Sunday, November 29, 2009
National Geographic names RP one of best new travel destinations in the world
MANILA, Philippines - The National Geographic Magazine had named the Philippines as “One of 25 Best New Travel Destinations in the World in 2010” and the country’s ancient cultures, structures and biodiversity were cited as key reasons to visit the archipelago.
The magazine said in its November 2009 Adventure issue that the Philippines has “as many islands as the Caribbean and some of the most spectacular reefs on the planet,” adding that travel organizations have “finally gotten wise.”
National Geographic presented the “25 brand new adventures, all of them just right for right now.” The list is directed at “travelers who want their dollars to do more – for others, for the planet and for themselves.”
Philippine Ambassador to the United States Willy Gaa said the inclusion of the Philippines in the list shows the global community is “taking note of the natural and cultural wonders in the country as well as the efforts to protect and preserve them.”
According to the article, Wilderness Travel is organizing a trip to the Philippines in May 2010 which will “lead clients high into the 5,000-foot Cordillera Central then deep into the world’s most biodiverse marine environment.”
Wilderness Travel members are mostly travelers who got reviews of tourist spots from other members that include naturalists, authors, ecologists, archeologists, art historians, teachers and mountaineers.
The 12-day trip to the Philippines costs $3,300.
The group’s website www.wildernesstravel. com described the Philippines as a country, which boasts of breathtaking hiking routes through ancient rice terraces and scenic mountain landscapes, cultural encounters with the Ifugao people, and world-class snorkeling in the “Coral Triangle.”
Wilderness Travel said the Philippine journey explores “the emerald world” of the Ifugao tribe who have transformed the precipitous mountainsides of their homeland into steeply contoured rice terraces, complete with 2,000-year-old indigenous irrigation system.
The trip will take travelers to Cabilao Island in the Visayas to view stunning coral reefs that are part of the famed “Coral Triangle,” the world’s greatest concentration of marine biodiversity.
The Philippines has been promoting its cultural and natural wonders as preferred travel destinations for global tourists. The Philippine embassy in Washington works closely with the National Geographic in raising awareness on the importance of sustainable development and ecological protection.
President Arroyo spoke at the National Geographic headquarters in Washington last August and appealed for international support for preserving, promoting and protecting biodiversity in the Coral Triangle. - Pia Lee-Brago (The Philippine Star) Updated November 07, 2009 12:00 AM
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Model OFW families: Pinoys who invest remittances wisely
For promoting cooperativism and entrepreneurship, two families – one each from Batangas and Masbate provinces - were named model overseas Filipino worker (OFW) families for 2009.
Labor Secretary Marianito Roque said Saturday the winners of this year’s Model OFW Family of the Year Awards (MOFYA) are the Lubis family from Lipa; and Bello family from Baleno, Masbate.
Engineer Rodolfo Pita Lubis of Lipa, Batangas represents land-based OFWs, while Capt. Emilio Bajar Bello of Baleno, Masbate represents sea-based OFWs.
Roque, who conceived the MOFYA when he was still the head of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), said the Lubis and Bello families exemplify OFWs model families in the country who have demonstrated the best practices of OFWs and their families in overcoming the challenges of migration.
Lubis worked in Saudi Arabia for more than 30 years, while his family invested his overseas earnings in various agri-business enterprises that employ more than 200 workers.
The Lubises have also developed their first Gawad Kalinga Reunion Village where residents are given employment, livelihood capital, and scholarship for their children.
Also, the family planted more than 45,000 narra and mahogany trees as their contribution to the “Greening of the Environment."
Bello, on the other hand, worked as a seaman for almost 29 years starting only as ordinary seaman in 1971.
His family invested his overseas earnings in various agri and retail business ventures as well.
Upon his retirement in 2000, Capt. Bello started to engage in community projects particularly in sharing his expertise on food sanitation and entrepreneurship through the OFW chapter of the Baleno Fishermen and Farmers Cooperative.
The MOFYA is a search for families who have maintained strong family relations, properly managed the financial benefits from the OFWs’ overseas employment, have educational achievements and exemplary performance in their respective professions, and at the same time have a positive impact in the community where they reside. - JHU, GMANews.TV, November 28, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
Marrying for the right reasons
By Lourdes Santos Tancinco
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: February 19, 2009
MEGAN and Philip met in the United States in 2006. Their friendship turned into a romance. After two years, Philip proposed marriage to Megan. It was at this time that Megan revealed that she was a “TNT” (“tago ng tago”). All the while she represented to Philip that she was a US citizen.
Philip was disappointed because he himself was a TNT and thought that Megan would be able to assist him in obtaining his green card. Their relationship then turned sour. Philip did not want to live as a TNT in the US and decided to go home to the Philippines. Megan stayed behind and refused to come back to Manila.
Megan was working as a caregiver for a health care facility when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) came to arrest undocumented workers. Megan was one of those arrested. While in deportation proceedings, Megan married her US citizen friend Mario in order that she would get a green card. Unfortunately, the petition by Mario on behalf of Megan was denied. As a result, Megan was eventually deported back to the Philippines.
Today, Megan is still in denial on why the petition was denied even if they had lived together and had a valid marriage.
Good faith marriage
Generally, marriage is the fastest option to obtain a green card. However, it is also the fastest way to be removed from the United States if it is discovered to be fraudulent.
To be considered valid for immigration purposes, marriage must be legal and entered into in good faith from the time of its inception.
Marriage is legal if recognized as such by the law of the jurisdiction where the marriage took place. Once a marriage has been determined to be legal, the second line of inquiry is whether or not at its inception that marriage is bona fide. The test of its viability is whether the parties intended to establish a life together at the time they married.
The burden of proving validity of a bona fide marriage is on the applicant. This may be proven through documentary and testimonial evidence during an interview.
Different types of documents may be presented by the parties during the interview, that may include joint bank accounts, joint lease agreements, joint income tax returns, joint utility and telephone bills, life insurance, health insurance, joint credit cards, photographs with friends and family and written statements from acquaintances and neighbors.
The joint documents may be easy to produce especially if the couple has been living together as husband and wife for quite awhile. Still, there are many cases where the examiner may still question the validity of a marriage. Like: the response of the couple during the interview which may reveal a lack of spousal relationship.
When a Filipino in the US is put in deportation proceedings, it is much more difficult to prove the validity of a marriage, especially if the married couple has not been living together that long. Though the immigration court has jurisdiction over the deportation case, a spousal petition by a US citizen has to be filed with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) which can approve or deny the petition. The USCIS examiner may schedule the couple for another interview. The process may involve having the couple being asked separately the same questions regarding personal aspects of the marital relationship.
Oftentimes, questions delve into personal information such as the other spouse’s favorite food, color, friend, sport or television show. Other questions may inquire into the spouse’s scars, birthmarks or tattoos. If their responses do not match, they should be given an opportunity to explain. Should they fail to explain the differences then the petition will be denied.
Permanent bar
This is what happened in Megan’s case. She and her US citizen spouse gave different responses to the same questions and were unable to explain their discrepancies. Also, the US citizen spouse was compelled to admit that the marriage entered into was just to assist Megan obtain her green card.
If there is a finding that a Filipino has engaged in a fixed marriage to obtain a green card, a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act bars this person from future immigration benefits. Hence, even if a spouse who has been found to have entered into a marriage for convenience later on marries in good faith another US citizen, he/she is still barred from receiving a green card. This harsh provision was meant to prevent foreign nationals from entering into fraudulent marriages.
It must be remembered that the fastest way is not always the appropriate way of legalizing one’s stay. Marrying solely for purposes of immigration benefit is not a solution but a compounding problem for many undocumented immigrants in the US.
Megan made a mistake in not following her lover back to the Philippines. She could have avoided all the trouble and anxiety of having a deportation case. Sometimes, following the dictates of the heart may be the best path to take for it is our heart, our feelings of love and desire that may inspire us on how best we spend our lives wherever we may be.
Tancinco may be reached at law@tancinco.com or at 887 7177
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: February 19, 2009
MEGAN and Philip met in the United States in 2006. Their friendship turned into a romance. After two years, Philip proposed marriage to Megan. It was at this time that Megan revealed that she was a “TNT” (“tago ng tago”). All the while she represented to Philip that she was a US citizen.
Philip was disappointed because he himself was a TNT and thought that Megan would be able to assist him in obtaining his green card. Their relationship then turned sour. Philip did not want to live as a TNT in the US and decided to go home to the Philippines. Megan stayed behind and refused to come back to Manila.
Megan was working as a caregiver for a health care facility when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) came to arrest undocumented workers. Megan was one of those arrested. While in deportation proceedings, Megan married her US citizen friend Mario in order that she would get a green card. Unfortunately, the petition by Mario on behalf of Megan was denied. As a result, Megan was eventually deported back to the Philippines.
Today, Megan is still in denial on why the petition was denied even if they had lived together and had a valid marriage.
Good faith marriage
Generally, marriage is the fastest option to obtain a green card. However, it is also the fastest way to be removed from the United States if it is discovered to be fraudulent.
To be considered valid for immigration purposes, marriage must be legal and entered into in good faith from the time of its inception.
