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Four million women from the Philippines and Indonesia—10 percent of the workforce—travel to other Asian countries and the Middle East for work. While some are better off for the experience, others suffer, sometimes brutally.

Foreign maids, cooks, and nannies are routinely required to work 18-hour days with a day off every three months. Some domestic helpers are confined to their employers’ homes—permitted to step outside only to set out the garbage.

The 2005 Trafficking in People report by the U.S. State Department notes the virtual enslavement of maids. In some horrific cases, women are sexually or physically abused, even forced into prostitution. Some, in desperation, commit suicide.

“Since 1999, over 100 maids have fallen from high-rise apartments in Singapore,” says Patrick Augustine. Hearing such reports, he says, “I was just compelled to do something.”

Augustine, 39, is a software engineer with Hewlett-Packard and also a final-year student in the Master of International Management (MIM) program at Portland State. Last year, working with other students from the program, he started Guardian of Humanity, which seeks to improve the working conditions for domestic helpers in Asia and the Middle East.

How does a software engineer wind up heading an international organization helping women in Southeast Asia? Augustine’s story says a lot about the village-ization of the globe and one man’s resolve to do something about a seemingly hopeless situation.

Women from poor countries throughout the world increasingly travel to places where middle-class and wealthy families hire them to watch their children, cook their food, and clean their homes. Why? A college graduate can earn up to five times as much working as a maid as she would earn in her home country as a teacher. That salary—$100 to $500 a month—can in turn be sent home to help her family achieve a better life.

From Sri Lanka, 650,000 women travel primarily to the Middle East to work as maids and nannies. Globally, the numbers are hazy, perhaps unknowable, given the shadow labor force of women working illegally outside their home countries. In Malaysia, for instance, 165,000 Indonesian maids were registered in 2003. But add the women working illegally in the country, and the numbers increase by an estimated 100,000.

Augustine’s working-class background, a history of looking out for others, and his international perspective have helped him sympathize with these women’s plights.

His story starts outside of San Francisco in the town of Vacaville. Augustine’s father worked in a warehouse and his mother had her own business making leotards—first for his younger sister, a gymnast, then for gymnasts throughout northern California.

He graduated from high school in 1984 and promptly followed his older brother into the U.S. Army, serving in the infantry and military police. Augustine was stationed in Hawaii and Texas, but was also deployed around the world—to Thailand, Japan, Korea, Panama, and Somalia.

“As a combat M.P.,” says Augustine, “you’re protecting not only military personnel and equipment, but also civilians—whomever you come in contact with.”

It was a life that suited him—for a while.

“I was pretty much planning on a career in the military,” he says.

His toddler changed all that. “After my fifth year of service, my wife and I had a baby girl,” says Augustine. “I was traveling so much—19 months on the road out of the last 24 I was in the service—that I was a stranger to my daughter. She would cry every time I tried to pick her up, and that really bothered me.”

Knowing little about what his future held, Augustine decided to find a career in the then newish field of computers. “I figured,” he says, “I’d try something ‘easy.’”

Although he discovered that computer science wasn’t easy, he loved the work. His enthusiasm and accomplishments landed him an internship at the Hewlett-Packard research and development facility in Vancouver, Wash. When he graduated from Chico State, a job was waiting for him.

The Vancouver R & D lab develops Hewlett-Packard’s most successful product: state-of-the-art inkjet printers. The company produces those printers at facilities around the world. Augustine quickly moved up the corporate ranks to a position that required him to travel frequently to the company’s far-flung production facilities and to launch contract facilities in Asia.

When he traveled, he picked up local English-language papers. What he read convinced him he had to do more than just read.

“Every time I went over there, I’d read a major story of abuse,” says Augustine. “It really opened my eyes as to what was happening overseas with domestic workers . . . Finally, I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

By that time, Augustine had enrolled in Portland State’s MIM program. The MIM degree is similar to an MBA, however courses are focused on international issues and the degree requires a foreign language, either Chinese or Japanese. Augustine is taking Chinese. Students can complete the work in one year as a full-time student or in two years in the part-time program. About 70 students are in the program.

MIM students complete an exit project in their final year—often working in groups of three to five with a local company to help solve a real-world problem. Last year, Augustine, who is in the two-year program, solicited students in their final year to conduct research into the plight of domestic workers working outside their home countries. Four students said yes.

Their first task was to understand the scope of the problem. They researched the numbers of people affected, foreign labor laws, and most importantly, the informal positions governments held regarding guest workers.

Augustine paid for himself and two members of the MIM team to travel to the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan and meet with government officials. These meetings helped them understand the nuances behind official positions on foreign workers—and the best way to go about establishing a helping agency in each country.

The MIM students found a profitable, poorly regulated industry with financial motivations for governments to ignore the situation. Some 12 to 16 percent of the gross domestic product of the Philippines and Indonesia comes from overseas salaries sent home. According to a United Nation’s economic report, maids and other nationals working overseas sent more than $8.5 million home to the Philippines in 2003.

The money trail begins with recruitment agencies that often operate out of the public eye. Agents collect fees of $100 to $400 from women in small villages whom they encourage to sign up for overseas jobs. Some agencies offer women the option to pay the fee from their first several months’ salary. With hundreds of unregulated agencies, the potential for abuse is staggering.

