Migrante-Middle East (M-ME) through its local chapter, the Samahan ng Migranteng Mangagawa in Qatar (SAMMAQA), on Sept.25 reported OFW Edielyn Buno Mirasol, 28 years old, from Tagum, Davao City, was found dead at the top of the apartment where she is residing on September 4, 2011 in Doha, Qatar.

SAMMAQA reported that a fellow OFW and flat-mate found her laid back on top of the platform with rope on her neck. The fellow OFW reported to the local police on the same day OFW Edilyn was found dead.

“Our Migrante chapter in Davao City confirmed that OFW Edielyn remains’ arrived in Tagum, Davao on Sept.30,” said John Leonard Monterona, M-ME regional coordinator.

Monterona added that Migrante-Davao were able to talked to one of the sisters of OFW Edielyn as the group asked its Migrante chapter in Davao to convey their sympathy to the OFW’s family and relatives.

“The family of OFW Edielyn raises doubt on the report that she had committed suicide since they’ve found out blood clot marks on her bodies and a wound and crack on her jaw which seems a hard thing had hit her and they noticed signs that she physically struggled with someone,” Monterona citing reports from Migrante-Davao after talking to the family of OFW Edielyn.

Monterona said the husband does not believed that OFW Edielyn had to take her own life because allegedly it has a relationship with other man and that she got pregnant which she became problematic.

“The report of her confession to her church that she would like to end her life allegedly because of homesickness was also belied by her husband,” Monterona citing report from Migrante-Davao.

Monterona said it would be of help if the OFW Edielyn husband and family will decide to subject her remains to an autopsy.

“The result of the autopsy will lead us to more convincing information leading to the confirmation of the real cause of her death,” the Saudi-based Migrante leader added.

Monterona said his group traced that ‘speculations’ of her suicide came from the PH embassy in Doha.

“As we are not convinced of the initial findings by the PH embassy in Doha that she had committed suicide because allegedly she was in an illicit relationship and is pregnant, we, in fact, have strongly urged the embassy to deeply conduct an investigation,” Monterona added.

Monterona deplores PH ambassador to Doha Cresente Relacion for his ‘irresponsible’ statement during a TV network interview aired last Saturday that his office initial information is that OFW Edilyn committed suicide as she was problematic on her illicit relationship and is pregnant, without deeply probing her case first.

Written by:

John Leonard Monterona

Migrante-Middle East regional coordinator

Janitorial workers employed by a number of cleaning services companies are required to work 12 hours a day and without a weekly day off even during Ramadan when most of Qatar’s workforce have reduced working hours.

Manpower companies have been complacent about the high death rate among Nepali workers. ‘Deaths of a few hundred people are natural’, the President of the Nepal Association of Foreign Employment Agencies (NAFEA).

According to some, stress is a leading cause of death.

‘Two-third of the deaths are caused by stress because they are cheated by employment agencies,’ Nepalese Ambassador Suryanath Mishra told Monsters and Critics.

Qatar too is beginning to have its own debate. The government is said to be considering moves to guarantee workers’ pay and gratuities. Despite the fact that most manual and domestic workers are paid a pittance, their wages frequently fall in arrears. Within a week of arriving on Doha I heard of two large-scale instances where workers had not been paid as the employers were away on their holidays. The groundsmen at Doha hockey club, for example, would turn the sprinklers on as we were about to start playing to ‘vent’ their anger and, I suppose, to try to get the players to agitate on their behalf.

On the more fundamental question of Qatar abolishing its sponsorship and exit-visa systems, progress looks grim. The Qatari Chamber of Commerce has successfully lobbied to retain both these facets of Qatari labor law, despite the growing understanding that they are outdated, unfair and contribute to workers’ rights being abused.

Although the trend is gradually turning against the sponsorship and exit permit systems in the GCC countries, Qatar’s private sector says it would continue to back the above rules.

Of course the Chamber of Commerce backs such laws! In much the same way that a Turkey will never vote for Christmas and the Catholic Church isn’t going to vote for a gay Pope, a lobbying group whose role is to make things as pro-employer as possible will never willingly vote for human rights over profits.

