How a Day of Cherry Picking and Sea Swimming Reminded Me That Joy Is Something I Deserve By Manilyn

There are days that do not ask anything of you except to show up and receive them. No duties, no schedules kept for someone else, no quiet watching of the clock. Just open air, good company, and the simple pleasure of being alive somewhere beautiful. My day at Felderland Farm with the Voice of Domestic Workers was one of those days, and it gave me something I did not fully realise I had been missing until I was standing in an orchard with cherries in my hand and laughter all around me.

As a domestic worker, most of my days are spent inside. Inside a home that is not mine, caring for a family that is not mine, pouring energy and attention and genuine love into a life that belongs to someone else. That work is real and it is meaningful and I do not diminish it. But there is something that happens to a person over time when their own needs are always placed last, when rest feels like a luxury rather than a right, when the world outside the front door becomes something you observe rather than something you inhabit. You begin to shrink, quietly and without noticing, into a smaller version of yourself.

Walking into Felderland Farm began to undo some of that shrinking immediately. The orchard stretched out around us, rows of cherry trees heavy with fruit, the air carrying that particular sweetness that only exists in places where things are growing freely and well. I reached up and picked a cherry straight from the branch and ate it then and there, and the taste of something fresh and unhurried and completely uncomplicated felt like a small miracle. We moved through the trees together, filling our containers, stealing cherries when we thought nobody was watching, and laughing when we realised everyone was doing exactly the same thing.

The laughter was constant throughout the day. The kind that builds naturally between people who have shared struggles and survived them together, who do not need to explain themselves to one another because the understanding is already there. That ease, that comfort of being completely known, is something that the Voice of Domestic Workers has given me in ways I could not have anticipated when I first became a member. I came looking for support and I found a family. And on that farm, surrounded by cherry trees and blue sky, that family felt more real and more precious than ever.

We took photographs the way people do when they want to hold onto something. Not posed and careful, but spontaneous and full of life, mid-laugh, mid-reach, mid-bite, the kind of photographs that actually look like the moment felt rather than a performance of it. I want to remember this, I kept thinking. I want to remember exactly how this feels.

This kind of day, of freedom and rest and genuine joy, is something every domestic worker deserves. And yet for so many, it remains out of reach not because they do not want it but because the conditions of their work make it impossible to fully claim. The right to change employer without restriction is connected to this in ways that matter deeply.

Because a worker who is trapped, who cannot leave a household that overworks them or denies them time off or controls their movements, cannot get to an orchard on a Saturday morning. Cannot swim in the sea on a summer afternoon. Cannot fully participate in the community that might otherwise sustain them. Freedom of movement begins with freedom at work.

After the cherry picking, we made our way to the beach, and the transition felt so natural it was as if the day had been designed by someone who understood exactly what we needed. The sound of the waves reached us before we could even see the water, and something in my body responded to it immediately, a loosening, a letting go, a deep exhale that had probably been waiting for weeks to happen. We changed and we swam and we laughed at the cold and we stayed in anyway because the joy of it was worth every shiver.

There was no rush. There were no expectations. Nobody needed anything from me that afternoon except my presence, and my presence was the one thing I was giving entirely and gladly. That feeling, of being present in my own life rather than always in service of someone else's, is one that the right to renew the Overseas Domestic Worker Visa makes possible in a broader sense. Because a worker living under the constant anxiety of an expiring visa cannot ever fully exhale. Cannot ever fully arrive in a moment of joy without part of their mind pulling them back toward fear. Renewal means being able to breathe. Renewal means being able to swim in the sea and feel nothing except the water and the happiness and the gratitude of being exactly where you are.

I thought about belonging as I floated on my back and looked up at the sky. About what it means to have found a community here, to have built friendships that hold, to have created memories on British soil that are woven into who I am now. The right to settlement would give that belonging an official name. It would say that the life I have been quietly and faithfully building here is recognised, that the years of work and contribution and community have counted for something permanent and secure. Settlement is not a reward for surviving. It is the acknowledgement that we were never just passing through.

And the right to British citizenship is the fullest version of that acknowledgement. It is this country saying to domestic workers, you have picked our fruit and cared for our families and swum in our sea and made your home among our communities and you belong here completely. Not partially, not temporarily, not conditionally. Completely. That is what citizenship means. And it is what every domestic worker who has given this country their years and their labour and their love deserves to receive in return.

The day ended the way the best days do, slowly and reluctantly, with nobody quite wanting to be the first to say it was time to go. We made our way home tired and salt-washed and full of something that is harder to name than cherries or seawater but just as real. Gratitude, perhaps. Or wholeness. The feeling of having spent a day entirely as yourself, in the company of people who see you clearly and love what they see.

I am grateful to the Voice of Domestic Workers for creating these moments. For understanding that domestic workers need more than advocacy and legal support, as vital as those things are. They need days that remind them who they are beyond their work. Days that fill them back up so they can keep going, keep fighting, keep believing that the future they are working toward is worth every difficult step of the journey.

A cherry picked straight from a tree. Cold waves on warm skin. Laughter that belongs to nobody but us. These are not small things. They are the very things that make a life worth living. And every domestic worker deserves a life worth living, fully, joyfully, and completely their own.

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