“A lot of bad things can happen to them,” says Augustine, “before they ever leave their country.”

Women may be told they will receive a month or two of training in laundry, cooking and caring for infants and elderly patients. Instead, says Augustine, they may be locked up for six months to a year in facilities with barred windows and razor-wire topped walls—buildings that resemble prisons more than schools. Guards monitor their activities, and they are often bused out to worksites where they provide free labor until they’re sufficiently “trained.”

Once they’re sent to their overseas employer, things can become really ugly. Work visas restrict the women to a single employer and worksite. But unscrupulous employers may farm them out to relatives’ homes, small businesses, even massage parlors. These are all outside the scope of the work visa, and if the women are discovered, authorities send them home.

Foreign labor laws generally do not protect the domestic worker, says Augustine. Employers face few if any consequences for withholding all or part of a maid’s pay. “The government is well aware, and they’re turning a blind eye.”

But as unfair as those work practices are, some women are subjected to even worse: physical abuse, sexual abuse, and rape.

Often, says Augustine, workers are abused by women employers, who accuse the maids of flirting with their husbands. Employers have burned maids with clothes irons and scalded them with boiling water.

While the numbers of reported cases of abuse and rape are small—in Southeast Asia only 25 to 30 cases a year may be reported—the more telling fact, Augustine believes, is that none of these are reported by the maids themselves.

Instead, individuals who see signs of the abuse call the authorities. Typically a worker is turned over to her country’s consulate, which sends her home. “Their goal is to send money home,” says Augustine. If they’re forced out of their job, there’s no money to send home. “That’s why they don’t go to the authorities.”

Still, the MIM researchers found that when the Philippines government acknowledged the situation and set up a safe house in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, some 30 women a week sought refuge.

Michele Gamburd, a PSU anthropology associate professor, has written about the issue as it relates to women in Sri Lanka in her book, The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids. Out of a nation of 19 million, 650,000 Sri Lankan women travel abroad for work, primarily to the Middle East, she says. Gamburd is interested in how global economics have helped create this diaspora.

The real issue, she says, is why these people “can’t make ends meet at home.” Gamburd points particularly to policies of the International Monetary Fund, which she says have been virtually requiring Third World countries with outstanding loans to cut back spending on social services—things like subsidies for rice and cooking kerosene.

“Basically these are programs that are really devastating to poor people,” she says. “The local economy is in the tank . . . going abroad is the only recourse.”

Gamburd believes that true relief must come through governmental action. “The large-scale structures that oppress people need to be worked on,” she says. Job placement agencies need to be more tightly monitored so that women can be assured of being placed where they are told they will be and paid what they’re promised.

Augustine has some of the same concerns.

“There is one thing that particularly upsets me about this issue,” he says. Women working in foreign countries as maids “are making huge sacrifices to provide for their families back home—many of them leave behind their husbands and children in the process. They are willing to accept the difficult working conditions, and for the most part that is all right. What will never be all right is all the abuse that is happening.”

Building on the research and field visits, Augustine formed Guardian of Humanity to work with governments to provide safe houses and develop protective foreign labor laws for domestic helpers.

Guardian has a board of directors composed of MIM students from Southeast Asia, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, Yemen, and Turkey. Fellow MIM student John Lee is vice president of the board and is also Augustine’s coworker and friend.

When they started the MIM program, the two were on the same work team at Hewlett-Packard and sat in across-the-aisle cubicles. Since Augustine joined the company, he and Lee have traveled together to Singapore, Spain, Japan and other countries for the company and socialized together outside of work.

As Augustine developed the idea for Guardian of Humanity, Lee jumped onboard.

Why are he and Augustine so willing to commit time and personal resources to the plight of people halfway around the world?

Lee says the motivation for Guardian of Humanity was a fusion of Augustine’s growing awareness of the issue as he traveled more to Southeast Asia on business combined with the focus of the MIM program on international topics and the opportunity to interest MIM students in the cause.

“You get to a certain stage. You have a family, house, kids, and successful job. You’re faced with a choice of spending on material goods or asking, ‘What else can I do?’” says Lee. “Some people find religion. Some people volunteer. Some people say maybe there’s something unique I can contribute—a skill or knowledge. That’s Patrick’s motivation.”

This year, Augustine is working with another group of MIM students on an exit project seeking $2 million in grants and other funding so Guardian of Humanity can begin opening embassy-affiliated safe houses. These houses would primarily offer refuge for abused domestic helpers, but Augustine would also like to provide job training that could qualify women for better jobs, such as beauticians or dental assistants, back home.

Once under way, Augustine believes the safe houses could be self-funding. Currently, maids send their wages home via remittance centers, where they are often charged high processing fees. If Guardian partnered with such a center, together they could offer lower fees and keep a portion as operating capital for the safe houses.

It’s an enormous goal—perhaps even quixotic. But Augustine sees no choice.

“The physical and sexual abuse needs to be addressed immediately,” says Augustine. “These women are entrusted with babies and grandparents. How do you mistreat someone who has those kind of responsibilities? I can’t even begin to imagine. Fortunately, I don’t need to understand why. I just have to prevent it.”

Melissa Steineger, a Portland freelance writer, wrote the article “A New Way Home” in the winter 2005 PSU Magazine.