Exactly this type of pressure in Bahrain led to the watering-down of their proposed reforms. Instead of allowing all workers to change jobs if they so choose [yes, the rights being argued for are this basic] domestic workers are still prohibited. Also, the kefala system has manifestly not been abolished: today it is the Labour Market Regulation Authority that sponsors workers and not individuals or agencies.

The fact that the Qatari government caved-in to its business lobby highlights just how strong it must be. Ordinarily, one might expect that Qatar would be leading the way on these kinds of topics. In recent years Qatar’s image has been built championing itself as some kind of progressive if not faintly liberal state, promoting values of education, tolerance and openness. This push has come from the three most powerful people in the country: the Emir, HBJ (the Foreign and Prime Minister) and the Emir’s wife. For them, therefore, not to reform such an egregiously harsh and manifestly illiberal blot on Qatar’s image shows the kinds of give and take that needs to go on. Neither can this triumvirate rely on wide-spread public support: such laws do nothing for Qataris themselves; indeed, if they do anything to them it is ‘inconvenience’ them. Until a ground-swell of domestic or international pressure is reached, there is little the government can do.

This post was originally published on The Gulf Blog and re-posted here with permission.

According to that report, the deported workers boycotted work after their company, Albadar, refused to increase their salary by 10% like it did each year as required by an agreement between the workers and the company. According to a previous report in e-Katnipur, the strike was over a decrease in the workers’ salary from 1000 Qatari riyals ($275) to 650 riyals ($180) per month. The workers were kept in jail without food for days and later deported. To add insult to injury, laborers who worked less than two years for the company had to pay for their ticket back home.

Unlike most Gulf nations, Qatar’s labor laws allow workers to strike, form workers’ committees and conduct collective bargaining. These arrests and deportation aren’t just a violation of basic human rights and an injustice – they’re also a violation of Qatar’s labor laws.

The mother appears to be a 30-year-old woman, mother of two other children, living in the north Apayao area of the Philippines. Last June, she set out to work in Qatar, where she says she was raped by her employer. She told her Representative, Lani Mercado, that her employer’s (and rapist’s) wife forced her to return home before she was able to complete her three-year contract. The woman gave birth to the baby in the plane’s bathroom and left him in the trash there because she was afraid of how her family would react.

We previously reported about a temporary orphanage in Indonesia that offers mothers who returned from abroad a shelter for their child, while they attempt to explain to their husbands that they were raped. Currently there are about ten Filipino rape victims who are awaiting repatriation in Saudi Arabia after fleeing their sponsors.

Unfortunately, the rape of migrant domestic workers occurs quite often in the region and is the result of the near-total dependence of migrant workers on their employers. Such helplessness encourages abuse, since rapists know that they won’t face the consequence of their actions.

Sophia Furber: How did you first get involved in making films on migrant workers?

Kesang Tseten: I’d traveled through Qatar before, and like many people I was struck by the number of migrant workers I saw. I had initially wanted to make a film about the 12 Nepali workers that were killed in Iraq in 2004, but in the end it was too difficult for me to get there to shoot. I then decided I wanted to make a film on the everyday circumstances of Nepalis going to the Gulf to work. This is also a horror story in its own right, but it’s so normal.

If you talk to people of a certain class in Nepal, like the people working here (we are sitting in a fairly upmarket cafe in Kathmandu having coffee), migration to the Gulf is a hugely important part of their everyday experience. Most of them have friends or family members working in the Gulf, and a lot of them aspire to go there themselves. Migration is part of their language. So for me the story was there already for In Search of the Riyal and Saving Dolma. My aim was to make a film that explained the sociological context.

SF: Was it difficult for you to get access to migrant workers in Kuwait and Qatar? (Many live in labour camps or private homes, which makes it notoriously hard for researchers, journalists and civil society members to come into contact with them)

KT: In Kuwait I couldn’t get a visa to go to shoot (for upcoming project Saving Dolma) so I had to ask other people to go to; there was an American who had worked with me before as an editor, and he went to Kuwait to shoot some footage. Alston D’Silva, an editor who is based in Kathmandu, went to shoot on my behalf in Kuwait as he grew up there, and was able to get some really great footage.

