Every Step of the Way I Learned What It Means to Never Give Up By Rose

There are days that stay with you not because everything went perfectly, but because everything that went wrong ended up teaching you something you needed to know. My day at the Seven Sisters Cliffs with the Voice of Domestic Workers was exactly that kind of day. It was joyful and exhausting and surprising and deeply, profoundly meaningful. And by the time it ended, I understood something about myself and about this community that I will carry for the rest of my life.

The day began with the kind of energy that only happens when a group of people who truly love each other are finally given a reason to celebrate. On the bus, nobody was quiet. Some members had brought a karaoke machine, and the singing started almost immediately. Others were eating, passing snacks back and forth, making sure everyone had something. The generosity was instinctive and immediate, the way it always is among domestic workers who understand without needing to say it that looking after one another is simply what you do. The noise, the laughter, the music filling the bus as the English countryside rolled past the windows, it was the best kind of beginning.

When we arrived at the Seven Sisters, we gathered for a group photograph before anything else. Everyone dressed in their summer outfits, bright and beautiful against the landscape, faces full of anticipation. Then we began our journey along the cliffs, moving together toward whatever the day had waiting for us.

At the first cliff, we made the wise decision to stop and eat before continuing. The bags were heavy with food and it made sense to lighten them before the real climb began. But before anyone opened a single container, something lovely happened. Someone started singing happy birthday for Lea, one of our members, and the whole group joined in immediately, voices rising together out in the open air on top of a cliff in the south of England. It was spontaneous and warm and completely wonderful. Then the food came out and was shared freely, everyone offering what they had to whoever needed it, nobody eating alone, nobody going without. That is not a small thing. Among people who spend their working lives giving to others, choosing to give to each other in that moment was a quiet and powerful act of solidarity.

After we ate, we continued walking and the joy of the day deepened with every step. The views were extraordinary. I put music on as we walked and the energy lifted immediately. Some people were dancing as they hiked, tired legs moving anyway because the music made it impossible to stay still. Others found another way to play, pulling out a malong and recreating a childhood game from the Philippines, the same hills and laughter and running that belonged to their younger years, transplanted now onto British clifftops thousands of miles from home. Watching that, I felt something open up in my chest. Because joy is portable. It travels with you. And the happiness of a Filipino childhood can live just as fully on the Seven Sisters as it ever did on the hills back home.

We reached all seven cliffs. Seven. Every single one of them. And by the time we began making our way toward Eastbourne, our legs had already given everything they had. We expected the bus to be waiting at the car park. We expected the hardest part to be behind us. What we did not expect was to discover, after walking further than we thought we could, that the vehicle we could see in the distance was not our bus at all. And so we kept walking.

When we finally reached a house and asked for directions, the answer was the last one any of us wanted to hear. We needed to go back. Back to the car park, back to the river, back the way we had already come on legs that were screaming for rest. The disappointment was real and physical. Everyone was exhausted. Everyone was thirsty. The idea of retracing those steps felt almost cruel after everything the day had already asked of us. But there was no other choice. And so we went back.

On the way, four of us separated from the rest of the group, convinced we had found a quicker route. We had not. We found ourselves on the cliff, the path unclear, the right direction uncertain, the gap between us and the others growing wider. But we kept moving. Up the hill, even when going up felt impossible. Forward, even when forward was not yet clear. We never stopped. We never sat down and gave up, even though every part of me wanted to. We found the way because we refused not to.

That refusal is something I recognise in myself now in a way I did not fully see before that day. The whole hike felt like a map of my own journey as a domestic worker and as a woman fighting for rights that should never have needed fighting for. The right to change employer without restriction is the right to choose a different path when the one you are on becomes harmful. It is the right to say this route is wrong for me and to turn around without losing everything. No worker should be forced to keep walking a road that is hurting them simply because the system has left them no other option.

The exhaustion of going back, of having to retrace steps already taken, reminded me of what it feels like to fight for the right to renew the Overseas Domestic Worker Visa year after year, to keep making the same journey, to keep proving the same things, to keep asking for what should already be guaranteed. The tiredness is real. But domestic workers keep going anyway, because the alternative is standing still, and standing still has never been an option.

When we finally found the right path and made our way toward Eastbourne, something in me had settled into a deeper kind of determination. Because I thought about the right to settlement and what it truly means. It means arriving. It means that after all the walking, all the wrong turns, all the hills climbed on aching legs, you finally reach somewhere that is yours. Somewhere permanent. Somewhere that recognises every step it took to get there and says, you are home now, and you can stay.

And I thought about British citizenship, about what it would mean to belong to this country fully and officially after everything so many domestic workers have given to it. We have climbed its cliffs and crossed its rivers and gotten lost on its paths and found our way back again. We have sung happy birthday on its clifftops and danced to music in its open air and shared our food with one another under its summer sky. If that is not belonging, I do not know what is. Citizenship would simply make it official. It would put into law what is already true in every other sense.

We made it to Eastbourne. All of us. Nobody was left behind. The group that arrived first waited for those of us still finding our way, and when we finally came together at the meeting point, the relief and the happiness and the love between us was something I will not find the words to fully describe. We had done it. Not gracefully, not without struggle, not without getting lost and going back and climbing hills we had already climbed. But we had done it together.

This hike taught me what I already knew in my heart but needed to feel in my body. That I am a resilient woman. That I do not give up. That when the path disappears I find another one, and when my legs are too tired to carry me I find the strength anyway, and when my fellow VODW members need someone to keep pushing forward I will be that person. Because that is what this community is. It is people who refuse to stop walking until every single one of them has made it safely home. We will keep walking. All the way to the rights we deserve. All the way to the future we are building together. And we will arrive. Of that I have no doubt at all.

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