graduates on Sunday, the People’s Justice party leader warned prime minister Najib Razak’s government: “We will have to pursue – in parliament and outside of parliament – free and fair elections, even by rallying unless they change the electoral vote.”

When asked whether Malaysia was in the middle of its own revolution, Anwar said: “We have no confidence left [in the government], so it is important for Najib to consider seriously that we are close [to that].”

Najib, whose ruling coalition Barisan Nasional (National Front) has been in power since 1957, has dismissed Anwar as an opportunist who “will do everything, good or bad” to become prime minister himself. He has also claimed that Anwar might have been using Saturday’s rally – organised by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections, a loose group of 62 non-governmental organisations – for his own political gain.

Najib’s government took extreme measures to prevent people from attending Saturday’s protest, including a city-wide lockdown that saw police suspend public transportation, seal off main roads, and threaten to arrest anyone wearing yellow, the colour of the coalition.

Amnesty International denounced the government’s actions as “the worst campaign of repression we’ve seen in decades”.

But Najib has since warned activists not to take to the streets again and claimed that his party, Umno, far outnumbered opposition groups.

“Don’t doubt our strength,” he said. “If we want to create chaos, we can. Umno has 3 million members. If we gather 1 million members, it is more than enough. We can conquer Kuala Lumpur.”

Such comments – along with images and videos of police brutality against peaceful protesters – are undermining the BN’s future, some say.

“They made a very big mistake on Saturday, by assuming that arresting more people would make the rest of us scared,” said youth leader Khairul Anuar. “Actually, it has just made us more brave.”

A similar rally in 2007 is widely credited with spurring on Malaysia’s opposition movement, which won a landslide victory in the 2008 elections.

Many are hoping that Saturday’s rally could potentially topple the BN entirely in the next election, slated for as early as this year. But some analysts say the government may hold off in order to smooth things over.

“From Najib’s perspective, holding elections any time soon would be a mistake because of the damage that has been done,” Bridget Welsh, Malaysia specialist at Singapore Management University, told Reuters.

“The fact that such a large crowd turned up despite a crackdown shows that voter anger is deep and this is going to push a lot of people who are in the middle towards the opposition.”

[published by The Guardian 10 July 2011  http://gu.com/p/3vemp]

Ali Doron (3'10"), with his 3-year-old son Andre (2'9"), 15-year-old daughter Rina (2'10"), baby Kent and wife Olivia (4'2")

With his jet-black hair, golden skin and hazel eyes, Alejandro Doron Jr is the sort of man who regularly stops people in their tracks. He may be good-looking, yes, but he knows why people stare. He’s small. Three-feet, ten-inches small, in fact.

Just one of Manila’s many vertically challenged unanos — dwarfs — Ali is hoping to soon put an end to the harassment he says he faces daily — by starting the Philippines’ very first little people colony.

The 35-year-old bartender works at Manila’s only “dwarf bar”, the Hobbit House, where he and his colleagues — ranging in height from 2’6″ to 4’5″ — serve tourists Hefeweizens and New York rib-eye steaks as dwarf comedians and Elvis impersonators perform on stage. Just a 10-minute drive away, in the red-light district of Makati, other dwarfs don gold-and-black Speedos to perform in oil wrestling matches. Still others, from the confines of their bedrooms, undress for fascinated sex tourists.

While there are no official figures for the Philippines, dwarfism — of which there are over 200 distinct varieties — is generally characterised by a person being 4’10″ or shorter, with its most common variant, achondroplasia, thought to affect around one in 25,000 people. Manila’s highly visible little people community can be explained by the fact that many of them have come to the capital to find both work and each other, says Ali: “Otherwise, they are like me: the only dwarf in their village”, vulnerable to both physical and verbal abuse.

Critics have questioned the so-called exploitative nature of Manila’s dwarf-specific jobs like Ali’s, but for many little people in the Philippines, such work can be a godsend. While Filipinos are, on average, of short stature (measuring just 5’4″ for men and just under 5′ for women), a minimum height requirement of 5’2″ exists for many jobs — which many dwarfs say is proof of discrimination.

