The following article was published in The New Paper on 4 May 2005.
Afraid, but I need the cash
By Jaclyn Lim
The New Paper, 04 May 2005
A FOREIGN maid here is supposed to work for a specific employer.
But there is a murky underworld of maids who hop from one household to another - a few hours at one, then on to the next.
These are the house-to-house maids.
These part-time, often freelance operatives, earn more than the rest - but run the risk of being nabbed by the law.
Nina (not her real name) is one such maid.
The 33-year-old offers her services to several families even though she knows she is breaking the law.
The New Paper met her at the Burger King outlet in Liat Towers recently.
Dressed in a black tank top and a skirt, she looked like any ordinary worker out on an errand.
In fact, she had just finished a cleaning job at a home near Orchard Road.
4 TO 6 HOURS
Nina officially works for one employer - but regularly cleans for three others.
She visits each family two or three times a week, each time working from four to six hours.
She also babysits twice a month, for five hours a session.
Nina is paid $10 an hour for both her cleaning and babysitting jobs.
It adds up to a monthly income of more than $1,000. She sends half back home and uses the rest for food, transport and other expenses.
On average, a foreign domestic worker earns about $380 monthly.
'Some employers don't have money to pay their maids but still need domestic help, so they'll let them work part-time,' Nina said.
Nina cleans and cooks for her 'sponsor family', as she calls her official employer, but they do not pay her.
Instead, they pay her maid levy, which was lowered from $345 to $250 for families with young children and elderly parents or grandparents effective from last August.
The family also provides her with food, lodging and the legal right to stay in Singapore.
Nina feels she is lucky to have met the family.
'They are kind. Some maids are made to pay for everything - food, rent, and levy,' she said.
The main lure of such part-time cleaning jobs is the money.
'A full-time maid doesn't earn much,' Nina said.
Working as a part-time maid, she earns 2 1/2 times more than a full-time maid.
Nina also likes the freedom and flexibility of being a house-to-house maid.
A full-time maid is expected to be at the beck and call of her employers.
MANAGE OWN TIME
Said Nina: 'Employers can wake you up in the middle of the night and get you to do chores for them'.
But she can manage her own time.
That said, she says she knows of house-to-house maids who work from 6am to midnight every day.
'Especially those who have to finish up their chores at their sponsor families' apartments every night,' she said.
To save money, even when rushing from one job to another, Nina never takes a taxi.
'Sometimes I fall asleep during the bus journey and miss the stop,' she laughed.
Last December, ovarian cysts were detected in her body.
Regular checkups at a private hospital followed. She now takes medication which costs about $50 monthly.
Nina said: 'If I am a full-time maid, and the employers know of my condition, they can send me home anytime.'
So she feels she is better off as a part-time maid even though it is illegal.
She said: 'We are afraid. But we see no way out.'
She added that the maids here all share similar dreams - to live a better life back home.
Nina herself hopes that soon, she can go back to her country and buy a piece of land to set up a pig farm.
These dreams are why so many maids here turned to part-time cleaning jobs, said Nina.
Wednesday, May 4, 2005
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
Maids: Stories of sacrifice
The following article was published in the Straits Times on 5 March 2005.
Maids: Stories of sacrifice
By Ng Hui Hui
Saturday Special Report
Straits Times, 05 March 2005
Poverty drives millions to leave their homes in search of work. In Singapore, 150,000 foreign domestic workers toil in the hopes of giving their families a better life back home.
BACK home, Ms Encarnacion Montales is hailed as a 'bagong bayani', which means modern hero in Tagalog and is one of the highest honours in the Philippines.
If she lands at Manila's Ninoy Aquino International Airport during Christmas, she is waved through an express Customs lane specially set aside for all returning Overseas Foreign Workers.
Sometimes, the President joins beaming government officials in greeting and garlanding heroes like her.
In 1998, the 59-year-old, who has worked in Singapore as a maid for 20 years, won one of four annual Bagong Bayani Awards. It was started in 1984 to recognise outstanding foreign workers whose effort - more importantly, income - abroad has contributed significantly to the Philippines.
According to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, at any one time, about 10 per cent of the country's 86 million people is working abroad. About half of them work as maids, the rest as seafarers, nurses or technical workers.
According to 2003 statistics, Saudi Arabia was the top destination of Filipino workers. Hong Kong ranked second, followed by Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, Kuwait, then Singapore.
The money they send home, which peaked at US$7.6 billion (S$12 billion) in 2003, accounts for 7.5 per cent of the country's gross domestic product.