Marriage is legal if recognized as such by the law of the jurisdiction where the marriage took place. Once a marriage has been determined to be legal, the second line of inquiry is whether or not at its inception that marriage is bona fide. The test of its viability is whether the parties intended to establish a life together at the time they married.
The burden of proving validity of a bona fide marriage is on the applicant. This may be proven through documentary and testimonial evidence during an interview.
Different types of documents may be presented by the parties during the interview, that may include joint bank accounts, joint lease agreements, joint income tax returns, joint utility and telephone bills, life insurance, health insurance, joint credit cards, photographs with friends and family and written statements from acquaintances and neighbors.
The joint documents may be easy to produce especially if the couple has been living together as husband and wife for quite awhile. Still, there are many cases where the examiner may still question the validity of a marriage. Like: the response of the couple during the interview which may reveal a lack of spousal relationship.
When a Filipino in the US is put in deportation proceedings, it is much more difficult to prove the validity of a marriage, especially if the married couple has not been living together that long. Though the immigration court has jurisdiction over the deportation case, a spousal petition by a US citizen has to be filed with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) which can approve or deny the petition. The USCIS examiner may schedule the couple for another interview. The process may involve having the couple being asked separately the same questions regarding personal aspects of the marital relationship.
Oftentimes, questions delve into personal information such as the other spouse’s favorite food, color, friend, sport or television show. Other questions may inquire into the spouse’s scars, birthmarks or tattoos. If their responses do not match, they should be given an opportunity to explain. Should they fail to explain the differences then the petition will be denied.
Permanent bar
This is what happened in Megan’s case. She and her US citizen spouse gave different responses to the same questions and were unable to explain their discrepancies. Also, the US citizen spouse was compelled to admit that the marriage entered into was just to assist Megan obtain her green card.
If there is a finding that a Filipino has engaged in a fixed marriage to obtain a green card, a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act bars this person from future immigration benefits. Hence, even if a spouse who has been found to have entered into a marriage for convenience later on marries in good faith another US citizen, he/she is still barred from receiving a green card. This harsh provision was meant to prevent foreign nationals from entering into fraudulent marriages.
It must be remembered that the fastest way is not always the appropriate way of legalizing one’s stay. Marrying solely for purposes of immigration benefit is not a solution but a compounding problem for many undocumented immigrants in the US.
Megan made a mistake in not following her lover back to the Philippines. She could have avoided all the trouble and anxiety of having a deportation case. Sometimes, following the dictates of the heart may be the best path to take for it is our heart, our feelings of love and desire that may inspire us on how best we spend our lives wherever we may be.
Tancinco may be reached at law@tancinco.com or at 887 7177
OFWs: From belly of luxury ship to top deck
By Ma. Ceres P. Doyo
Columnist / Writer
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: March 12, 2009
FROM BOILER room to ballroom, from stage to spa, from poolside to pantry, from bar to fine dining. From the belly of the luxury ship to the topmost deck where one could see forever and behold the azure sea and sky of the Mediterranean.
Overseas Filipino workers (OFW) rule the roost, so to speak, aboard the cruise ship Brilliance of the Seas because of their sheer number and also because of their skills, talent, dependability and graciousness. Filipinos comprise about 60 percent of the 853-strong crew that is composed of 51 nationalities.
“Here I earn the combined salaries of four teachers and three security guards in the Philippines,” reveals Jerry Dioneo, 36, who works in the dining section. Dioneo who hails from Silay City in Negros Occidental has been on the ship for about three years and is on his fourth contract. Only the Filipino nationals, Dioneo adds, are compelled to allot and remit 20 percent of their earnings to their folks back home. This is stipulated in their contracts.
And what is work like on cruise days? “Every day here is a Monday,” Dioneo chirps as he replenishes the cornucopia of food for the guests.
Victoriano Camacho, 46, of Calamba, Laguna, has been with the cruise company for 16 years and is now the sous chef (assistant of the executive chef). He started out at the Nikko Hotel in Makati. Now he earns $2,600 a month.
$1.7 billion of the total $10.8 billion remitted by OFWs in 2005 came from the sea-based OFWs. The number of Filipino seafarers working abroad as of 2005, is about 250,000 or approximately 20 percent of the world’s total.
‘White List’
The rise in the number could be attributed to the inclusion of the Philippines in the International Maritime Organization’s “White List” of 72 accredited countries. Being on the list means the country has continuously complied with the standards required for competent seafarers.
Being a Filipino seaman or seafarer does not necessarily mean working in cargo ships sailing drearily on a gray sea and being cooped up, fighting ennui until land appears on the horizon. A good number of the sea-based OFWs work in cruise ships. These luxury liners cater to vacation-bound, fun-loving, adventure-seeking humans, people who work hard and play hard, or who just want to be out of reach and listen to the music of the ocean, heeding the cruise logo catchphrase that says, “Get out there.” One could also choose to get holed up in the ship’s library.
The three-year-old German-built Brilliance of the Seas belongs to a fleet of cruise ships of the Royal Caribbean International (RCI) that sails in Europe, North America and the Caribbean. It has a passenger capacity of 2,500.
The Filipino seamen and women working on board are there to help make good things happen. The job is demanding as cruises involve service, hospitality, food, fun, travel, safety and, most of all, people.
Earning from tips
Bar server Vergie Mompil, an education course graduate, has spent eight years working on several cruise ships. Her husband, Edwin Vicero also works in another cruise ship, Jewels of the Sea.
Those in food service are not paid the fixed salary rate that workers in other sections receive. Food and drink servers like Vergie receive only $50 per 12-day cruise but the tips (provided for in the bill) earn her about $1,000. Two cruises per month or more than ten cruises in a six-month contract mean a lot when remitted to the Philippines. “After six months, we go on a two-month break,” Vergie adds.
Vergie is stationed at the bar in the main lobby ballroom at the foot of a luminous stairway where guests in formal wear linger to chat or dance to music provided mainly by—you guessed it—Filipino musicians.
Vergie and her husband have a three-year-old child who is being cared for by two aunts. The couple is building a home south of Manila and planning for a hardware store.
Not everyone is in the direct employ of RCI. Hoffman Roscano, 27, married, works as a photographer of a photo agency that operates aboard the ship. He and several photographers have their hands full during formal dinners and evening activities as well as land tours. During special occasions, they set up a mini studio where guests in their glittering “Titanic” finery could go for a formal shoot. Guests snap up the photos the morning after. Roscano also receives commissions from the sales.
‘Better than 5-star salary’
Karen del Carmen, in her 20s, works as a beauty therapist in the Brilliance Day Spa operated by an agency. A tourism graduate of a college in Bacolod, she had a work stint in a hotel in the Philippines after which she applied in a maritime agency. The spa company hired her and sent her to London for training.
“Better than a five-star salary,” is how del Carmen describes what she earns. After every 12-day cruise she gets two days off. “It’s fun working here,” she says as she looks up from her desk in the spa’s lavender-scented receiving area.
Nights are busy for the musicians who play in different venues aboard the ship. John Neri, 24, regales the night owls with violin music. As a child he studied music under a scholarship program for the musically gifted.
Neri met his wife in another cruise ship. Married for four years now, the couple is building a house in Kalookan City.
‘Oye como va’
Although now US-based, Vicky Gallarde of Vicky and The Holding Company band still calls the Philippines home. It’s a rollicking night when the band plays for a crowd with itchy feet.
Vicky switches without a hitch from lusty “Amor, amor, amor” to a staccato “Oye como va” while husband Chris and the rest segue from rhumba to disco beat. The band is a ship mainstay.
The couple has a room for two of their own at the crew quarters. The standard rooms for two for the crew have TVs and computers with e-mail capabilities. The Filipinos also have a daily two-page news digest called “Philippines Today.” There is a bar as well as games and exercise facilities.
Edgardo Villarino, 42, studied music in the University of the Philippines and sang with the UP Concert Chorus. He is married with three kids. The Inquirer chanced upon Villarino playing soothing classic guitar music by the poolside.
He was in the Caribbean several months earlier and he remembers the day a hurricane blew around there. There are less “sea days” in the Mediterranean, he says, meaning, the ship docks often in tourist havens.
Selling the Philippines
On his fifth contract now, Villarino says their own families could enjoy cruise privileges when there is space available. And could the entertainers have some fun during the day? “If there are less than five guests using the pool, we could take a dip,” Villarino says.
He dreams of cruises on Philippine waters that could rival those elsewhere. “We try to advertise the Philippines. Subic is so beautiful.” He talks of an island in Haiti that Royal Caribbean had developed.
Great workers
Bill Brunkhorst, American cruise director who makes sure entertainment is at its peak, has only good words for the Filipinos. “They are so talented and they learn very quickly,” he says. “They’re great workers.”
The Greek ship captain Michael Lachtaridis, a seasoned sea voyager who has been sailing the seas for 33 years says he has been working with Filipinos since the 1980s. “They get along well with other nationalities,” he says. “They are very educated and they are a happy lot.”
