Eugenia Baja’s family began to receive worrisome text messages towards the end of 2007. First, the 25-year-old Filipina domestic worker in Riyadh said she could not send money for Christmas. Then in January 2008, Eugenia pleaded to her brother, “Please help me. Please find me.”
Eugenia texted that she felt cold all the time. Hungry. She did not know what was being done to her. She felt like she was losing her mind.
Then in February came the news that Eugenia had died in a Saudi Arabia hospital of an unspecified illness. The Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs later changed the story, saying Eugenia committed suicide by banging her head against the bathroom tiles in her employer’s bathroom. But Riyadh autopsy documents listed her cause of death as an ulcer, and noted that her body showed signs of starvation.
Eugenia was one of the 3,000 Filipinos who leave the country every day to work overseas. An estimated 75 percent of them are female, making Filipinas the country’s largest export. People like Eugenia are also the country’s most lucrative export, generating remittances of over US$15 billion in 2007.
This state-sanctioned labor migration is therefore a key component of the country’s economic development program. Despite the fact that too many women are coming home in caskets.
Tanglad 