The Satwa Diaries with Dubai’s Filipino Domestic Workers

I was seven years old when Mary was welcomed into my family. Mary was there to help. I remember her sincere kindness and loyalty to a family that wasn’t her own. She cleaned, she fed, she bathed, she did it all. Mary was the fifth member of our family. She stayed with us for a total of three years, and vivid memory of her still remains.

Growing up in Dubai, I have never come across a family that did not have a housemaid, and every single one of them has left their family and home country to a family of strangers to provide for them and adhere to their every need. She is given duties that are often chosen to be neglected by families that either doesn’t have enough time to fend for their households, or simply to maintain an upscale lifestyle that comes with living in a city deemed as a luxurious paradise.

Fifteen years later and my family still lives in Dubai with Shiela Mae Fernandez. Shiela entered our humble abode in 2014, I was 15 years old, and I wanted nothing more than to understand who this stranger was living in my house. I tried to understand why she chose to leave her family for us, she picked us over her own family. Sheila has become somebody who is extremely dear to my heart and life; she is a sister to me and my brother and a daughter to my mother and father. 

In a city known for its hyperbolized luxurious elements, everything is given to you on a silver plate without even lifting a finger. A city that is deemed as paradise but lacks so much warmth and life. It lacks life above all, a dessert that was birthed to become one of the world’s leading cities, and that would have never happened without the help of the endless streams of labourers brought from abroad, specifically India, Pakistan and the Philippines. Some may call it a discrete form of slavery, but they are brought to Dubai under the Kafala system.

The Kafala system was created to organize migrant workers specifically within domestic services and construction. How it works is an Emirati, a resident of the United Arab Emirates, or an institution that sponsors workers attempting to enter the country. The controversial system first emerged during the 1950s when the GCC countries began hiring migrant workers at a highly rapid pace in order to accelerate the development of their newly birthed cities.

The Kafala system gives employers a large amount of power over the workers. Migrant workers need to sign a no-objection letter, meaning they are tied to their sponsor by any means. Some “kafeels” (Emirati sponsors) withhold their worker’s passport and any other travel documents. Meaning they cannot quit their jobs, change jobs, and leave the country. Essentially, Dubai is what it is today due to this elaborate and intricate system that induces large amounts of labour on individuals in need of money. 

The Filipino community is the third-largest expatriate community, and their presence is imminent across five different sectors: architecture, engineering/construction, tourism and hospitality, customer service, health and medical fields, and domestic household services. Over 10 million Filipinos are working globally, and around 750,000 of them are in the UAE, making it the second leading GCC destination for them after Saudi Arabia.

The Filipinos that choose to leave their country and work abroad to provide for their families are known as the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW), and there are 2 million of them in the Middle East. And household workers make up 10% of Filipino migrant workers. I went on a weekend excursion to Satwa, where every Filipino housemaid goes on her day off. I spent the day with Sheila and five of her friends to understand and listen, and all I can say is I have never witnessed such resilience from a group of individuals. And the Satwa diaries begin.

Every Friday, Sheila wakes up at 6 am, gets ready and heads to Satwa, where she meets up with a group of her friends. I had told her to take me with her one day because I was always curious to know where she went and how she spends her weekends. Because to my knowledge everyone in Dubai spent their weekends at either an extremely overpriced beach club that is too hot to handle so everyone settles for the extremely cooled pool infested with god knows what, or at one of Dubai’s most hyped restaurant of the week that is also extremely overpriced and not even that good, or if you’re a tourist you’ll go to downtown and stare at the tallest building in the world whilst a bunch of fountains dance around it to an extremely overplayed song.

My curiosity ate me up, and I was set on finding out where every migrant worker heads to on their weekend. And so Sheila took me with her to Satwa; for those who don’t know anything about Dubai, Satwa is the side of Dubai that you will never see or hear of because they don’t want you to see it. Because Satwa is the only place in Dubai that truly exudes a sense of life, culture, and a soul. Satwa is where every Filipino worker resides, it’s their home away from home, from food, fashion, alcohol, cigarettes, everything in Satwa is meant to ease the fact that they are working for another family to provide for their own.

Sheila took me to Jollibee, a Filipino fast-food chain restaurant known for their taste-quenching fried chicken. As I walked into Jollibee I was met with many stares because I was the only non-Filipino. I’m an Egyptian female walking into Jollibee with Sheila, curious to enter the world of Jollibee, a side of Dubai I had never seen. Shortly after, I was met with an extremely warm hug from AnneLin, one of Sheila’s best friends, telling me that she had been practicing her English just for today. I had previously told Shiela to tell her friends that I was interested in knowing their story. We ordered a twelve-piece bucket of fried chicken with a side of fries, gravy, and Filipino spaghetti, so it began.

As we sat down, ready to indulge in the crispiest fried chicken I had ever had, I was introduced to Rose, Terry, Anne, Yasmine, a.k.a Scarlet, and AnneLin. Each and every single one of them slowly started to tell me their story one by one. “I wanted to be a police officer” was the first thing that Sheila told me, “But my family didn’t have enough money and I wanted to be independent and earn my own money so I moved to Singapore to become a housemaid when I was only 19”, she adds.

Sheila grew up in a small village with her grandparents, her parents were separated, and her mom had left early on in her life to go work with a family in Saudi Arabia. After moving to Singapore, she continued to work with different families from Lebanon and now in Dubai. She built her family a house in the Philippines with the money she made, bought three lots of land, and supported her brother to complete his college degree.

