Filipina helper working in Brazil ate dog's food to keep from starving

 

A Filipina hired as a domestic worker in an upscale Sao Paulo neighborhood in Brazil shared with BBC News her experience of being overworked and starved to the point that she ate food meant for her employer's dog. 

Maria, not her real name, is a 40-year-old mother who sent almost all her wages to her mother and three daughters back in the Philippines, two of whom needed medicine to treat their cardiac disease.

Maria had a long list of tasks to perform daily and would often not have enough to eat. She thought about ending her life as she went on a second day without any food. 

Still, she persisted and, hours later, she found a meal for herself. She cooked the meat meant for the family's dog and took half for herself. 

"I didn't have [any other] choice to survive," she told Hugo Bachega of BBC.

Maria was a nanny to three school-aged boys and a baby. In addition to this, she was tasked to clean a house that the BBC report described as having a "large dining room, a living room and four bedrooms, each with its own bathroom." She also had to walk the dog.

The report detailed that Maria's employer, unsatisfied with her work, would make her redo them for hours. When she confronted her employer about the harsh treatment, the employer had "said disdainfully that she had never liked Maria."

Maria, after finding out that her employers lock her inside the apartment when they leave, made a successful attempt to escape early in the morning one day. She says she considers herself lucky. 

BBC noted that Maria's case is far from unique and that it occurs it different parts of the world, as millions of people from the Philippines work abroad.

Authorities in the Brazil are currently looking into the situation of 180 other foreign domestic workers, and some labor law violations have already been found in the first cases. — Margaret Claire Layug / AT, GMA News