A few hours ago, my brother Orville made an inquiry through his Facebook account on whether or not the world would be a better place if half of the important posts in government and the corporate world were to be run by women while half of the households were to be run by men. (Click here to view the thread.) I did not answer his query; rather I gave him another hypothetical scenario by pointing out that Filipina maids are all over the world running the households of commoners and the rich, the powerful and the famous. What would happen if ever ALL the Filipina maids all over the world decided and actually carried out a simultaneous one- or two-day strike?
I did not mean that query as a pun to the Filipina maids. I am in no position to do so because I am only but a very humble person with no university diploma or even a centavo of bank savings. In fact, I am one of the many supporters and sympathizers to the plight of and tolls being extracted on the millions of Philippine citizens who are forced to leave the country in search for greener pastures.
Anyway, I think that somewhere along the course of the discussion, I have committed something wrong. Hence the Almighty taught me a lesson by causing a Filipino friend of mine to ask me to do her laundry! I am not her maid, for crying out out, yet the way she asked me to do that household chore for her was quite demeaning to me. "So what do you intend to do today? Ah, you can do my laundry though. It would be a great honor for me [for you to wash my clothes]." I was very surprised to receive from her such a command sugar-coated as a request. It was at around 5am just today; I was about to go to sleep while she just woke up and was preparing to leave for work. Obviously, those statements were not to be mistaken for a joke for that was no time for one!
In my horrified state, I simply told her that I am not her maid but I can definitely try to help her in re-stacking her laundromat-cleaned laundry. Then the cruel joke of the situation hit me: I have used the maids as a base for a hypothetical scenario; now it seems that I am being taken or viewed by my own friend as her personal assistant slash maid-in-waiting.
Ahh, karma really strikes fast.
