When she visited the palace at his request, Philippines President Fidel Ramos squeezed Sarah Balabagan tightly to him as if to say, “At last, we saved one.”
Eight days later, the 17-year-old, who a year ago had been sentenced to death by an Arab court for killing the man who raped her, knelt beside the white coffin of Elisa Salem, another Filipino also recently returned from working abroad as a maid.
Jordanian authorities insisted Salem committed suicide July 27, four months after she arrived in Jordan. But photos taped to the inside of her casket of her on the autopsy table reveal bruises and various odd marks. Philippine press reports give the cause of death as hemorrhage due to deterioration of the spleen. The family suspects her employer was fatally abusive.
Up to the killing of her attacker, Balabagan’s ordeal was a typical Filipino tribulation: an impoverished family life, a steely desire to ease her family’s suffering, illegal recruitment as a maid half-way around the world, the long hours of housework for less money than promised, little food, no time off, occasional physical abuse and in general, compassionless employers. In her few letters home, so as not to worry her family, she just wrote that it was difficult.
Balabagan worked only 51 days as a domestic helper in the United Arab Emirates. Unlike the thousands of Filipina women abroad who are said to suffer harassment in silence, when her boss raped her at knifepoint, the then 15-year-old fought back, stabbing the widower 34 times.
First sentenced to seven years in jail for the man’s murder, she appealed and was sentenced to death. That decree was lessened ultimately through the delicate jockeying of Ramos, several European and Asian leaders and diplomats and the strong urging of the UAE President Sheikh Zaid bin Sultan al-Nahayan to the victim’s family to forgive Balabagan. She was sentenced to one year in jail, 100 lashes and to pay $41,000 diya, or blood money.
She returned on Aug. 1 as a symbol of the plight of the 4.2 million Filipino overseas contract workers, more than half of whom are female.
“I went with the intention of trying to make a difference for my family, but it turned out opposite. I was a burden,” Balabagan explained the day after returning to Manila. She was released for good behavior upon serving three-quarters of her term in the Al Ain Central Jail near Abu Dhabi.
In her first days home, Balabagan met with the secretary of justice, two politicians, the businessman who contributed the blood money, Ramos, a dentist (Ramos had suggested that she get her teeth fixed) and an endless string of journalists, most of whom wanted to know if she had any regrets. None, she kept asserting. “I just defended myself,” she said.
When she stated she intended to finish high school then go on to study law to help other poor people, a local senator offered her a full scholarship to law school.
Press stories claim Balabagan has received four marriage proposals, and that two French writers have offered to write her life story. Most likely there will be a local movie version of her story released soon. The elements are just right, as Boy Tutay, a spokesman with the Philippine Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, described. “She was just an ordinary person trying to fulfill her dreams. She’s a symbol for those who really try to aspire and try to stand their ground despite their difficulties.”
There is a grace in Balabagan’s smile that’s more than just her new teeth. She said she’ll take a few weeks to relax in her home province then return to Manila and look for a house to rent and someone to tutor her before she resumes her high school studies next fall. She said she’s committed to studying law. “This is my second life,” she added.
Balabagan had left her Muslim community of Sultan Kudarat in Maguindanao, a poor province in the southernmost island of the Philippines, after falsifying documents to show she was 28 years old so she could get a visa and work contract. She said she didn’t leave home because of abuse, which crisis counselors say has become part of the reason why many women choose to work abroad.
Her father, Karim Balabagan, has been criticized for allowing her, as a minor, to leave the country to become the breadwinner for the family. He said he wasn’t home when she left.
Balabagan’s father said he earned about $5 a day at a plywood factory, not enough for the five of seven children still in school. Her family lived with an older brother.
Balabagan insisted she knew what she was doing by going so far away.
“I was in control of myself. I wanted my parents to have their own house and lot and to make my mother’s life easier,” she said.
Balabagan said she arrived in Abu Dhabi on the evening of May 29, 1994, with hardly any money. The next morning she was taken to a house in an undistinguished middle-class area of the city where she would work for Almas Mohammed Abdullah al-Baloushi, his four sons, one daughter-in-law and two grandchildren for about $150 a month, less than her original contract had guaranteed.
She described an arduous routine. Rising at 5:30 in the morning, she was to cook, clean and launder for the family, which kept her busy until after 1 or 2 in the morning. She was allowed to eat whatever remained from the family’s meal.
“Often there wasn’t enough or not what I would eat. Usually I drank water,” she said. At first she could eat with a neighboring Filipina maid, but after a few weeks, the family ordered her not to leave the house, she said.
Balabagan admitted friends had warned her to be wary of her boss because rapes are common. She thought she could handle it, she said. When Philippine Embassy officials visited her upon learning of her arrest, she confided to them that a few weeks before the rape-killing, she had complained to the agency that arranged her employment about her employer’s frequent sexual advances, like mashing her breasts and touching her private parts. (Balabagan said al-Baloushi was 58; one of his children said he was 85, and published reports have put his age at 70.) She claimed she had been offered money and gold in exchange for her virginity. A representative of the agency told her to stay put and be patient, according to documents the embassy sent to the Foreign Ministry in Manila.
It wasn’t the only complaint she made. Once after haranguing about the conditions to the agency representative, she said, her boss pulled her hair and pounded her back and shouted Arabic words she didn’t understand because she was only beginning to study the language.
Balabagan refused to describe what happened the night of the killing except to say “I was driven by anger.”
But of her actions, she said, “In my mind it wasn’t excessive.” Most of the 34 wounds on the victim were described as superficial.
She also denied she was raped. “It was the doctor who forced me to say I was raped,” she claimed, tensing up while a brother sat nearby. According to reports from the Philippine Embassy in Abu Dhabi, a doctor who examined Balabagan after her arrest noted she had been raped. The reports also mentioned there was a small wound on her head and a grip mark left on her neck where the man had tried to strangle her.
While jailed, Balabagan received letters and money from around the world that boosted her strength, she said. In France, a Save Sarah Balabagan Movement collected about $46,000. The Philippine government sent her parents three times to visit her. After the first visit, her father said while anxiously waiting for the reunion with his freed daughter, “It was very painful for me. I rather that it be me in jail instead of her.”
Arrested when her sponsor abandoned her at the airport, Florence Dela Cruz spent a month with Balabagan in prison until she was released along with two other Filipinas the day before Balabagan was freed. Dela Cruz said the prison was a clean place but so hot the concrete floor burned their bare feet. Never allowed outside, they had windows revealing only the massive desert.
Meals were sparse, she said. They had bread and tea for breakfast and dinner and camel meat and a dish of unknown ingredients for lunch. Dela Cruz said to distract their minds, the Filipina girls sang together, played games and acted out dramas. Dela Cruz admired Balabagan for her “guts.”
“Always she trusts in God — that’s her weapon. She told us, `Nothing is impossible. Don’t cry. Just pray to God. Don’t lose your hope. Everybody has hope.’ “
