Filipina Maid VANISHED From Her Kuwait Employer’s Mansion — 2 Years Later She Was Found In a FREEZER
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A farming municipality, the kind of place where the rhythm of life is set by the planting season and the harvest, >> >> by the wet months and the dry months, by the price of rice and the strength of the next typhoon.
In Barangay Ferraris, >> >> a small village within the municipality of Sara, the Demafelis family lived in a house that was modest even by the standards of rural Iloilo.
Crisanto and Eva Demafelis were farmers, but they did not own the land they worked.
They leased it.
They grew rice and sugarcane on rented soil, and from whatever the harvest brought in, they fed and clothed and educated nine children.
Nine.
That is not a misprint.
Crisanto and Eva raised nine children in a farming village in Iloilo province on a tenant farmer’s income.
Joanna was the sixth.
Sixth of nine, right in the middle of the pack, if you round it up.
The family called her baby girl, which tells you something about the warmth in that household, about the kind of easy, unforced affection that can exist in a home with too many people and not enough space.
Her aunt, Rosella Demafelis Tolentino, who helped raise her, would later describe Joanna to reporters as shy and quiet.
The kind of girl who smiled even when she was angry, >> >> the kind of girl who kept things to herself, who did not complain.
That quality, that quiet refusal to burden others with her own pain, would become the most devastating detail of her story.
But not yet.
In the early years, in the years before Kuwait, it was simply who Joanna was, a quiet girl in a loud, loving, crowded household, surrounded by siblings, shaded by an old avocado tree that grew in the yard, walking to Sara National High School >> >> along dirt roads that turned to mud in the monsoon season.
The world was small in Barangay Ferraris, but it was open.
The sky was wide over the rice paddies.
There was room to breathe.
After graduating from high school, Joanna did what many young Filipinos from provincial towns do.
She moved to Manila.
Specifically, she moved to Parañaque, one of the cities that make up Metro Manila, and found work as a housekeeper for relatives.
It was honest work.
It paid enough.
She could send money home to her parents in Sara, and she had the freedom to walk through the shopping malls on her days off.
To eat at the food courts, to feel the air conditioning, and the bright lights, and the hum of a city that never fully slept.
She was in her mid-20s.
She was making it work.
If the typhoon had not come, she might have stayed in Parañaque for years.
She might never have looked at a map and wondered about Kuwait.
She might have kept sending small amounts home, kept visiting Sara during the holidays, kept working quietly and without complaint in the homes of her relatives.
The trajectory of her life might have been entirely different.
But the typhoon came.
In November 2013, Super Typhoon Yolanda tore across the Eastern Visayas.
The international designation was Haiyan, and it was one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded.
Sustained winds of over 300 km per hour.
A storm surge that wiped entire coastal towns off the map.
More than 6,000 people died.
Entire provinces were flattened.
The destruction was almost beyond comprehension.
Sara, in Iloilo, >> >> was not at the direct center of the storm’s path.
It was not Tacloban, where the footage of the surge crashing through the streets would be broadcast around the world.
But Sara was hit hard enough.
The raging flood waters stripped the De Mesa Felisa family home down to its frame.
>> >> The old avocado tree, the one that had shaded Joanna and her eight siblings throughout their childhood, was knocked down.
The rice paddies and sugarcane fields that Crisanto and Eva had worked for decades >> >> became pits of trash and debris.
The roads through town were ruptured.
Buildings in the center cracked open.
The De Mesa Felisa family was not just damaged, they were ruined.
The crops were gone.
The land could not be tilled, and because they did not own the land, because they had only ever leased it, there was no insurance payout, no safety net, no fallback.
The debts began to pile up almost immediately.
Crisanto and Eva, both aging into their senior years, were suddenly facing the kind of poverty that offers no exit.
Joanna in Parañaque watched this happen from a distance.
She was sending money home, but a housekeeper’s salary in Metro Manila was not going to rebuild a house.
It was not going to clear the debts.
>> >> It was not going to pay for her younger sister Joyce’s education.
Joyce, the youngest of the nine, wanted to be a police officer.
She was studying criminology.
Tuition was not cheap, and now the family home was a skeleton, and the fields were underwater, and the debts were growing faster than anything Joanna could earn in the Philippines.
A month after the typhoon, sometime in December 2013, Joanna sent a chat message to a distant aunt named Agnes Tubal is.
The message was simple and direct as Joanna’s communications tended to be.
“Tita,” she wrote, “could you help me? I want to go abroad.
” That single message, those two sentences typed on a phone screen in the aftermath of a natural disaster, set Joanna Demafelis on a path that would end in a freezer in Kuwait City.
Everything that followed, every choice, every transaction, every stamped document and signed contract, began with that message.
Tubal is had connections to the overseas labor recruitment industry.
This is not unusual in the Philippines.
The country is one of the largest exporters of labor in the world.
Approximately 10% of the entire Filipino population works overseas at any given time.