On a national level, it boosts foreign currency reserves, cushions the impact of worldwide recession by stabilising the peso, and helps settle the country's external debt, which shot up to US$58 billion in 2003.
On a personal level, their wages help transform ramshackle dens into majestic multi-storey houses with proper plumbing, start small businesses for jobless siblings and husbands, foot parents' medical bills and see children through school.
Hence the red-carpet hero's welcome for these foreign workers.
But the moment maids like Ms Montales head off to work, their lot is anything but heroic.
Reverend Angel Luciano, the Filipino spiritual director of a Catholic Church welfare group serving foreign workers in Singapore, says: 'Calling them heroes is their government's way of giving them recognition. In church, I call them 'sacrificial lambs' because they are doing all this for their families.'
His group, formed in 1998, runs skills centres and a counselling service for the estimated 150,000 foreign maids in Singapore today.
There are no available official figures but industry players estimate that 55 per cent of them are Indonesians, 40 per cent Filipinos and the rest are Sri Lankans, Indians and others.
Maid agencies say that most come here in their 20s from rural villages or impoverished cities. While Filipinas are usually better educated and many have university degrees, Indonesians typically come with only primary education.
The Filipinas are the highest-paid, earning between $320 and $350 a month, while Indonesians and Indians earn the least - $210 to $250 a month.
From April, wages for Indonesian maids will go up by $50 a month - in a move by the Association of Employment Agencies to entice more Indonesians to come to Singapore. In recent years, many have preferred to work in Hong Kong or Taiwan where they can earn up to three times more.
Most of the 30 maids interviewed by The Straits Times for this report say they see Singapore as a 'stepping stone' to pick up skills in nursing, dressmaking and baking and to improve their English.
Ultimately, they dream of landing a job in places like Belgium or Italy, where they can earn up to 450 euros (S$970).
Many say they had no choice in coming here - they were simply sent here after signing cut-throat deals with transfer agents at home.
Typically, these agents exact prepayment of up to $1,800 to arrange for their pre-departure training, orientation and air passage here. That means about six months of their wages.
It means most maids have to grin and bear with working here for at least two years to make it worth their while. Most have little choice because of grinding poverty at home, where two in five Filipinos live below the poverty line and survive on less than US$1 a person per day.
The high unemployment rate in the Philippines - which reached a record five million last year - forced Ms Remia Regalado to become a maid in Singapore.
After six months of searching in vain for a software job after bagging a computing degree in Makati, she lowered her expectations and settled for a job as a cook.
But when her father needed a costly heart operation six years ago, she knew her salary of 1,500 pesos a month would no longer do, swallowed her pride and became a maid.
'I felt I had wasted my degree then, but it's okay. At least I can earn more to help my family,' she says with a stoic smile.
But while she had to stifle her dreams, for others, becoming a foreign maid in a faraway land is a dream come true, sometimes also providing an escape from family problems.
Indonesian maid Susanti Lasiman put up with her husband's gambling and joblessness in Lampung, Sumatra, until he became abusive as well.
'He would scold and hit me when he lost money. Sometimes, he threw things at me,' recounts the petite 27-year-old who fled home four years ago to work as a maid first in Malaysia and then in Singapore two years later.
Although she misses her two children, aged three and nine, she is happy with her 'more peaceful' life and stash of savings here.
Hard-won trust
BUT she is among the charmed minority of maids here, having won the trust of her employers, a Chinese couple living in a four-room HDB flat in Serangoon.
Maid agencies say many Singaporean employers go to great lengths to test their maids' honesty, such as installing hidden cameras to spy on them.
Ms Maria Luisa Tayco, a 44-year-old Filipina who came here to work in 1990, relates: 'I only knew about the cameras when my ma'am finally told me about it four years later. I was a bit angry when I found out but luckily, I hadn't done anything wrong.'
Filipina Amelia Sentina, 52, who has worked in three homes over the past 21 years, was tested so routinely she could tell the signs.
'My employers would leave money in various locations. It was obvious they were testing me because this 'habit' of leaving money lying around always stopped after some time,' she recounts.
Other employers are paranoid about their maids making friends or chatting with neighbours.
Indonesian Ari Sumajo, 29, who worked in Taiwan and Malaysia before coming here last year, laments: 'If I talk loudly at home, Madam scolds me. If I talk to other people, she also scolds me.'
