When I landed in Saipan, I broke my future. Wendy Doromal has been trying to do something about the plight of guest workers in the C.N.M.I. for 15 years. Doromal first went to the small island of Rota in 1984, when maybe 20 foreigners worked on the island. She watched the numbers explode to the point where, in 1993, the foreign guest workers outnumbered the locals. You're on this tiny island where everybody knows everybody.
Somebody gets a Filipino maid, so everybody wants a Filipino maid.
Pretty soon people on food stamps had maids. Doromal went to Rota as a school teacher. She didn't intend to get involved politically. She married a Filipino guest worker, a musician who speaks nine languages but was treated like a servant. She quickly came to the conclusion that the government was hopelessly corrupt, and in many cases complicit.