When I was in Qatar shooting In Search of the Riyal we had to shoot without permission using small, hand-held cameras – not secret cameras, though. This meant that all the footage we brought back from Qatar had a very journalistic style. For this reason I went back to Nepal to shoot more footage so that I could give a fuller picture and show the background to the story.

The Nepali communities in both Qatar and Kuwait were really helpful to me and my team. We were effectively embedded in the Nepali community when I went to shoot there. The Nepali community there are very conscious of being migrants, and because of this there are a lot of societies set up by Nepalis so that they can help one another. There are 116 migrant associations in Qatar and the Nepali community really feels that the existence of these groups has really made life better for them. People are so ready to ‘help their own.’ They are also very ready to help researchers.

SF: What was your impression of the labour camps that you visited?

KT: Some of them were not that bad, but others were very crowded, with 15-20 bunks per room. Conditions were not that appalling for people coming from Nepal, and in my experience the labour camps were not what Nepali migrants were complaining about most. People are willing to suffer a lot when they migrate to the Gulf, provided that they get something in return. The problem is when Nepalis feel that they are putting up with a lot of everyday hardship but find that there is no real financial gain (because they are not being paid enough or wages are being withheld).

SF: So what are the things that Nepali migrant workers complained about when they described their experiences in the Gulf?

KT: Money. Nepalis feel that they are not being paid enough to pay off their overheads. The calculation for most people migrating to the Gulf is so tight. Getting a passport, then going from their town or village to Kathmandu to see a manpower agent, taking a loan at up to 60% interest to pay the manpower agency is a hugely expensive process.

To pay that back the money that they have borrowed to get to the Gulf in the first place people need to be earning enough money, and their financial calculation is also based on doing overtime. This means that Nepalis in the Gulf are working so hard that they don’t have any leisure time. Nepalis aren’t used to not having time in this way. They come to the Gulf and for perhaps the first time in their lives they just feel like a small part of a machine. Being fitted like a cog to the modern economic apparatus is extremely difficult for them.

SF: What was the psychological effect of this on migrant workers that you met?

KT: You can definitely see the evidence of psychological problems on migrants. If you are a migrant worker from the developing world, it’s like you’re there but you’re not there, because the economic barrier separates them from participating in wider society. Migrant workers in the Gulf own so little compared to the cost of living over there, but it is in a place where power and money are being rubbed in their faces constantly. Imagine being a migrant worker earning $5 per day and serving rich expats coffee that costs as much as your daily wage. This sends a message to the migrant that they are worth nothing, and they begin to feel bereft.

People come here with a burden, and I felt that this was taking a clear psychological toll on them. To begin with, Nepali migrants are shouldering huge debts and responsibilities to their families. Maybe their families have got their land up as collateral against a loan. There is a really loneliness in this burden for migrant workers.

The other problem is that a lot of Nepalis are separated from their spouses, and this is a huge cause of stress. Fears are constantly preying on them: is my spouse being sensible with the money I send home? Are they being faithful to me? Bear in mind that it costs a huge amount of money for them just to make a short phone call home.

SF: Were the problems that migrant women were facing different from those of men?

KT: In a sense you can’t really compare. But I personally would say that women’s condition is fundamentally worse. Everybody is vulnerable, male or female, but the women migrants are worse off because they generally work as housemaids in private homes. Once you’re behind those doors it’s the luck of the draw what kind of human beings you will get. As hard as it is for men, their position is one of socialized production. They are working in public spaces. But women are in private spaces and are physically vulnerable in a way that the men aren’t.

SF: Did the migrant workers that you met with encounter racism from the locals?

KT: The men hardly ever come into contact with the locals; in their workplaces the foreman is usually an Indian or a Nepali. However, Nepalis I spoke to said that there was a lot of abuse against them by Nepali foremen or managers. In a way it’s like a whole unequal society is being replicated.

SF: Finally, what do you think could be done to improve the situation for Migrant Workers?

