82-Year-Old Enslaved In US For 65 Years Wants To Go Home, Find Her Family

In an amazing story of perseverance, 82-year-old Fedelina Lugasan from the Philippines says that all she wants to do is go home and try to find some family members after spending 65 years as a slave to a Filipino family that took her to the United States when she was a teenager.

"I want to go home to Tacloban and find my family," Nanay Fedelina said, as reported by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). Nanay is the term Filipinos use when referring to a female parent or a mother.

Philippines ambassador to the US Jose Manuel Romualdez, referred to President Rodrigo Duterte's directive to prioritize overseas Filipinos when he said he hopes to help Fedelina achieve her dream.

As is with most cases like this, an unusual set of circumstances beginning in the mid-1950s led to an orphaned 16-year-old Fedelina being recruited to work as a domestic helper by a family in Manila. Once she was under the family’s control, she was subjected to verbal and physical abuse, fed poorly and given no pay for her services.

The DFA explained, "Nanay Fedelina came from a generation when slave-like employment practices or highly unregulated domestic employment were still commonplace in the Philippines. She also seems to be one of the few to survive this and gain freedom.”

The family later moved to Los Angeles, California, bringing Fedelina with them where the abuse continued. Her passport, birth certificate and any other identification document were taken away making her a “non-person” and with no way to escape her enslavement.

Her 65 years were spent taking care of the family’s children and grandchildren. She did all the domestic chores like cleaning, gardening, cooking and laundry. Her bed was the floor with only a thin blanket for the chilly LA nights. When she begged for her papers and pleaded to go home, her “employers” threatened to accuse her of stealing and throw her in jail.

In a way, Nanay Fedelina rescued herself in 2018 when she collapsed at a hospital where she was tending to the needs of her captor. It was reported that she had not eaten for several days.

Thanks to the FBI’s Victim Protection Unit and the Philippine Consulate General in Los Angeles, she was finally free of her bondage and is now living comfortably in a Long Beach, California nursing facility free of charge thanks to the generosity of the facilities owners.

But what is most amazing is that Nanay Fedelina asked the judge in her case against her now elderly abuser not to send him to jail. He was, however, convicted and ordered to pay restitution.