Housemaid's journey from death row to centre stage

By Claire Wallerstein

Herald correspondent

MANILA - Four years after escaping death by firing squad for killing a would-be rapist, the Philippines' most renowned housemaid, Sarah Balabagan, is taking a second shot at fame - by becoming a pop star.

Sarah, at the time just 16, was saved from execution in the United Arab Emirates in 1995 following an international outcry. The young Muslim girl claimed she had stabbed her employer 34 times to protect her honour after he tried to rape her.

The sentence was reduced on appeal to a year in jail and 100 lashes, and Sarah, a high school dropout, arrived home in August 1996 amid a storm of publicity.

Since then, she has kept a low profile. But the would-be recording artist has just burst back into the headlines after signing a one-album deal with Sony Philippines, and holding her first big concert - appropriately enough in the Manila women's jail.

Her on-stage persona, confidence and dress-style contrast starkly with the sobbing, veiled Muslim girl who was too shy to look reporters in the eye after returning from her ordeal in the Gulf.

In her weekly shopping mall appearances these days she wears revealing dresses with slits up the sides, leather trousers and figure-hugging blouses.

She attributes her new-found confidence to the singing and acting lessons which she took last year as therapy to help her cope with the memories of her nightmarish experience, and says she wants to completely erase the stigmas of her past.

"People see me and say: 'Oh, that's Sarah Balabagan. Wasn't she the one who was in jail, the one who killed, who stabbed someone to death?' I wish I could change that so that people would say instead: 'Isn't that Sarah? The singer?'"

Her publicists portray her as a beacon of hope to the more than four million poverty-stricken Filipinos who leave home for years at a time to work abroad as maids, nannies, nurses, merchant seamen and construction workers.

Sarah's album will be released later this summer. It will include two of her most popular numbers You are a Filipino, which tells of fighting back against the odds, and Buhay Kulungan, or Prison Life.