For Clarita, the contract seemed heaven-sent. It included a P3,500 monthly salary, plus bonuses and Social Security System (SSS) benefits. It also mentioned something about vacation every six months. Just for signing the contract, Clarita could also get P1,000 in advance from her first month’s salary. Surely, Clarita thought, her employer must be very kind.

A single mother raising three children, and a woman who can barely read and write, Clarita could not find any other tempting offer. She lived in one of Cebu’s growing slum colonies, and following her husband’s death (which occurred a year ago), she was left to eke out a living by servicing households in adjacent subdivisions. She worked as a stay-out laundry woman and was paid in piecemeal. But it was not every day that she was asked to come over and wash clothes, so it was not every day that she brought home some cash. She could not even afford to buy milk for her three babies with the money that she was earning.

One day, she decided to try her luck in Manila. She was enticed by a newspaper ad that read, “YAYAS, HOUSEMAIDS FOR HIRE.” She left her babies with her mother-in-law and went to work in Manila, just as countless other mothers have done before her.

The first contract that Clarita signed after talking to a recruiter was difficult to understand. The agency told her that in order to facilitate her employment, they would charge her P4,000 for her boat fare and recruitment fees. She could already leave P1,000 to her children as an advance payment of her salary. Clarita did not bother to ask about security benefits and days off at this time because she supposed that she would not be traveling anywhere in Manila anyway.

But Clarita found her actual employment contract a bit odd. The salary was slightly smaller than anticipated, P3,500 a month, although it included SSS benefits. Her new contract also allowed her to take a vacation every six months. The P1,000 advance payment earlier given by the recruiter was stipulated in the contract as well.

Clarita soon began to work for a couple who were also raising three children, who reminded her of the three children that she herself had left behind. She also shared the task of caring for the house and the children with another domestic worker. At first, the division of their tasks wasn’t clear, but the two domestic workers soon sorted out their duties upon the decision of their employer’s wife.

The wife, however, turned out to be very strict and would nag Clarita for every minor mistake. She would summon her endlessly for repetitive tasks and small errands, starting at 4 am. Clarita would cook, clean the house, and bathe her wards before sending them off to school, which had to be done before the parents left for work.
The other domestic worker washed and ironed the clothes. Clarita and her companion shared not only tasks but also a limited supply of strictly-rationed food and toiletries.

To their surprise, Clarita and her co-worker were soon conscripted to serve the parents and other sisters of their employer, who lived in a different house within the same compound. As their workload increased, their rest periods fell by the wayside, and Clarita no longer had the energy to think of or write home.

For three months, Clarita endured this sacrifice just to pay off the debts that she had incurred from her recruiter. She had no money left to send back home for her three children. One day, she tried to ask for a small advance payment from her employers so that she could remit money to her children. Her request was ignored. She waited a little bit more, hoping that her employers would change their minds, but it didn’t happen.

Shackled to her daily routine and disconnected from any information about her children, Clarita kept on thinking of her family at home. One day, she met an old friend and townmate at the market and learned some tragic news: her mother-in-law had been looking for her for months because her youngest child had died of pneumonia.

Distraught and unfocused on anything but her emotions, Clarita at once negotiated the payment of two months’ salary from her employers. They granted her P4,000, which she immediately sent home. Anticipating that Clarita herself would try to come home, her family strongly warned her not to leave her job. But Clarita, who was still grieving over the loss of her child, decided to run away. By that time, she had learned only too well that domestic work in the city, instead of helping her to provide for her children, had led her into an exploitative situation in which she lacked not only the means to help her family but also access to news of their situation – a level of isolation that proved tragic in this case.