‘Please Lord, help me’: Hong Kong ‘helper’ saved toddler and his grandma as towers burned

2 hours ago 1

Tai Po, Hong Kong: When she closes her eyes, Vame Mariz Wayas Verador is haunted by the inferno: the smoke choking her lungs, the flaming debris falling around her, and the toddler crying in her arms as she carried him 17-storeys down the stairs to safety.

Just before 3pm on Wednesday, she was getting ready to wake the toddler from his nap and take him downstairs to the playground at the Wang Fuk Court residential complex, where she lived with a couple and their child in Hong Kong’s northern Tai Po neighbourhood.

Domestic helper Vame Mariz Wayas Verador breaks down in tears as she recalls the horrific situation of her escape from the Tai Po building fire.

The boy’s parents were at work, and his elderly grandma was visiting for the day. But their playground plans were interrupted by a frantic banging on the door and someone urging them to get out.

“I opened the door and there was smoke. Then I don’t know what happened. I panicked,” Verador, 39, says, recounting the trauma of that day through tears.

“I’m thinking ,‘We need to go down’. The baby is crying. I tell grandma, ‘Grandma, [you go] first’.

“If I had delayed a few minutes, maybe three [minutes], me and grandma and the baby would be gone.”

Verador shows a video of her escaping from the building fire, carrying the boy.

Verador had arrived in Hong Kong from the Philippines 10 months earlier to work as a live-in domestic maid, sometimes called “helpers”.

As Hong Kong began three days of mourning on Saturday, she returned to the scene of the city’s deadliest fire in decades, which tore through seven of the eight towers of the 2000-unit complex and burned for almost two days.

By the time authorities managed to extinguish the blaze on Friday, 128 people were confirmed dead – a toll that is expected to rise, with some 200 people still unaccounted for.

The death toll includes at least seven Indonesian workers, who were among the 119 Indonesians and ⁠⁠82 Filipinos that authorities believed lived and worked in the towers.

The Philippines consulate in Hong Kong said in a statement on Friday that had so far confirmed 24 Filipinos were safe, one was injured, one was missing.

Verador told her tale of escape to this masthead on Saturday, describing how she fled down the stairs, carrying the boy – who is almost two years old – and leading the elderly woman to safety.

As they reached the 15th floor, plumes of smoke were curling around them. Outside, the bamboo scaffolding – clad in green netting and erected around the facade of the towers for renovations – was in flames. She placed a jacket over the toddler to protect him from the burning debris.

“I saw the fire,” she says. “I want to make it out because I have my four children waiting for me in the Philippines. I am a single mum. ‘Please Lord, help me, help me’.”

Hong Kong firefighters walk through the burned buildings at Wang Fuk Court on Saturday.

The toddler was crying out “tita, tita” – the Filipino Tagalog word for aunty – and the grandmother was having trouble making it down the stairs. When they reached the fifth floor, Verador wanted to run, but stayed back to help the elderly lady.

“Grandma is in pain. I am saying, ‘Go faster, go faster grandma’,” she says. “I did not leave my grandma.”

Once they made it outside, she saw the neighbouring tower had been engulfed in flames – and her own block was on fire.

“It was very traumatic. If I sleep, I can see the building again – ‘whoosh’,” she says, throwing her hands up, mimicking the inferno.

“I don’t know how to start again. Everything I have is burned. Even my passport.”

Verador played this masthead footage that she filmed on her phone, showing her holding the child outside the burning buildings.

The cause of the fire has not been confirmed, but Hong Kong authorities have launched an investigation into why the fire alarms were not triggered and if the green netting and use of styrofoam in the renovation materials accelerated the blaze.

Police have now arrested 11 people involved in the towers’ renovation, including scaffolding subcontractors, directors of an engineering consultant company and project managers supervising the renovation, the Independent Commission Against Corruption said.

Verador is among the nearly 400,000 domestic workers – mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia – living in Hong Kong.

Many of them have left behind their own children to seek work helping expatriate and local families raise theirs, earning monthly salaries of about $HK5000 ($983). Any money they manage to save, they send home to support their families.

The Philippines consulate has been contacted for comment about what support it is providing to its affected workers.

Migrant worker support agencies have set up pop-up clinics close to the fire-destroyed towers, handing out food, clothing and toiletries, and providing workers with financial assistance to help them urgently obtain new passports.

Bethune House executive director Edwina Antonio, second from the right, is assisting South-East Asian workers affected by the deadly Tai Po fire.

The Hong Kong government has pledged to provide survivors with at least $HK10,000 to help them relocate, but it is not clear if that support extends to domestic workers.

“We’re actually appealing to the Hong Kong government to include the foreign domestic workers in those benefits, because they also lost everything,” says Edwina Antonio, the executive director of Bethune House migrant women’s shelter.

She says her organisation has received messages from the public saying the community needs to recognise the heroic role domestic workers played in helping their employers’ families to safety.

Hong Kong media has carried reports of another Filipino worker who is in a critical condition after being rescued from one of the towers by firefighters while trying to save a three-month-old baby. She had only been in Hong Kong for a few days, the reports said.

Antonio says her organisation has helped 37 survivors so far, including two women who were staying in boarding houses because their employment had been terminated after the fires.

The plight of domestic workers in Hong Kong is often overlooked, and they were vulnerable to exploitation as their visas are tied to their employment, she says.

Unconnected to the fires, her organisation is supporting 26 workers in temporary shelters whose employment has been terminated, leaving them without any support and forced to leave the country if they did not find another job within 14 days.

“Some have been raped, some have been physically assaulted, some have just given birth to a baby, some have cancer. They have to rely on charities like us,” Antonio says.

People place flowers near the scene of the fire in the Tai Po district of Hong Kong’s New Territories on Saturday.

By Saturday afternoon, bouquets of flowers were amassing at a site near the towers, as Hong Kongers paid tribute to the victims.

Elaine Wong, 68, who was handing out flowers for people to place at the site, said the workers should not be forgotten.

“Filipinos, particularly the domestic helpers, are tremendously great people. They have been a great help to us. Hong Kong mums are often occupied with busy work schedules, and therefore the burden of taking care of the kids is on the shoulders of the Filipinos,” she says.

“I think there are a lot of restraints in Hong Kong when it comes to housing. The apartments are really really cramped. You literally can’t breathe when it’s packed with 4 or 5 people plus the domestic helper.

“This sort of density makes it unbelievably dangerous for people to escape in case of emergencies.”

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