They are called OFWs, overseas Filipino workers, >> >> and the money they send home accounts for roughly 10% of the country’s gross domestic product.
The Philippine economy does not function without them.
The government calls them heroes.
The recruitment industry that funnels them into domestic service in the Gulf states, into construction in Singapore, into nursing in Saudi Arabia, into elder care in Hong Kong, that industry is massive.
>> >> It is deeply embedded in the social fabric of the country.
Almost everyone knows someone who has gone abroad.
Almost everyone knows someone who has a contact at an agency.
Tubeless referred Joanna to a recruitment agency called Our Lady of Mount Carmel Global E-Human Resources Incorporated.
For making the referral, >> >> Tubeless received 13,000 pesos from a woman named Ara Mitingbang, who was recruiting workers for deployment to Kuwait.
The standard referral fee was 5,000 pesos per worker.
It is unclear why Tubeless was paid more than double for Joanna.
At the agency, Joanna met the assistant general manager, Mary Gay Canlas Abrantes, and a secretary named Marissa Ansaji Muhammad, who handled her deployment papers.
The pitch was straightforward.
It was the same pitch that has sent millions of Filipino women into domestic service in the Gulf countries.
>> >> The salary comparison.
In the Philippines, a housekeeper might earn 6,000 to 10,000 pesos per month, roughly 100 to 200 US dollars.
In Kuwait, a domestic worker could earn the equivalent of 60,000 to 100,000 pesos per month, 10 times as much.
10 times.
That single number, that 10 to 1 ratio, is the engine that drives the entire system.
It is the reason Joanna said yes.
It is the reason her family supported her decision.
It is the reason millions of women before her had said yes, and millions after her would say yes.
When you are the sixth of nine children, and your parents are tenant farmers whose fields have just been destroyed by a typhoon, and your youngest sister needs tuition money to finish her criminology degree, and the debts are climbing.
10 times the salary is not a luxury.
It is salvation.
In May 2014, 5 months after she first messaged her aunt, Joanna Daniela de Mesa Felis boarded a plane and flew to Kuwait.
She was 25 years old.
She had never left the Philippines before.
She carried with her whatever documentation the agency had prepared, a contract, a work visa, the name and address of her sponsor.
Under the kafala system, which governs migrant labor in Kuwait and most other Gulf states, every foreign worker must have a local sponsor.
The sponsor is your employer.
Your visa is tied to them.
Your legal right to exist in the country is tied to them.
You cannot change jobs without their permission.
You cannot leave the country without their permission.
You cannot, in most practical senses, do anything without their permission.
If your sponsor decides to confiscate your passport, your passport is confiscated.
If your sponsor decides you do not get a day off, you do not get a day off.
If your sponsor decides you cannot use your phone, you cannot use your phone.
If your sponsor decides you cannot leave the house, you do not leave the house.
This is not a metaphor.
This is not an exaggeration for dramatic effect.
This is the lived reality of the kafala system for hundreds of thousands of domestic workers across the Gulf.
Human Rights Watch has documented it extensively.
90% of the female domestic workers they interviewed in the region reported having their passports confiscated by their employers.
Many described working 21 hours a day without rest.
Many described being confined to the house.
Many described having their salaries delayed, reduced, or withheld entirely, sometimes for years.
Some described being slapped, burned with hot water, beaten with sticks.
Some described being sexually assaulted.
And some described conditions so extreme that the only escape they could imagine was suicide.
Joanna landed in Kuwait City >> >> in May 2014 and entered the system.
The apartment where she would work was in the Al Shaab district in the Hawalli Governorate, a residential area in the eastern part of the city.
Her employers were Nader Essam Assaf, a Lebanese national, and his wife, Mona Hassoun, a Syrian.
They were a mixed nationality couple who had moved to Kuwait, as many Lebanese and Syrian expatriates do, >> >> for work and economic opportunity.
They lived in a rented apartment.
They had children, and they needed a maid.
What happened inside that apartment over the next 2 years is known only in its outcome, not in its details.
Joanna did not keep a diary.
She did not record video.
She did not leave behind a written account of her daily life in the Assaf Hassoun household.
What we know comes from two sources.
The first is the condition of her body when it was found.
The second is the silence.
In her first 3 months in Kuwait, Joanna was able to communicate with her family back in Syria.
She called.
She sent messages.
She told them she was working.
She was fine.
The job was what she expected.
She did not report abuse.
She did not ask to come home.
Whether this was because she was not yet being mistreated or because she was already being mistreated and chose not to say so because she was shy and quiet and the kind of girl who smiled >> >> even when she was angry, no one will ever know for certain.
At some point during her employment in Kuwait, Joanna was transferred to a second set of employers.
According to the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation, the Assaf Hassoun couple >> >> were not Joanna’s original sponsors.
She had initially been placed with another household through the Fadilla Farz Kayed recruitment office and then transferred to Assaf and Hassoun.
This transfer was done without informing her family.