Whether it is instructing on wine tasting, giving beauty massages, serving at formal dinners, making omelets at the buffet breakfast, playing music, snapping photos amidst the Greek ruins, ensuring security and swiping cards at entry and exit points, disposing garbage or keeping staterooms clean, Filipino seamen and women are doing their best. And why not a Filipino guest chaplain or morgue attendant?
The least seen
The least seen but perhaps the most important because they make the ship sail the distances are those who work in the belly of the ship or the engine room. The lives of those on board are practically in the hands of these experts in ship engineering.
The Inquirer descended to the grime-free hard hat area and met some of the Filipinos there. Jessie Hervilla, Estefanio Joel, Steve Flores, Ramon Cerio, Percival Dilag and so many more. Chief Junior Engineer Rasmus Norling of Sweden has only high praises for the men who are seldom seen on deck.
But life for the OFWs on board these cruise ships is surely not problem-free, as life anywhere is not. Are the OFWs on these so-called floating four-star, five-star hotels better off than their counterparts in cargo ships and oil tankers? What lies beyond those glittering nights and sunny days at sea? What awaits them in their homeland? What awaits Edward Pampis, Joselito Benito, Cipertino Apil, Arlene Salon, Susan Gatmaitan, Arthur Pernia, Julius, Mijares, Juanito Embolori, Edwin Miranda, Enrico Sabido, Victor Amuyang, Ronaldo Carreon, Ernita Villanueva, George Tardo, Joselito Benito…
Don’t they feel resentful when they see food and drink flowing endlessly, people having so much fun and spending so much money for this kind of voyage, while they work so hard to keep these people thrilled and while the pine for home?
“Oh no,” says a food server without a tinge of resentment. “Many of them have worked hard too. And because of them we have our jobs. Someday we too could enjoy something like this.”
This Inquirer reporter was a regular paying guest on this cruise. The ship sailed from Barcelona and back and stopped in several key places on the Mediterranean coasts of Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Turkey.
12 Filipino seafarers stranded in Greece to go home
MANILA, Philippines—Twelve Filipino seafarers stranded in Greece since July 2009 are now being prepared for their repatriation, the Philippine embassy in Athens said Thursday.
The Filipino crew of M/V Aetea Sierra sought the embassy’s help after negotiations with the Greek vessel owner for their unpaid salaries and damages failed. And the seafarers have opted to stay in the ship until their salaries are paid, per advice of a non-government organization.
“The Greek government stopped the vessel from leaving port because of unpaid cargo claims,” the Department of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
The embassy offered the Filipino seafarers assistance for their immediate repatriation and provision of shelter at the Filipino Workers Resource Center pending their repatriation. It is coordinating with the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency for plane tickets to be used for the seafarers’ repatriation.
The seafarers also filed a case against the vessel owner. Eleven of them have availed themselves of the legal services offered by the International Transport Federation to pursue the case against their employer, while a Filipino ship engineer is represented by a Greek lawyer offered by the embassy. - INQUIRER.net, November 26, 2009
The Filipino crew of M/V Aetea Sierra sought the embassy’s help after negotiations with the Greek vessel owner for their unpaid salaries and damages failed. And the seafarers have opted to stay in the ship until their salaries are paid, per advice of a non-government organization.
“The Greek government stopped the vessel from leaving port because of unpaid cargo claims,” the Department of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
The embassy offered the Filipino seafarers assistance for their immediate repatriation and provision of shelter at the Filipino Workers Resource Center pending their repatriation. It is coordinating with the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency for plane tickets to be used for the seafarers’ repatriation.
The seafarers also filed a case against the vessel owner. Eleven of them have availed themselves of the legal services offered by the International Transport Federation to pursue the case against their employer, while a Filipino ship engineer is represented by a Greek lawyer offered by the embassy. - INQUIRER.net, November 26, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
OFWs who keep families together to be honored
MANILA, Philippines—Thirty-four OFW (overseas Filipino worker) families will be honored by the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (Owwa) on November 26 at Sofitel Hotel for their outstanding efforts at keeping parent-child relationships close despite at least one parent being away for periods of time.
The Model OFW Families of the Year Award 2009 (Mofya) shows that although long-distance parenting is complicated, family members can exert effort to guide behavior, affirm love and trust, observe family traditions, provide support, and otherwise keep the family together through various means like cell phones, e-mail, videos, and texts, said Owwa Administrator Carmelita Dimzon.
Labor Secretary Marianito Roque will announce two national-awardee families to be selected from the 34 regional-awardee families, one in the sea-based category and the other land-based. Special awards for outstanding achievements in community projects and entrepreneurship will also be given out. - Philippine Daily Inquirer, November 23, 2009
The Model OFW Families of the Year Award 2009 (Mofya) shows that although long-distance parenting is complicated, family members can exert effort to guide behavior, affirm love and trust, observe family traditions, provide support, and otherwise keep the family together through various means like cell phones, e-mail, videos, and texts, said Owwa Administrator Carmelita Dimzon.
Labor Secretary Marianito Roque will announce two national-awardee families to be selected from the 34 regional-awardee families, one in the sea-based category and the other land-based. Special awards for outstanding achievements in community projects and entrepreneurship will also be given out. - Philippine Daily Inquirer, November 23, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
RP to lift ban on au pair deployment to Norway
NORWAY - The Philippine and Norwegian governments will forge a bilateral agreement soon to lift the ban on au pair deployment to Norway.
This was announced by Philippine ambassador to Oslo, Elizabeth Buensuceso, at an au pair conference dubbed, "Daughter of Globalization: An au pair conference", held in this city.
She said the move was long expected after a series of negotiations and consultations among relevant Norwegian authorities, the Philippine embassy, and the Filipino community.
"We have gotten very positive responses from the Norwegian government and on the part of the Philippine government. We are certain that we can already give the recommendation to lift the ban," Buensuceso said.
She also announced that the implementing guidelines for this are already being drafted and the Philippine government will be submitting its own suggestions to reflect the changes it wants to be included.
The lifting of the ban however will only cover au pairs traveling to Norway and not to other European countries like Denmark, although negotiations with the Danish government are also underway.
Buensuceso explained: "The reason we chose to do it in Norway is because we are convinced that they have the capacity to police their ranks. Also, because Norway has opened itself to us and sat down with us to discuss the solutions to the problem."
Babaylan Denmark founder Filomenita Hoegsholm welcomed the move to lift the ban, but he said the bilateral agreement must ensure that Nordic countries police themselves since "there is so much to be done in terms of policing among the host families, and the au pair agencies who speculate on the families and earn double fees from the host families and the au pairs."
The Philippine government has banned the deployment of female migrant workers under the au pair program since 1998 due to reports of abuse, discrimination and prostitution of Filipino women.
But despite the ban, a dramatic rise in the number of Filipino au pairs in Nordic countries like Norway and Denmark has been recorded.
In Norway, the number of Filipino au pairs grew to 2,060 in 2008 from only 78 in 2000. Similarly, Filipino au pairs in Denmark rose to 2,163 last year from only 21 in 1999.
New agreement, new opportunities
In her study, FAFO Researcher Cecile Oeien Oeien discussed how the deployment of au pairs became an explosive political issue in Norway.
She said that while a global migrant scheme for au pairs is favorable, "this is not politically viable in an environment where the ruling Arbeiderpartiet (Labor party) do not want migration of low skilled labor to Norway."
She said that new guidelines for au pair deployment should have increased focus on cultural exchange that would allow au pairs to enjoy less hours of work, opportunity to study, mandatory language courses paid for by host families, and the right to holiday pay and free board and lodging.
Asked about what they think the new au pair scheme should provide, Filipina au pairs in Norway cited the same things.
"There should be opportunity to study, join organizations, learn Norsk (Norwegian language)...you should have a chance to study here longer and find a job," said Herma Rodriguez, who came to Norway four months ago to work as an au pair after working in Denmark.
For her part, Sandra Bunda, who flew to Norway two months ago, would like to have a longer contract period.
"Sa akin lang, ang dapat baguhin sana ay kontrata. Dapat maging matagal 'di gaya ng ganito na palipat-lipat tayo. Katatapos mo lang sa isang bansa, lipat ka na naman sa ibang bansa (For me, what they should change is our contract period. It should be longer so we won't have to hop from one country to another all the time)," she said.
Norway only allows au pairs to work for two years, forcing some Filipino au pairs to seek employment in Denmark after their stint in the country or to apply as caregivers in Canada.- By Macel Ingles, ABS-CBN Europe News Bureau | 11/23/2009 12:03 PM
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Filipino declared “Hero of the Year” by CNN
By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net
Posted date: November 22, 2009
MANILA, Philippines – For his innovative “Kariton Klasrum” (pushcart classroom) Filipino educator Efren Peñalforida has been awarded by CNN as “2009 Hero of the Year.”
Peñaflorida was awarded during the CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. He received his award from American actress Eva Mendes.
He bested nine other nominees from different countries for the Hero of the Year award. The nominees were initially selected by a panel of 14 “Blue Panel” luminaries but the Hero of the Year award is given to the one with the most number of online votes in the CNN Heroes website.
Peñaflorida would be the first Filipino to become a nominee of the annual CNN Heroes awards and the first to Filipino to win the top prize.
