Thousands of Indonesians yesterday gathered at New Taipei City People’s Square to celebrate Indonesian culture and honor the contributions of migrant workers.
The festival started with Indonesian hard rock bands Sider Roses and Jamsatoe Band engaging the crowd with rock music. After a break, there was a change of pace as dancers dressed in traditional Indonesian clothing took to the stage.
Booths offering shirts made using batik — an Indonesian wax resist-dyeing technique — Indonesian food and drinks, free massages and haircuts were set up along the venue’s perimeter.
Photo: Tung Kuan-yi, Taipei Times
There are about 100,000 migrant workers in the city, with Indonesians constituting the largest group — about 40,000 people, New Taipei City Labor Affairs Department Director Chen Jui-chia (陳瑞嘉) said.
About 4,000 Indonesian spouses of Taiwanese citizens also live in the city, he said.
Chen expressed hope that the event, held in collaboration with the Indonesian Economic and Trade Office to Taipei (IETO), would help alleviate the homesickness experienced by Indonesian workers in Taiwan and reassure them that they are welcome in the country.
The bureau would better promote future events through migrant worker employment agencies by distributing Chinese-language advertisements, he added.
As of Thursday, there were no Chinese-language promotions for the event, except for the name of the event shown inconspicuously on an online poster mainly written in Indonesian.
Having Chinese-language advertisements would also make it easier for migrant workers who work over weekends to ask for time off, Chen said.
An IETO Labor Department analyst also called on the crowd to take advantage of the Cabinet’s Long-Term Retention of Skilled Foreign Workers Program, and to try and obtain permanent residency in Taiwan.
Dwi, a migrant live-in caregiver from Sragen, Indonesia, attended the event with her husband, Saman, a migrant factory worker from Lampung, Indonesia, who works in Zhongli.
She said that while she often attends cultural or religious gatherings with fellow Indonesian migrant workers, she does not often get to go to a concert featuring a popular Indonesian pop star.
Dwi was referring to Javanese pop singer Denny Caknan, the event’s headliner and who the organizers called “the Indonesian Jay Chou (周杰倫).”
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