Under the kafala system, such transfers are technically supposed to require official approval.
In practice, domestic workers are moved between households with little documentation and no oversight.
The worker has no say.
The worker is not consulted.
The worker goes where she is told.
So, Joanna ended up in the apartment in Al Shaab working for Nada Essam Assaf and Mona Hassoun and the walls began to close in.
Think about the physical spaces Joanna moved through in her life.
In Barangay Ferraris, the family home was small, but the world outside it was enormous.
Rice paddies stretching to the horizon.
The sky above Iloilo wide and blue and crowded with clouds during the monsoon.
Nine siblings means a cramped house, yes, but it also means noise and laughter and bodies brushing past each other in doorways.
It means a life lived in community.
The recruitment agency office in Manila was smaller.
A desk, some chairs, some paperwork, a transaction.
The plane was smaller still.
A sealed metal tube at 30,000 ft carrying her away from everything she knew.
The apartment in Kuwait was the smallest space yet.
Four walls, a kitchen, a bathroom, rooms that belong to other people.
And within that apartment, Joanna’s world was even smaller than the apartment itself.
A domestic worker in a Gulf household does not occupy the same space as the family.
She occupies the margins, the kitchen, the laundry area, >> >> whatever corner or closet has been designated as her sleeping quarters.
Many domestic workers in the Gulf sleep in storage rooms, in hallways, on mats on the kitchen floor.
The grand square footage of the apartment, whatever it was, was not Joanna’s.
She moved through it to clean it.
She existed in it to serve, but she did not live in it.
Not really.
Her passport was almost certainly not in her possession.
This is the first and most important tool of control under the kafala system.
Wait.
Without your passport, you cannot go to the airport.
You cannot board a flight.
You cannot present identification to the police.
You are, in the most literal sense, trapped.
E- Even if you walk out the front door, where do you go? You are a foreign national in a country where your legal status depends entirely on the person who holds your documents.
If you run, you become illegal.
If you become illegal, you can be arrested and deported.
And deportation means going home with nothing.
>> >> No money.
No passport.
No ability to repay the debts your family took on to send you abroad in the first place.
So, you stay.
You stay because the salary is 10 times what you would earn at home.
You stay because your younger sister is studying criminology and the tuition is due.
>> >> You stay because the typhoon destroyed the house and the fields and your parents are aging and the debts are growing.
You stay because you do not have your passport and you do not know anyone in Kuwait and you do not speak Arabic and the Philippine Embassy is a place you have heard of but have no idea how to reach.
And even if you reached it, you have heard stories of other workers who went there and were told to go back to their employers, to honor their contracts, to be patient.
You stay because every alternative to staying seems worse than staying.
This is how the kafala system works.
Not through chains, not through locked doors, although sometimes those too.
It works through the elimination of alternatives.
It works by making the world so small that the only option left is endurance.
Joanna endured.
In 2016, she made what would be her last known phone call to her family.
She spoke with her sister Juliet, who was in Manila.
She told Juliet that she had decided to extend her contract for 1 year.
She said she planned to come home in 2018.
That was all.
She did not say she was being hurt.
She did not ask for help.
She said she would extend and she would come home in 2018.
Then, the calls stopped.
At first, the silence was not alarming.
Phone calls from overseas workers are not always regular.
Schedules are busy.
Phone credit runs out.
Employers restrict access to phones.
A week of silence is normal.
Two weeks is unusual, but not unprecedented.
A month begins to worry you.
Two months begins to frighten you.
But Joanna’s family did not hear from her for far longer than two months.
The silence stretched through the rest of 2016, through the end of the year, through the new year, through the first months of 2017, and then through the rest of 2017.
Month after month after month, no calls, no texts, no messages, nothing.
Imagine being Eva Demafeliz, Joanna’s mother, during those months.
You are a farmer’s wife in Barangay Ferraris.
Your daughter is thousands of miles away, >> >> in a country you have never visited, working in a house you have never seen, for people you have never met, and she has stopped calling.
You try her number.
It rings and rings, or it goes to voicemail, or the line is dead.
You do not know which is worse.
You try again and again, and the answer is always the same.
Silence.
Imagine being Joyce Demafeliz, the youngest, the one Joanna was paying tuition for.
You are studying criminology because you want to be a police officer.
Your older sister, your ate, >> >> is paying for your education with money earned scrubbing someone else’s floors in a desert country on the other side of the world.
And now she has gone quiet.
You called her phone and hear nothing.
You stop going to class because without Joanna’s remittances, >> >> there is no money for tuition.
You drop out.
The family did not just sit and wait.
They acted.
They contacted the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, the government agency responsible for the welfare of Filipino workers abroad.
They contacted the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration.
They filed a missing persons report.
They begged for information and the agencies tried.
To their limited credit, they tried, but they ran into a wall almost immediately.
The recruitment agency that had deployed Joanna to Kuwait, Our Lady of Mount Carmel Global E-Human Resources Incorporated, had closed.