KT: There are a number of major problems that need to be looked at. Really, the problems of migrant workers are rooted in an exploitative global economic system. The GDP of the Gulf states is as high as most western countries but they take in labour from low income countries, and then pay disproportionately low wages. In some of the richest oil economies of the world, people are earning as little as US$5 per day.

One issue that needs to be tackled is that of crooked manpower agencies, and there are certainly enough of them to be a problem. In the destination countries, these ‘suppliers’ can earn 100 Riyals per day for sourcing a Nepali migrant worker, but the worker only gets maybe 30 Riyals of that.

I think that Nepali migrants need to go to the Gulf with better information. People feel that they can go, and they must go, and it is not for us to tell them not to; but they could at least be better prepared. Migrants with just two months training in say, scaffolding, could earn 25% more than completely unskilled workers. If Nepalis are earning more overseas it will be better for the individual and better for the country, since the Nepali economy is so dependent on remittances.

You can see footage from Kesang’s work-in-progress, Saving Dolma, here here.

Here are the relevant passages from this awful article:

The demand for housemaids is on the rise in the country, but problems persist on the supply side since several other Arab countries as well as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore are emerging as major employers of domestic help.

These countries have in place laws regulating the wages, daily working hours and weekly rest days for maids, besides the fact that the remunerations there are high. “So most maids prefer to head to these countries making things difficult for us,” a local manpower agency owner Saq Ghanim told Al Sharq.

….

The embassy of the Philippines here says although the standard monthly wage of a Filipina maid is fixed at $400, the average one gets is half the amount.

….

Many new licencees are not experienced in recruiting maids and bring over just about any young woman supplied by a recruiting agency in a major manpower exporting country.

“The result is that maids who come here run away barely days after being delegated to a family,” said Al Marri.

A maid who has not undergone basic orientation training in her home country to work in this part of the world, gets fed up easily and either runs away from her employers or comes back to the agency looking to be delegated to some other household, or worse, wants to return home.

“For new maids coming here it is sort of a fun trip. They come here and want to go back home barely a few days after serving a household,” said Ali Al Khwaja, also from the manpower recruitment trade.

…

According to Ghanim, most families do not allow maids to carry mobile phones fearing that they may get in contact with men outside and have an affair. “Then, there are maids who complain of harassment by their employers no sooner than they have begun working in a family,” he pointed out.

One of the last (two) countries where divorce is illegal and where the ruling Catholic elite maintains a staunch anti-reproductive rights stance, the island nation of the Philippines boasts a staggering population of 90 million people and (exponentially) counting. To better appreciate this figure, consider that the Philippines has nearly one third of the US population living in an area slightly bigger than Arizona.

According to the latest statistics compiled by the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (part of the Philippine Dept. of Labor and Employment), the agency responsible for facilitating the government’s aggressive export labor policy, ten percent of the Philippine population works abroad.

A fresh batch of 1.3 million citizens leave every year for employment overseas and a daily average of 3,377 workers pass through the country’s international airports to work abroad. Of the Filipino migrant workers who left in 2008, 51.1% were headed for the Middle East and there are 2.3 million Filipino migrant workers in the region (over 1 million in Saudi Arabia alone).

As the world’s largest exporter of women- 70% of migrant workers from the Philippines are women- the Philippines holds considerable bragging rights to the fact that women comprise the majority of the world’s migrant workers (this according to an alphabet soup of UN agencies, grassroots organizations and state labor departments).

To be sure, male and female migrant workers are often subject to similar abuse and exploitation as economically displaced persons whose labor is considered disposable and replenishable; however, unlike their male counterparts, female migrant workers experience an entirely unique set of issues and are most vulnerable to abuses as a sex-linked class. Female migrants workers are more likely to find themselves isolated and ensconced within their employers’ homes because they make up the majority of household service workers in the Middle East – official figures indicate that 79% of household service workers and 85% of non-professional nurse caretakers deployed to the Middle East in 2008 from the Philippines were women – and housework is considered unalterably private.

When female domestic workers ready themselves for the daily treadmill of barbarously petty housework activities (there is no clear delineation of tasks), they live with the knowledge that rape and murder are occupational hazards. Indeed, female returnees recount stories of wearing three or four pairs of underwear at night and barricading themselves in their quarters with chairs jammed beneath their doorknobs.