The project, already in its third year, is a a tribute by the international news organization to selfless humanitarian acts of individuals from different countries.
In his acceptance speech, quoted by CNN, Peñaflorida said: “Our planet is filled with heroes, young and old, rich and poor, man, woman of different colors, shapes and sizes. We are one great tapestry. Each person has a hidden hero within, you just have to look inside you and search it in your heart, and be the hero to the next one in need.”
"So to each and every person inside in this theater and for those who are watching at home, the hero in you is waiting to be unleashed. Serve, serve well, serve others above yourself and be happy to serve. As I always tell to my co-volunteers ... you are the change that you dream as I am the change that I dream and collectively we are the change that this world needs to be."
Peñaflorida will receive $100,000. This will be used to fund his work in the Dynamic Teen Company, a volunteer organization that he put up to conduct his “Kariton Klasrum” program.
Peñaflorida’s program conducts weekly visits to poor and underserved areas in Cavite, north of Luzon, to teach young people basic lessons in Mathematics, English, and Science using only a specially designed pushcart.
In a previous interview, Peñaflorida said he will continue holding weekly lessons and hopes that it will encourage other people to lend time to help others in need.
INQUIRER.net
Posted date: November 22, 2009
MANILA, Philippines – For his innovative “Kariton Klasrum” (pushcart classroom) Filipino educator Efren Peñalforida has been awarded by CNN as “2009 Hero of the Year.”
Peñaflorida was awarded during the CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. He received his award from American actress Eva Mendes.
He bested nine other nominees from different countries for the Hero of the Year award. The nominees were initially selected by a panel of 14 “Blue Panel” luminaries but the Hero of the Year award is given to the one with the most number of online votes in the CNN Heroes website.
Peñaflorida would be the first Filipino to become a nominee of the annual CNN Heroes awards and the first to Filipino to win the top prize.
The project, already in its third year, is a a tribute by the international news organization to selfless humanitarian acts of individuals from different countries.
In his acceptance speech, quoted by CNN, Peñaflorida said: “Our planet is filled with heroes, young and old, rich and poor, man, woman of different colors, shapes and sizes. We are one great tapestry. Each person has a hidden hero within, you just have to look inside you and search it in your heart, and be the hero to the next one in need.”
"So to each and every person inside in this theater and for those who are watching at home, the hero in you is waiting to be unleashed. Serve, serve well, serve others above yourself and be happy to serve. As I always tell to my co-volunteers ... you are the change that you dream as I am the change that I dream and collectively we are the change that this world needs to be."
Peñaflorida will receive $100,000. This will be used to fund his work in the Dynamic Teen Company, a volunteer organization that he put up to conduct his “Kariton Klasrum” program.
Peñaflorida’s program conducts weekly visits to poor and underserved areas in Cavite, north of Luzon, to teach young people basic lessons in Mathematics, English, and Science using only a specially designed pushcart.
In a previous interview, Peñaflorida said he will continue holding weekly lessons and hopes that it will encourage other people to lend time to help others in need.
Why I would rather vote for an overseas household worker than an incumbent
Outside Looking In
I thought of writing about this but didn’t feel the urgency so I left it in my mental inbox for next year, a month or weeks before we have our 2010 national and local elections. However, the announcement that Loren Legarda will run (yet again) for vice president has made me forego my planned topic on overseas Filipino networking. It isn’t that I despise her (how could I when I don’t personally know her?), but her undying interest in aiming for a much higher position in politics is typical of most incumbents and I just have to write about this.
“… (B)e the change we wish to see …,” once said Mahatma Gandhi. But these words don’t translate into action for me. I am very critical of our government and all that I do whether I am home or abroad is complain (for now, that is). Like I always gripe about the fact that millions of our kababayans are poor, yet I don’t give every beggar who harasses me for money a mere change. I don’t even donate an insignificant part of my salary to charitable institutions in the Philippines. I do hel prelatives and friends financially from time to time, but I do know that I can do more yet I choose not to.
That is why I mainly blame our public officials for the chronic existence of poverty in our country. They are, in my opinion, in the best position to help the poor because they have all of the resources at their disposal such as money and policy to alleviate their plight, but they aren’t doing anything about it. Official estimates in 2006 show that 32.9 percent of the Filipino population live below the poverty threshold of P15,507 per year (imagine surviving on less than P43 per day!).
In 2000, this figure was 33 percent. In short, during a six-year period, only 0.1 percent of the people had experiened statistical improvement in their lives. Given that we hold our national and local elections every six years, this period covered politicians who were elected before and after 2004.
In other words, what were they able to do (or, more appropriately, didn’t do) to help our poor kababayans? Have they become the change they wish to see? Do they actually visualize a Philippines that is poverty-free in the first place? And now that most of our presidential and vice presidential aspirants are these same public servants – the incumbents, what else can they do for our country in the future that they aren’t doing in the present?
So if you ask me, I would rather vote for a neophyte in politics than someone who is already in politics. Yes, there is the risk of not knowing how this person will fare but there is a much greater risk in knowing that an incumbent has done nothing. In fact, I would cast my ballot (maybe electronically) for any overseas Filipino household worker wishing to run for political office. I have encountered them in the places where I have traveled and I have become friends with them in the cities where I have lived, and I must say that they are on the top of my list of people who I both admire and respect.
For one thing, overseas household workers shed their blood, sweat, and tears (and still do) to be where they are now. I have known how most of them had to sell all of their properties, borrow money left and right or both so that they could pay for their placement fees. And I know how some others are being abused by their employers but they couldn’t leave them because they have no other option except to stay. As far as these incumbents are concerned, they have most probably utilized their guns, goons, and gold to be elected. They are arguably abusing their power to enrich themselves and their families, so it is clearly not an option to leave their lucrative posts.
Some overseas household workers do “steal” not to become rich but to be “kind” to others. I am one of those who have received their acts of kindness (remember the condiments and toiletries?...). I am not in any moral position to tell them what to and not to do. But as a columnist, I can write that they chose to become thieves – a Robin Hood, I suppose – for other people. As for these incumbents, I can go back to writing about Loren as an example and remember reading an article in 2007 that she finally bought a house, I mean, a mansion in the exclusive Forbes Park. I forget how long she has been a senator, but with only a P35,000 per month salary, she has probably been in power, I mean, public service for a century to have at least made that down payment on her new property.
Finally, some overseas household workers may do reprehensible things behind their employer’s back, but they still do a good job in their chosen profession. I believe that their amos aren’t at all dense in not figuring out that there are, for instance, extra items on the grocery receipt. So I have yet to know of one kababayan who was fired because of this. Unlike them, these incumbents are most likely doing things in front of the people they are supposed to serve. Moreover, their track record remains a track without the record, and their value addition to the government and, hence, our country is zero or negative. Another difference is that once elected to public office, we cannot fire them because they are unfortunately there to stay.
What really sets our overseas household workers apart from these incumbents who choose to remain in power and aspire to have more of it by running for a higher post, is that the former are selfless, have good intentions for other people, and are conscientious when it comes to their work. I am already 34 years old but I am still not a registered voter. Being out of the country for 12 years is no excuse because we now have absentee voting. What is keeping me from exercising my right to suffrage is that I have yet to wait for an overseas household worker to run for politics. With all of these incumbents (as well as entertainers) seeking another term in public office, none of them is definitely going to get my vote. - Jerick Aguilar, philstar.com, November 22, 2009 12:00 AM
I thought of writing about this but didn’t feel the urgency so I left it in my mental inbox for next year, a month or weeks before we have our 2010 national and local elections. However, the announcement that Loren Legarda will run (yet again) for vice president has made me forego my planned topic on overseas Filipino networking. It isn’t that I despise her (how could I when I don’t personally know her?), but her undying interest in aiming for a much higher position in politics is typical of most incumbents and I just have to write about this.
“… (B)e the change we wish to see …,” once said Mahatma Gandhi. But these words don’t translate into action for me. I am very critical of our government and all that I do whether I am home or abroad is complain (for now, that is). Like I always gripe about the fact that millions of our kababayans are poor, yet I don’t give every beggar who harasses me for money a mere change. I don’t even donate an insignificant part of my salary to charitable institutions in the Philippines. I do hel prelatives and friends financially from time to time, but I do know that I can do more yet I choose not to.
That is why I mainly blame our public officials for the chronic existence of poverty in our country. They are, in my opinion, in the best position to help the poor because they have all of the resources at their disposal such as money and policy to alleviate their plight, but they aren’t doing anything about it. Official estimates in 2006 show that 32.9 percent of the Filipino population live below the poverty threshold of P15,507 per year (imagine surviving on less than P43 per day!).
In 2000, this figure was 33 percent. In short, during a six-year period, only 0.1 percent of the people had experiened statistical improvement in their lives. Given that we hold our national and local elections every six years, this period covered politicians who were elected before and after 2004.
In other words, what were they able to do (or, more appropriately, didn’t do) to help our poor kababayans? Have they become the change they wish to see? Do they actually visualize a Philippines that is poverty-free in the first place? And now that most of our presidential and vice presidential aspirants are these same public servants – the incumbents, what else can they do for our country in the future that they aren’t doing in the present?
