At close to midnight, Awe, a domestic worker from Myanmar, curls up in the corner of the living room with a thin mattress and a small fan and tries to get some sleep. “Sometimes it is difficult,” she says, “because my employer watches TV or her son plays computer games till the early hours of the morning.” She copes with the noise by using ear plugs, but when she rises at 6am to start her day, she does not feel rested at all.

When Yanti started working for a Singaporean family, she never thought she would have to deal with not having enough food to eat. For migrant domestic workers (MDWs) like her, Singapore represents wealth and prosperity. “I didn’t expect I would have to depend on my next-door neighbour to feed me,” she said.

Every Sunday for six weeks, we shadowed Robina Navato, a 44-year-old Filipino domestic worker who has been volunteering for three years at HOME’s help-desk. What began as a final-year project to make a short film about Robina’s volunteer experience became, in the end, an eye-opening experience for us. We heard first-hand accounts of the abuse – emotional or verbal, and sometimes physical – that some domestic workers suffer. The stories were both shocking and sad.

In March 2017, HOME and TWC2 submitted a joint report for the 26th session of the United Nation’s Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW), where the Bangladeshi government’s state report was to be examined. Our submission examined the Bangladesh government’s commitments as a signatory to the United Nations’ Convention on the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.