Rape is not sex in the sense that a woman is attractive and a man can’t resist her. Elderly women and babies are raped. It’s about being a convenient victim and dominance. The domestic worker is the highest manifestation of “convenience”.

As activist Angela Davis wrote in describing the collective rape of Black women by their white American slavemasters: “Having already established their economic dominance over their female subordinates, employers may attempt to assert this authority in sexual terms”, especially in environments where employers are immune to prosecution and their authority unchallenged. There are no accurate figures on the rape of migrant workers but it is very common.

This culture of impunity importunes abusive employers to continue to mistreatment their domestic workers: some women are flogged, cut, shaved bald, and even beaten to death as punishment. Cases of abuse filed to the OWWA (Overseas Workers Welfare Association) rank in the hundreds of thousands each year yet the organization has been remiss in its handling of migrant workers’ concerns, refusing to subsidize the shipment of migrants’ murdered bodies home, ricocheting rape victims between one indifferent government agency to another, and acting complicit in the deliberate dissolution of the family as women are forced to raise other children and service other needs at the expense of their own (Awfully reminiscent of the state-implemented separation of Black women and their families in apartheid South Africa, no?).

The desperate situation is reflected in the high death toll and high rate of suicide among female migrant workers. In 2008 a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch reported, “Domestic workers are dying in Lebanon at a rate of more than one per week. All those involved – from the Lebanese authorities, to the workers’ embassies, to the employment agencies, to the employers – need to ask themselves what is driving these women to kill themselves or risk their lives trying to escape from high buildings.”

Despite all good intentions, organizations advocating migrant rights often share a common thread with the OWWA in that they, consciously or subconsciously, ask women to good-naturedly take the backseat to and “not inject gender into” a purportedly genderless overarching agenda. However, the lived reality, as discussed, is not gender neutral. Women’s rights are not the parenthetical, Other issue to be handled by a special caucus, but are an integral part of human rights.

To break women’s invisibility, we have to first realize that women are not being listened to or seen (Note: we are confronted only by photos of male migrant workers on the homepage of this website). We have to take some real, not rhetorical, actions in advocating the fact that the overwhelming majority (both statistically and anecdotally) of the most egregious abuses are perpetrated against female migrant workers. Let us take power out of its hiding place while bringing women’s voices and leadership to the forefront of the struggle against oppression.

One would be hard-pressed to find a Filipino who does not know of or (surprisingly often) in the personal, at least one Filipina co-worker, neighbor, relative, friend or partner who has been raped while working in the Middle East. I can count three whom I know personally: a family friend (impregnated by her rapist-employer while working as a domestic in Riyadh), a former colleague and telecommunications engineer (gang raped while working for a Nokia-Siemens subsidiary in Saudi Arabia) and Grace Vasquez.

This is Grace’s story, told in her own words.

“Sometime in April 2005, my father suffered a second stroke and was unable to work since then. I wanted to be able to work in Oman in order to care and provide for my parents as I did not want them to return to the Philippines. This prompted me to seek for any job placement for Oman. Sometime in May 2005, I read Jinhel International Recruitment Agency’s (hereinafter, “Jinhel”) Manila Bulletin advertisement for job placements in countries in the Middle East. I immediately placed a call in the telephone number contained in the ad.

After one week, I went to Jinhel’s office and paid P3,000.00 for my medical exam. I was assured of a job placement in Qatar so I decided to resign from my work as Guidance Counselor in Systems Plus Computer College in Caloocan City. I went L-R Medical & X-ray Clinic. I paid P2,730.00. Then Jinhel called in March 2006. I was told to prepare as I was sure to be sent for work in Qatar. I paid Jinhel Five Thousand Pesos (P5,000.00) to Haja Fatima as payment, she said, for her services.

Jinhel and I agreed on the following terms of my employment in Qatar: monthly salary of QD700; work is Executive Secretary; the first two months’ salary will go to Jinhel as it’s commission.