“I’m a computer programmer by profession, but even if you have a good resume and meet the job qualifications, [potential employers] say there’s a height restriction, so they can’t hire you,” says Jonathan Cancela, 30, who, at 4’8″, has worked for the past few years as an oil wrestler at the Ringside bar.

The Philippines have had a longstanding fascination with little people, popularised in the 1970s by TV shows and films on dwarf boxing, wrestling, comedy and kung-fu. Even today, if a little person happens to be the only dwarf in his immediate family — said to occur in around 80% of cases worldwide — popular Filipino legend dictates that the mother must have been watching “dwarf TV” while she was pregnant.

Such an interest in little people means that many of them — at least in Manila — are kept busy with work. Ali often dons fancy dress to play leprechauns and monsters for local TV, children’s parties and even “Snow White” weddings; he also recently starred as a cross-dressing, papal-robed shaman in the film Son of God.

At the three-story squat he shares with eleven others — including his own family and that of his sister’s — Ali slowly sips a glass of RC Cola while his partner Olivia, 38, who is 5’2″, rocks their one-year-old baby in her arms. Of their five children, two of them are dwarfs, and one of them, Rina, 15, has taken the day off from school.

“Some boys wanted to cause a rumble, so I am home,” she explains quietly, her 2’10″ frame the same height as her three-year-old brother’s. “It is hard for me — people say I’m small, they shout at me. But I just go to school to learn more about life. I don’t care what they say. I know what I am.”

Rina is not alone in her suffering. Her mother Olivia has fought both friends and family over her partnership with Ali, while seven-year-old Glysdi, also a dwarf, gets so much verbal abuse that “she is always crying”.

“I told them, if people talk about you, don’t listen to what they say,” says Ali, who left secondary school early due to harassment. “But it’s hard. It’s the natural attitude of the people… I prayed that all my kids would be normal, but I have no choice — this is what God gave me.”

Being free from this constant abuse, says Ali, is a major reason why he — and some 30 other dwarfs — are so keen on setting up a little people’s colony. An investor has already donated 16,000 square metres of land near Manila to their cause, but the fields still have to be cleared, the houses built, and the businesses started. Rina, who plans to be an architect, aims to design the family’s new home. But money is tight, and Ali hopes that local politicians will help with funding and that the colony will one day become a tourist hotspot.

So-called dwarf towns have existed in the past — in Coney Island at the turn of the century and more recently in Kunming, China — but not everyone agrees that they help in the long run.

“The answer is not segregation,” says Gary Arnold of the charity Little People of America. ”The answer is raising awareness about differences and doing all we can to promote communities that embrace and are inclusive of all differences.”

Dressed in children’s jeans and a t-shirt, Ali slowly winds his way back to work through alleys crowded with caged roosters and stray dogs. A neighbour, wiping away the afternoon’s heat with a handkerchief, cackles loudly as he passes. “Ooooh!” she laughs. “There goes the dwarf!”

Ali turns and smiles at her, then continues deliberately on his way.

:: FACTS ABOUT LITTLE PEOPLE ::

– Dwarfism is caused by over 200 medical conditions, with achondroplasia, a bone-growth disorder resulting in disproportionately short arms and legs, the most common.

– Dwarfism can also be caused by growth-hormone deficiency, poor nutrition and, in extreme cases, stress.

– There are thought to be some 651,000 people worldwide with some type of dwarfism.

– The term “midget” once described ‘proportionate dwarfs’ but is now considered offensive, due to its association with so-called freak shows. The terms dwarf, little person, lp, or being of ‘short stature’ or ‘restricted growth’, are preferable.

[A slightly shorter version of this article appeared in the Guardian on 1 August 2011 http://gu.com/p/3xvfg]

A Bersih supporter defies tear gas and chemical-laced water cannons to call for a "clean and fair" Malaysia

Over 1,400 people have been arrested and one person has died after tens of thousands of activists took to the streets of Kuala Lumpur Saturday to rally for electoral reform, where they braced tear gas, chemical-laced water cannons and baton-wielding police to call for an end to so-called “dirty politics”, vote-rigging and corruption.

