Neither a borrower nor a lender be

A wise domestic helper, with a fixed income will not need to be a borrower because she does not spend beyond her means; she does not spend more than she earns. In fact, she probably saves part of her income, putting money aside for a rainy day, when an unexpected problem arises. For example, her parents may need money to repair their house which has been damaged by a typhoon. A person who spends all and has no saving will need to borrow to tide her over. And, of course, she has to pay interest. And if she borrows from a loan shark, she would be in deep trouble as one domestic helper found out to her familiy's eternal regret. (She did not live to regret it because her creditor killed her.)

It is very foolish to borrow money in order to maintain an extravagant lifestyle - taking a taxi instead of going by bus, eating at an expensive restaurant instead of eating at home or at a food court, buying an expensive camera that costs the equivalent of what earns in say six months or one year!

To be a borrower is not wise, to be a lender is probably even worse. The borrower loses a friend, a lender loses not only a friend but money too. Yet, we often hear of one domestic helper lending money to another just because they are townmates. Sometimes the borrower really intends to pay back but often enough she cannot because she does not know how to manage her money. She has dinner in a restaurant which offers rellenong bangus and avoid the food courts because they do not have rellenong bangus there. She goes about by taxi because she it is less convenient to go by bus or MRT or because going by bus or MRT will take an additional 30 minutes. She does not seem to realize that if she starts her journey half an hour earlier she will be able to save quite a bit of money. But why worry, her townmates will lend her what she needs!

To resist the habitual borrower, a migrant worker has only to remember why she sacrifices two years or more of her life. A woman has no future as a domestic worker in a foreign country. There is no doubt that she works in a foreign country for financial reasons - to earn more than she can at home, to save and perhaps start a small business when she finally goes home for good, or to buy a plot of land for farming or to build a house. With this goal firmly fixed in mind, it is not easy to persuade her to part with her hard earned money to help a "friend" who earns more or less the same amount but blows it on luxuries and other unnecessary things.

And sometimes the amount is not just one hundred dollars (which is already a big amount to someone who earns less than four hundred a month), but even up to two thousand dollars, as we recently read in the papers. One domestic helper lent two thousand dollars to another domestic helper. (One thousand dollars came from a loan shark who was putting pressure on her to repay the loan.) She never got her money back. To cut a long story short, she killed her friend. Thus we see the wisdom of Shakespeare's Polonius. The lender not only lost her money and her friend (or more accurately, ex-friend) but also her freedom. She was sentenced to a long prison term - 10 years or 3,653 days.