At the airport, inside the immigration area, we were asked to pay P1,500.00 each, unreceipted. We were previously advised by Nelia to prepare the said amount. One of the Immigration Staff said “arbor ko na silang tatlo” (Hand those three over to me) because we didn’t have proper documents.

I arrived in Qatar on June 8, 2006. At the airport, I was met by Faruq, a Pakistani National who introduced himself to be from Al Waleed Agency – Jinhel’s Qatari counterpart agency. Faruq asked me to sign a contract with the following terms: monthly salary of QR600; work is to take care of a five-year-old child all day long with no day-off. I can’t do anything just to accept the contract.

Mr. Faruq brought me to my employer, Dr. Abdul Aziz Al Jumiah (hereinafter, “Dr. Abdul Aziz”). I came to know that Dr. Abdul Aziz is a Saudi National and a surgeon at the Al-Ramelah Hamad Hospital. His wife, Dina, was then pregnant and they had a five-year-old son.

I worked from 5:00 in the morning until about 1:00 or 2:00 the next morning as I was not allowed to sleep while my employers’ child was up. And since the child was asleep most of the time during the day, he usually went to bed past midnight.

Sometime in June (after about 2 week-stay in Qatar), I called the Philippine Embassy and I was able to talk to one Mr. Jack. I told him about my situation but, in return, he coldly told me: ”Hindi pa naman grabe ang nangyayari sa yo. Tapusin mo na yang 2 years mo.” (What’s happening to you isn’t even that bad. Just finish your two years.) He also gave me Overseas Workers Welfare Administration’s (OWWA) telephone number.

In the last week of June, I called OWWA and talked to one Mr. Sam to whom I repeated my story. He told me: “Tumakas ka na kung ayaw mo na. Lumabas ka at sumakay sa taxi.” *Escape if you’ve had enough. Walk out and get in a taxi.)

Madam Dina brought me with her to her hometown Syria. Where I cleaned all the house of her parents and brother’s house. I slept past 3 am and woke up at 6 am also.

We came back to Qatar in September.

On 14 September 2006, I was at the kitchen while Madam Dina was upstairs taking a bath, when Dr. Abdul Aziz arrived from the office. He suddenly embraced me and touched my breasts. I pushed him and told him that I would report to his wife. He just gave me a devil’s grin. When Madam Dina came down, I told her about what her husband did to me. But Madam Dina slapped me and blamed me for what had happened. And she shaved my head.

On the same day of September 14, 2006, Dr. Abdul Aziz asked for the key in my room. He ordered me not to lock my room from then on. I became so scared that I started to use the table in my room to block the door. I also kept a knife in my room.

On the third week of September, I again called OWWA. I told them about the harassment but I was given the same advice – to run away! I again requested that I be fetched or rescued but I was given the same answer – that OWWA does not rescue workers.

At around midnight on November 2, 2006, Madam Dina gave birth. He was brought to the hospital by Dr. Abdul Aziz. At about past 4:00 in the morning of November 3, 2006, I heard Dr. Abdul Aziz’s car arrive. I was then taking a shower. I got out of the bathroom. I just finished putting on my uniform when Dr. Abdul Aziz banged the door in my room. I was so shocked. Then Dr. Abdul Aziz immediately twisted my hands, laid me on the bed and tied my two hands on the bed using some cloth. He forcibly tore my clothes then raped me.

I pleaded and begged him not to do it. It hurt. After he raped me, he untied me. Then I saw that I was bleeding. I was so weak and almost went blank. I thought of the knife but I could not think or move. After what he did, I even saw him pray the Muslim prayer. Then I heard his car leave. I checked if he left any door unlocked. All doors/gates were locked. I was still bleeding.

At about 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning, I saw the window in my comfort room. I jumped out of that window. Luckily, Lorna (a fellow domestic worker) was then working in our neighbor’s garden. She told me to look for chairs I can step on. As I was jumping to our neighbor’s garden, Lorna saw that I was bleeding. Lorna let me out of her employer’s yard through their gate. But there were guards and so Lorna hid me behind a tree. We had to wait until the next prayer time at 11:00 in the morning. When she saw the guards entered their prayer house, Lorna advised me to run.

