When your helper says it is black magic, she is telling you something real

It usually comes out sideways. She has been quiet for a week, things around the flat have slipped, and when you finally sit down to ask what is going on, she tells you that someone back home has put black magic on her. Kulam, if she is Filipino. Santet or guna-guna, if she is Indonesian.

Most Hong Kong employers have no idea what to do with that sentence. It sounds like something out of a film, and the first instinct is either to laugh or to panic. Both make the next month harder. Here is a calmer way to hold it.

What she is probably telling you

For a great many domestic helpers from the Philippines and Indonesia, this is not a fringe belief. It sits roughly where luck and fate and feng shui sit for a lot of Hong Kong families: not something you build your life around, but not something you wave away either.

So when she says it is black magic, she is usually not reaching for an excuse. She is giving you the only explanation she has for something she is genuinely going through. Underneath it there is almost always a list you have not seen. She cannot sleep. She is frightened. Her body hurts and nobody has told her why. There is a fight happening in her family at home, or money trouble she has not mentioned to you.

The curse is the frame. What is inside the frame is real.

Arguing about whether it is real gets you nowhere

You will want to explain that black magic is not a thing. Leave it. You will not win, and winning was never the point.

There is a harder reason than politeness. When a problem is understood as spiritual rather than medical, people wait. The spiritual remedy gets tried first and the doctor comes weeks later than he should have. That delay is the actual danger here, not the belief.

The other cost of a dismissive reaction is quieter and lasts longer. Helpers tend to be careful about looking fragile in front of an employer, because looking fragile is how people lose jobs. If she has told you this at all, she has taken a risk with you. React badly and she will not bring you the next thing, and the next thing may be the serious one.

Settle the children today, and say why

If a child has not been properly looked after, that part is not up for discussion, and it is also not a punishment. Change the arrangement for now. A grandparent, a neighbour, a couple of days you take off yourself, whatever you can actually reach.

Then say so plainly, without making it a verdict on her. Something close to: I am going to sort out the children for the next few days while we work out what is going on with you. That sentence protects your child and leaves her dignity intact, and you need both of those to survive the fortnight.

The first day or two

1. Sit down with her privately, with time set aside, not in the kitchen doorway on your way out.
2. Ask what has been happening, then stop talking. Silence does more work here than questions do.
3. Ask when she last slept properly, and when she last ate a proper meal.
4. Ask what is going on at home. Money and family are where this usually starts.
5. Take her to a doctor, and go with her if she will let you.
6. Ask her who she would like to talk to, and help her reach them.

This is not an interrogation and it does not have to happen in one sitting. If you get through two of the six in the first conversation, that was a good conversation.

Let her own people in

The strongest support most helpers have in Hong Kong is not their employer. It is their church and the other women they know here. For many Filipino helpers the parish is the centre of the week. For Indonesian helpers it is often a mosque, a study group, or a network from the same home province.

Whatever you privately make of the belief, those are the people who can talk to her inside it rather than around it, which is the only place the conversation is going to land. Giving her the time and the privacy to reach them costs you nothing and does more than anything you could say yourself. If her rest day is how she gets to them, protect it rather than quietly cancelling it because the housework has slipped.

Two things worth not doing

Do not join in. Paying for a healer, arranging a cleansing, letting someone come to the flat to sort it out: all of it confirms that the problem is supernatural, and it hands a stranger access to your home and to someone who is not in a position to judge them clearly. A fair amount of it is simply a scam aimed at frightened people with wages.

Do not let it become the family story. She will know if she has turned into the thing you tell friends about over dinner, and a household where she is the strange one is not a household anyone recovers in.

When it is bigger than a conversation

Some of this stops being a settling-in problem.

If she talks about harming herself, or about anyone harming anyone, or she is not making sense and you cannot reach her, that is 999, right then, whatever the hour. The same goes for anything that looks like a medical emergency.

Short of that, a doctor is the next step, and it is worth knowing where you stand on medical costs before you need to. If something serious has already happened in the household, the first 48 hours walks through that ground properly. And if this turns out to be the tail end of a change you have been noticing for months rather than days, a helper's attitude shifting covers the longer version.

When the trust has gone

There is a point past which understanding is no longer the question.

If you have stopped being able to leave your children with her, that is your answer, and it is kinder to both of you to admit it early than late. Trust is not a pleasant extra in this job. It is the job. A parent who feels uneasy every time they close the front door does not relax into it later, and the unease rarely fades on its own.

If you are still in it a month from now, it probably will not be because you are unsure. It will be attachment, and guilt. She has been with you two years. She was lovely with the baby. It feels cruel to end things over something she says she cannot help. Those feelings do you credit and they are still not a reason to spend another six months uneasy in your own home. A decision you have already made privately is harder on her, drawn out, than a clear one would have been.

Ending it does not have to be harsh, and it should not be. It can be quiet and respectful, she can leave with her dignity intact, and none of it needs to happen tonight. That part is ours: we will talk it through with you, help you find the words, and handle the arrangements and the replacement so you are not doing it alone or in a hurry.

You do not have to work this out on your own

Some of this passes. She sleeps, she sees a doctor, something at home resolves, and in a month it is a strange fortnight the two of you remember differently. Some of it does not pass, and then the decision is the one above.

Either way, it helps to talk it through with someone who is neither inside your household nor inside the belief. Our office is open 10am to 7pm, seven days a week, and this is exactly the kind of call we take, whether you are trying to help her through it or you have decided it needs to end. Nothing on the employment side has to be settled tonight. Talk to us when it suits you, or read a little about how we work first.