So if you ask me, I would rather vote for a neophyte in politics than someone who is already in politics. Yes, there is the risk of not knowing how this person will fare but there is a much greater risk in knowing that an incumbent has done nothing. In fact, I would cast my ballot (maybe electronically) for any overseas Filipino household worker wishing to run for political office. I have encountered them in the places where I have traveled and I have become friends with them in the cities where I have lived, and I must say that they are on the top of my list of people who I both admire and respect.
For one thing, overseas household workers shed their blood, sweat, and tears (and still do) to be where they are now. I have known how most of them had to sell all of their properties, borrow money left and right or both so that they could pay for their placement fees. And I know how some others are being abused by their employers but they couldn’t leave them because they have no other option except to stay. As far as these incumbents are concerned, they have most probably utilized their guns, goons, and gold to be elected. They are arguably abusing their power to enrich themselves and their families, so it is clearly not an option to leave their lucrative posts.
Some overseas household workers do “steal” not to become rich but to be “kind” to others. I am one of those who have received their acts of kindness (remember the condiments and toiletries?...). I am not in any moral position to tell them what to and not to do. But as a columnist, I can write that they chose to become thieves – a Robin Hood, I suppose – for other people. As for these incumbents, I can go back to writing about Loren as an example and remember reading an article in 2007 that she finally bought a house, I mean, a mansion in the exclusive Forbes Park. I forget how long she has been a senator, but with only a P35,000 per month salary, she has probably been in power, I mean, public service for a century to have at least made that down payment on her new property.
Finally, some overseas household workers may do reprehensible things behind their employer’s back, but they still do a good job in their chosen profession. I believe that their amos aren’t at all dense in not figuring out that there are, for instance, extra items on the grocery receipt. So I have yet to know of one kababayan who was fired because of this. Unlike them, these incumbents are most likely doing things in front of the people they are supposed to serve. Moreover, their track record remains a track without the record, and their value addition to the government and, hence, our country is zero or negative. Another difference is that once elected to public office, we cannot fire them because they are unfortunately there to stay.
What really sets our overseas household workers apart from these incumbents who choose to remain in power and aspire to have more of it by running for a higher post, is that the former are selfless, have good intentions for other people, and are conscientious when it comes to their work. I am already 34 years old but I am still not a registered voter. Being out of the country for 12 years is no excuse because we now have absentee voting. What is keeping me from exercising my right to suffrage is that I have yet to wait for an overseas household worker to run for politics. With all of these incumbents (as well as entertainers) seeking another term in public office, none of them is definitely going to get my vote. - Jerick Aguilar, philstar.com, November 22, 2009 12:00 AM
Saturday, November 21, 2009
A piece of paradise
Endless unspoilt beaches, affable locals and dirt-cheap but miraculously easy-on-the-body Tanduay rum made the Philippines the perfect location for FERGAL QUINN
THE CONCEPT of paradise is an overused one, but as my rented motorbike rounds the top of Mount Bandilaan, on Siquijor Island, in the Philippines, it’s the only word I can think of.
Just a few hundred metres up, almost at this tiny island’s highest point, I can see most of the 100km of coastline, the gorgeous palm-lined beaches and the effervescent blue of the Bohol Sea all around. Best of all, my girlfriend, Suzanne, and I have it almost to ourselves.
Though excellent roads and ferries make most corners of the Philippines – a collection of more than 7,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean – surprisingly accessible, the secret to the perfect holiday here is not trying to do too much.
We quickly discard the strict itinerary we had devised to see most of the Visayas, a dazzling spread of islands across the midriff of the country, as new attractions grab our attention.
Trying to take in any more than a few of the islands in one trip would be to take away from the one essential component in a holiday experience here: the relaxation. A combination of endless unspoilt beaches, affable locals and dirt-cheap but miraculously easy-on-the-body Tanduay rum makes the Philippines a location in which your inner sea-dog-cum-beach-bum can express himself.
If Manila thrills and exasperates in equal measure, then Cebu, the main transport hub for the Visayas and the Philippines’ second city, quietly smoulders. Short of Enya referring to it in Orinoco Flow and the explorer Ferdinand Magellan meeting his maker here, it has rarely raised a ripple internationally, but its low-key charms and oddly underpopulated streets offer an easy way to adjust to the tropics.
Driving to our hotel on our first day in Cebu, the graffitied walls and multicoloured jeepneys – former US army vehicles that were commandeered and pimped up as a means of public transport – make for a vivid first impression of a city that predates Manila but, sadly, has little in the way of architecture to demonstrate this.
Spanish and US colonial influences are immediately evident, as is the blood-and-guts Catholic imagery, in place of the gold-hued Buddhist aesthetic so prominent in the rest of southeast Asia.
Basilica del Santo Nino, its most significant church, offers an insight into the rather idiosyncratic approach to devotion to the Catholic faith we see in the Philippines. The day we visit it’s like a psychedelic Knock, with crowds of hawkers selling bizarre religious figurines alongside candles, multicoloured balloons and barbecued chicken for the faithful.
A long queue waits patiently to kiss the relic in front of the Santo Nino statuette, which Magellan himself is said to have brought here. The dual impulses of Filipinos’ faith are amply demonstrated by the fact that both Magellan, who introduced Catholicism to the Philippines, and the fierce Chief Lapu-Lapu, leader of the group of Indian natives who killed him for his trouble, inspire seemingly equal degrees of veneration.
“The beautiful die first,” Humaida Jumalon, at the Jumalon butterfly sanctuary, tells us rather fatalistically the following day as she explains the dangers the 55 species of butterflies she has in her sanctuary face in the wild.
Her small but impressive garden is part tourist attraction and part memorial to her father, the late Prof Julian Jumalon, a renowned lepidopterist. The Philippines is something of an ecological wonderland, and butterflies reflect this diversity, with 800 species here. The sanctuary is also home to amazing mosaics that the professor made from butterflies’ wings in his spare time.
It’s a hair-raising ride through the mountainous interior of Cebu to the pleasant if unexceptional resort town of Moalboal. A far stronger draw than its fairly average restaurants and bars are the corals just a few metres off shore. A quick snorkelling expedition reveals an array of fish and other creatures that is like something out of Finding Nemo.
We while away an enjoyable couple of days snorkelling, drinking beer on nearby White Beach and befriending a couple of preening, down-on-their-luck lady boys who seemed a bit lost away from the bright lights of Manila.
A short ferry ride across the Tañon Strait is Negros Occidental, once the sugar-producing centre of the Philippines but now unfairly overshadowed by the better-known Cebu and Bohol. It has three national parks, as well as some excellent locations for watching whales. The straits are a prime migration route for numerous species, including killer whales.
Dumaguete, the regional capital, is a bustling little university town with a surprisingly funky nightlife, and there’s some top-drawer people-watching along its famed oceanfront Rizal promenade.
We sit there for a long time, snacking on sugared almonds and gazing across the ever-changing strait. Last night, during the trip from Cebu, the water was a sheet of glass, but this evening a brisk crosswind whips it up to boiling point.
A child who looks about eight tries to bum a cigarette. I refuse. “That’s okay, Joe,” he says. That’s Joe as in GI, a reminder of the long US presence here. The widespread use of English is another.
Bohol is meant to be next on the itinerary, but a chance sighting of an article in a Filipino newspaper about witchcraft on Siquijor Island piques our interest, and we hop on a boat across.
Though a winner in so many ways, the island is something of a letdown on the dark-magic-and-curses front. The single “sorcerer” I am brought to see turns out to be a disappointingly sedate old gentleman peddling ointments from the back of his cottage.
I’ve seen far wilder looking characters on a night out in west Clare, frankly, but everything else, from the incredibly romantic sunsets to sailing on bangkas – the graceful little boats balanced ingeniously by two bamboo outriggers – and night-time strolls watching fireflies, is just perfect.
We head inland through San Antonio to visit the Cantabon Caves, which go more than a kilometre underground and have some beautiful rock formations and deep plunging pools. Our guide switches off her torch as I float in one to create the perfect sensory-deprivation tank.
The following day we cover most of the circumference of the island by motorbike, from Larena, around the eastern coast through numerous charming flower-festooned villages, before cutting through the interior of the island via the waterfall near Lazi to Siquijor town.
The sight of westerners is enough of a novelty for us to be almost physically forced to share a few rums with a group of locals in one small village on which it seems like half the island has descended to watch a cockfight.
Near Maria, an artists’ retreat and performance centre is being constructed by the charming Cielo, who shows us his workshop, in which he makes electric stick basses by hand.He’s spent most of his life in Manila but was happy to return to Siquijor, where he was born. “I have never found anywhere better than this,” he says firmly.
While unrest in the south, most recently underlined by the kidnap and subsequent release of Fr Michael Sinnott, has kept the Philippines down the list of holiday locations until now, more travellers are starting to cotton on to its charms.
As John, the seasoned American traveller we meet in Cebu, puts it: “The thing about this place is that there is so much beauty to go around. There’s a little bit of perfection here for everybody.”
Where to stay, where to go and where to eat in the Philippines
Where to stay
Marco Polo Plaza. Cebu Veterans Drive, Nivel Hills, Apas, Cebu, 00-63-322-531111, marcopoloplazacebu.com. This is the best-rated four-star hotel in town. Rooms cost about €60 per night.
