The 26 September was another hot and humid day in the mountainous region of Lake Sebu, the Philippines, when Jerson Kues received an unexpected video call from an unknown number. On the line was a woman from Dubai, with news that would tear the father of four’s world apart. His wife, Vergie Tamfungan, was dead. The woman on the call stared back at him, expressionless. Kues had a thousand questions, but she refused to reveal any more information, not even her phone number. Just wait to be contacted for updates, she said, before abruptly ending the call.
Shock set in. Tamfungan had been planning to return to Lake Sebu in December after four years as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia. But in August she received a Facebook message from a Filipina recruitment agent she knew, asking if she wanted a domestic worker job in Dubai. The salary offered was much higher than she was currently earning, and she would also get a signing bonus, the recruiter said. It was too good to refuse.
With four children aged 10 to 17, Tamfungan had their education to fund and dreams of earning enough to build a modest family home in the Philippines. Excited, the 39-year-old accepted the job offer, and took a short flight from Riyadh to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, paid for by her recruiter.
These plans concerned her family. “We were worried about her, but we are poor,” says Zsa Zsa Sambulao, Tamfungan’s sister. They were close and spoke almost every day. Their last call was on 25 September and everything seemed fine. “We talked about happy things – life plans and her kids.” The next day, Tamfungan was dead.
The woman who called Kues with the devastating news was the recruiter who first messaged Tamfungan over Facebook in August. But Tamfungan’s family now have reason to believe she does not have a licence to operate as a recruitment agent – a legal requirement in the Philippines – and lured Tamfungan to Dubai through deception and false promises. Tamfungan had been staying in the agency’s accommodation and had not yet been placed in a house to work when she died.
“Most of the illegal recruiters in Dubai promise to give bonuses,” says Emily Chilagan, an anti-trafficking activist. “These bonuses never materialise.”
Tamfungan didn’t even know the name of the recruitment company who’d brought her to Dubai; she did not know the address of the accommodation where she was staying; and she did not have proper documentation as she entered the country on a tourist visa and without a work permit.
These unknown details are key for the family, not only to find out what happened to Tamfungan but in getting a swift response from the Philippine authorities. Weeks after her death, the family are still scrambling for information.
Filipinos wishing to work overseas must obtain permission from their government, which issues them with an overseas employment certificate. Then they are documented, making it easier for the worker or their family to access assistance when an incident happens, or tragedy strikes. Because she was recruited illegally, Tamfungan did not have an overseas employment certificate when she arrived in Dubai.
Family and friends set up a group chat to keep each other updated, exchanging leads and any snippets of information they could gather. “The migrant workers’ office in Dubai responded to the inquiry asking for the name and phone number of the recruitment agency. [The recruiter] won’t give it,” says one relative. “Someone mentioned to me yesterday that 200,000 pesos (£2,900) must be paid in Dubai to get her body back,” says another. “No new information today. What do we do?”
What happened to Tamfungan before her death is known as going “cross country” by the Filipino overseas worker community – when you leave an employer in one country for a job in another. The Philippine government’s Department of Migrant Workers Dubai office warned against cross-country employment this year, stating it is unlawful and amounted to “human trafficking”.
“Workers who use this kind of service face the risk of being charged exorbitant recruitment fees, unfair labour practices and fraudulent employment opportunities, among others,” it said.
The Guardian and Tamfungan’s family contacted the Philippine consulate in Dubai to ask for updates and confirmation on the situation but have not received a response.
About 10 million Filipinos work overseas to provide for their families, with the Gulf countries being the destination most of them choose. The Philippine government has called them “modern-day heroes” and the remittances they send home accounted for more than $36bn (£29.5bn) in 2022 – almost 9% of the country’s GDP.
Tamfungan’s home, Lake Sebu, is a rural municipality on the island of Mindanao, the Philippines’ poorest region. Houses in her neighbourhood are small and overcrowded bamboo and cinderblock structures with corrugated iron roofs, dotted among trees and untamed vegetation. The poverty cycle is difficult to break. A family’s one hope is if a parent can secure a manual job overseas. So, in 2019, Tamfungan got a job as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia, which paid $400 (£330) a month.
Tamfungan left school at 12, but she wanted better for her children. “It is the dream of every mother to see their children have a degree,” says Hasel Fungan, Tamfungan’s relative and neighbour. “She was so courageous to leave her family and work far away to improve their lives.”
About 10,000 migrant workers from Asia die every year in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and Kuwait. More than half of the deaths are effectively unexplained. There are serious and systemic issues with how the Gulf states investigate migrant worker deaths, according to a 2022 report by the Vital Signs Partnership, a coalition of NGOs focused on the rights of such workers.
“On the available evidence, more than half of migrant worker deaths are not explained, which is to say that deaths are certified without any reference to an underlying cause of death, instead using terms such as natural causes or cardiac arrest,” the report states.
The blue-collar migrant workforce in the Gulf comprises people typically in their 20s, 30s and early 40s, who are required to pass medical checks before they arrive.
“It’s a shocking statistic to anyone familiar with basic pathology, because in a well-financed health sector, the rate should be 1%,” says Nicholas McGeehan, co-director of FairSquare, an NGO focused on migrant worker rights. “The reason it’s so high in the Gulf is that the Gulf states don’t investigate unexplained migrant worker deaths, either through postmortem examinations or coroners’ investigations.”
Many migrant workers can’t access healthcare services in the Gulf, which means that they often get to hospital too late, and examining physicians often can’t refer to a worker’s medical history, adds McGeehan.
“Given the confinement of domestic workers in their employers’ homes, a positive policy development would be to introduce regular and mandatory health checks for domestic workers,” he says.
A few days after Tamfungan’s death, the recruiter sent her family a screenshot of her death certificate. The cause of death is “unspecified”. Despite having no underlying illnesses, the recruiter claimed that Tamfungan died of a heart attack. She told them they would need to pay 200,000 pesos to have Tamfungan’s body repatriated – an impossible sum for them to find. Her body now lies in the mortuary of Al Qassimi hospital in Sharjah. Her family are still waiting to find out when her remains might be repatriated from the Philippine government’s Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) and consulate in Dubai.
With the Philippine authorities slow to respond to their pleas for help, the family are trapped in a situation where their main source of information is Tamfungan’s recruiter.
“She always says wait until tomorrow,” says Fungan. “We really don’t know what to do, we don’t know who to contact in that big country.”
The family have just one photograph of the six of them together “That’s the only picture we have with our mother before she went to Saudi,” says Tamfungan’s daughter Gellian. “Our first and last family picture.”
