This Singapore trip was jinxed from the very beginning. Little things have gone wrong the entire trip but they’ve added up. They were small annoying things that I didn’t bother blog about.
So then on my last day, I bought a bag from Fossil but it was incomplete and I only realized that when I was already at the train going to the airport. Aside from that, I only had 30 mins to spare to eat before they started to open the gates for boarding. My last meal was around 11 am. I just had coffee at 1 pm so I was already low on sugar by 6pm.
At Terminal 2 at NAIA, I had my SGD exchanged to PHP at a good rate but… I dropped my atm cards and didn’t realize it until my Grab was already at Edsa Makati/Rockwell. The girl at the money changer messaged me (found me on FB) and told me that my main atm cards had fallen off my wallet at 1+ am. I was just so tired from clearing Immigration because the queue was long since there weren’t enough gates and another long-bodied plane arrived from either the US or Australia = passengers started choking BI.
I had asked the Grab driver to turn around to claim them so I had to pay double my original fare. Got home at 2+ am but slept at past 3 because I had to get rid of my dirty clothes or else I won’t be able to bring up my luggage that was around 19kg heavy. My year-old Delsey is very tempting for my cats that had made everything their scratching posts.
I was just so tired the entire day. Stayed in bed and did little else but chat with a former nanny of my girls who now works as a housemaid in Oman. More of that later. My cats missed me so much that they stuck to me like glue in my room, same with my girls.
I had a two-hr Zennya massage and zonked out. So here I am at 1:30 am…
G worked for me as a nanny to Twin A. She and R left (when the girls were almost 3 years old) because of the girls’ dad who didn’t treat them well (she just revealed it to me today).
Long story short, she ended up in Oman as a housemaid but her employer holds her passport. Her original contract lapsed and was sold off (yes, her term) to another abusive employer so she can pay off her placement fees with the agency that brought her to Oman.
She is basically a slave because 1) she doesn’t have a contract with her current employer (one of the many ways a placement agency fucks with undereducated Filipinos); 2) her passport is held hostage by her employer; 3) she only earns PhP 20k and she has to pay for her toiletries and those things add up. She sends 15k to her family (older brother and sister, ageing mother, and her 7-yr old son) a month. She is the only one with a job and this culture of mendicancy is killing Filipinos.
She tries to save 1k a month for emergencies for her child but there are always fuck ups that drain her savings. Like her 32-yr-old brother is undergoing dialysis for stage 5 chronic kidney disease. They had to pull him out of the hospital because they couldn’t pay. He no longer has a functioning kidney or little else was functioning. Dialysis is PHP 2500 per session and he needs to have it 3x a week. G is hopeful he can have a kidney replacement but I told her kidney donation is so remote that it’s basically a death warrant. Kidney donations here have come mostly from family members and yet the kidneys still get rejected. Moreover, people are known to fly to China to sell kidneys because of the lucrative human organ trade in that part of the world.
I can’t straight away tell her brother will soon die. Dialysis that they cannot afford will not sustain him. A kidney operation costs 100k.
I had given her some little financial assistance but what I’m doing now for her is much bigger. 1) she lost 9k from messes with Gcash (that e-wallet is 90% unreliable) so I had contacted friends there to help sort it out; 2) contacted a fellow journo at ABS-CBN whose beat was labor/overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) to help in releasing her from her situation in Oman.
G complained to POEA about her agency but all she got were threats that she will be put to jail and her phone taken away. She said the embassy always sides with the placement agencies and the Omani government has no fucks to give to foreign domestic workers. Well, basically all MENA governments don’t have any fucks to give. Period.
Mind you, there are hundreds and thousands of OFWs in the MENA area who are enslaved by the system. Their passports are held by employers who physically beat or rape housemaids. They get paid so little. Many have their cellphones confiscated and cut off from families. G only gets 30 mins to eat and little rest. She locks herself up in her room to avoid being beaten or raped. She goes to the supermarket to buy shampoo and send remittance but that’s it. She doesn’t want to get nabbed by the police for working without a contract and they do random checks regularly. OFWs like G are made to believe they owe the placement agencies thousands so they are basically tied forever to working without contracts.
I told G that once she gets to go home in December (she is being positive here) have a little money of her own and I can add to it so she can put up her canteen back home. I don’t know how she can cough up 30k in airfare but I don’t want to rain down on her hopes. All I am trying to do now is have her repatriated home for free.
G said she is remorseful that she didn’t take up my offer to send her to school. Another Filipino employer offered to send her to nursing school at night. She was being pig-headed and thought going to MENA is a ticket way out of poverty but she realized that with little education, she is just stuck as a housemaid forever. At least if she finished high school, she could have had a better job at the supermarkets in Saudi or Kuwait. She said working for factories in S.Korea or Taiwan required a college degree.
The Philippine economy is propped up by slaves. Our source of forex are stuck in their rooms and live in fear of being raped or beaten up. USD 37bn a year from the likes of them. Singapore-based maids are in the same situation. One Filipino maid was so malnourished that she only weighed 80lbs, fed only watered down instant noodles and little bread. She was locked up in her room, her passport held. She was released because a neighbor sounded off the authorities.
And here I am, close to having my maid finish college… And she got pregnant 🤦♀️ that’s another story for another day. All I’m saying now is, what kind of future will she have with only 3rd year college education?
