Intermittent Departures, Returns, and the Incremental Acts of the Everyday: Paid Domestic Work and Insurgency in Sitio Sibol, Bohol

Abstract

Our understanding of maids and their condition is confined within the current discourse of domestic labor exploitation and its general assumptions. This study presents an expansion of the discussion as experienced by residents of Sitio Sibol, Bohol including past experiences of NPA (New People’s Army) insurgency and counterinsurgency that partly played an instrumental role in shaping the maid’s experience. Informed by ethnographic research among former and current maids and their community in Sitio Sibol, this study problematizes how the changing context in the community affects the emergence and proliferation of local domestic work. It traces back the community’s history and analyzes both individual and collective experiences, attitudes, and practices as exercises of human creativity when faced with adversity and different conditions of injustice. The shared community life in the sitio established active and passive social networks; and changing political conditions shaped and illustrated the complex process of “pagpapa-maid” revealing realities of human costs usually unaccounted for.