SINGAPORE: After the maid she hired to care for her cancer-stricken mother started threatening the elderly woman, an employer took to social media asking others for advice.
In a post on Reddit, the woman wrote that the maid was hired last August and was transferred directly from another employer without going through an agency. Her role was to support the woman’s mother through her chemotherapy. “Her duties were simple. Mostly surrounding taking care of my mother. Since her niece came to Singapore to work at a hospice in December, we noticed a change in her attitude. She would constantly cry saying she misses her children (and she’s the only breadwinner in her family)”.
The woman added that she recently found out that the maid had been threatening her mother and saying that she wanted to report to the Manpower Ministry (MOM) that the family had been abusing her and denying her sufficient rest. “To clarify, we have done nothing of that sort. We let her roam around outside for 2 hours a day under the guise of buying groceries (supermarket is a 15min walk) and let her sleep in the afternoon when she had nothing to do, to avoid her emotional outbreaks”.
The woman added: “I’m frustrated as i just found out her threats to my mother recently, and my brother called me a racist when i shared with him my fears of the possibilities of unpleasant things happening to my mother. What should I do?”
The netizens’ answer was unanimous – send the helper back or transfer her; get the maid away from the woman’s mother. Others commented that since her elderly mother’s safety was an issue, the helper needed to be replaced.
Here’s what they wrote:
Last year, in a rather shocking post, a netizen accused his neighbours of abusing their maids to the point where two of the helpers escaped.
In an anonymous post to popular confessions page, the netizen wrote that his neighbour’s first maid “jumped down the rubbish chute (she survived) to escape, the second starved”.
He added that both maids had escaped returning to their own countries and wrote that the neighbours did not have a maid.
“I actually always hated them because they kick our items (we have a small sofa outside the house) or use it as a footstool for wearing their shoes, while throwing their items everywhere. I wish I could put chilli in their shoes or a cockroach under their door. I hate them so much. What stops me is that they will likely never move and I don’t want my parents (who also don’t plan to move) to be involved in years of conflict with them”, the netizen wrote.
He added that his neighbours had grandchildren. Because of his hatred towards them, he even wished ill on their grandchildren.