Maids in the Philippines & Evil Drivers

Our kababayans living abroad envy those of us living here in our country because we live like royalty. We are spoiled. In the Philippines, one doesn’t have to be rich to enjoy having household maids at disposal.
“Penge ngang tubig, ‘day nasan yung damit ko? Plantasahin mo ito kasi isusuot ko mamaya. Paliguan mo si Stitch, pumunta ka sa grocery”.

Middle class families and the working class have at least one household maid or “katulong”. There are those who employ part-time labandera and plantsadora who come once a week, washing clothes in the morning, ironing in the afternoon, and mag-wawalis-walis na rin.

We also have drivers. The more affluent ones employ full time driver or drivers. Others hire drivers on need-basis. I know of one driver who drives for seven families. He goes to a different house everyday. He drives from morning to about midnight because what the families do is to schedule all their meetings/appointments/errands in one day, when they have the driver para sulit na sulit.

I grew up mingling with many household helpers in our house in Binangonan. While most families did not have maids during those days, having just one katulong was already a status symbol. My parents did not have just one. We had many because we have a general merchandise store with my mom’s gift shop on one side, ice-candy factory and my mom rented-out wedding gowns. My father also had a few passenger jeepneys that’s why there were drivers that go in and out of our house. My parents were very enterprising and hard-working. They ventured into several micro enterprises.

Unlike now where our maids and drivers have their own quarters, toilets and dining areas, our house in Binangonan had one dining table and one toilet we all shared with the maids and drivers. My parents let them dine with us.
because they thought not to was tantamount to being “matapobre”.

The comforts of having extra hands to help us with household work has its own equivalent misgivings and misfortunes.

Many are lucky to have loyal, respectful, dependable and efficient domestic helpers and drivers. On the other hand, there are also many who have suffered misfortunes, problems and tragedy in the hands of those they employed.

I can write a thousand pages from my own experiences with maids. To share a few, my decors and household fixtures are broken, we lost clothes and personal things including spoons, forks, etc.

Only one hand

Broken bronze ormolu cabinet trims

An angel lost both wings

I lost my jewelry box containing several watches, the jewelries my parents (+) have given to me since I was a baby, my husband’s gold necklace he inherited from his father (+), the gold ring Edmund’s lola (+) gave me when I visited her in HK, all of Julienne’s baby jewelries gifted to her by my parents including the jade bracelet. Our wedding ring with diamonds, and lots of gold and diamond jewelries including loose diamond stones from my mother. These are very valuable considering the current prices of diamond and gold, but the painful thing is that these pieces have stories and memories that were also stolen from us.

Beware of yayas too. My mom told me she caught my yaya eating my food, then telling her that I ate fast.
One of Julienne’s yaya also did that. I came home at 8 pm with a big ube cake, placed it in the ref, the following morning at 8 am, only 1/4 of the cake was left. The yaya said my son ate it. My son was two years old that time. I have seen yaya’s hitting and tagging their wards.

I met a parent at a Xavier gathering, she told me she caught the yaya of her grade 3 son kissing him lips to lips. One mom said she caught the yaya molesting her two year old baby boy. She’s now in jail.
There are so many horror stories regarding yayas. SO BEWARE.

We’ve also had mabait na drivers like Kuya Dong (+). Even when I was already married and my parents gone, he sent Edmund and I ginataang hipon kasi he knew favorite ko yun.

Many drivers are evil too. It doesn’t matter if they have been working for you for many years.
ALWAYS EXERCISE CAUTION. BE OBSERVANT. BE VIGILANT.

A family in San Lorenzo Village, Makati, had a driver for 20 years who raped and killed their daughter who looked up to him like her own father. He stacked her body under the bed.

A driver of a Chinese couple molested their daughter practically every single day inside their own house, without them knowing it. Only when the girl’s trauma became obvious that they found out. She has tried to commit suicide and have been undergoing continuous psychiatric help to get her through life. The driver is on the loose because he had long been gone before they discovered his evil deeds. May curse be with him.

I was also a victim of one of our drivers from Binangonan when I was in grade one.
He tried to molest me and exhibited his birdie to me. Those experiences have left a big scar in my emotional and psychological state. Until now, I still feel outraged. Because I was very pretty when I was little, many men from Binangonan tried to molest me. My parents didn’t know. Even when I was already in college, since our bathroom was butas-butas, it wasn’t unusual catching men trying to peep while I was inside the bathroom.

The trauma of this experiences kept coming back to me even when I was already in college and up until I was married with a daughter. Although I was lucky I wasn’t raped, I still felt oppressed, offended, violated. I have imagined stabbing them, cutting their organs and hanging them upside down. The world would be safer without this evil men lurking in the dark ready to victimize another hapless little girl. To hell with them. Hell!

Believe me, I exercised a lot of self control in not actually doing what I wanted to do. I just held on to my belief that nature has a way of correcting itself. I just secretly relied on dear God, to find and seek justice for me. Those men would die poor and miserable. Justice will find them, if not on earth and in this life, then to the next.

One time I was vacationing in Paris by myself, it was on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, sunny but cool air, I sat at the Trocadero gardens overlooking the Eiffel Tower, I laid down on the soft clean grass and glanced at the Eiffel Tower and the clear blue sky. I took a heavy sigh and inhaled the cool Parisian breeze, It felt so good. I was happy. I thanked God for giving me such wonderful moment. Then suddenly my bad childhood memories flashed before me, my happiness was instantly replaced with sadness. With teary eyes, I looked around me and saw such beautiful flowers, the fountains that framed the Tour Eiffel, my favorite color blue above me. This is God, this is his blessings, this moment is his gift to me, He’s embracing me with love, this is God’s way of apologizing to me, this is his way of saying sorry that bad things happened to this little girl. Then I uttered “God, sige quits na tayo”.