It was gone.
The office was shuttered.
The people who had processed Joanna’s paperwork were not answering inquiries.
There was no point of contact, no paper trail that led anywhere useful, no one who could or would tell them where Joanna was working or who she was working for.
This is another feature of the system.
Recruitment agencies in the Philippines operate in a gray zone between legality and illegality, between regulation and chaos.
There are legitimate agencies and there are fly-by-night operations that open, process workers, collect fees, and close before anyone can hold them accountable.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel appears to have been closer to the latter end of that spectrum.
When the Demafelis family needed them most, they were gone.
The Philippine Embassy in Kuwait was contacted, but the Embassy, responsible for the welfare of over 250,000 Filipino workers in the country, was overwhelmed.
The sheer volume of cases made meaningful follow-up on any individual worker nearly impossible.
And Joanna’s case was complicated by the fact that she had been transferred to a second employer without her family’s knowledge.
The official records pointed to one household.
Joanna >> >> was in another.
The trail was cold before anyone even started looking.
A Filipino labor officer in Kuwait was later recalled after it was revealed that he had failed to adequately respond to the Demafelis family’s reports.
The family had done everything they could think of.
They had gone to every office, made every call, filed every form, and the system had failed them completely.
Absolutely.
>> >> Without exception.
Meanwhile, in the apartment in Al Shaab, Joanna Demafelis was already dead.
She is believed to have died sometime in late 2016, most likely in September.
The exact date has never been established with certainty.
What is known is that in November 2016, Nada Essam Asaf and Mona Hassoun left Kuwait with their children.
They abandoned the apartment.
They left the furniture, the dishes, the clothes.
They left the freezer, and they left Joanna inside it.
They fled to Syria, Hassoun’s home country.
Whether they left because they knew what they had done and feared discovery, or because of the financial troubles that would later bring authorities to the apartment, or both, is not entirely clear.
>> >> What is clear is that they left a dead woman in their freezer and walked away.
They took their children and their passports, and they crossed a border, and they disappeared.
For over a year after they left, the apartment sat empty.
The freezer hummed.
Joanna’s body lay inside it, and her family kept calling.
Think about that silence.
Think about it in terms of days.
From September 2016, when Joanna is believed to have died, to February 6th, 2018, when her body was discovered, is approximately 520 days.
520 days of silence.
520 days of Eva De Maffei trying to reach her daughter.
520 days of Joyce De Maffei wondering why her aid had stopped calling.
520 days of a family suspended between hope and despair, unable to grieve because they did not know there was anything to grieve, unable to move forward because they could not accept that Joanna was simply gone.
The cruelty of those 500 days is almost incomprehensible.
Not the physical cruelty, that came before, in the apartment, in whatever happened between Joanna and her employers in the months and weeks before she died.
The cruelty of the silence was different.
It was the cruelty of not knowing, of being trapped in an indefinite present tense, where your daughter, your sister, your aid is simultaneously alive and dead, missing and maybe fine, possibly hurt, and possibly just out of phone credit.
The cruelty of having to wake up every morning and face the same unanswered question, “Where is she? >> >> Why has she stopped calling? Is she okay? Is she alive?” On February 6th, 2018, Kuwaiti authorities entered the abandoned apartment in Al Sharq.
They were there because of the unpaid debts.
The landlord wanted the unit cleared.
There were legal proceedings related to bad checks written by Nader Essam Assaf, who was already wanted in Kuwait on suspicion of financial fraud.
The authorities were not looking for a body.
They were looking for evidence related to a civil dispute.
When they opened the freezer, the case became something else entirely.
The body inside was frozen solid.
Despite this, the physical evidence was unmistakable.
The marks of violence were preserved by the cold as clearly as if they had been inflicted hours rather than years earlier.
>> >> The woman had been severely beaten.
Her ribs were broken.
There was internal hemorrhaging.
There were ligature marks or compression injuries consistent with strangulation.
She had been tortured.
That was the word Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte would use when he saw the photographs.
Torture marks.
The identification process was swift.
Kuwaiti authorities were able to determine relatively quickly that the body was that of a Filipina domestic worker.
Through dental records, documentation found in the apartment, and coordination with Philippine authorities, she was identified as Joanna Daniela Demafelis, born in 1988, deployed to Kuwait in May 2014 through Our Lady of Mount Carmel Global E Human Resources Incorporated.
The woman whose family had been searching for her for nearly 2 years.
The woman who had been right there in that apartment the entire time.
The news broke in the Philippines like a detonation.
The story had every element that could inflame public rage.
A young woman from a poor family.
A natural disaster that drove her overseas.
A system designed to exploit her vulnerability.
Employers who tortured and killed her.
A body hidden in a freezer.
A government that failed to find her despite her family’s desperate pleas.
And the underlying reality that everyone already knew but no one wanted to confront.
That Joanna’s story was not unique.
That she was one of hundreds of thousands of Filipina women working under similar conditions across the Gulf.
