Life During The Indenture Period
The contracts of the indentured labourers, which they called girmit (agreements), required them to work in Fiji for a period of five years. Living conditions on the sugar cane plantations, on which most of the girmityas (indentured labourers) worked, were often squalid, degrading and brutal. Hovels known as "coolie lines" dotted the landscape. Women were often molested in the cane fields by both European overseers and Girmitya men who often managed the plantations. Illegitimate births were often high and suicide mostly among the women.
Read more about this topic: Indians In Fiji
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or period:
“I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a mans housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poverty, she became a drudge; if she married wealth, she became a doll. Had I married at twenty-one, I would have been either a drudge or a doll for fifty-five years. Think of it!”
—Susan B. Anthony (18201906)
“Stupid word, that. Period. In America it means full stop like in punctuation. Thats stupid as well. A period isnt a full stop. Its a new beginning. I dont mean all that creativity, life-giving force, earth-mother stuff, I mean its a new beginning to the month, relief that youre not pregnant, when you dont have to have a child.”
—Michelene Wandor (b. 1940)