The Vintage Inn. Legaspi Street, Dumaguete, 00-63-633-2251076. A decent selection of scrupulously clean, if spartan, rooms in a good location from just €10.
Kiwi Dive Resort. Sandugan Beach, Siquijor Island, 00-63-919-3785741 kiwidiveresort.com. An impeccably laid-out and excellent-value option right on the beach. Just €20 gets you a beachside bungalow.
Where to eat
Larsians. Fuente Osmente, Cebu. The Philippines is heaven for carnivores, with vegetables rather thin on the ground. If barbecue is your thing, you are in luck with this cracking place. No booking necessary.
Lighthouse Restaurant. Gaisano Country Mall, Banilad, Cebu, 00-63-322-312478. This venue has great food and really friendly staff. Try the bulalo (beef stew), banana heart salad, adobo (marinated meat) or lechon de leche (pork).
Manny O’s Wine and Tapas. Hilton Cebu Resort and Spa, Punta Engano, Mactan Island, 00-63-324-927777. For something higher-end, this place has a large selection of tapas and wine, and a great view of the sea, given its impressive location.
Where to go
In Dumaguete, Gardenia bar, just off Rizal promenade, is a funky little find; Why Not bar is also lively well into the wee hours.
The Live Wire in Cebu is a good live jazz and blues venue, and a fine place to blow your winnings – or drown your sorrows – after a night out at the impressively large-scale Waterfront Casino, where the region’s high rollers (and tourists feeling lucky) go to chance their arm.
When to go
Any time is a good time to visit the Philippines, with the possible exception of Holy Week, when hotels book out months in advance and prices triple. January to May usually brings the best weather to most of the country. However, this is also the high tourist season. Low season is during the “rainy” months of June to September, which in some areas of the country aren’t rainy at all. Accommodation prices usually decrease during this time.
Go there
KLM (klm.ie) flies to Manila from Amsterdam. It uses Aer Lingus for connections from Dublin, Cork and Shannon. Aer Lingus (aerlingus.com) also flies to Amsterdam from Belfast.
The Irish Times, Sat, Nov 21, 2009
THE CONCEPT of paradise is an overused one, but as my rented motorbike rounds the top of Mount Bandilaan, on Siquijor Island, in the Philippines, it’s the only word I can think of.
Just a few hundred metres up, almost at this tiny island’s highest point, I can see most of the 100km of coastline, the gorgeous palm-lined beaches and the effervescent blue of the Bohol Sea all around. Best of all, my girlfriend, Suzanne, and I have it almost to ourselves.
Though excellent roads and ferries make most corners of the Philippines – a collection of more than 7,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean – surprisingly accessible, the secret to the perfect holiday here is not trying to do too much.
We quickly discard the strict itinerary we had devised to see most of the Visayas, a dazzling spread of islands across the midriff of the country, as new attractions grab our attention.
Trying to take in any more than a few of the islands in one trip would be to take away from the one essential component in a holiday experience here: the relaxation. A combination of endless unspoilt beaches, affable locals and dirt-cheap but miraculously easy-on-the-body Tanduay rum makes the Philippines a location in which your inner sea-dog-cum-beach-bum can express himself.
If Manila thrills and exasperates in equal measure, then Cebu, the main transport hub for the Visayas and the Philippines’ second city, quietly smoulders. Short of Enya referring to it in Orinoco Flow and the explorer Ferdinand Magellan meeting his maker here, it has rarely raised a ripple internationally, but its low-key charms and oddly underpopulated streets offer an easy way to adjust to the tropics.
Driving to our hotel on our first day in Cebu, the graffitied walls and multicoloured jeepneys – former US army vehicles that were commandeered and pimped up as a means of public transport – make for a vivid first impression of a city that predates Manila but, sadly, has little in the way of architecture to demonstrate this.
Spanish and US colonial influences are immediately evident, as is the blood-and-guts Catholic imagery, in place of the gold-hued Buddhist aesthetic so prominent in the rest of southeast Asia.
Basilica del Santo Nino, its most significant church, offers an insight into the rather idiosyncratic approach to devotion to the Catholic faith we see in the Philippines. The day we visit it’s like a psychedelic Knock, with crowds of hawkers selling bizarre religious figurines alongside candles, multicoloured balloons and barbecued chicken for the faithful.
A long queue waits patiently to kiss the relic in front of the Santo Nino statuette, which Magellan himself is said to have brought here. The dual impulses of Filipinos’ faith are amply demonstrated by the fact that both Magellan, who introduced Catholicism to the Philippines, and the fierce Chief Lapu-Lapu, leader of the group of Indian natives who killed him for his trouble, inspire seemingly equal degrees of veneration.
“The beautiful die first,” Humaida Jumalon, at the Jumalon butterfly sanctuary, tells us rather fatalistically the following day as she explains the dangers the 55 species of butterflies she has in her sanctuary face in the wild.
Her small but impressive garden is part tourist attraction and part memorial to her father, the late Prof Julian Jumalon, a renowned lepidopterist. The Philippines is something of an ecological wonderland, and butterflies reflect this diversity, with 800 species here. The sanctuary is also home to amazing mosaics that the professor made from butterflies’ wings in his spare time.
It’s a hair-raising ride through the mountainous interior of Cebu to the pleasant if unexceptional resort town of Moalboal. A far stronger draw than its fairly average restaurants and bars are the corals just a few metres off shore. A quick snorkelling expedition reveals an array of fish and other creatures that is like something out of Finding Nemo.
We while away an enjoyable couple of days snorkelling, drinking beer on nearby White Beach and befriending a couple of preening, down-on-their-luck lady boys who seemed a bit lost away from the bright lights of Manila.
A short ferry ride across the Tañon Strait is Negros Occidental, once the sugar-producing centre of the Philippines but now unfairly overshadowed by the better-known Cebu and Bohol. It has three national parks, as well as some excellent locations for watching whales. The straits are a prime migration route for numerous species, including killer whales.
Dumaguete, the regional capital, is a bustling little university town with a surprisingly funky nightlife, and there’s some top-drawer people-watching along its famed oceanfront Rizal promenade.
We sit there for a long time, snacking on sugared almonds and gazing across the ever-changing strait. Last night, during the trip from Cebu, the water was a sheet of glass, but this evening a brisk crosswind whips it up to boiling point.
A child who looks about eight tries to bum a cigarette. I refuse. “That’s okay, Joe,” he says. That’s Joe as in GI, a reminder of the long US presence here. The widespread use of English is another.
Bohol is meant to be next on the itinerary, but a chance sighting of an article in a Filipino newspaper about witchcraft on Siquijor Island piques our interest, and we hop on a boat across.
Though a winner in so many ways, the island is something of a letdown on the dark-magic-and-curses front. The single “sorcerer” I am brought to see turns out to be a disappointingly sedate old gentleman peddling ointments from the back of his cottage.
I’ve seen far wilder looking characters on a night out in west Clare, frankly, but everything else, from the incredibly romantic sunsets to sailing on bangkas – the graceful little boats balanced ingeniously by two bamboo outriggers – and night-time strolls watching fireflies, is just perfect.
We head inland through San Antonio to visit the Cantabon Caves, which go more than a kilometre underground and have some beautiful rock formations and deep plunging pools. Our guide switches off her torch as I float in one to create the perfect sensory-deprivation tank.
The following day we cover most of the circumference of the island by motorbike, from Larena, around the eastern coast through numerous charming flower-festooned villages, before cutting through the interior of the island via the waterfall near Lazi to Siquijor town.
The sight of westerners is enough of a novelty for us to be almost physically forced to share a few rums with a group of locals in one small village on which it seems like half the island has descended to watch a cockfight.
Near Maria, an artists’ retreat and performance centre is being constructed by the charming Cielo, who shows us his workshop, in which he makes electric stick basses by hand.He’s spent most of his life in Manila but was happy to return to Siquijor, where he was born. “I have never found anywhere better than this,” he says firmly.
While unrest in the south, most recently underlined by the kidnap and subsequent release of Fr Michael Sinnott, has kept the Philippines down the list of holiday locations until now, more travellers are starting to cotton on to its charms.
As John, the seasoned American traveller we meet in Cebu, puts it: “The thing about this place is that there is so much beauty to go around. There’s a little bit of perfection here for everybody.”
Where to stay, where to go and where to eat in the Philippines
Where to stay
Marco Polo Plaza. Cebu Veterans Drive, Nivel Hills, Apas, Cebu, 00-63-322-531111, marcopoloplazacebu.com. This is the best-rated four-star hotel in town. Rooms cost about €60 per night.
The Vintage Inn. Legaspi Street, Dumaguete, 00-63-633-2251076. A decent selection of scrupulously clean, if spartan, rooms in a good location from just €10.
Kiwi Dive Resort. Sandugan Beach, Siquijor Island, 00-63-919-3785741 kiwidiveresort.com. An impeccably laid-out and excellent-value option right on the beach. Just €20 gets you a beachside bungalow.