That the system that killed her was still operating, >> >> still processing workers, still collecting fees, still sending women into homes where they had no rights, no recourse, and no way out.
The Philippine Embassy in Kuwait recorded 6,000 cases of abuse among Filipina domestic workers in 2017 alone.
6,000.
That is not a typo.
6,000 reported cases in a single year in a single country.
And those were only the ones that were reported.
The actual number is certainly higher, perhaps much higher, because reporting abuse requires access to a phone, knowledge of the embassy’s location, the ability to leave the house, and the willingness to risk deportation.
Many workers had none of these things.
In the same period around Joanna’s case, at least six other Filipino workers had died in Kuwait under suspicious circumstances.
Some had been ruled suicides.
Some had injuries inconsistent with their reported causes of death.
The Philippine government was investigating.
The Filipino public was enraged, and then the photographs of Joanna’s body emerged, and the rage became something that could not be contained.
President Rodrigo Duterte responded with the kind of volcanic, profanity-laced fury that had become his political trademark.
He called Joanna’s death a national shame.
He ordered an immediate ban on the deployment of Filipino workers to Kuwait.
He offered free flights home for any of the approximately 10,900 Filipinos who had overstayed their visas in the country.
He dispatched commercial aircraft to bring them back.
He stood before cameras and declared that he would sell his soul to the devil to bring home workers who were being abused.
The deployment ban took effect on February 12th, 2018.
The Department of Labor and Employment stopped processing deployment certificates for Kuwait-bound workers.
>> >> Repatriation flights were organized.
On February 11th, 400 workers flew home.
On February 12th, 150 more.
On February 13th, another 250.
The numbers >> >> kept growing.
The operation was massive and chaotic and driven as much by political calculation as by genuine concern for worker welfare.
But it was also, for the thousands of workers who took those flights home, real, it was a way out.
But for Joanna, there was no way out.
There had not been one for a very long time.
On February 12th, >> >> 2018, 6 days after her body was discovered, Joanna’s remains arrived in the Philippines.
She landed at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila in a wooden crate, not a casket, a crate, the kind used for cargo shipments.
Her sister Jessica was waiting at the airport’s cargo area.
The images from that day are difficult to describe without the risk of turning someone’s grief into a spectacle.
So, the facts will have to speak for themselves.
Jessica Demafelis broke into tears the moment the crate was wheeled into view.
She threw herself at it.
She had to be pulled back and consoled.
Joanna’s brother Joejit stood nearby weeping quietly, unable to speak.
Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano stood with the family and said a prayer.
Joejit, when he finally spoke to reporters, said only this, “I hope my sister will be given justice.
” From Manila, Joanna’s remains were flown to Iloilo.
The plane, Philippine Airlines flight PR 2130N, landed at Iloilo International Airport in Cabatuan town at 5:52 in the morning on Saturday, February 17.
More than 80 of Joanna’s relatives and townmates had left Sara at 2:00 in the morning to make the journey to the airport.
They wore white shirts.
They held up streamers calling for justice.
They waited in the cargo area.
When the wooden box was unloaded, Joanna’s mother Eva pounded on it with her fists and collapsed.
She said over and over, “I cannot accept it.
I cannot accept it.
” Joanna’s youngest sister Joyce, the one whose criminology tuition Joanna had been paying, the one who had dropped out when the money stopped coming, threw herself against the box and screamed.
“Boogtor, eight.
Boogtor, wake up, sister.
Wake up.
” A convoy of approximately 30 vehicles escorted the hearse from the airport to the town of Ajuy, and from there to Barangay Ferraris, where Joanna had grown up.
The drive took almost 2 hours.
Along the highway, Ilonggos lined the road to pay their respects.
People who had never met Joanna Demafelis stood on the shoulder and watched the procession pass.
She had become a symbol, the latest and most visceral symbol of the injustice that millions of Filipino workers face every day.
Joanna’s aunt Rosella spoke to reporters outside the funeral parlor.
She said Joanna had only ever wanted a good life for her family.
That was all she had dreamed of, a good life for her family.
>> >> And now she was home, in a box.
The wake was held in Ferraris’ village.
>> >> It lasted 2 weeks.
During that time, the entire machinery of the Philippine government descended on that small farming community.
The Overseas Workers Welfare Administration >> >> sent representatives.
The Department of Social Welfare and Development visited and noted that Joanna’s parents were both senior citizens, that they were beneficiaries of the government’s social pension program, and that they were caring for Joanna’s nephew, a child named Ralph John.
The government agencies that had failed to find Joanna while she was alive now showed up to process her death.
On February 22, President Duterte himself flew to Iloilo.
He arrived at the wake in Barangay Ferraris at 3:32 in the afternoon.
He extended his condolences to the family.
He presented them with 500,000 pesos from the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, on top of the 100,000 that had already been given.
>> >> He gave life insurance coverage worth 15,000 US dollars.
