Precy Lucero plopped onto a bench in the Mazza Gallerie mall and surveyed the gaggle of girlfriends beside her.
Two of them were scanning the front page of the Manila Mail. A third sang aloud to a Philippine torch song playing on her Walkman.
Clockwise, Teresita Dotson, left, Remy Montilla, Margarita Marco and Carmelita Carrigan talk over a bowl of steamed peanuts.
(Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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"Yoooo are the one I love. Yoooo give me a reason to live," she crooned in Tagalog before the rest of the group collapsed into giggles.
"It's just as if we were in our own country," Lucero marveled. "Just as if we were in the Philippines."
It's an illusion that draws dozens of her compatriots from across the Washington area to this Friendship Heights mall every Sunday.
Back in the Philippines, many have college degrees, husbands and children. Here, they are the live-in "help" -- housekeepers, nannies and elder-care nurses paid to serve at the beck and call of someone else's family. From Monday through Saturday, they are the threads in an ever-expanding network of immigrant women who take care of the home front for Washington bureaucrats, diplomats, journalists and lawyers.
But Sunday -- ah, glorious Sunday! -- is the live-in domestic worker's day off, to do with as she pleases. And so Lucero and her friends flock to Mazza Gallerie in Friendship Heights and the next-door Chevy Chase Pavilion to gossip about tightfisted employers and faraway children, to buy and sell everything from phone cards to Avon cosmetics, but mainly to simply relax with fellow countrywomen among whom no translation is necessary.
"It's so nice just to speak in our own language," said Lucero, who has been a live-in nanny and housekeeper for 12 years.
Numbering more than 34,000, the Washington area's Philippine-born residents work in a wide range of professions. There are prominent doctors, such as Washington Hospital Center heart surgeon Jorge M. Garcia; Pentagon leaders such as Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba; civil rights activists such as Irene Natividad, director of the annual Global Summit of Women; and elected officials such as former Maryland legislator David Valderrama.
Others pass through the area as students, as did the president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who did graduate work in economics at Georgetown University.
Although they are largely scattered across the District and surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia, many Filipinos get together through Filipino American professional associations and charity groups, as well as at several churches.
Most of the women who come to the Friendship Heights malls on Sundays, however, are part of a subset who do domestic work and live in their employers' homes. Although they, too, often see each other at church, the mall provides a place to hang out for longer stretches of time.
Generally in their mid-forties to early fifties, the women hail from all corners of their country. Few knew each other back home. But word of the gathering spot spreads quickly among the latest arrivals from the Philippines.
Newcomers are immediately greeted with an inviting "Kumusta ka?" -- Tagalog for "How d'you do?" The warm welcome is born of a shared sense of isolation. Facing a shortage of jobs at home, a large segment of Philippine women -- even many who are well-educated -- spend nearly their entire adult lives working as domestics overseas while their husbands stay in the Philippines to raise their children.
