“What interests the historian of everyday life is the invisible.”

Cecil Asong is a thirty-nine-year-old woman from the small township of Zarraga (population 27,000) in the Province of Iloilo in the Philippines. She has two teenage daughters – the younger,  in secondary school, is still doing home-based learning, and the elder has just begun her tertiary education. The girls have no internet access at home. They make do by sharing the service with a neighbor. Cecil’s husband is a farmer of a smallholding. He grows vegetables, and they have two pigs. Cecil’s mother-inlaw stays close to help with the girls. They are a close-knit family. Cecil is intelligent, resourceful, tenacious, and reliable. She is good with children. I know all this because she has been living with my family in Singapore for the last eight years as our domestic helper. Without her labor I would not be able to write this brief statement about caregiving and the significance of “repair” in an academic  context. With my adult asthma risks and the family choosing not to go out so as to minimize my chances of falling seriously ill during the pandemic, she has also been staying at home with us since March 2020. We owe her a huge debt of care.