From Malaysia To Trinida & Tobago - A Net Friendship That Hurts

If you don’t know, know now; Malaysia is a country where the sentence is death by hanging for possession of drugs.  A few Asian countries do it, China, Turkey and some Arabian countries.   

In the West, the death penalty for drugs no matter how much is inconceivable.  The fact is that if you get caught with enough drugs and you can get so much time that it’s a slow one day at a time death penalty.  If you live in the Caribbean and deal with drugs; pay attention.   

This is what my young niece likes to call, a “true story”.  It’s so true that it would not qualify for reality TV.   

  

A few years ago I started using yahoo instant messenger and Skype.com. Within a short space of time I had a number of “friends” on both networks who I chatted with regularly.   One of those friends was a lady by the name of Eleanor, a forty eight year old single Filipina.  

She’s or maybe was (tell you why later) living in Malaysia and attending a Christian Church.  My perception of Eleanor was that she was a giver.  She had started a school with the help of her sister in the Philippines that catered for orphaned Filipino children.  She provided financial support for the school from the work she did in Malaysia.  It’s amazing how many things that can be done with a change in currency.   She did not have much but that was only one of her charities.  

She was a Domestic Helper working for a Malaysian family.  To add to her income she arranged for other Domestic Helpers from the Philippines to come to Malaysia.  She would locate jobs, contact other Domestic Helpers at home and arrange to lend them the funds to come to Malaysia.  She was paid the equivalent of one month salary over a three month period and reimbursed for the cost of the plane ticket.  It worked for her.

She encouraged me to help support the school financially.  Mind you, I’m as suspicious as anybody else online so I satisfied my skepticism by having the school checked out by another friend in the Philippines. Further I never sent money to her but through my friend to her sister who managed the school.  I did not ask but her sister took the trouble to send with copies of receipts for the items purchased for the children.  Pictures of book bags, paper and pencils; I was satisfied that I was helping good cause.  

She was able to get her daughter, family members and quite a few Filipinas into Malaysia to work.   To cut a long story short one day she disappeared.  I thought nothing of it but after a few months of sending occasional messages with no responses, I gave up.   I realized that something was wrong.  Not that it worried me but I was a little concerned. 

Then about a year later, I got a message.  Guess what she had to tell me? No, don’t.   I know you would not be able to because I knew het or thought I did then bigger more serious questions came to mind.  It would be too long to tell it all in this post so…  

 I will share it with you in my next post.  It just builds the belief that life and reality is stranger than fiction.  Sometimes we find ourselves in positions that there is nothing we can do but watch life unfold and accept it. 

See you soon.   

Take a guess at what it was if you dare.