At first, Joojoo told Dana that things were going well in northern
Jordan. She sent Dana Facebook and WhatsApp messages almost every day,
filled with talk of getting a new, better-paying job and more money for
her children back in the Philippines. But then Joojoo started to talk
about bleeding. “She says, ‘I’m tired, no food, just bread and one
cheese, and my period is not stopping,’ ” Dana recalled. In cryptic
conversations, Joojoo said that the head of her new employment agency
didn’t believe that she was sick and wouldn’t let her see a doctor. “I
tell her, ‘Eat. Be strong. Don’t think too much. God take care of you,’
” Dana, who is also a Filipina migrant worker in Jordan, said. On
February 5th, Joojoo said that her agency had promised to buy her a
ticket back to the Philippines. The following day, Dana wrote to Joojoo,
but didn’t receive a response. Three days later, Dana heard from a
friend of Joojoo’s family, who had been contacted by the Philippine
Embassy. Joojoo was dead.

“I don’t want to believe,” Dana told me in a recent interview. The two
young women, whom Dana asked not be named for safety reaons, had met in
an apartment building in Amman where dozens of Filipina domestic workers
lived and quickly become friends. Unable to accept that Joojoo was dead,
Dana went to Prince Hamzah Hospital, in Amman, where Joojoo’s body had
been transferred from northern Jordan, and insisted on seeing her
friend’s corpse. The doctors uncovered only the face, but it was Joojoo.
“I just cry and fall down,” Dana recalled. “I don’t know if they killed
her or what, because she is strong.”

Joojoo was admitted to Jerash Hospital on February 6th with “excessive
menstrual bleeding,” according to a copy of a Jordanian police report.
Doctors found that she was seven weeks pregnant, but the embryo was
already dead. They administered antibiotics, to no avail. That night,
Joojoo died. The medical records said that she had died from a pelvic
infection resulting from incomplete abortion, which can be natural or
self-induced. Abortion is illegal in Jordan, though Cytotec, an
abortion-inducing medication that doctors recommend taking only with
medical supervision, is available on the black market. Some of Joojoo’s
friends suspected that she had taken Cytotec, but no one knew for
sure—Joojoo hadn’t even told anyone she was pregnant. Telling would have
meant risking arrest, deportation, and losing her chances of going back
to work.

Sexual and reproductive health is a rarely discussed aspect of migrant
women’s vulnerabilities. In Jordan’s conservative society, women’s
bodies are associated with family “honor.” Only two weeks ago, Jordan’s
parliament repealed a law that allowed rapists to walk free from
punishment if they married their victims; women’s-rights advocates had
spent more than a decade fighting for that change. Migrant women’s
rights are an even lower priority, which means sexually exploited women
will try to take care of their own problems, however dangerous that may
be.

An estimated 1.2 million male and female migrant workers live in Jordan,
according to
Tamkeen,
a Jordanian legal-aid group for migrants, only a quarter of whom have
work permits. More than fifty thousand are migrant domestic workers,
mostly women from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Kenya.
Like Joojoo, many run away from the employers who sponsor their initial
visas, in the hopes of increasing their low pay. “The majority are
running not because people treat them badly but because they want to get
more money,” Mohammad al-Khateeb, a Ministry of Labor spokesperson, told
me. Hayder al-Shboul, the director of Jordanian public security’s
anti-trafficking unit, agreed. “They breach the law to do part-time
work, and they make good money,” Shboul said.

But migrant workers in Jordan are legally dependent on the sponsor of
their visa—if they leave that employer, their immigration papers become
invalid, and they are vulnerable to arrest and deportation. Many
migrants want to work legally, Linda al-Kalash, the director of Tamkeen,
told me, but they cannot change employers without the sponsor’s
agreement, which migrants almost never get. And if a migrant woman is
beaten or sexually harassed her choices are to endure it or to run away
and face potential arrest and deportation.

Similar sponsorship systems exist across the Middle East, creating a
region-wide power imbalance between employers and migrants that often
leads to migrant abuse, or even death. In nearby Lebanon, migrant
domestic workers are dying at a rate of two per week, Lebanese
government officials told
me.
In Jordan, the number of migrant deaths is unknown. I asked Kalash if
there should be a public report of any death in the kingdom. “If we
follow up, then yes, but, if not, then no,” she said. There’s a problem
with the public mentality toward these migrants, she added. “They regard
these people not as human, and they don’t care.”

