Tragic End for a Maid

Normina Piang was 17 when her foreign nightmare began. It ended when she died at age 20.

Her home was a one-room bamboo hut in a Muslim village on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. It had neither electricity nor running water.

Desperate to help her family, she applied for work as a maid overseas. A recruitment agency found her a job in Kuwait in exchange for her first three months’ pay. Until the agency gave her a two-week housekeeping course, she had never seen a vacuum cleaner.

When she got to Kuwait, she found that she would be cleaning a two-story, seven-bathroom house, doing laundry, cooking and caring for four children, ages 1 to 12. She worked from 5 a.m. to midnight without days off. She slept on the floor without a mattress, she recounted in an interview months before she died.

According to her contract, she was supposed to receive $200 a month, but like many Philippine maids in Kuwait, she got only about three-quarters of what she was promised.

Unable to understand Arabic, she quickly ran into trouble. The older children hit her and threw shoes at her, she said. Their mother slapped her.

Piang said she ran away to her employment agency office, but the recruiter ordered her to keep working to pay back the fee. When she got back to her employers’ home, the woman beat her. The husband tried to kiss her and tore her dress. Piang said she asked to be taken to the Philippine Embassy, but the man held a knife to her throat and said he would kill her if she did not work.

At 4 o’clock the next morning, she slipped out of the house. With the help of a passerby who gave her bus fare, she reached the Philippine Embassy. But she was unable to leave the country because her employers had kept her passport and return ticket.

Two weeks later, they turned over the documents. But police said the couple also had filed a complaint against her for running away. An embassy employee delivered her to the police station, she said.

There were no charges, but police locked her up anyway. During the night, three officers came into her cell. One tore her clothes, beat her unconscious and raped her. It was not until the next evening that an embassy worker returned to pick her up.

After she filed a complaint, the officers offered to marry her or pay compensation. She refused. For the next eight months, she lived on the embassy grounds, waiting for a court date.

The compound was overflowing with runaway maids. By day, the temperature often exceeded 100 degrees. The women bathed by pouring water over themselves with a bucket.

“You sit there, that’s it,” Piang said. “You line up for food. You line up to use the bathroom.”

As she waited, she developed a urinary tract infection that she believed was caused by the rape. It went untreated until it apparently spread to her kidneys. She was hospitalized, but her illness was never cured.

A Kuwaiti judge convicted the three officers, sentencing the one who raped her to 15 years in prison and the other two to 10 years. The sentences were later reduced to seven and five years.

Piang was proud of making a stand.

“No Filipino ever sent a cop to prison,” she said. But she went home sick and empty-handed. Unable to work, she lived with her aunt in a one-room apartment in Manila, surviving on the $3 a day her aunt made selling hair clips on the street.

Piang didn’t go home to Mindanao for more than six months, not because of the rape but because she had lost her job.

An advocacy group, Migrante International, tried to help her get assistance from the government, which collects millions of dollars from workers leaving the country to aid those who encounter problems.

“Her illness was not fatal, but got worse from neglect,” said Migrante Chairperson Connie Bragas-Regalado. “She had to beg for medication from the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration,” the Philippine agency at the embassy where Piang and the other runaway maids had stayed.

The government gave Piang $180 for medical tests. Instead, she used the money to go to Mindanao.

Bragas-Regalado said that in their last conversation, Piang seemed to know she was dying. But she was more concerned about helping her family. She asked that Migrante International pursue a lawsuit against the Kuwaiti police officers in the hope of winning enough to educate five younger siblings.

Until she died last year, Piang was angry that she had come home with nothing: “I worry because instead of helping my family, I became a problem.”