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Antonia Timmerman

Antonia Timmerman

Antonia Timmerman is an independent journalist reporting on migrant workers, LGBTQ communities, arts and culture, Taiwan and Southeast Asian affairs. She is a former finance reporter supplying intelligence news for Asia Pacific's capital market from Jakarta and Taipei. 100% Indonesian.

Three days of planned protests against the jobs-creation law began on Tuesday, even as the country struggles to get Covid-19 under control and with police launching ‘cyber patrols’ and ‘counter-narratives’ to stop them.

Melanesian ancestry gives Papuans curly hair and darker skin than other Indonesians, who discriminate against them. Models and make-up artists from Papua use social media to fight for acceptance and against racism.

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Help is on the Way, which follows the lives of four Indonesian women workers, is a story of the hardships that force rural Indonesian women to look for jobs abroad and how they fare working in a foreign society – in this case Taiwan.

More than 30 years ago, a group of women in Taiwan banded together to campaign for waste recycling. Now their focus is on reducing food waste and promoting green energy, as they pass the torch to a new generation of activists.

While Taiwan has avoided a huge outbreak, activists doubt the government’s readiness to protect migrant workers, some of whom live in dorms of 30 people a room.

Trapped in a system sometimes described as modern slavery, some migrant workers in Taiwan still manage to devote a portion of their precious free time to learning new skills that may one day better their lives.

They go from Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong and elsewhere to see for themselves what it is like to be homosexual yet feel secure, to see gay couples holding hands in public; some pay short visits, such as for October’s Pride parade, others stay long-term.