I first heard about Joojoo while talking to another Filipina migrant
named Rose, who lived in the same apartment building as Joojoo and Dana,
in Amman. We met in Rose’s apartment, a dark, musty two-room unit behind
a grocery called Manila Market, in central Amman. The grocery sits in
front of a litter-strewn staircase connecting twenty-two apartment
units, all of which belong to Rose’s boyfriend, Abu Omar, a
thirty-seven-year-old married man from the Jordanian city of Salt. Abu
Omar rents his apartments exclusively to Filipinas, mostly runaways,some of whom have been his girlfriends. “I’m a simple person. I have a
white heart, especially with the girl. I don’t need to use her for the
sex or the money,” Abu Omar told me in a recent interview. He had been
renting to Filipinas for almost eleven years, he said. “Maybe two
hundred and fifty out of my three hundred Facebook friends are
Filipinas. I hear too many stories. I try to help them.”

Abu Omar said that he “helped” runaways by arranging their papers,
offering a place to stay, and intimidating the men who abused them. One
of his ex-girlfriends, for example, had run away from her madam and was
arrested and then released, only to have a policeman keep her in his
home for sex and money. When Abu Omar heard about this case, he said
that he paid to have the girl’s residency and work permit sponsored
under his name. He also claimed to have beaten up the policeman instead
of reporting him to higher authorities. “I don’t like the police way,
the government way,” he told me. Abu Omar took the Filipina in,
providing rent and food while she worked for another madam. His
generosity ended, he said, when his girlfriend had sex with the madam’s
husband.

“She don’t want to lose the job. She think that if she don’t allow man
to make sex with her, maybe they will kick her out of the work,” Abu
Omar told me. He had called the madam’s husband to confirm. “The husband
said, ‘I want to tell you something. If the girl doesn’t want sex,
nobody can make her.’ It’s true. Excuse me, you cannot open your legs if
you don’t want it. Right? And he told me it’s not the first time.” The
husband’s explanation made sense to Abu Omar, so he cancelled the
girlfriend’s papers and had her deported to the Philippines. “Until this
moment, she calls me and says, ‘Baby, I want to come back to you.’ I
say, ‘No way, game over for you,’ ” Abu Omar said, raising his eyebrows
and snorting. Rose sat next to him on the couch, looking at her phone,
silent.

Joojoo’s death came as a shock to all the residents of the Manila Market
building, because they’d known her as a survivor, even a defender of
other Filipina women. Claire, a twenty-six-year-old friend of Joojoo’s
who asked that her real name not be used, told me that Joojoo had
protected her when men approached her on the street. “If some Arab
people ask me, ‘What’s your name? Can I get your number?’ she always
shout, ‘No! She’s my sister, khalas, don’t talk to my sister,’ ”
Claire told me. Sitting in a Filipino restaurant near Manila Market,
Claire said that she had only been in Jordan for a year but was planning
to leave in March. She said that she had run away from an employer who
forced her to clean four houses instead of the one house in her
contract, and to take care of the children on her day off as well.
Claire didn’t take taxis, she said, because a driver had once tried to
grope her. She said that it reminded her of her ex-husband, who had
locked her and her daughters in their house until he came home at night,
angry and drugged. Claire’s neighbors had rescued her in the
Philippines, and, here in Jordan, Joojoo was her safety. “She is stand
like my sister here. If I have problem, I speak alone to Ati Joojoo and
she always advice to me,” Claire told me, using the Tagalog word for
“sister.” “She tell me like that, don’t speak to the Arab men, because I
know what’s Arab. I tell her it’s O.K.”

Rose told me about another friend, whom she called Jenny. One night,
Jenny called in a panic, at 1 A.M., and asked Rose to come to her
apartment. When Rose arrived, she learned that Jenny had taken six
tablets of Cytotec. Rose wanted to leave, but it was too late. Jenny’s
face was white, as pale as the bedsheets were before she soaked them
through with blood. Rose poured Jenny water, wiping her face as she
shivered and cried. “Why you cry, it’s pain? You’re the one who do
that,” she recalled barking at her friend. “You are crazy. You want to
die here?” Rose told me that she had wanted to slap Jenny. She should
have known better, especially since she was Muslim and married back home
in the Philippines. Jenny’s former boyfriend was an undocumented
Egyptian migrant who had now disappeared, and neither she nor Rose had
legal papers in Jordan.

“If she die, what will we do? All of us will go to jail,” Rose told me.
If Jenny’s blood pressure dropped below seventy over sixty, Rose decided
that she would take her to the hospital and leave her there. The doctors
would ask questions that were sure to land both women in prison: if not
for abortion, then for adultery, and, if not for that, then for working
in Jordan illegally. Better to bleed, which Jenny did for a week as Rose
brought her fruit and vitamins. Jenny survived and went back to work in
a hotel, but was later caught by the police, imprisoned for a month, and
then deported to the Philippines. “I said that’s your bad luck, you’re
in Jordan,” Rose told me. “That’s your very bad luck.”