Where to eat
Larsians. Fuente Osmente, Cebu. The Philippines is heaven for carnivores, with vegetables rather thin on the ground. If barbecue is your thing, you are in luck with this cracking place. No booking necessary.
Lighthouse Restaurant. Gaisano Country Mall, Banilad, Cebu, 00-63-322-312478. This venue has great food and really friendly staff. Try the bulalo (beef stew), banana heart salad, adobo (marinated meat) or lechon de leche (pork).
Manny O’s Wine and Tapas. Hilton Cebu Resort and Spa, Punta Engano, Mactan Island, 00-63-324-927777. For something higher-end, this place has a large selection of tapas and wine, and a great view of the sea, given its impressive location.
Where to go
In Dumaguete, Gardenia bar, just off Rizal promenade, is a funky little find; Why Not bar is also lively well into the wee hours.
The Live Wire in Cebu is a good live jazz and blues venue, and a fine place to blow your winnings – or drown your sorrows – after a night out at the impressively large-scale Waterfront Casino, where the region’s high rollers (and tourists feeling lucky) go to chance their arm.
When to go
Any time is a good time to visit the Philippines, with the possible exception of Holy Week, when hotels book out months in advance and prices triple. January to May usually brings the best weather to most of the country. However, this is also the high tourist season. Low season is during the “rainy” months of June to September, which in some areas of the country aren’t rainy at all. Accommodation prices usually decrease during this time.
Go there
KLM (klm.ie) flies to Manila from Amsterdam. It uses Aer Lingus for connections from Dublin, Cork and Shannon. Aer Lingus (aerlingus.com) also flies to Amsterdam from Belfast.
The Irish Times, Sat, Nov 21, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
OAV Internet Voting and OFW representation – Hoping for the best
GFN (Global Filipino Nation) a group of a coalition of major Filipino expatriate organizations who drafted the insertion of internet registration and voting said that the proposed amendment of Republic Act 9189 known as Overseas Absentee Voting Act of 2003 is now pending in the Senate. The bill contains the new version of allowing Internet voting for overseas Filipinos.
GFN office in Manila spokesperson Connie Gomez Valdes in an email said that “the bill was technically approved in the Committee on Constitutional Amendments headed by Sen. Chiz Escudero and is being passed around the tables of Senators Loren Legarda, Manuel “Mar” Roxas and Noynoy Aquino for signature. Once they have signed, it will be discussed in the Senate.”
GFN advocates empowering global community of unified Filipinos to proactively participate in their motherland’s mainstream activities particularly the right to vote. GFN is pursuing the passage of this amendment for the coming May 2010 elections. GFN led convenor, Asian Leaders 2004 awardee Mr. Vic Barrios and FilAm community leader Ernie Del Rosario are the two proponents who drafted the insertion of internet registration and voting in the proposed amendment.
Called GFN Lead Harvesters, they appeal to global Filipinos to help lobbying or pushing for the passage of the amendment before the May 2010 election. “Since we did not make it happen for the registration period, I appeal to everyone to please help us by writing letters to the senators and congressmen” said Connie Gomez Valdes.
”It would be good also to write to your consuls to make them aware that we are on top of the situation” she added.
Internet voting was successfully tested in Singapore last July 20 to August 8 which the Commission on Elections describes as “major step forward” towards the full modernization of Philippine elections. Being a remote electronic system, OAVs can cast their votes from their homes, workplaces and cyber cafes and voting stations to be set up inside the Philippine embassy.
Filipino community leader Rudy Nazruddin Dianalan based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and the main proponent of ”internet voting” during the tripartite meeting of Filipino community in Saudi Arabia said “internet voting is the most practical method to maximize the participation of OAVoters in elections.”
Most Overseas Filipinos are far away from diplomatic posts and going to the nearest one to vote entails too much expenses. Like here in Saudi Arabia. OFWs that are registered as absentee voters can only go either to the embassy in Riyadh or the consulate in Jeddah.
“Of more than one million OFWs in the kingdom, only about ten to fifteen percent are within reasonable distance to the two diplomatic posts here. Spread over a land area about five times larger than the Philippines, most OFWs do not have the means or the motivation to travel a long distance to cast their votes.” Mr. Dianalan added.
Rudy Nazruddin Dianalan is among called by OFWs in Saudi Arabia to represent the OFWs in the Senate. Filipino community is hoping that major Philippine political parties will include OFW stalwarts in their Senate slate.
“Assuming a crack at the senate, my advocacy shall center on the protection of OFWs from recruitment to worksite, the welfare of their families left back home, strengthening the ties of Overseas Filipinos to the Philippines and their reintegration, and enhancing a global Filipino nation.” He said.
Mr. Dianalan is the Chairman Emeritus of KASAPI, duly recognized federated and coalesced alliance of Filipino community organizations in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He was one of those who hardly fought that OFWs should be represented in Congress.
Among the names eyed to represent OFWs is Susan “Toots” Ople, the daughter of the late Sen. Blas F. Ople.
She served in the Senate in 1987 as media relations officer of Senator Ernesto Herrera. In 1989, the Citizens’ Drug Watch Foundation was created with Herrera as president and Susan as executive director. When the late Sen. Ople was designated Foreign Affairs Secretary, he brought Susan with him as chief of staff. It was during her stint at the DFA that Susan became deeply involved in human trafficking and OFW cases. In 2004, after Senator Ople died, Susan Ople was appointed Undersecretary of Labor and Employment.
Since the 1970s, the issue of Overseas Filipino Workers welfare has become one of the primary concerns of the government. However, in spite of efforts to provide protection, benefits, and programs to address their welfare, there are still many OFWs that have become victims of various circumstances and abuses from their foreign employers.
In 1992, the Party List Act of the Philippines was signed into law. However, the implementing rules of the Party List Act came very late and the then newly elected President, Fidel V. Ramos, appointed party-list representatives from several recognized sectors, like labor, business, cooperatives, teachers, OFWs, and others.
Ramos also appointed two OFW sectoral representatives in Congress, from the ranks of OFWs in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
But many say the failure of OFW sectoral representation in Congress was because the representation itself did not enjoy the mandate of the OFW sector they are supposed to represent.
In 1995 up to now many OFW party lists tried their luck to participate in the last elections, not even one of them garnered the mandatory requirement in number of votes needed to be able to nominate a representative to Congress.
Now, that unity is too elusive to achieve, the OFWs will try the upper House of Philippine Congress, the Senate – hoping for the best. - Bong Amora, Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) Empowerment, 14 November 2009
Taking pride in family ties
Bird's The Word
Ever since Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao stepped into the limelight, people - strangers included - have been telling me that he is the only person Filipinos can be proud of.
Excuse me?
Although Pacquiao has become a boxing legend all over the world, especially after his winning fight against Miguel Cotto last weekend, he alone does not take on the responsibility of an entire nation's pride.
One reason why I think people associate me with the famous Filipino boxer is because he may be the only Filipino they have associated with through the media.
But Pacquiao isn't the only Filipino who has seen stardom in the U.S.
Arnel Pineda, the new lead singer of the band Journey, was selected above all the rest because of a YouTube video that showed off his vocal talent.
Black Eyed Peas singer, Allen Pineda Lindo, better known as Apl to fans - pronounced "apple" - represented Filipino pride in his song titled, "The Apl song."
This song is partly sung in Tagalog, a Filipino dialect. The music video illustrates a lonely Filipino veteran who wishes his family wasn't too busy to visit him in a retirement home. Apl's lyrics describe what life was like in his home country before he moved to the U.S.
Charice Pempengco was featured on Oprah last year when she showed off her ability to almost mirror Celine Dion's vocals in her rendition of "My Heart Will Go On."
Most of my examples are about well-known Filipinos in America, thus not really proving my initial point.
So besides all the glitz and glamour, we Filipinos also have a rich history to follow.
Filipinos' migration to the U.S. was not an easy ride.
My mom, for example, waited until she was 18 years old to move here after her eldest brother joined the U.S. Navy, and her other siblings slowly made their way to the States.
They knew that their family would have a better future working and living in America.
My dad was also 18 years old when he migrated to the U.S. He was blessed to have a father who was recruited to the U.S. Army in the Philippines for World War II.
But becoming a U.S. citizen was not an easy journey.
My grandfather was part of the Bataan Death March in 1942. During this war, Filipino soldiers were captured and tortured by Japanese soldiers.
At some point, he was found floating in a river, half dead, by my dad's home town of Hagonoy, Bulacan in the Philippines.
After the war, my grandfather became a U.S. citizen, which made my dad and his 11 siblings U.S. citizens as well.
Of the different stereotypes I have heard about Filipinos - family always come first, we're always late, we're very loud, etc. - my favorite, and the most accurate, is that we have a lot of pride.
I am part of the first generation of kids on the Vallejo side of my family. If you count my extended family, there are close to 60 of us living in the Bay Area, and there are even more Vallejos in the Philippines.
As a child, I was taught to be proud of who I am and to know my roots. And although I'm not completely educated on my ancestry, it's always good to know I have plenty of people that can teach me.
As far as I'm concerned, all ethnicities have their own culture and history that they can take pride in.
