Mick Hartley

The life and death of a Filipino domestic servant in Saudi Arabia:

Aisis International Manpower Agency, Manila-based recruitment agency sent Baja to Saudi Arabia to work as “patient server” on May 6, 2007. But she was asked to sign another contract as a domestic helper. “She had no choice but to sign it because she was already in a foreign land,” her family said.

Twenty-five year old Baja is married and has two children, Migrante media coordinator Jonathan Panlilio said.

Six months later, Baja called her family in Bohol and told them she has not received yet any salary from her Arab employer. She was tired, distressed and helpless, her family said.

The last communication she had had with her family was when she texted them that she wanted to go back home last January 2008. Two months later, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) informed Baja’s family that the OFW died in a hospital on Feb. 24, 2008 due to an unspecified sickness.

DFA sent them a second formal letter informing the family that Baja died of suicide when she continuously banged her head on the bathroom tiles in her Arab employer’s home.

Clearly a woman of remarkable determination, this Baja: repeatedly smashing her head into the bathroom tiles, again and again, resulting in "severe hemorrhage and skull fracture". Three months later, her body was sent back to relatives in Manila.

More here:

…according to her employer, Eugenia killed herself after they refused to give her permission to go on vacation. The employer, the statement added, also told DFA that Baja locked herself inside her room for three days. She was found dead inside the toilet near broken tiles.

The group said however that according to records of actions taken by the Philippine Overseas Labor Office (POLO), Baja’s employer "alleged that she got sick, was brought to the hospital and later died."

The family are demanding an enquiry.