Scammed, shaken, she enrolled with S’pore charity empowering migrant domestic workers and started over

Nur Bayani was 23 when she left Indonesia in 2011 to work as a domestic worker in Singapore. Her parents could no longer afford her school fees, and she needed to help support her siblings.

Working for a family with two young children, she struggled to adjust.

“It was the first time I had ever been in a foreign country, facing a different culture and speaking a different language,” she recalls in Indonesian.

She was shy, unsure of her English and knew little about managing money.

“I did not even dare to have a dream or goal for myself,” she says.

That changed in 2018, when she enrolled at Aidha – a charity empowering migrant domestic workers and low-income women through sustainable wealth creation – which offers financial literacy and self-development courses. At classes twice a month, she improved her English, learnt to manage money and began saving. She also drew up a business plan.

Using her savings, she opened a warung, or roadside shop, in her hometown of Ponorogo in East Java. She partnered with an ice cream company to sell treats near a primary school and managed the shop from Singapore. The proceeds helped support her family and buy land where she planted coffee and acacia trees.

By the time the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Bayani had saved about $5,000. She returned to Indonesia for good and got married.

The couple invested US$1,000 (S$1,280) of her savings through an overseas online broker. Within three months, the platform showed their portfolio had grown to US$5,000. They planned to use the profit to buy a car, but when they tried to withdraw the money, they discovered that the platform was a scam.

“We did not know what to do. I felt like I had hit rock bottom after pouring all our family’s savings into the platform. I was stressed and depressed,” says Bayani.

The pandemic compounded their troubles. Jobs dried up, her shop closed when schools shut, and she sold her farm at a loss. To get by, the couple borrowed from a sibling working in Taiwan.

Unwilling to keep relying on family, they decided Bayani would return to Singapore. In 2023, she began another stint as a domestic worker.

She was homesick and struggled with an unsupportive employer. Eventually, she sought a transfer.

“To me, mental health is very important,” she says.

Her new employer was an elderly man with pancreatic cancer.

“I took care of him like I would for my own father,” she says.

When he asked how she spent her Sundays, she told him about her courses at Aidha and her ambition to work in healthcare. He sponsored her caregiving diploma and gave her a two-month salary advance of $1,000 to invest in new ventures.

Over the following year, Bayani and her husband saved $7,000 and invested it in a local mining venture. She continues to set aside half her monthly income to grow the business.

“To me, failure is feedback. I use it to become better in the future,” she says.

After her employer died, she moved to another family. She has a year left on her contract, after which she hopes to use her diploma to apply for work in a nursing home.

Today, she is an Aidha ambassador, encouraging fellow domestic workers to manage their money and avoid financial traps.

“For domestic workers who just arrived in Singapore, it’s very common to fall for scams,” she says, citing peers targeted by unlicensed moneylenders on social media.

She urges those in financial trouble to speak openly with their employers before turning to lenders.

“If I really need money, I prefer to have an honest conversation with my employer.”

At Aidha, she also teaches domestic workers to set boundaries when relatives back home ask for more than they can afford.

“Most domestic workers send everything they earn back home without planning for their own future or growing their savings,” she says.

“Being a domestic worker does not have to be the end goal. You can have dreams and a future, too.”