Long Distance Self Sacrifice

15.01.2010

Father Eamon Sheridan looked out over his Hong Kong congregation one Sunday and described why he likes saying Mass for this group of people, many of them migrant domestic workers from the Philippines. “You are here for one reason only: because you love someone.” It was a powerful thing to say because it was profoundly true. One domestic worker told me that she had been here working so her daughter could go to University back in the Philippines. But how to measure the terrible strain on marriages and family relationships?  Because of their country’s economy, many Filipinos find themselves going overseas to seek a job. Even well educated people take domestic work for the money they can remit home from places where the pay scale is higher. The money they send home boosts the economy of the Philippines; in the first ten months of 2008, Filipino workers in Hong Kong sent U.S. $339.4 million to their families at home.

A Filipina maid who is working outside the Philippines is working to put food on the table for her family, but that table is thousands of miles away. Back home, her family sits down to dinner without their wife and mother. Mom is off seeing to it that someone else’s table is beautifully set, and someone else’s children have their hands properly washed.

Hong Kong’s well-educated middle class women have entered the work force in unprecedented numbers, and demand for someone else to do housework has soared. Approximately 3% of Hong Kong’s population is now foreign domestic workers. Nearly all of them are women. They serve on two-year contracts, and more than 50% are from the Philippines (125,850 were in Hong Kong as of November, 2008, according to immigration department figures. Increasing numbers are from Indonesia (122, 900).

If you go to Immigration on any day, you will see hundreds getting their official papers. Near any of the better schools in the morning, foreign women will be there accompanying their employers’ children to school – and carrying the books. You will meet them carrying heavy bags of groceries from the market. Or maybe you will see one leaving a garage carrying a bucket having just washed her employer’s sedan. Caregivers push the wheelchairs and help with bathing and changing the old as well as the young.

This work has its own pressures. It is hard to anticipate the expectations of people from another culture. It is even harder to please an old person who thinks he does not need a caregiver. Nonetheless,  though exploitation is rife, many of the maids are grateful to be in situations that allow them to send money home.

Recently a court in Hong Kong ruled that an employer was guilty of burning her maid with a hot iron. That employer will serve time in prison. Is that an extreme case? It may be unusual, but not unique.  How many cases of assault are never reported? What other forms of ‘discipline’ are used behind the closed doors of the private homes? Someone else’s home, with no third party present, can be an oppressive environment, more oppressive than a factory floor.

Weekdays Hong Kong’s business districts are busy with shoppers and business people But on Sundays domestic workers on their day off flood into the canyons between the tall buildings, using every imaginable space to rendezvous with hometown friends and picnic. They seem oblivious to the less-than-friendly comments of passers-by.

A surprisingly large number resist the oppressiveness of their situation through taking legal action or making political protests. Sometimes they let off steam by making jokes at the expense of the people who rule their lives six days a week.

Sunday is also a day for worship. Catholic parishes in Hong Kong that schedule mass in English tend to draw a standing-room-only crowd of Filipina women. The crowds are so great each Sunday at the Catholic Centre in Central Hong Kong that many are turned away because of fire safety regulations. How many parishes can boast of that problem? For some, attending mass and singing in the choir is a taste of home.  Home, after all, is where the heart is.

Fr John Burger is currently on the General Council of the Columban Fathers.