Her worst nightmare has come true! She has to go to the toilet. Maria uses the airline cup to collect the drugs that will come out of her body. She carefully cleans the cocaine wrapped in a rubber material, covers it with airline toothpaste and swallows. My sister who was watching "Maria Full of Grace" with me says: "Ay Jesus kag Maria!!!"
The scene sends me back a few years ago to a tourist tour around China and Hong Kong. On the long line to immigration, we met a group of Filipina women who do not know how to fill-out the forms. They have illegally stayed as maids in Hong Kong before. They have been blacklisted in the Hong Kong immigration but they were hoping that they can come back by entering Shenzen or perhaps Macau. For a few hundred dollars a month (meager amount they will never earn doing menial jobs in the Philippines), these women are risking their lives. I know one woman who entered Indonesia illicitly to work as a maid. From a small boat in Mindanao, they entered Indonesian soil at night. Concealed in darkness they crawled on shore to remain undetected by the border police. When I heard this story, I thought she was despicably stupid! Now I realized that sometimes you feel life does not give you much choice. Desperate people do not realize that they deserve better.
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