An estimated 50,000 protestors defied a ban on the rally made by Prime Minister Najib Razak, whose National Front party has been in power since 1955. Twelve activists were reported injured, with some seen leaving the rally in handcuffs whilst bleeding.

The opposition-backed rally — organised by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections, a loose group of 62 nongovernmental organisations — was strongly denounced by the government, who declared both the rally and its organisers illegal, and arrested over 200 supporters and leaders in the weeks leading up to it.

After a weeks-long campaign against the coalition — which included government-funded television and radio adverts warning people not to attend — police sealed off roads into the city centre, closed down metro stations and, according to some reports, patrolled hotel rooms late into Friday night to arrest any potential activists pre-rally.

Despite the government’s various efforts to prevent people from attending, however, many joined because of those efforts.

“I’m not usually political, but the things the government has been saying and the way it’s reacted to this rally made me want to come out and protest,” said Jan Lee, a management consultant.

As helicopters hovered overhead and riot police stood guard, the multi-ethnic mix of protestors, old and young, many of them in yellow — the banned colour of the coalition — walked calmly towards Independence Stadium, where the rally was planned.

Sporting yellow face paint and holding yellow balloons, they shouted “Clean up the elections” and “We want freedom, we want peace”. Police reacted by shooting tear gas and water cannons directly at protestors, some of whom were hit directly in the face.

“We have no human rights!” shouted one aged activist in yellow, ducking for cover. “I worry for the future of my children and grandchildren. I am 68 and I fight for a better Malaysia!”

Dispersing and regrouping as police advanced, protestors huddled for safety in doorways and alleyways, at one point seeking safety in front of a hospital, where police once more threw canisters of tear gas. An unconfirmed report soon circulated of hospital patients fainting from the fumes.

The coalition behind the rally — called Bersih, or “clean” in Malay — has been widely credited in recent years for creating a strong opposition movement, notably a landslide opposition victory in the 2008 elections, after Bersih held a rally in 2007 calling for reform.

Saturday’s activists — many of whom noted the ethnographically mixed group of protestors — said this rally could potentially topple the incumbent National Front in the next elections, slated for as early as this year. The National Front has long been criticised for polarising political groups by race.

“We are not happy with this government, because every election’s wins go to the prime minister’s party,” said taxi driver Kamal Nadir, 36, holding a wet handkerchief up to his face to block tear gas.

“The government is dirty, and that is why they are scared of the public. This party is no more. Look at what they do to us!”

But analysts say the government may try to hold off on elections to smooth things over.

“From Najib’s perspective, holding elections anytime soon would be a mistake because of the damage that has been done today,” Bridget Welsh, Malaysia specialist at Singapore Management University, told Reuters.

“The fact that such a large crowd turned up despite a crackdown shows that voter anger is deep and this is going to push a lot of people who are in the middle toward the opposition.”

Using roadblocks as their guides, police had dispersed activists into three or four separate crowds in an attempt to diminish their numbers, which some said caused more chaos than needed.

“This was meant to be a peaceful rally along one route only — to the stadium — but because the government banned it, now it’s tons of different routes with the city shut down,” said Andrew Yong.

Some found themselves caught up unawares in the rally, like tourist John Gilmore, 54, from Glasgow.

“I only discovered an hour ago there was a protest going on, when I couldn’t find a taxi to get into the city centre,” said the software engineer, his eyes watering as police threw a a canister of tear gas just a few feet away.

Bersih had planned to deliver to the king a memorandum of eight demands, ranging from freer media access for opposition parties, to electoral reforms like the use of indelible ink.

But many of the coalition’s leaders, including chairman Ambiga Sreenevasan, were arrested before the memorandum could be delivered.