I hailed the taxi. I saw that it had passengers but I later learned that the taxi driver, a Filipino, saw me bleeding and so he stopped the taxi. From the taxi, the driver placed call to the Philippine Embassy.

When we arrived at the embassy, there was a party which I later learned was a party for Connie Sison and TJ Manotoc for their Kwentong Disyerto. There were media people at the embassy. The driver called Mr. Sam to inform him that we were already outside the embassy. Mr. Sam got out and even saw the blood on my body. He did not invite us in. He just told the driver to proceed and take me to OWWA. The driver even repeated that I was bleeding but Mr. Sam insisted that I be taken to OWWA.

When we got to OWWA, there was an ongoing ballroom dancing. We were asked who we were looking for. The taxi driver was making a call to Mr. Sam in order to ask who we would look for but he was not yet responding. We waited for two hours.

After two hours (or about 9:00 at night of November 3, 2006), one Sir Levi arrived at the OWWA from the embassy. He led me to a quarter that they call “shelter” inside the OWWA. I saw many (about 30) Filipino women inside the quarter .

On the night of November 3, Connie Sison’s group also proceeded to OWWA from the embassy. Sir Levi told the leader to hide those who needed to be hid including myself because I did not look good and I was hysterical. Out of the 30 plus women, only 15 were presented to Connie Sison’s group. I later learned that they were introduced as Filipinos studying computer inside the OWWA. I stayed in OWWA the whole day of November 4, 2006. We were fed “lugaw” (water mixed with rice). No one counseled me. I was not checked up or brought to the hospital.

On the night of November 4, 2006, Ma’am Ferida without first talking to me or asking me, called my employer. At about 8:00 in the morning the following day, my employer came. He was first attended to by Sir Levi. He was asked if I was his employee. They were later joined by Ma’am Ferida. They then invited me to sit down with them inside Ma’am Ferida and Sir Levi’s office. The door of the office was left open. Ma’am Flerida talked to me and told me “wag ka na magreklamo anyway may asawa ka naman na, wala naman nawala sayo” )Don’t make a complaint [because] you already have a husband, you have nothing to lose.)

I was angry at the sight of my employer-rapist. But I could not do anything because Ma’am Ferida and Sir Levi facilitated the negotiation. I was asked not to file charges against my employer. In return, my employer would give me my five months salary, a plane ticket to the Philippines as well as return my personal belongings that I left at their house when I escaped. I was made to write and sign a waiver which I worded as follows: “I will not file charges against my employer, the rape case, although it happened.”

In the morning of November 6, Sir Levi called me and gave me a plane ticket. I asked him about my personal belongings and the agreed five months salary that my employer would return. He said my employer only gave the ticket. I insisted, at the very least, on my things, but he said “Mamili ka. Uuwi ka or made-deport ka? Basta’s kailangan ko ng sagot mo hanggang 3:00 dahil alis tayo ng 3:30.” (Buy (new) things. Will you go home or will you have to be deported? Either way, I need an answer by 3:00 otherwise we’re leaving at 3:30.) I cried and demanded for my things but he said ”Wala akong magagawa.” (There’s nothing I can do.) I had no choice but to agree.

Sir Levi and I left OWWA for the airport at 3:30 in the afternoon. But before leaving, I got my mobile phone that was earlier confiscated by Ma’am Ferida. I was penniless. I was not even given any money for snacks or any emergency.

At about 6:00 p.m., I boarded the plane for the Philippines. I arrived in the Philippines in November 7, 2006 where I was brought o the hospital by my family. Not one from OWWA of the Department of Foreign Affairs assisted me in the Philippines.

When I arrived at the airport in Manila only my husband was there to receive me. My relatives took me to the hospital where I live in Batangas.* There was local press at the hospital that picked up what had happened to me.

I had to go to therapy for almost a year because I was in shock.

I’ve been waiting for the response of the government but until now there’s been absolutely no help.

It’s still not over.”

Grace with her daughter a year after returning to the Philippines.

On the right: Grace with her father before going to Qatar.