The long queues at the airport are once more shortened by conversations with strangers. While the day's headline was capped by Grace Poe's bid for the presidency and the re-emergence of citizenship issues, I met a woman for whom nation has not meant as much as providing food on the table miles and miles away.
Meet Minda, a 40 year-old domestic worker from Kuwait. While I kept myself busy recharging my phone and surfing the internet while falling in line before the check-in counter, I was disrupted by an assertive voice that asked, "magkano bili mo sa ticket mo" (how much did you pay for your ticket). As I was flying solo, I did not bother to turn and pick out a face behind the voice, until she nudged me. Surprised, it took me sometime to respond.
"Ang mahal ng ticket ko. Halos isang buwang suweldo" (My ticket is expensive. It is worth a one-month salary)." Minda earned a meager PHP13000 a month while working for an Egyptian family. It may sound high for someone from Cotabato, but not when you are supporting oneself in a foreign land and shouldering the expenses of so many others, from basic meals to utility bills, from education to rentals.
Not too long later, she gave hints on how life has been, referring to the never-ending suffering, "hirap" as a low-paid domestic helper in a conservative household. At that moment, she was like a child who was telling her parents how her playmates wronged her and at once a grown woman whose certainty of not returning to Kuwait was forged by stone and fire.
"Nakumpleto mo naman eh" (You completed it), I remarked about her finishing her two-year contract in the end, despite the odds. Minda seemed to have felt the sense of achievement. But still not quite. For she knew that there was hollowness over a her self-proclaimed mantra, "tapos na ang pagtitiis" (the suffering is over).
Two years of slaving, she was coming back to a nation, unbeknownst to her as a nation. It is merely a place where much of her journeys began.
