A dire situation for the Philippine family in Qatar

[MRT144]

albert speer can play the black dude who gets shot first.

I play the womanizer/polio victim

[Straybow]

On a more serious note, I have no money but I do have prayers. It is hard to see loved ones going through suffering.

[Lancer]

I'm not into paying off the agency. If they release her with her paperwork I could have a plane ticket waiting for her no problem,I have all the $ needed.

Ideas is why I made the thread, prayers Straybow, thanks! Those are needed too. I've already prayed on the matter and the more that do so the better.

Even if we get Crispina out though, there's the other girls there.

Plus, her sister hasn't sent us the needed info yet. We'll call her again on her cell and get it if she doesn't reply soon.

[Arrian]

Wow, that's seriously ****ed up.

At the very least could you set up a way to send her care packages w/food and stuff, until this gets sorted out somehow?

That's prolly naive of me, but it's a thought.

-Arrian

[Proteus_MST]

It sounds to me like they are doing so on purpose,
so that they get the family to pay the 1000 $.

It sounds to me like they are holding her ransom.
A way to cover the costs they had with this her
(as they probably had some costs with her without any revenue that balanced it out, for one the flight to Quatar, and for the other the fact that the sheik were she was employed probably wanted his money back).
So they want to make at least a little bit of money with her (i.e. the 1000 $ ransom from her family)

[Lancer]

Good thought that. Any package would take weeks to get there and would be almost certainly be stolen by the agency. On top of that it would show the agency that they need to hold on to Crispy if there is a westerner sending stuff...that they might be able to extort $ from. A care package might abruptly stop her release. Plus, we would need the info of where she is being held which is what we're waiting on now.

If we get this info and start calling the folks Rufus mentioned then the agency will know anyhow so we still might send a package before this is over. Maybe make it very basic foods not worth stealing.

[Lancer]

Proteus_MST, the agency took all she earned already which amounted to over $700 R- somethings, whatever the currency is called there. I don't know how much in dollars.

Yes, the agency might be looking at a loss.

[Straybow]

At a whopping 27¢ each, that 700 Qatari Riyal isn't covering much more than bread and water.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Mrs. Tuberski
Lancer are u retired military? Maybe the military can help ya..

yeah bomb them into submission.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Lancer
Letting them know there's an american they can extort money from might just make things worse. Crispina's sister is working on the agency in Manila and going through the Philippine government too, if she listened to us. Since Crispina is a Philippine citizen they are the ones who might do something.

The sister, Lucina, didn't reply to our email offer of $300 in assistance so I haven't heard any progress report.

What about the phillipine tv stations and such. There should be an outrage in their country about their countrymen doing that to their own people.

Other than that, paying the money seems the only option.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Straybow
At a whopping 27¢ each, that 700 Qatari Riyal isn't covering much more than bread and water.

Maybe, maybe not. While 700 Riyal ($192) doesn't sound like much, it's about 9500 Philippine pesos, which is way, way more than most Philippine domestics could make in a month (I don't know how long she's been there, but it sounds like a month or less). In fact, the nominal per capita GDP of the Philippines is less than 5,000 pesos -- $100 -- per month.

9500 pesos/month is probably 3-4x what Crispina could have earned doing domestic work in the Philippines. Only the most highly-paid domestics -- the ones working for guilt-ridden liberal expats on lush corporate packages in Manila -- would even get close to that at home. It's more like a skilled-worker salary; it's what a young nurse would make working in a major Manila hospital.

This is simply to underscore, for those who've never really come across this kind of poverty, just why it is that Crispina would have left her family to move halfway around the world and work in these circumstances, and just what a huge sum, in local terms, the $1000 the agency want really is.

[Lancer]

Good news! Crispina is released! She arrived in Manila today, very skinny but alive. There's still nine other girls stuck in Qatar and if I can get any timely info from Lucina or Crispina I'll try to help them.

We're sending Lucina the $300 so Crispy can have some space to relax and fatten up a bit.

Thanks all for your concern and advise. I'll post here on any news of the other nine girls. Apparently it was Lucina's efforts with the Philippine gov's OFW organization that did the trick, so there is hope.

[SlowwHand]

[Lancer]

[germanos]