Spared a horrible execution, Manila maid turns top singer
Spared a horrible execution, Manila maid turns top singer
By Ruben Alabastro
MANILA (Reuters): Four years ago, she stood in tears before a court in the United Arab Emirates, scarcely 16 years old but already facing death by firing squad for killing her employer.
Today, Sarah Balabagan, the Philippines' most famous maid, has turned into one of the country's promising singers. She holds weekly concerts in Manila's shopping malls, dishing out songs of hope -- and of defiance.
"What took place that night was the worst thing that ever happened to me. If only there is a way I can forget," she said. "But whatever it is that has happened, my dream goes on."
On a July night in 1994 in the UAE oasis town of Al-Ain, the frail-looking, painfully shy Muslim Filipino stabbed her Arab employer 34 times because, she said, he had tried to rape her.
The killing occurred just seven weeks after Balabagan, then 15, arrived in the UAE to work as a maid. She joined more than four million other Filipinos forced by poverty at home to try their luck in foreign lands, many of them taking menial jobs.
Fourteen months after the killing, an Islamic court found Balabagan guilty of murder and sentenced her to death.
The case provoked international outrage and ignited appeals from Paris to Washington for clemency for a girl who said she had killed to defend her honor.
In a re-trial after a personal appeal for mercy from UAE President Sheikh Zaid bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the court set aside the death penalty and sentenced Balabagan to 100 lashes and a year in jail.
She received a hero's welcome when she returned to the Philippines in August 1996.
Two years after her homecoming, she began taking up singing lessons -- partly meant to be therapy after her nightmare in UAE.
But singing may well turn out to be a full-time career for her.
Butch Albarracin, founder of the Center for Pop Music school where Balabagan trains, sees a bright future for his young protege as "a singer for a cause" in a country where more than a third of a population of 70 million live in poverty.
"She would be singing to people who need to be encouraged to live, (who) need hope... who have problems in life," Albarracin told Reuters.
"These people will find a need for Sarah, look at Sarah as a hero... They look at her as a strong Filipino, a person who can defend herself... We are capitalizing on that image because now we certainly need a hero... And here comes Sarah to the rescue."
Hundreds of people -- students, professionals and housewives -- flocked to the lobby of Metromall in suburban Las Pinas city to hear Balabagan sing one recent afternoon.
Her most applauded number was a song a friend had written for her.
Titled You are a Filipino, it speaks of toughness in times of adversity, of the need to fight back if stepped on.
Her voice pierced with pain, Balabagan sang the song with her fist clenched.
As her voice floated across the mall, shoppers stopped and listened, trying to see in the young woman dressed in leather pants and body-hugging blouse a trace of the frightened, sobbing maid in UAE only a hair's-breadth away from death by firing squad.
But the maid was gone.
The 20-year-old singer stepped off the stage, flirted with a man in the audience, asking him if his wife was around, and sang him a love song.
"I am no longer embarrassed to appear before people. Before, I could not even look at them," she said.
Many times she has tried to block out what happened to her but the past is always there, she says.
"People see me and say, 'Ah, that's Sarah Balabagan. Wasn't she the one who was in jail, the one who killed, who stabbed someone to death.' I wish I can change that and that people will say instead, 'Isn't that Sarah? The singer?'"