Learning to Feel Visible Instead of Invisible Changed Everything for Me By Liezel Tuyor
I came to VODW because a friend introduced me to it, describing the classes as helpful and interesting. That simple recommendation turned into six months to a year of genuine transformation across ESOL, IT, Mediacom, and Financial Literacy classes, a journey I began feeling nervous, excited, happy, and curious all at once.
Along the way, I picked up skills that surprised even me, learning to create designs on Canva, exploring blogging, and sharpening my communication. But it is one particular realisation that clearly meant the most to me, the understanding that domestic workers can be visible instead of invisible. My daily work often happens quietly behind closed doors, unnoticed and unacknowledged, so that shift in perspective is profound to me. During my sessions, I felt reconnected with myself, watched my stress ease, built confidence, grew more resilient, felt genuinely healed, and experienced a real sense of belonging, a full spectrum of emotional growth packed into a single set of classes.
By the end, I feel more confident, and graduation felt like real recognition, a moment where my classmates and I were finally acknowledged for the effort we had poured into our learning. My gratitude toward my teachers is heartfelt, and my hope for the future extends generously beyond myself. I hope other domestic workers can experience what my classmates and I experienced at VODW, and I hope to keep learning more myself.
My insight about visibility speaks directly to the heart of VODW's mission and its campaigns for justice. Domestic workers are often the invisible engine behind homes and families across the country, essential yet unseen, and rarely given a platform to voice our needs or our rights. VODW's push for the right to change employer without restriction, the right to renew the ODW visa, the right to settlement, and the right to British citizenship, is, at its core, a fight to make domestic workers visible in the eyes of the law, not just within the walls of a classroom.
My story shows how the two are deeply connected, personal confidence and public recognition, each one strengthening the other, until a domestic worker who once felt invisible finally feels seen.
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