In her experience, Singaporean employers are the most exacting, imperious and tight-fisted.
There is the flip side of course.
Ms Montales' employers, a family of three living in a five-room HDB flat in Bishan, for example, set up and pay the bills for a private phone line she uses as the de facto counselling hotline for Filipinas here.
'Every day, I get all kinds of calls asking for help. I believe I may have even saved a few lives through counselling,' she gushes.
Another Filipina Mel Icabandi, 37, now works for a Swiss family in Adam Road, but still prefers her former employer, a Chinese family in a four-room HDB flat in Hougang.
'Although they were less generous with off-days, they treated me more like family. When they introduced me to their friends, it was as 'helper' or 'companion', never as 'maid'.
'They asked me about my family and I confided in them.'
According to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), the number of people banned from hiring foreign maids has come down from 49 in 2001 to 30 in 2003.
To set some ground rules on the treatment of maids, the ministry started a half-day compulsory orientation programme for first-time employers last April. More than 17,200 have attended since.
Still, an average of 10 foreign maids seek help each day from their embassies, complaining of physical or sexual abuse, wage disputes, inadequate food or stress.
Maid agencies here note that some Singaporean employers work their maids to the bone. To get their money's worth, some draw up a mile-long list of chores that mean shifts of up to 16 hours.
More fortunate maids here enjoy a shoe-box-size room to themselves. But the norm is to share a room with the employers' children, which means sleeping on the floor.
According to Mrs Bridget Lew of the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics, which runs shelters for maids, some sleep in the living room, balcony, or even 'under the study table'.
Mr Peter Loh, co-owner of the Swift Arrow Maids agency, which has eight branches, notes: 'I remember a client who complained that her maid never seemed to remember anything she was told.
'Later, we discovered it was because she woke up at 5.30am and worked till 2am every day.'
The problem was solved when the maid was allowed to go to bed two hours earlier.
Family ATMs
STILL, most maids say they try to put on a happy face - at least to their folks back home.
Filipina Jennifer Buado Atizado, 22, who is supporting her younger siblings at home, says: 'People look down on us here but I don't want my family to know what I'm going through.' She and others routinely mail back rosy pictures of themselves posed against the Merlion in Sentosa or the Orchard Road Christmas light-up - inadvertently sending the message that they are having the time of their lives.
That only lures even more naive young women here and results in families badgering the maids for money, notes Father Angel. He wishes the women would send photos of themselves mopping floors and wiping windows 'because that is more reflective of their hardship here'.
Indeed, many maids like Ms Tayco say they are snowed under by incessant demands for money by family members, who often treat them like automated teller machines (ATMs).
Teary-eyed, she confides: 'Whether it's to buy a jeepney or new cellphone, they keep asking me for money. But no one even bothers to send me a Christmas card.'
She vents her frustrations by 'crying like a mad woman' in church and immersing herself in community work.
In desperation, some have been driven to suicide - but not before penning heart-wrenching letters to their families.
Dr Chia Boon Hock, a psychiatrist who monitors spikes in suicide rates here, says that between 1995 and 2003, a total of 77 maids - 51 Indonesians, 11 Filipinas, nine Indians and four Sri Lankans, two of other nationalities - took their own lives.
He shows a suicide note peppered with phrases like 'no day without scolding', 'have to work from 5am till midnight' and 'employers here are crazy and bossy'.
He notes: 'The figures for Indonesian maids are alarming because it is uncommon for Muslims to kill themselves. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that they do not speak English well. Like lost souls, they find it difficult to adapt to this strange new land.'
Indeed, maid agents and welfare groups say the language barrier is often the root of misunderstandings between maid and employer.
To solve this problem, MOM ruled in January that new maids must be at least 23 years old, with at least eight years of formal education.
From April, first-time maids here have to do a written test upon arrival to gauge, among other things, their literacy in English.
But what of the more complex issue of over-controlling, invasive and mean employers?
Many employers interviewed say they have 'little choice' but to watch their maids like hawks. Most cite the mandatory $5,000 deposit they pay when hiring a maid - and the spectre of losing it if their maid misbehaves - as the reason for their tight rein.
Housewife Veron Chen, 30 is not ashamed that she recently confiscated the mobile phone she gave her maid after she discovered mushy SMSes flying between her and a few men.
'I don't want to lose the $5,000 deposit,' she says. 'What if she gets into bad company or gets pregnant?'