Opposition MP Nurul Izzah Anwar, who, along with Ambiga, defied a police ban to attend the rally, found herself “kettled into” a tunnel along with her father, top opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

“Riot police shot tear gas at us from either side of the tunnel without warning and without reason,” she said.

“We were choking, we couldn’t breathe, we could hardly walk or see. I fell down, my father fell down and sustained a head injury, it was hell. I thought I was dying.”

Amnesty International has called the government’s response to the protest “the worst campaign of repression we’ve seen in decades”.

Despite Bersih calling the rally “one more step in the long walk for clean and fair elections in Malaysia”, its success was soured by the death of Baharuddin Ahmad, the husband of an opposition leader, who is said to have died after falling down when clashes broke out between riot police and protestors. His funeral will be held Sunday.

Singapore's new underground dinner clubs, like the Secret Cooks Club, are pushing social boundaries

It is often derided as a cultural desert, but a younger generation of Singapore‘s residents and expats is determined to bring an edgier side to the city. They are leading an improvisation drive, chiefly culinary, and the results are rarely dull.

Borrowing from ideas hatched in New York and Hong Kong, secret dinner clubs are now the menu du jour, some with themes betraying Singapore’s inherently geeky nature.

Co-founded by expatriates Florian Cornu, 26, and Denisa Kera, 36, the Secret Cooks Club bases its dinners on novel technology, philosophy and food-science concepts. A recent five-course meal, labelled You are what you eat, But you can also eat what you are, required every dinner guest to send in saliva samples and then meals were created based upon their DNA.

Another dinner pushed conservative cultural boundaries by copying the Japanese practice of nyotaimori – serving sushi on a naked woman’s body.

The two self-declared nerds, who met at Singapore’s underground Hackerspace club, wanted to add an “element of excitement to a city full of potential, but a bit sleepy and dull”, Kera said.

Similarly interested in rebelling against what she felt was a lack of “personality, history or unique ambiance” in Singapore’s restaurants, Zina Alam, 27, decided to start her own Bangladeshi-style supper club, Khana Commune.

“Singapore is changing every day, politically and culturally,” said the former journalist, whose own change of direction was inspired by a visit to Edinburgh’s supper clubs. “People are a lot more open and adventurous now.”

Even larger establishments are catching on. At Kilo, a new Japanese-Italian fusion venture in a converted waterfront warehouse, diners are encouraged to step away from the table and into the kitchen where, from August, they will be able to act as “guest chef” for the evening. The aim is to prepare a meal of up to five courses that diners will “love, hate, scrutinise – and everything else in between”, said Kilo’s 32-year-old co-founder, Sharon Lee.

Ideas are also emerging beyond the dinner plate. At Blink-BL-NK, an evening out, once a month, where people exchange ideas, participants share their expertise on subjects in forums, along the lines of the increasingly popular TED conferences. Recent talks focused on pilgrimages, psychosis and sex – the latter two traditionally taboo subjects in a “rational, efficiency orientated society”, according to one regular attendee, Stella Lee, 28. “You wouldn’t see this anywhere else in Singapore,” she said.

Isaac Souweine, 32, the co-founder of Blink-BL-NK, said: “This city is growing up. A hundred years ago, this place was a swamp. The economic development here happened really fast. Now the cultural development is following.”

While some grumble that Singapore’s music and arts scene is still far from robust, at the Crazy Elephant, a popular live music bar on the busy Clarke Quay waterfront, novice musicians are invited to perform on stage in a weekly DIY music night. Drums, keyboards, guitars and microphones are all provided. “It’s a great way to get the crowd involved,” said the venue’s manager, Anita Lydia. “Most people think Sundays are quiet, but budding artists too afraid to play in a bigger arena, or even well-known bands like Deep Purple, have all come to jam.”

The beauty of living in a “cultural desert”, some say, is that it provides an empty space upon which a promising new future, like Singapore’s, can be built. “We are definitely at the cusp of finding a real national identity,” Alam said.

[published by The Guardian, 17 June 2011, http://gu.com/p/3vx56]