03.12.09 kulturnatib

Picture imperfect

As soon as I saw the picture -- half a page of one page and a quarter of the next page -- of a middle aged woman looking away from the camera into space that must be as wide as hope and deep as despair, I knew I was looking at a Pinay.

It is a single picture. But there is a one inch space – gutter margin on two separate but adjacent pages that are not contiguous – that slices it in two unequal halves.

This margin is not necessary. The picture could have been bled up to the folding line of both pages maintaining pictorial integrity.

But pictorial integrity is hardly what this picture and the story it tells is about.

The bigger half is taken up by the torso of Julia Evangelista. The smaller half, immediately behind and to her left that the tight focal point of the camera already blurs a bit, shows snapshots of her life pinned up on a board. She is not in any of them, but she is all over them, in her children – during graduation – , her family and friends and, perhaps, a grandchild or two.

In the presentation of this picture an inch separates both halves. In truth, both are several thousand kilometers apart betrayed only by Julia's far-away look that fixes a deeper truth of necessary separation made more heart rending by unnecessary cruelty especially in the hands of people so educated.

Hell is how the accompanying article in the Montreal-published French newspaper, La Presse, calls it.

With my somewhat shaky command of French, this is what I was able to piece together of Julia's story. She arrived in Montreal in 1996 on a tourist visa. She found live-in domestic work with a Kuwaiti couple, both medical doctors, who then keeps her passport and for the next ten years keeps her in servitude working daily, without breaks or holidays, from 6am till 11pm. She was not allowed the regular wherewithals of a normal life, access to the city's shopping centers, cinemas, banks, transportation system, etc.

Still with her measly 280Can$ monthly salary she was able to send her four children, who she has not seen in more than a decade, through university.

Had it not been for an almost one-way trip to heaven facilitated by a cerebral stroke in 2006 hell would have been forever for her. Actually hell lasted a bit longer. When she was literally felled by the stroke, sending her tumbling down the stairs, she had to wait for four hours before she was taken to the hospital, in favor of the children being taken to the day-care center.

The stroke half-paralyzed her but fully freed her. Her story was out. Her employers were prosecuted. They plead guilty. They were made to pay 4,000Can$ to an organization that defended immigrants rights. They also had to organize information sessions especially among their compatriots on the importance of respecting the laws of Canada.

There is no mention in the article of Julia being paid anything.

But it must have been payment enough for her to be freed from virtual slavery conditions, to reclaim a normal life, to find work on a regular job, after recuperating from her stroke and her ordeal.

It was a stroke of luck that many, mostly Pinays in similar situations, are banking on. Here, where Pinays make up the majority of domestic helpers and caregivers, and in the Philippines, where many are all too willing to risk falling into dire straits brought on by exploitation and deprivation.