Month: January 2006

Finally, my favourite game has arrived via air mail….1997 and still going strong..

Forget Harry Pothead…Baik Punya Cilok, or other movies that you see. If it isn’t an action movie, then I wouldn’t normally watch..except for some excellent ones such as Phenomenon, Michael, and Notting Hill.

Last night, I watched “Anak”, a Filipino movie about a foreign domestic helper who returned to Manila from Hong Kong, to a family that hardly knows her.

In reality, this is what is happening. These “maids” as we generally term them, leave their hometown, husband, sons and daughters, to find income they cannot normally find at their place of origin, even with the correct qualifications; even if they have to weather the abusive behaviour of some employers.

When I lived in USJ, my neighbour changed 3 maids in the span of 5 months. Every night as I sit facing my PC monitor, I would hear the maid scrubbing clothes before putting them into a washing machine, then hang the clothes to dry at around 2am. By 4.30am, she was up washing the three cars they own.

In another example, a maid was cruelly and physically abused by the employer’s wife until one day, the maid couldn’t bear it any longer, stabbed the employer’s wife to death.

We always forget that these “maids” are…human beings too…with physical limitations, in some cases, probably slower processing capacity than most of the employers. It is up to the employer to condition the maids into the routine and standards that we want them to have. We cannot expect them to know what we want them to be within a few hours of her stepping into the house. Even I still have trouble pressing the correct light switch at home after 2 years living there.

I do not dispute the fact that there are irresponsible maids too. As I said, they are human beings too. I’ve had one maid who spat into my stepson’s bottle (I gathered that in some Indonesian culture they do that so the child would grow up to listen to the person whose spit he/she drinks). I kicked that one back without hesitation. Another caused my wife and I to shop for food every month, and rack up a minimum of RM800 in electricity bill every month. Apparently she was a big eater, and would sleep in my children’s bedroom with the air-conditioning on from morning till evening when we’d come home.

But “Anak” gives a general idea about how families are broken up when these women have to migrate in order to give their children (and in many cases, husband) a better life, only to find that at the end of the rainbow is just another shattered dream.

If you have the time to watch the DVD, go buy it.