Many migrant domestic workers choose to work informally, despite their
vulnerabilities, because they have worse problems at home. When I was
alone with Rose, she told me that her father had molested her
half-sister and tried to rape her when she was eighteen. “I will not go
back until my father is dead,” she said. Dana also told me about bad
experiences with men when we met in her apartment, its blue walls
decorated with photos of her twelve- and fourteen-year-old daughters in
the Philippines. Dana went abroad when she was nineteen, working first
in Kuwait and then in Oman, where an employer beat her for refusing to
change a baby’s diapers while she was sick. At first, Dana sent money
home to her husband, but the first time that she returned from Kuwait
neighbors told her that he had spent it all on prostitutes.

“He go happy-happy here and there,” Dana told me, feeding her tank of
goldfish. “When I go home, I find no money. My neighbors told me what he
did.” Now she was working at a beauty salon in Amman and sending money
directly to her oldest daughter. Dana had calculated that in six years
she would have enough money to pay for the girl’s university education.
“I’ll be thirty-seven then, still young. Then I will not come back
here,” she said.

Joojoo had also kept working, rather than returning to the Philippines,
because she needed money for her children, Dana told me. She’d found a
waitressing job at a restaurant called La Storia, near Mount Nebo, a
tourist site where Moses supposedly once looked over the promised land.
Joojoo had been friendly and popular with customers, I learned from her
boss, the restaurant manager Bashar Twal. “She was very funny, always
laughing, joking,” Twal told me. Joojoo had told him that she was
working as a housemaid before, but that her family had sold her to
another household. Her death was a shock and mystery, he said, to him
and to her friends. Twal also told me that Joojoo had a Syrian boyfriend
named Emad. They’d been in touch by phone, and Twal had asked about
Joojoo’s death. Emad claimed not to know what happened.

Joojoo kept secrets, both Claire and Dana told me. Dana wasn’t even sure
if she had a boyfriend. Claire knew about Emad, but she thought he had
gone back to Syria. Joojoo’s family hadn’t known that she was a runaway,
and Claire and Dana did not know that she was behind in paying rent. But
Joojoo had been pregnant once before, Abu Omar said. Emad had called him
once, about seven months ago, and asked for money to get rid of a baby.
There are underground pills and doctors who will help for enough money,
although Abu Omar stressed that he had not given any to Emad. “No way.
It’s killing. I don’t want to kill baby, even it’s not complete,” he
said. But he had asked Joojoo about it later. “She said, ‘It’s true, I
made this like that.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

When I called the number Twal gave me for Emad, the line was
disconnected. Emad had changed his phone number, but Abu Omar was able
to track it down. Emad picked up and spoke in wheezy Arabic, coughing
and huffing like he was sick. I asked if we could meet to talk about
Joojoo.“Not today,” he said. He never picked up his phone again.

Claire told me that Joojoo had been forced to leave Amman in January.
They had come home late from a party, after 2 A.M., and hadn’t even
gotten out of their taxi when police pulled over and asked for their
I.D.s. Dana had her papers in order, but Joojoo did not because she was
no longer working for her original visa sponsor. So the police took
Joojoo to prison, and then a Jordanian employment agency bailed her out,
bringing her to a house in the northern city of Jerash and promising her
a job.

I finally confirmed the details of Joojoo’s case at a women’s shelter
run by the Philippine Embassy in Amman. Joojoo had come to Jordan on
August 3, 2015, had run away from her first employer in March, 2016, and
had been arrested in January, 2017. She had entered Jerash Hospital on
February 6th, due to excessive menstrual bleeding, according to the
official police report. Her medical report stated the cause: septic
abortion. According to freight records, the Embassy shipped her body
back to the Philippines on February 18th.

The agency that took Joojoo to Jerash was called al-Salam. Its office
was on the second floor of a downtown building, at the end of a narrow
hallway with a printout tacked to the door that read, in Arabic:

Sultan Abu Majid, the agency’s director, sat behind his desk in a gray
suit. “She didn’t admit she was pregnant. She said she had her period,”
he told me. Joojoo was complaining of cramps but wouldn’t go to the
hospital, he added. “We tried a hundred times to take her. She didn’t
accept. She said, ‘I’m fine, I know my situation.’ She was going to
travel the next day.” When they brought Joojoo to Jerash Hospital, on
February 6th, the doctors discovered her pregnancy. A Filipina nurse
asked her about the father. Joojoo only said that he was Syrian and out
of the country. They had scheduled a uterine evacuation for the next
morning, February 7th.

“I paid my own money, you know? We paid three hundred and fifty
Jordanian dinars”—five hundred dollars—“for that operation,” Abu Majid
told me. But Joojoo died before the morning, around 1 A.M. How did the
embryo die? Had Joojoo tried to perform an abortion herself? Did the
father know? Abu Majid shrugged. “She was a runaway. God knows.”