How Finding the Voice of Domestic Workers Gave Me Something I Had Almost Stopped Looking For By Rowena
There are moments in life when you are lost without fully admitting it to yourself. When you are moving through your days, doing what needs to be done, surviving in the quiet and determined way that people do when they have no other choice, but carrying underneath it all a weight that has no name yet because you have not found the words or the place or the people that would help you name it. I was in that place when I found the Voice of Domestic Workers. And what I found there changed everything.
It was the Philippines Embassy that introduced me to this community, and I will be grateful for that introduction for the rest of my life. I did not know what to expect when I first came. I did not know who I would meet or what would be offered or whether this would be one of those organisations that promises much and delivers little. What I found was the opposite of that. What I found, from the very first moment, was safety.
Safety is not a small word. For a domestic worker who has been through difficult experiences, who has navigated a system that can feel overwhelming and isolating and sometimes deeply frightening, safety is everything. It is the foundation upon which everything else must be built, because without it nothing else is possible. The Voice of Domestic Workers gave me that foundation. It gave me a place where I could arrive as I was, with all my uncertainty and all my experience and all my unanswered questions, and be received with care rather than judgment.
Through the VODW I was also connected to Doctors of the World, and through them I was referred to the National Referral Mechanism. Those words might sound procedural and administrative to someone who has not needed them, but to me they represented something profound. They represented being seen. Being taken seriously. Being guided toward the help and the protection that I needed and deserved but had not known how to reach on my own. There are systems in this country that exist to protect vulnerable people, and the VODW helped me find my way into them at a time when I needed that guidance more than I can easily express.
And then came the classes. ESOL to strengthen my English, giving my voice greater reach and my understanding greater depth in a language that I was still growing into. IT to open up the digital world that so much of modern life depends upon, to give me the tools to navigate it with confidence rather than anxiety. Financial literacy to help me understand and manage my money, to give me agency over my own earnings rather than simply watching them pass through my hands. Media Communications to help me tell my own story and understand the stories being told around me. Each class was a door opening onto a room that had always been there but that I had not previously had the key to enter.
The learning was not always easy. Showing up week after week while managing the demands of domestic work requires a particular kind of commitment, the kind that comes from knowing deep down that what you are building in those classrooms belongs to you in a way that nothing can take away. Skills travel with you. Knowledge stays. And with every session attended and every lesson absorbed, I became more capable, more confident, more fully equipped to advocate for myself and understand the world I was navigating.
That navigation includes understanding my rights. One of the most transformative things the Voice of Domestic Workers gave me was knowledge of what I am actually entitled to in this country. For a domestic worker who arrived without that knowledge, discovering it was like being handed a map after years of wandering without one. The right to change employer without restriction is one of those rights, and understanding it changed the way I see my own situation. No worker should feel compelled to remain in circumstances that harm her simply because she does not know that she has options. Knowing your rights is the first step toward being able to use them.
The right to renew the Overseas Domestic Worker Visa is another right I have come to understand more deeply through my time with the VODW. The anxiety of visa uncertainty is something that touches every aspect of a domestic worker's life, from how freely she speaks to how safely she sleeps at night. Understanding that there is a campaign fighting for that renewal, that there are people and organisations putting real pressure on the system to change, gave me a sense of not being alone in facing that uncertainty that I had not had before.
Becoming an active member of this community was not something that happened all at once. It grew gradually, through the classes and the events and the relationships formed over time with people who had walked similar roads and who understood without needing everything explained. That growing sense of belonging is what the right to settlement speaks to most directly. Because I have found something real here. A community, a support network, an education, a foundation. Settlement would mean that the life I am building on that foundation cannot simply be dismantled by the expiry of a document. It would mean that the years of showing up and learning and growing count toward something permanent and secure.
And the right to British citizenship is the fullest version of the belonging I have begun to find here. It is the recognition that a person who came to this country, who found safety and community and education within it, who learned her rights and became an active participant in the fight for those rights, who arrived lost and found herself here, belongs to this country in every meaningful sense. Citizenship would make that belonging official and permanent and protected in law.
I came to the Voice of Domestic Workers as a new member, uncertain and still finding my footing. I am still learning, still growing, still discovering what is possible when you are supported by people who genuinely believe in your worth and your future. But I am no longer lost. I know where I am. I know who stands beside me. And I know, more clearly than I have ever known anything, that I have rights and that they are worth fighting for.
To the Philippines Embassy, thank you for the introduction. To Doctors of the World and the National Referral Mechanism, thank you for the care. And to the Voice of Domestic Workers, thank you for the safety, the knowledge, the community, and the reminder that I was always worth finding. I am here. I am learning. And I am not going anywhere.
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