He gave each of Joanna’s parents and siblings a cell phone, and he made a promise he would help finish the construction of the family home, the one that had been destroyed by Typhoon Yolanda over four years earlier.
He would help redeem the approximately three hectares of rice land that the family had pawned.
It was an extraordinary scene.
The president of a country standing in a farmer’s house in a village of perhaps a few hundred people handing out cell phones and cash to the family of a maid.
The political dimensions of the gesture were obvious.
Duterte was using Joanna’s death to burnish his image as a defender of the Filipino poor, as a strong man who would stand up to wealthy Gulf nations.
The deployment ban was as much about domestic politics as it was about worker protection, but the grief of the Demafelis family was not political.
>> >> Their loss was not a gesture.
Their daughter was dead.
Their sister was dead.
No amount of government money or presidential attention was going to bring her back.
While Duterte was at the wake, the manhunt for Joanna’s killers was already underway.
Kuwaiti authorities, embarrassed by the international attention and under pressure from both the Philippine government and their own media, moved quickly.
They coordinated with Interpol to issue red notices for Nader Essam Assef and Mona Hassoun, who were believed to have fled to Syria after leaving Kuwait >> >> in November 2016.
The pursuit moved across borders and through the tangled geopolitics of the Middle East.
Syria in 2018 was in the seventh year of its civil war.
Damascus was under the control of the Assad government.
Lebanon, next door, was its own complicated patchwork of political factions.
Locating a Lebanese man and his Syrian wife somewhere in that landscape was not a simple task, but Interpol found them.
Both of them, in Damascus.
On February 22, >> >> the same day Duterte was visiting Joanna’s wake in Iloilo, the Philippine Foreign Secretary announced that Nader Essam Assef had been arrested.
Syrian authorities had taken him into custody and immediately transferred him to Lebanon because of his Lebanese citizenship.
His wife, Mona Hassoun, was arrested in Damascus and remained in Syrian custody.
Assef’s family, when contacted by Kuwaiti media, made statements that bordered on the surreal.
His paternal aunt, who said she had raised him, told the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Rai that it was impossible.
“My nephew would never kill anyone.
” His cousin went further, suggesting that Hassoun was behind the crime.
“She is edgy,” the cousin said, “and he always feared her.
” He once let her kick his mother from their house in Kuwait.
Whether one or both of them killed Joanna, or who struck the blows and who watched, was for the courts to determine.
The physical evidence, the broken ribs, the internal bleeding, the strangulation marks, suggested sustained and severe abuse over an extended period, culminating in death.
This was not a single act of violence.
This was a pattern, a regime of cruelty that ended in murder.
On April 1st, 2018, a Kuwaiti criminal court convicted both Nader Essam Assef and Mona Hassoun of murder.
The trial was conducted in absentia since both defendants were in custody in other countries.
The sentence was death by hanging.
>> >> The Philippine government welcomed the verdict.
Foreign Secretary Cayetano called it a very important development in the quest for justice for Joanna.
The Kuwaiti government pointed to the swift proceedings as evidence of its commitment to protecting foreign workers.
The diplomatic crisis that had erupted between the two countries weighed, with Manila banning worker deployments >> >> and Kuwait accusing the Philippines of violating its sovereignty after Filipino embassy staff were filmed helping domestic workers escape from abusive employers began to cool, but the legal proceedings were far from over because Assef and Hasoun were not in Kuwait.
>> >> The death sentences could not be immediately carried out.
Each defendant faced separate proceedings in their home countries.
In Lebanon, Assef was interrogated by the General Security Directorate and faced murder charges under Lebanese law.
In Syria, Hasoun was tried by the Syrian District Criminal Court.
In September 2019, more than a year and a half after Joanna’s body was discovered, >> >> the Syrian court convicted Hasoun of murder.
The expected sentence was between 8 and 15 years in prison, >> >> a significantly lighter punishment than the death sentence handed down in Kuwait.
The gap between those two sentences, death by hanging in Kuwait and 8 to 15 years in Syria, captures something about the uneven distribution of justice across borders.
Joanna’s body was found in Kuwait.
Joanna was killed in Kuwait, but her killers were tried in three different countries under three different legal systems, >> >> and the outcomes varied enormously.
The Kuwaiti death sentence was symbolic since neither defendant was in Kuwaiti custody.
The Syrian and Lebanese proceedings were real in the sense that the defendants were physically present in the courtrooms, but the sentences reflected the legal frameworks and political realities of countries that were not primarily invested in the fate of a Filipino domestic worker.
Whether either Assef or Hasoun will ever actually serve a full sentence, or whether the passage of time and the chaos of Middle Eastern geopolitics will erode whatever accountability the courts imposed >> >> remains an open question.
Justice for Joanna, the phrase her brother Joe Jade spoke at Manila airport, the words printed on the streamers her family held at Iloilo Airport may ultimately prove to be more of an aspiration than a reality.
The The diplomatic fallout between the Philippines and Kuwait meanwhile was resolved with a document.
