Her husband will drive some 50–60 kms on the Aklan West Road through the towns of Ibajay and Tangalan, past rolling green hills and along blissful coastal roads all the way to the airport. Tourists travel the same route in reverse to get to the Philippines’ island paradise of Boracay. Marifel and her husband get to the airport early enough to ensure she is the first person on the flight —but there they sit and wait until the last person has checked in for the Tiger Airways flight to Singapore. As today is the weekend before Chinese New Year — Kalibo is packed with holiday makers.

When all the passengers have checked in, Marifel calmly kisses her husband goodbye, walks into the airport, presents her booking details and coasts through immigration. She might look like a late boarder — the person who got her timings wrong — but she’s not: all of this is the meticulous habit of someone who has done this journey many times before as a foreign worker in Singapore.

This trip is slightly different in that Marifel is travelling back with her employer: me.

I hired her back in 2010 when I moved to Singapore with my wife and baby to work as a journalist. She first started working in Singapore 11 years ago. The decision to leave her family and move overseas wasn’t made by choice, but necessity. Daily life had become a struggle for her family: on occasion they ran out of milk and food for their children; sometimes they couldn’t pay their electricity bill. In the end, something — or rather someone — had to give.

We lived in a condo in Singapore called The Aberdeen, which is in Boon Keng, just off Serangoon Road. (Photo by Tom White)

When she and her husband decided to look for work overseas, it broke their hearts. In the frantic days after Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 she wrote this piece for the New York Times about her decision to move: “We couldn’t afford basic things like food or electricity. I knew that it would be me who moved; I knew it was the best thing for me to find a job overseas. In my mind, this is all for the sake of giving my children a good life, and I am happy to have made that sacrifice,” she wrote.

I have asked myself this many times over the last few years: how do you tell your children that you’re going away when you don’t know when you’ll be coming back?

To make her leaving home easier on the children, amid the sobbing and wailing, Marifel told them that she was heading off to buy them some toys. She didn’t return. Her youngest son was just six months old when she left. The next time she laid eyes on him he was nearly three years old.

Her first week in Singapore was incredibly difficult. She stayed with her employment agent in a dorm full of other women and was paralysed with homesickness. “Sometimes the tears rolled down my cheeks without me even noticing,” she wrote in this blog post for the migrant charity Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2). “My breasts were swollen because I was still breastfeeding, so every night I pumped them. It was so painful. I was crying in pain, but I could do nothing about it; I needed to be strong and face my new life with confidence, knowing that all my suffering was for my beloved family.”