But MOM confirms that, contrary to popular belief, the $5,000 security bond is not confiscated when a maid gets pregnant. Her work permit will be revoked and she will be sent home, but there is no penalty for the employer.
That deposit is at risk only if the maid runs away. Even then, the employer has a grace pe- riod of two to three months to find her.
The ministry knows that it is not always possible for an employer to stop a maid from running away.
But employers of foreign maids know from the start that they have a responsibility to send the workers home at the end of their stay.
Without that obligation, a ministry spokesman explains, there is a risk of having a large number of foreign maids being abandoned by their employers for a variety of reasons.
Few happy endings
ULTIMATELY, what spurs most maids to plod on is the romantic mirage of returning home to the loving, grateful fold of their families and a better life with non-leaky roofs, VCRs and fans.
However, when homecoming day finally dawns, many find themselves faced with frosty reality instead.
Indonesian Rusiyah Bani, 25, returned to her hometown in 2003 after a two-year stint here, looking forward to 'kissing and hugging' her five-year-old son.
But the boy, unused to her, ran away from her. 'It hurt me very much and I almost cried,' she recounts. Her technician husband, meanwhile, had run off with someone else. She is back here again, working to support her son.
Another left with the shards of a broken marriage was Ms Tayco, who returned to Manila in 1993 after working here for three years only to find her husband in the arms of another woman.
It was a painful 'double betrayal' as the other woman was her close friend. Then her five-year-old daughter, Corazon, died from a brain haemorrhage.
Fighting back tears, she says: 'I would never have imagined he was spending the money I gave him on another woman. He blames me for leaving but if I hadn't come here, would he be able to survive?
'Who is to know my pain and tears?'
Maids: Stories of sacrifice
By Ng Hui Hui
Saturday Special Report
Straits Times, 05 March 2005
Poverty drives millions to leave their homes in search of work. In Singapore, 150,000 foreign domestic workers toil in the hopes of giving their families a better life back home.
BACK home, Ms Encarnacion Montales is hailed as a 'bagong bayani', which means modern hero in Tagalog and is one of the highest honours in the Philippines.
If she lands at Manila's Ninoy Aquino International Airport during Christmas, she is waved through an express Customs lane specially set aside for all returning Overseas Foreign Workers.
Sometimes, the President joins beaming government officials in greeting and garlanding heroes like her.
In 1998, the 59-year-old, who has worked in Singapore as a maid for 20 years, won one of four annual Bagong Bayani Awards. It was started in 1984 to recognise outstanding foreign workers whose effort - more importantly, income - abroad has contributed significantly to the Philippines.
According to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, at any one time, about 10 per cent of the country's 86 million people is working abroad. About half of them work as maids, the rest as seafarers, nurses or technical workers.
According to 2003 statistics, Saudi Arabia was the top destination of Filipino workers. Hong Kong ranked second, followed by Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, Kuwait, then Singapore.
The money they send home, which peaked at US$7.6 billion (S$12 billion) in 2003, accounts for 7.5 per cent of the country's gross domestic product.
On a national level, it boosts foreign currency reserves, cushions the impact of worldwide recession by stabilising the peso, and helps settle the country's external debt, which shot up to US$58 billion in 2003.
On a personal level, their wages help transform ramshackle dens into majestic multi-storey houses with proper plumbing, start small businesses for jobless siblings and husbands, foot parents' medical bills and see children through school.
Hence the red-carpet hero's welcome for these foreign workers.
But the moment maids like Ms Montales head off to work, their lot is anything but heroic.
Reverend Angel Luciano, the Filipino spiritual director of a Catholic Church welfare group serving foreign workers in Singapore, says: 'Calling them heroes is their government's way of giving them recognition. In church, I call them 'sacrificial lambs' because they are doing all this for their families.'
His group, formed in 1998, runs skills centres and a counselling service for the estimated 150,000 foreign maids in Singapore today.
There are no available official figures but industry players estimate that 55 per cent of them are Indonesians, 40 per cent Filipinos and the rest are Sri Lankans, Indians and others.
Maid agencies say that most come here in their 20s from rural villages or impoverished cities. While Filipinas are usually better educated and many have university degrees, Indonesians typically come with only primary education.
The Filipinas are the highest-paid, earning between $320 and $350 a month, while Indonesians and Indians earn the least - $210 to $250 a month.
From April, wages for Indonesian maids will go up by $50 a month - in a move by the Association of Employment Agencies to entice more Indonesians to come to Singapore. In recent years, many have preferred to work in Hong Kong or Taiwan where they can earn up to three times more.
