How Four Classes Changed the Way I See Myself and What I Believe I Am Capable Of By Ellain
- thevoiceofdomesticworkers
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
There is a version of myself that existed before these classes, and there is the version of myself that exists now. The distance between those two people is not measured in months or in the number of sessions attended or even in the certificates earned along the way. It is measured in confidence. In the quiet but powerful shift that happens when a person who has spent years doubting what she is capable of begins, slowly and then all at once, to believe in herself.
I am a domestic worker, and like so many in this community I arrived in this country carrying not just the weight of hard work and sacrifice but also the weight of everything I did not yet know. Technology that felt foreign. Finances that felt complicated. A language I was still finding my way inside. A body and mind that had been giving and giving for so long that I had almost forgotten they needed tending too. The courses offered through the Voice of Domestic Workers reached into each of those areas and began, gently but persistently, to change them.
The IT class gave me something I had not expected to find in a computer lesson. It gave me access. So much of modern life is conducted through screens and software and digital tools that those who cannot navigate them are quietly excluded from opportunities that everyone else takes for granted. Learning to use different software, developing genuine comfort with a computer rather than the anxious uncertainty I had carried before, felt like being handed a key to a door that had always been there but that I had never known how to open. I sit at a screen now with a confidence that is new and real and entirely mine, and that confidence reaches further than the classroom. It reaches into every part of life where technology plays a role, which is to say almost every part of life.
The financial class was a different kind of opening. Money is something that domestic workers think about constantly, because the reason so many of us are here, far from home and family, is precisely to earn it and send it back and build something better for the people we love. And yet the knowledge of how to manage it well, how to budget with intention and save with purpose and understand the systems that govern our finances, is not something that arrives automatically with the earning of it. Learning to budget, to save, to make my money work for me rather than simply watching it pass through my hands, gave me a sense of agency over my own future that I had not fully possessed before. That agency matters. It is the difference between surviving financially and building toward something.
The Body and Mind sessions offered something that I had perhaps needed longer than any of the other courses but had been the last to seek. Domestic workers give their bodies and their minds to their work every single day, often without adequate rest, often without space to process the emotional weight of living far from home in circumstances that are not always easy. Stress accumulates quietly and thoroughly in this life, and learning ways to reduce it, to care for my physical and mental wellbeing with the same attention I give to caring for others, felt like a radical act of self-recognition. I am worth caring for. My wellbeing matters. Those truths sound simple, but for someone who has spent years placing her own needs consistently last, they required learning just as much as any software or budgeting technique.
The ESOL classes wove through all of it like a thread connecting everything together. Language is how we understand and are understood, how we assert our needs, build our relationships, navigate the systems that govern our lives, and tell our stories in our own words. Improving my English speaking, listening, reading, and writing did not just make me a better communicator. It made me more fully present in my own life. It gave my thoughts and experiences a clearer channel through which to reach other people. It made me harder to overlook and easier to hear, which matters enormously in a world that does not always make space for the voices of domestic workers without being pushed to do so.
That pushing, that advocating for space and recognition, is what the right to change employer without restriction is fundamentally about. Because a domestic worker who has invested in herself through education and skill building deserves the freedom to take those skills to an employer who recognises and respects their value. She should not be trapped in a situation that undervalues her simply because the visa system leaves her no legal way out. The growth achieved through these courses belongs to her, and she deserves to take it wherever it will be most honoured.
The knowledge gained in the financial class, the confidence built in the IT sessions, the wellbeing practices learned in Body and Mind, the language skills sharpened in ESOL, all of these are investments in a future. But investments only pay their full return when there is a stable foundation beneath them. The right to renew the Overseas Domestic Worker Visa is part of that foundation. It means that the learning does not get cut short before it has had the chance to translate into real and lasting change. It means that the version of herself a domestic worker is becoming through these courses has the time and the security to fully emerge.
Becoming more confident and better prepared for everyday life, work, and future learning. Those words carry more meaning than they might appear to hold on the surface. Future learning. The assumption that there is a future here worth preparing for, that the investment in today's classes will lead to tomorrow's opportunities, is one that requires more than hope to sustain. It requires security. The right to settlement provides that security in its most permanent form. It transforms the hopeful assumption of a future into a guaranteed one, replacing uncertainty with the solid ground of knowing that the years of learning and growing and contributing are recognised as counting toward something real and lasting.
And the right to British citizenship is where all of that learning ultimately leads in its fullest expression. It is the recognition that a person who has educated herself, managed her finances with care, tended to her own wellbeing, and learned to communicate with confidence in a language that was not her own has done everything and more that could be asked of someone building a life in a new country. Citizenship says that this effort, this growth, this commitment to becoming more fully oneself in this particular place, is seen and honoured and rewarded with belonging. Complete, permanent, unambiguous belonging.
I am more confident than I was before these classes began. I am better prepared for the life I am living and the future I am building. I am a domestic worker who is also a student, a learner, a person in the ongoing process of becoming more fully herself. And I am grateful, deeply and completely grateful, to the Voice of Domestic Workers for creating the space in which that becoming is possible.
The learning continues. And so do I.
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