On May 11th, 2018, representatives of both countries signed a memorandum of understanding entitled agreement on the employment of domestic workers.
The agreement stipulated that employers in Kuwait could no longer confiscate their workers’ passports or travel documents.
Workers would be entitled to use their mobile phones.
They would be provided food, housing, clothing, and health insurance by their employers.
They would receive at least one day off per week.
They could not be transferred to another employer without their consent or the approval of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration.
On paper, these were significant reforms.
They addressed, point by point, the exact mechanisms of control that had made Joanna’s life in Kuwait a prison.
Passport confiscation, phone restrictions, no days off, involuntary transfers.
If these provisions had been in place and enforced when Joanna arrived in Kuwait in 2014, her story might have been different.
She might have been able to call home.
She might have been able to leave.
She might have been able to walk out the door of that apartment and go to the Philippine Embassy and say, “I need help.
I need to go home.
” But the agreement was signed in May 2018.
Joanna had been dead since 2016, and the enforcement of such agreements in the Gulf states, where the kafala system remains deeply entrenched despite incremental reforms, is notoriously inconsistent.
The words on the paper were a response to Joanna’s death.
They were not a guarantee that her story would not be repeated.
The deployment ban was eventually lifted.
Philippino workers began returning to Kuwait.
The economic gravity that pulls millions of people from the Philippines to the Gulf did not pause because one woman died in a freezer.
The salary comparison, the 10 to 1 ratio, did not change.
The poverty in provinces like Iloilo did not change.
The typhoons did not stop coming.
The recruitment agencies did not stop recruiting.
The planes did not stop flying.
Over 250,000 Filipinos were working in Kuwait at the time of Joanna’s death.
>> >> At least 60% of them were domestic workers, women who lived in the homes of their employers, who cooked and cleaned, and raised other people’s children, who slept in whatever corner was assigned to them, who sent money home every month so their own children could eat and go to school.
Women whose passports may or may not have been in their own possession.
Women whose phone access may or may not have been restricted.
Women whose daily reality was shaped by the temperament and character of their employers, >> >> which is to say, by luck.
Some of those women had good employers.
Some were treated with dignity and respect.
Some earned their salaries on time, had their own rooms, were given days off, >> >> were allowed to call home whenever they wanted.
This must be said because it is true, and because the story of migrant domestic labor in the Gulf is not a story in which every employer is a monster.
Most are not, but the system, the kafala system, is designed in such a way that when an employer is a monster, the worker has no escape.
The system does not protect against the worst-case scenario.
It enables it.
The confiscation of passports, the elimination of independent mobility, the tying of legal status to a single sponsor, the absence of meaningful government oversight, the geographical and cultural isolation, >> >> the language barriers, the lack of access to legal representation.
All of these features of the system create the the under which abuse can occur and escalate without detection, without intervention, without consequence, until a body is found in a freezer.
Joanna Demafelis was buried on March 3rd, 2018 at Virgin Island Cemetery in Sara, Iloilo.
She had been home, in one sense or another, for about 2 weeks.
The wooden box that arrived at Manila Airport had traveled from Kuwait City to Manila, from Manila to Iloilo, from the airport to the funeral parlor, from the funeral parlor to Barangay Ferraris, and finally to the cemetery.
A journey of thousands of miles for a woman who had only ever wanted to travel those miles in the other direction, who had only ever wanted to go abroad, earn money, and come home.
After the burial, the media attention faded.
The diplomats signed their agreement.
The deployment ban was lifted.
The recruitment agencies reopened, or new ones opened to replace the old ones.
The planes resumed their flights to Kuwait City.
The cycle continued.
But in Barangay Ferraris, nothing resumed.
Nothing continued.
For Crisanto and Eva Demafelis, for Joaget and Jessica and Joyce and Joaget and Juliet and the rest of the nine siblings, the world had been permanently altered.
One of them was gone.
The sixth of nine.
The quiet one.
The one who smiled even when she was angry.
The one who had messaged her aunt after the typhoon and asked for help going abroad.
The one who had said yes to Kuwait because the money would change everything.
The one who had stopped calling in 2016 and never called again.
Joyce, the youngest, never finished her criminology degree.
She had wanted to be a police officer.
Joanna was going to make that possible.
>> >> That was the plan.
That was the whole reason for Kuwait.
10 times the salary.
Enough to rebuild the house and pay the tuition, and clear the debts, and give the family a life that the rice paddies of Iloilo could not provide.
The plan was simple.
The plan was the same plan that millions of families across the Philippines had made, were making, would continue to make.
Send one family member abroad, pool the money, build something better.
The plan did not account for Nida Esam Asaf and Mona Hassoun.
The plan did not account for the kafala system.
The plan did not account for the silence that begins when a phone stops ringing in a distant country, and no one can tell you why.
There is a specific kind of grief that belongs to the families of overseas workers who die abroad.