Most of the 30 maids interviewed by The Straits Times for this report say they see Singapore as a 'stepping stone' to pick up skills in nursing, dressmaking and baking and to improve their English.
Ultimately, they dream of landing a job in places like Belgium or Italy, where they can earn up to 450 euros (S$970).
Many say they had no choice in coming here - they were simply sent here after signing cut-throat deals with transfer agents at home.
Typically, these agents exact prepayment of up to $1,800 to arrange for their pre-departure training, orientation and air passage here. That means about six months of their wages.
It means most maids have to grin and bear with working here for at least two years to make it worth their while. Most have little choice because of grinding poverty at home, where two in five Filipinos live below the poverty line and survive on less than US$1 a person per day.
The high unemployment rate in the Philippines - which reached a record five million last year - forced Ms Remia Regalado to become a maid in Singapore.
After six months of searching in vain for a software job after bagging a computing degree in Makati, she lowered her expectations and settled for a job as a cook.
But when her father needed a costly heart operation six years ago, she knew her salary of 1,500 pesos a month would no longer do, swallowed her pride and became a maid.
'I felt I had wasted my degree then, but it's okay. At least I can earn more to help my family,' she says with a stoic smile.
But while she had to stifle her dreams, for others, becoming a foreign maid in a faraway land is a dream come true, sometimes also providing an escape from family problems.
Indonesian maid Susanti Lasiman put up with her husband's gambling and joblessness in Lampung, Sumatra, until he became abusive as well.
'He would scold and hit me when he lost money. Sometimes, he threw things at me,' recounts the petite 27-year-old who fled home four years ago to work as a maid first in Malaysia and then in Singapore two years later.
Although she misses her two children, aged three and nine, she is happy with her 'more peaceful' life and stash of savings here.
Hard-won trust
BUT she is among the charmed minority of maids here, having won the trust of her employers, a Chinese couple living in a four-room HDB flat in Serangoon.
Maid agencies say many Singaporean employers go to great lengths to test their maids' honesty, such as installing hidden cameras to spy on them.
Ms Maria Luisa Tayco, a 44-year-old Filipina who came here to work in 1990, relates: 'I only knew about the cameras when my ma'am finally told me about it four years later. I was a bit angry when I found out but luckily, I hadn't done anything wrong.'
Filipina Amelia Sentina, 52, who has worked in three homes over the past 21 years, was tested so routinely she could tell the signs.
'My employers would leave money in various locations. It was obvious they were testing me because this 'habit' of leaving money lying around always stopped after some time,' she recounts.
Other employers are paranoid about their maids making friends or chatting with neighbours.
Indonesian Ari Sumajo, 29, who worked in Taiwan and Malaysia before coming here last year, laments: 'If I talk loudly at home, Madam scolds me. If I talk to other people, she also scolds me.'
In her experience, Singaporean employers are the most exacting, imperious and tight-fisted.
There is the flip side of course.
Ms Montales' employers, a family of three living in a five-room HDB flat in Bishan, for example, set up and pay the bills for a private phone line she uses as the de facto counselling hotline for Filipinas here.
'Every day, I get all kinds of calls asking for help. I believe I may have even saved a few lives through counselling,' she gushes.
Another Filipina Mel Icabandi, 37, now works for a Swiss family in Adam Road, but still prefers her former employer, a Chinese family in a four-room HDB flat in Hougang.
'Although they were less generous with off-days, they treated me more like family. When they introduced me to their friends, it was as 'helper' or 'companion', never as 'maid'.
'They asked me about my family and I confided in them.'
According to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), the number of people banned from hiring foreign maids has come down from 49 in 2001 to 30 in 2003.
To set some ground rules on the treatment of maids, the ministry started a half-day compulsory orientation programme for first-time employers last April. More than 17,200 have attended since.
Still, an average of 10 foreign maids seek help each day from their embassies, complaining of physical or sexual abuse, wage disputes, inadequate food or stress.
Maid agencies here note that some Singaporean employers work their maids to the bone. To get their money's worth, some draw up a mile-long list of chores that mean shifts of up to 16 hours.
More fortunate maids here enjoy a shoe-box-size room to themselves. But the norm is to share a room with the employers' children, which means sleeping on the floor.
According to Mrs Bridget Lew of the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics, which runs shelters for maids, some sleep in the living room, balcony, or even 'under the study table'.