“I always put my family first; once I feel like they are secure and settled and they can maintain a proper living with the money I provided, it’s time for me to do something else and settle my own life,” says Sheila. When asked why she chose to go live and provide for another family, Sheila provided me with the most selfless answer, “As long as people need my help, I will help as much as I can.” 

As we went around the table, stories were shared. Stories that spoke of such resilience and strength matched with a quirky gossip element targeted at the inevitable infidelity of their husbands. Terry, a 47-year-old housemaid who moved to Dubai in 2012 to support her two kids, “In the Philippines, we aren’t fortunate in life, so I decided to move to Dubai to find a job”. She now works with an Italian family. Yet, she is filled with sentiments of a longing to be back home with her kids.

“It’s tough being away from your family and kids; every Filipino here has problems regarding their family back home. So we need to fight, fight and fight for the future of our kids. You have to be strong and patient. You always need to think about what’s best for your kids. See, you’re looking at us now, and we’re all smiling and laughing but on the inside, we are in deep pain, all of us it’s so difficult for us to see a future for our kids with our lives back home, so we are here to make sure that they have one”.  

When asked the question why they chose to move to Dubai to become housemaids and provide a family that isn’t their own, 47 year old Rose explains “Because it is the easiest work for us to find here, and the salaries are higher than any other jobs available for us here. For example, if you work in a mall, you would have to pay for rent, transportation, and many other expenses. Dubai is not a cheap place to live in. There are many benefits of working as a housemaid; you are provided with everything from food, accommodation, wifi and a good salary that I can send back home. In other words, the benefits are much better and all the money goes to our families back home, not on other useless expenses, you receive your salary in full. It’s freer, we get freedom.”

Rose has four kids and says this is the only job that would send them all to school, as she is adamant that they receive a complete and full education. “I am a countrywoman. I grew up in a village where we didn’t have any electricity, water. We had nothing. We used to go to the river to wash our clothes and would wait for it to rain so the water tank could fill up for our water supply. That was our supply for food, drinking, for everything. If there was a drought we would go to the river to get some water to survive”. She adds: “We would walk two hours from our village to go to school. It was hard, we worked day and night on the farm, and we always dreamed of getting out of there, and we did. I am now in Dubai, one of my sisters is in Hong Kong, and the other is Kuwait”.

Although Rose spoke of freedom, when she first came to Dubai, her first employers believed in the opposite and freedom. So she suffered for two years while living with a Jordanian family that would not let her leave the house, even if it was just to take the garbage out, she was locked in the house not allowed to go anywhere.

“Life is not easy for most of us. On top of all that every single one of us had to deal with our husbands cheating on us. My husband cheated on me and we have now been separated for fifteen years. When I found out my father died, I called my husband to see what’s going on and he accidentally left me a message that was meant for his girlfriend. I confronted him, and he told me the truth. Fuck him; he cheated twice. When I went back home, I slapped him four times”. As Rose spoke of her husband’s infidelity, this sparked reactions from the rest; Terry passionately adds that when she found out her husband cheated on her, “When I found out I chased him with a knife”. 

We were halfway through the bucket at this point, and the stories are slowly coming to an end. Yasmine, also referred to as Scarlet, was hesitant to speak the whole day; however, after some courage from the crunchy Jollibee chicken, she started telling me why she came to Dubai and why her reason differs from everyone else. She came to Dubai to escape a marriage that was going to be the end of her, “I got married in 2006, and I have two kids. I didn’t want to get married, but I had to because I was pregnant at the time. My husband is not good; he’s a sadist. He would beat me up for his pleasure, without any reason at all he would punch me, and beat me to death”. Scarlet pulled up her shirt to show me a cigarette burn mark that he left on her body. “I would be left with bruises everywhere, that’s why I decided to go abroad, to get away from him because he would beat me every day”.

Scarlet has two kids that still live with him in the Philippines. “Even when I came here, he still continues to torture me emotionally and mentally. Every day he sends me messages threatening to kill my kids. He’s always asking for money, and if I don’t send me, he’ll continue to threaten me with my kids. He blackmails me with my kids”. Scarlet built a house for her family, her husband included thinking that the house would instill a sense of responsibility in him and things would change, she believed that the fortunes she has been sending home will make it better, but “it’s useless, he’s an extremely horrible person and husband’. “You see, this is the culture of us Filipinos, even if you are tortured and battered, for the sake of our kids, well do absolutely anything.” 

Each and every single one of these women sacrificed their own lives, putting their needs aside to keep their families safe and secure. They move to a foreign country to live with foreign people who treat them like the other to make sure their families can survive. By the end of the day, after tears have been shed, hugs have been given out, and stories have been shared, Sheila tells me, “You see Zanzoon (my nickname) we are all laughing but in the back of our minds we have so many problems, but we laugh and we will continue to laugh. We are together. Every Friday, we meet up, get together, change our attitudes, recharge, and then go back to work. Life must go on. We have six days of daru daru (hard work) and on the seventh day, we let out all our stress, so we have the strength to daru daru always.” 

By the end of the day, they left me with the word laban, which means strength in Filipino. When describing the Filipino community in Dubai, laban is an understatement because no matter what, you will always be met with a smile and a warm hug, utmost warmth.