It is different from other forms of grief because it contains within it a particular kind of guilt.
The family sent her.
The family supported her decision.
The family needed the money.
And so, the grief is tangled up with the knowledge that the very thing that killed her was the thing the family asked her to do.
Go abroad.
Earn money.
Come home.
The first two happened.
The third did not.
No one in the Demafeliz family asked Joanna to go to Kuwait so that she could be beaten and strangled and stuffed into a freezer.
That goes without saying.
But, the silence from which that sentence emerges, the silence that every family of every overseas worker lives with >> >> is the silence of a system that asks the poorest people in one country to entrust their lives to the wealthiest people in another country with no meaningful in between.
The salary comparison makes the decision feel rational.
10 times the money.
Of course, you go.
Of course, you say yes.
What kind of daughter, what kind of sister would say no when the family home is destroyed and the debts are mounting and your youngest sister needs tuition money? You go.
You go because you love them.
You go because the math makes sense.
You go because everyone else is going and coming back with money >> >> and building houses and buying motorcycles and sending their children to college.
And then, one day the phone stops ringing and no one can tell you why.
The Philippine government made promises after Joanna’s death, better protection for workers abroad, better monitoring, better coordination between agencies, better response times when families report that a worker has gone missing.
These promises were sincere in the moment and largely forgotten in the months that followed.
The structural conditions that produced Joanna’s, the poverty, the lack of domestic employment, the enormous demand for cheap domestic labor in the Gulf, the profit motive of recruitment agencies, the kafala system, none of these conditions changed in any fundamental way.
The memorandum of understanding with Kuwait >> >> was a step, a small, paper-thin step.
The workers who returned to Kuwait after the ban was lifted returned to the same system, softened slightly at the edges by new rules that may or may not be enforced.
In the Gulf, over 620,000 migrant domestic workers were employed in Kuwait alone at the time of Joanna’s death.
90% of Kuwaiti households employed a foreign domestic worker.
The number across all Gulf states, >> >> including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman, runs into the millions.
These workers come from the Philippines, from Indonesia, from Sri Lanka, from Ethiopia, from Nepal, from Bangladesh, from India.
They are overwhelmingly female.
They are overwhelmingly poor and they are overwhelmingly invisible, >> >> working behind the closed doors of private homes, outside the reach of labor inspectors, outside the view of the public, outside the protection of laws that were written for citizens, not for servants.
The word servant is not used casually here.
It is the word that most accurately describes the legal and social position of a domestic worker under the kafala system.
Not employee, not contractor, not staff, servant.
A person whose existence in the country is contingent upon the goodwill of a single sponsor.
A person who can be kept or discarded, paid or unpaid, cherished or brutalized, depending entirely on who they work for.
A person whose humanity is, in the eyes of the system, secondary to their utility.
>> >> Joana Demafelis was not a statistic.
She was not a diplomatic incident.
She was a woman from Sara, Iloilo.
She graduated from Sara National High School.
She worked in Parañaque.
She survived Typhoon Yolanda.
She asked her aunt for help going abroad because her family needed money and she could earn 10 times as much in Kuwait as she could at home.
She was quiet.
She was shy.
She smiled even when she was angry.
She loved her sister Joyce and wanted her to finish college and become a police officer.
She promised to come home in 2018.
She did come home in 2018, but not the way she meant to, not the way anyone meant for her to.
She came home in a wooden box, wheeled through the cargo area of Ninoy Aquino International Airport, while her sister screamed and her brother wept and the foreign secretary stood awkwardly to one side and said a prayer.
She came home to Iloilo on a morning flight while 80 of her relatives waited in the pre-dawn darkness.
She came home along a highway lined with strangers paying their respects.
She came home to Barangay Ferraris where the avocado tree was gone and the house was still being rebuilt and her parents stood in the yard and watched the procession arrive and Joyce, the youngest, the one who wanted to be a police officer, the one who had dropped out of school when the money stopped coming, threw herself at the box and screamed in Ilonggo, the language of their province, the language of their childhood, the language Joanna spoke before she ever heard a word of Arabic.
“Bougtar, eight.
Bougtar, wake up, sister.
Wake up.
The apartment in Al Sharq has been cleared now.
The freezer is gone.
Whatever remained of Joanna’s presence in those rooms, a hairpin, a shoe, a fingerprint on a doorframe, has been scrubbed away or discarded.
The apartment is just an apartment again.
Four walls, a kitchen, a bathroom, rooms that will be rented to someone else who will cook in the same kitchen and sleep in the same rooms and never know what happened there.
The system that brought Joanna to that apartment is still running.
The planes still fly from Manila to Kuwait City.
The recruitment agencies still operate out of offices in Parañaque and Makati and Quezon City.
The salary comparison is still ties workers to their sponsors.
Passports are still confiscated.
Phone access is still restricted.
Days off are still denied.
The families back home still wait for calls that come on Sundays >> >> or every other week or once a month or less and less frequently and then not at all.
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