JEDDAH, 10 March 2008 — Leonora Somera, the 66-year-old Filipino woman who had been stranded in the Kingdom for 20 years, is back in the Philippines at last.
Somera left Jeddah on board an Emirates Airlines flight on Thursday night and arrived in Manila the next day, the Philippine Consulate in Jeddah has said. Consulate officials gave no other details.
In a telephone interview yesterday, she said that she was made to stay at a center maintained by the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) in Pasay City for debriefing.
“I’m extremely elated to be back in the country I left long ago. Please say thank you so much to everyone who helped me in one way or another, including those who offered prayers and expressed their sympathies over my plight,” Somera told Arab News in Tagalog.
She said she was told that she would be sent today to her home in San Jose City, about 140 kilometers north of Manila. She was expected to be reunited with her daughter, Marivic, now a hotel worker.
To ensure that Marivic would get a college education, Somera set out for Riyadh to work for a family in late 1987, leaving her daughter under the care of her sister when the girl was just six years old.
Her dream turned into a nightmare a year later when her original employer died and the employer’s son, Misfer Al-Ghamdi, and family took her with them to Al-Baha, about 275 kilometers south of Jeddah. She tended to her new employer’s goats apart from doing household chores such as washing clothes, and taking care of the man’s sick uncle.
Her previous job as a bus conductress in Manila prepared her for the tough duty of herding goats to the mountains, but her employer’s failure to pay her salary began to take its toll on her patience.
In a previous interview with Arab News, she said her employer did not even show any sign of sympathy when she told her once that she needed money for her daughter’s examinations in school.
She said her repeated requests for her employer to send her home were ignored. In November 2005, she met a Filipino woman who helped her contact the consulate in Jeddah to rescue her.
Somera’s ordeal did not stop when she moved to the OWWA shelter for distressed Filipino women at the consulate. The Philippine Overseas Labor Office helped her file before the Saudi Labor Office claims for SR67,000 in unpaid wages and end-of-service benefits, but her employer continued to stall.
Last December, the son of her employer, Mohammad Misfer Al-Ghamdi, now 18 years old, made a surprise visit and gave her a pittance of SR2,000 plus a plea for forgiveness by his father, who was supposedly ill.
The young Al-Ghamdi also signed a document releasing Somera so that she could get her exit papers. But for reasons the consulate has refused to make public, Somera was not allowed to leave the Kingdom through the normal way.
Last month, she was fetched by immigration officials along with 42 other distressed Filipino workers at the consulate and taken to the deportation center of Jeddah. Somera said she was luckier this time because she was allowed to board for a flight home, while the fate of the 42 remained unclear.
