Sometimes, when nanny Imelda Gonzales cradles three-year-old Ben in her arms to rock him to sleep, she closes her own eyes and allows herself to dream a little, too. And what is in Imelda's mind then is her own children: And what she dreams is that this little person in her arms isn't Ben at all, but one of them.
Imelda, 37, left the Philippines in January 2000 for a job as a migrant domestic worker in Hong Kong, leaving behind her daughter, Joanne Nicole, then seven, and her son John Valerie, who was five.
Her husband was also working abroad and the children were left with her mother.
Imelda adores her country and misses her children "every minute, every second," but left for one simple reason -- to earn money to secure a better future for them. Despite being a university graduate (she has a BSc in biology and would love eventually to do a degree in medicine and become a pediatrician), she says it would be impossible to earn enough at home to break the poverty cycle and improve her children's life chances.
And so she paid US$1,400 (around six months average salary in her country) to register with an agency which finds domestic work overseas for Filipinos. It secured her a job as a housekeeper with an English employer in Hong Kong. He treated her well and after four years asked if she would come to England to care for his mother. He applied for a domestic worker visa for her and she traveled to the UK.
Things didn't go well and Imelda says she was badly treated. In May last year, she ran away to London and found a job quickly as a nanny with her current employer who is "absolutely wonderful." She looks after Ben four and a half days a week, lives in and sends home 90 percent of her ?1,000 (US$1,750) a month salary which is used to pay for her children's current needs and to save for their future education.
She has been able to buy a computer to help her children with their schoolwork, something that would never have been possible if she had remained at home.
"As a nanny in the Philippines I would have earned about US$75 a month and would have been unable to support my children properly," she says. "In my current job my employer pays for me to go home a couple of times a year and when I go back people call me `the millionaire.'"
Imelda isn't the only woman who has left her own children thousands of miles away to care for British youngsters. Camilla Brown of Kalayaan, a charity which campaigns for justice for migrant domestic workers, says there are many others in the same or a similar situation.
"If they don't have children themselves they will often have a family or multiple families who they are supporting back home. There is a huge burden of guilt and responsibility on their shoulders," Brown says.
Officially there are 111,500 nannies in Britain, but campaigners believe there are many more from abroad who are uncounted in the figures and that tens of thousands are in a similar situation to Imelda. Last year alone more than 17,000 visas were issued for overseas domestic workers -- and many of these, though not all, will be child care workers who have left their own kids back home.
According to Julia Harris, who runs The Housekeeper Company, which supplies nannies and housekeepers to UK families, demand for overseas nannies has never been higher. Filipinos are particularly highly prized. Workers also come from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, along with parts of Africa and South America.
While women like Imelda have secured good working arrangements, others are horribly exploited. Kalayaan staff report stories of employees who are beaten, spat at, kicked by their employer's children or called "dog" or "donkey" by the family that employs them.
Some are locked in the house when their employers go out and are forced to work long hours for pay well below the minimum wage.
Migrant workers do have some rights in the UK, but changes are on the horizon. Currently, people are only permitted to enter the UK with a domestic worker visa if they have already been working for their employer in another country for a minimum of a year. It is illegal for UK employers to recruit domestic workers directly from their home countries. They are entitled to the national minimum wage, statutory holiday and a notice period.
Importantly they have the right to change employers as long as they inform the Home Office and this allows them to leave an exploitative employer and secure a job with decent pay and conditions. After the initial six-month visa runs out they can renew them annually. After five years they have the right to apply for settlement in the UK as well as family reunification.
Now, though, the government wants to reverse these rights in a move which Kalayaan says will "legalize trafficking." In March the government announced a new strategy to limit employment routes to the UK for low-skilled workers.
The plan, according to Kalayaan, is to restrict domestic workers who arrive in the country with their employers to a maximum stay of six months, with no right to change employers and no route to settlement here. According to Kalayaan, this will dramatically increase the power of employers over these workers, increase levels of exploitation and force more underground.
Harris is alarmed about the new proposals, which she says could lead to a labor shortage in the UK and have a knock-on effect on working mothers who will find recruiting nannies even more difficult.
Sally, 40, another Filipino nanny, left her son, Roberto, six years ago when he was seven months old for the same reasons as Imelda. She is paying into a five-year plan to pay for education at a good school for her son and for a university education later. She says proudly that Roberto is always among the top 10 students at his school. The money she sends home has also provided funds to put one of her sister's children through university.
She came to the UK with an employer having first worked in the Middle East. The employer treated her badly but she managed to escape and switch to her current employer with whom she is very happy. She would like to stay here for the foreseeable future, but fears she may be forced home by the new proposals.
"Of course it's very difficult emotionally to be apart from my child. He's only got me to rely on, as I'm separated from my husband," she says.
"My sister looks after him. But no matter how hard it is for me to be here, away from my child, I'm prepared to sacrifice everything for his future. What I'm doing feels very worthwhile. If I don't secure a good education for him who knows how he might turn out?" she says.
Imelda, too, is very anxious about the government proposals and hopes fervently that they won't be implemented.
"I miss everything about home, the family get-togethers, my friends. I do everything I can to keep in touch with my children: I call them or text them every day to express my love for them. I even help my little boy with the answers to his maths homework via text message. Of course I'd much rather be sitting beside him while he does his homework," she says.
"And it's hard when my daughter says: `Mama we want you, not your money. Why are you not with us?'" she says.
"But I feel I must continue to make this sacrifice. None of us mothers working in the UK looking after other people's children are doing this for ourselves. This is for our children's future," she says.
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