COMMENT | Volunteer power - a collective effort

COMMENT | Like clockwork, the volunteers begin the day. Even if you are there as a newcomer, it is easy to jump straight into the routine as makeshift workstations and packing sites spring up. 

Trucks begin to arrive bearing supplies – rice, dhal, potatoes and cooking oil – all of which must be unloaded, repackaged and distributed. But off-site, work has been ongoing long before the volunteers arrive, and it must necessarily stay that way. 

Lists of recipients are compiled, suppliers and deliveries confirmed, addresses and phone numbers of those who have fallen through the cracks of Malaysia’s existing safety net are saved on hand, the recipients ready to receive the packages that will last them and their families another two weeks. They are all over the Klang Valley: Ampang, Kajang, Selayang, Ampang.

Regardless of whether packing goes on in a school hall in Cheras, or a community hall in Kepong, a complicated chain of logistics and funding is always in operation, enabling an ongoing food aid programme to stay running. Its avowed goal is to keep on supplying emergency aid for as long as possible, only possible through the labour of its volunteers and the generosity of donors. 

This requires flexibility in planning and operationalisation: in addition to conventional sources of aid, such as Yayasan Hasanah, there can be interesting forms of corporate involvement, such as when BMW sponsored a fleet of drivers and vehicles to deliver the aid packages.

Since the start of the first movement control order (MCO), a crisis of acute unemployment, as well as a lack of housing and food security, has taken root. Most heavily affected are those who have fallen through the system, the bureaucratic machinery of relief efforts such as the Bantuan Prihatin Rakyat. 

These would include not just members of the B40 community, but also those who lack the security of citizenship or residency papers: migrants and refugees.

The result is that there has been an unprecedented and constant demand for food aid by these groups, which is currently underreported given the deluge of other news (daily case numbers, political crises and regular economic woes). 

The majority of them would effectively form a “precariat” class, reliant on daily wages and piecemeal employment. The hardest hit, however, are refugees. The details of Malaysia’s rocky approach to the refugee crisis has been discussed elsewhere – for now, it is most important to note that if they had any form of employment, this had to be done outside of the law, with neither the safety net of the Employee Provident Fund nor government aid.

Deliveries are done through mass drop-offs, or by going to residences, and calling up recipients one-by-one. The impromptu, grassroots nature of the programme is surprisingly flexible and adaptable, with the locations changing with each cycle of aid, from back lanes behind the Kotaraya complex or driving up to the apartments where the recipients live. Given the precariousness of the situation, this has been the most effective way to navigate turbulent waters.

Even as we have waxed and waned through cycles of outbreaks and containment, employment opportunities remain especially limited especially for non-citizens, whose movement remains disproportionately restricted due to their existing fear and distrust of the authorities, a situation not alleviated by incidents such as mass arrests in the midst of the first MCO, as reported in the South China Morning Post and various expressions of xenophobia. 

At one point, Refugee for the Refugees director Heidy Quah was questioned by the authorities over statements made about immigration detention centres. In a volatile situation, it can be difficult to tread safely, but on the ground, the practical realities of food aid take centre-stage over those broader concerns.

Each package that arrives has been budgeted accordingly at RM60 each to cover for expenses, calculated to sustain a family of four to five for up to two weeks, with as balanced a diet as possible. Occasionally it is supplemented by other items. 

Perishables such as fresh chicken have been added to the package fairly recently, adding a new layer of complexity – and the corresponding sanitary, preservative and preparation challenges to contend with – but the target remains the same. 

Each cycle is aimed at supporting 200 households, which means that a minimum expenditure of RM12,000 is required. This is not a small amount, and for individual donors and corporate sponsors, there is no clear, tangible, publicity-friendly outcome.

What emerges is a story of survival, of being able to feed enough people long enough to get them to the next cycle. Naturally, money is the main overriding factor. How long can it last before donor fatigue sets in, especially since this is a grassroots-level effort? 

Without the solid backing of, say, state institutions, the programme exists in its own state of precarity. But for now, what it can keep relying on is the generosity of its volunteers – putting in their time and labour into the provision of meals, equipment, and the hours of expertise and planning that forms the machinery of the operations. 

This story is not one of clear heroes, of a “saviour complex” and other simple narratives. Instead, it is one of collective effort that draws individuals together into the achievement of clear and specific goals. It is also one of scarcity and uncertainty: in spite of the achievements in mechanised agriculture and access to international sources of food, its supply can so easily be cut off.

The Klang Valley is not the only part of Malaysia where there are large numbers of migrants and refugees present. In Parthiban Muniandy’s Politics of the Temporary, a journalistic, searing ethnography of migrant and refugee life in West Malaysia, he details his encounters with the migrant and refugees he comes across, and how they form the backbone of the functioning of our economy, premised as it is upon cheap foreign labour. 

At the same time, many remain invisible in the sense that they do not factor into the everyday deliberations of race, class and belonging that characterises Malaysian discourse, but are simply accepted as being part of the background.

There is not much incentive for employers to improve the situation, such as the infamous recent example of rubber glove manufacturer Top Glove. As The Guardian reported in late 2020, their corporate performance “surged during the pandemic, but the company has faced repeated criticism over its treatment of migrant workers”, and abysmal worker conditions at their crowded dormitories and factories came to the fore recently, with the Covid-19 virus severely infecting its workforce.

If we look at refugees alone, we have a population of at least 180,000 people, although nobody knows this number for sure, given the lack of documentation and the pervasiveness of international human-smuggling networks operating across the region. At the same time, we have a migrant worker population of over two million registered individuals, many of whom are severely exploited in the interests of unsustainable development. 

Leaving aside polemics of how “deserving” they are of aid, it is clear that we need to respond to food and housing insecurity among these communities, as well as our citizens who have fallen into difficulties. Thus it becomes a question of our common humanity versus a narrower sense of community stratified along ethnic and geographical lines.

WILLIAM THAM WAI LIANG is an editor at Gerakbudaya and the author of two novels. His new novel, The Last Days, is set in 1981 and covers the continuing legacy of the Emergency. His first book, Kings of Petaling Street, was shortlisted for the Penang Monthly Book Prize in 2017.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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