Mr Peter Loh, co-owner of the Swift Arrow Maids agency, which has eight branches, notes: 'I remember a client who complained that her maid never seemed to remember anything she was told.
'Later, we discovered it was because she woke up at 5.30am and worked till 2am every day.'
The problem was solved when the maid was allowed to go to bed two hours earlier.
Family ATMs
STILL, most maids say they try to put on a happy face - at least to their folks back home.
Filipina Jennifer Buado Atizado, 22, who is supporting her younger siblings at home, says: 'People look down on us here but I don't want my family to know what I'm going through.' She and others routinely mail back rosy pictures of themselves posed against the Merlion in Sentosa or the Orchard Road Christmas light-up - inadvertently sending the message that they are having the time of their lives.
That only lures even more naive young women here and results in families badgering the maids for money, notes Father Angel. He wishes the women would send photos of themselves mopping floors and wiping windows 'because that is more reflective of their hardship here'.
Indeed, many maids like Ms Tayco say they are snowed under by incessant demands for money by family members, who often treat them like automated teller machines (ATMs).
Teary-eyed, she confides: 'Whether it's to buy a jeepney or new cellphone, they keep asking me for money. But no one even bothers to send me a Christmas card.'
She vents her frustrations by 'crying like a mad woman' in church and immersing herself in community work.
In desperation, some have been driven to suicide - but not before penning heart-wrenching letters to their families.
Dr Chia Boon Hock, a psychiatrist who monitors spikes in suicide rates here, says that between 1995 and 2003, a total of 77 maids - 51 Indonesians, 11 Filipinas, nine Indians and four Sri Lankans, two of other nationalities - took their own lives.
He shows a suicide note peppered with phrases like 'no day without scolding', 'have to work from 5am till midnight' and 'employers here are crazy and bossy'.
He notes: 'The figures for Indonesian maids are alarming because it is uncommon for Muslims to kill themselves. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that they do not speak English well. Like lost souls, they find it difficult to adapt to this strange new land.'
Indeed, maid agents and welfare groups say the language barrier is often the root of misunderstandings between maid and employer.
To solve this problem, MOM ruled in January that new maids must be at least 23 years old, with at least eight years of formal education.
From April, first-time maids here have to do a written test upon arrival to gauge, among other things, their literacy in English.
But what of the more complex issue of over-controlling, invasive and mean employers?
Many employers interviewed say they have 'little choice' but to watch their maids like hawks. Most cite the mandatory $5,000 deposit they pay when hiring a maid - and the spectre of losing it if their maid misbehaves - as the reason for their tight rein.
Housewife Veron Chen, 30 is not ashamed that she recently confiscated the mobile phone she gave her maid after she discovered mushy SMSes flying between her and a few men.
'I don't want to lose the $5,000 deposit,' she says. 'What if she gets into bad company or gets pregnant?'
But MOM confirms that, contrary to popular belief, the $5,000 security bond is not confiscated when a maid gets pregnant. Her work permit will be revoked and she will be sent home, but there is no penalty for the employer.
That deposit is at risk only if the maid runs away. Even then, the employer has a grace pe- riod of two to three months to find her.
The ministry knows that it is not always possible for an employer to stop a maid from running away.
But employers of foreign maids know from the start that they have a responsibility to send the workers home at the end of their stay.
Without that obligation, a ministry spokesman explains, there is a risk of having a large number of foreign maids being abandoned by their employers for a variety of reasons.
Few happy endings
ULTIMATELY, what spurs most maids to plod on is the romantic mirage of returning home to the loving, grateful fold of their families and a better life with non-leaky roofs, VCRs and fans.
However, when homecoming day finally dawns, many find themselves faced with frosty reality instead.
Indonesian Rusiyah Bani, 25, returned to her hometown in 2003 after a two-year stint here, looking forward to 'kissing and hugging' her five-year-old son.
But the boy, unused to her, ran away from her. 'It hurt me very much and I almost cried,' she recounts. Her technician husband, meanwhile, had run off with someone else. She is back here again, working to support her son.
Another left with the shards of a broken marriage was Ms Tayco, who returned to Manila in 1993 after working here for three years only to find her husband in the arms of another woman.
It was a painful 'double betrayal' as the other woman was her close friend. Then her five-year-old daughter, Corazon, died from a brain haemorrhage.
Fighting back tears, she says: 'I would never have imagined he was spending the money I gave him on another woman. He blames me for leaving but if I hadn't come here, would he be able to survive?
'Who is to know my pain and tears?'
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