A Nation of Servants

There is this brouhaha over a HK columnists tagging the Philippines as a "Nation of Servants" Not that it has malicious intent but to look at it realistically, this is no where far from the truth.

I ran a maid agency and before I would feel a bit embarrased hearing my Singaporean friends talking about their Pilipino maids. But since I had been associating with maids for the last 5 years I got to know more about these group of our kababayans who toil every day and night just to send money to their children and relatives in the Philippines.

There is no reason for us being ashamed about having our female kababayans going to work overseas as domestic helpers. They are doing decent jobs. Increasingly in SIngapore some of our maids are now upgrading themselves to look for jobs in the service industry ,in restaurants and in hospitals.

Arent nurses, hotel personnel,and even doctors also considered servants? As long as you work under a company or an employer you are considered a "servant".One can only escape from this label if one works for himself or runs his own company.

A lot of Pilipino maids in SIngapore have dreams of going somewhere else and doing other jobs. Their hard earned money send numerous relatives to school and helps feed our economy back home.

Theres no use pinpointing the blame to our government for why we have to be tagged as such. As long as we are doing legal and honest work I dont see any reason for being ashamed for being tagged as a "Servant".