So please, if you ever see me, know that I'm more than just a Filipina who can be proud of the latest trend. My background is much more colorful.- Stephanie Vallejo, http://www.thespartandaily.com, 11/19/09
Ever since Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao stepped into the limelight, people - strangers included - have been telling me that he is the only person Filipinos can be proud of.
Excuse me?
Although Pacquiao has become a boxing legend all over the world, especially after his winning fight against Miguel Cotto last weekend, he alone does not take on the responsibility of an entire nation's pride.
One reason why I think people associate me with the famous Filipino boxer is because he may be the only Filipino they have associated with through the media.
But Pacquiao isn't the only Filipino who has seen stardom in the U.S.
Arnel Pineda, the new lead singer of the band Journey, was selected above all the rest because of a YouTube video that showed off his vocal talent.
Black Eyed Peas singer, Allen Pineda Lindo, better known as Apl to fans - pronounced "apple" - represented Filipino pride in his song titled, "The Apl song."
This song is partly sung in Tagalog, a Filipino dialect. The music video illustrates a lonely Filipino veteran who wishes his family wasn't too busy to visit him in a retirement home. Apl's lyrics describe what life was like in his home country before he moved to the U.S.
Charice Pempengco was featured on Oprah last year when she showed off her ability to almost mirror Celine Dion's vocals in her rendition of "My Heart Will Go On."
Most of my examples are about well-known Filipinos in America, thus not really proving my initial point.
So besides all the glitz and glamour, we Filipinos also have a rich history to follow.
Filipinos' migration to the U.S. was not an easy ride.
My mom, for example, waited until she was 18 years old to move here after her eldest brother joined the U.S. Navy, and her other siblings slowly made their way to the States.
They knew that their family would have a better future working and living in America.
My dad was also 18 years old when he migrated to the U.S. He was blessed to have a father who was recruited to the U.S. Army in the Philippines for World War II.
But becoming a U.S. citizen was not an easy journey.
My grandfather was part of the Bataan Death March in 1942. During this war, Filipino soldiers were captured and tortured by Japanese soldiers.
At some point, he was found floating in a river, half dead, by my dad's home town of Hagonoy, Bulacan in the Philippines.
After the war, my grandfather became a U.S. citizen, which made my dad and his 11 siblings U.S. citizens as well.
Of the different stereotypes I have heard about Filipinos - family always come first, we're always late, we're very loud, etc. - my favorite, and the most accurate, is that we have a lot of pride.
I am part of the first generation of kids on the Vallejo side of my family. If you count my extended family, there are close to 60 of us living in the Bay Area, and there are even more Vallejos in the Philippines.
As a child, I was taught to be proud of who I am and to know my roots. And although I'm not completely educated on my ancestry, it's always good to know I have plenty of people that can teach me.
As far as I'm concerned, all ethnicities have their own culture and history that they can take pride in.
So please, if you ever see me, know that I'm more than just a Filipina who can be proud of the latest trend. My background is much more colorful.- Stephanie Vallejo, http://www.thespartandaily.com, 11/19/09
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Experts’ advice in buying first home
Charles E. Buban
Philippine Daily Inquirer
November 13, 2009 20:40:00
MANILA, Philippines--Having a house that one can call his own remains one of the lifelong objectives for a lot of Filipinos.
This would probably explain why even during the height of the global financial crisis, Filipinos hardly missed a beat buying their dream home.
In fact, bank lending to the real estate sector, both for personal and commercial construction of houses remained relatively high according to Antonio Moncupa, president of EastWest Banking Corp.
“In general, when you talk about Filipinos, there’s really a big, big desire to own a house. That’s what distinguishes us from the rest of Asia and other markets,” he noted.
This also means lots of emotions involved when deciding which home to buy.
“Buying a house is one of the major investments they will ever make in their lifetime so quality and the so-called look and feel of the house they are considering is important,” architect Roger Villarosa said.
Preference
According to him, majority of Filipino homebuyers would rather prefer a spacious floor space like what is being offered at West Parc Condominiums, a 15-story project in Alabang that Villarosa helped design for Filinvest.
“The units here offer ample space that matches every homebuyer—from yuppies and retired couples who would rather prefer a much smaller, more manageable space to newlyweds and growing families who would naturally require more space. In fact, if they want an even bigger space West Parc Condominiums could combine adjacent units,” Villarosa described.
For Filinvest, he also designed several projects that offer excellent location.
“Location would be the main draw of The Entrata and Studio Two, which are just among the many vertical projects of the Filinvest Group,” Villarosa said.
Occupying an entire block, he said The Entrata enjoys a prime location as it is flanked by Festival Supermall and South Station.
While The Entrata is master-planned commercial, retail, Small Office-Home Office complex situated at the main gateway to Filinvest Corporate City, the Studio Two is a 14-story residential condominium located inside Northgate Cyberzone in Filinvest Corporate City, Alabang.
While buying a home is challenging and emotional Moncupa and Villarosa shared that the following tips should prove useful:
1 Make sure you are buying from a reputable developer. Remember the real estate bubble of the late ’90s when a lot of developers failed to deliver on their promises? The most important lesson from that bubble is to stick with the developer you can trust. “There is a huge difference between, say, a name like Filinvest and another unknown name,” Moncupa suggested. As one of the country’s largest and most diverse developers, Filinvest has developed more than 2,000 hectares of land for 100,000 families nationwide for the past 40 years.
2 Canvass mortgage loan terms. “On anything that’s a major purchase, it is still best to make sure the mortgage loan term is workable on the long-term,” Moncupa suggested. For some, monthly amortization will be the center of concern, for some interest rates. Generally, the lower the monthly mortgage payments, the higher the interest rates.
3 Take time to assess what you want versus what you can afford. “Life is all about estimating reality. Those who can estimate nearest to reality will be happier. Be sure you understand your true situation and that your income is consistent with your dreams,” Moncupa advised. What happens when you don’t? Moncupa warned that you may suffer from foreclosure. He said make sure to balance affordability and marketability of your house, so that if things get difficult financially, you can sell it at a higher price.
4 Plan ahead with the size of your family in mind. If you are a newly married couple, it may be more realistic to invest in a home where children can have a room of their own or ample space for them to run free. Consider buying a one- to two- bedroom unit rather than a studio-type unit.
5 Pay close attention to lighting and ventilation. The standard size for windows is 1.2 x 1.2 meters. Ample-sized windows allow for good lighting and ventilation. “Good ventilation will help you reduce air-conditioning and lighting costs in the long-term,” Villarosa said.
6 Be sure you check for anti-termite treatment. “Termites can eat up your entire house in a year,” Villarosa reminded so ask if there is soil poisoning in the area and make sure your new home is treated against these voracious pests.
7 As much as possible, go for long-term, fixed home-lending rates. Moncupa suggested that mortgage rates now among banks don’t vary much, and if these rates will go up in the future, they will not be far from the 8 to 9 percent rate banks currently charge. However, to be sure sudden market volatility caused by unforeseen financial upheavals doesn’t hit you, go for long-term fixed rates. Home loans are good debt; they give you a good place to stay, as well as equity in an asset that you can sell in the future. “Don’t look at your house only as fulfillment of your dreams, but also as savings,” Moncupa said.
8 Shop around for mortgage redemption insurance. A few know that it is against Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ regulations for banks to require their borrowers to get mortgage redemption insurance—insurance that protects the bank in case the borrower dies—from the bank itself. So shop around because the premium rates for MRI vary widely among banks, and if you find the rates steep, don’t be shy to ask for a discount.
9 Put your family in mind. Don’t just go for the cheaper alternative. Always have your family’s interest at heart when you buy a home. Offer them peace of mind in a home they can also love and embrace as their own.
10 Whatever you do, think carefully and objectively. Take your time. Doing this right will help you truly enjoy the home of your dreams.
Pinoy HK travelers warned vs fake visa stamps
MANILA - Filipino tourists planning to visit Hong Kong are warned against using fake entry and exit immigration stamps following the arrest of another Pinoy traveler who used bogus travel documents.
The Philippine Consulate in Hong Kong issued the warning after immigration authorities nabbed a Filipino woman at the Hong Kong international airport on October 28.
The woman from Batangas province was on her way back to the Philippines with her family. It was her first visit to Hong Kong.
The Consulate said the woman’s passport bore fake entry and exit stamps “to falsely show that she had previously traveled to Hong Kong.”
Two days after her arrest, the woman was brought to Shatin Magistrates’ Court and pleaded guilty to the offense of possession of a false instrument. She was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment.
The Consulate added that the immigration entry/exit stamps were allegedly forged by a company that peddles the service as a way of bolstering a visa applicant’s chances at getting a visa from certain embassies in Manila.
However, mere possession of a false instrument is an offence under Section 75 of Hong Kong’s Crimes Ordinance and carries with it a maximum penalty of 3 years’ imprisonment, the Consulate warned. - abs-cbnNEWS.com | 11/05/2009 1:13 PM
Where the trains run on time
Business World
Vantage Point -- By Luis V. Teodoro
NOvember 6, 2009
The results of a poll recently released by the US-based Gallup Organization say that some 700 million people worldwide would move to another country if they could.
No, Filipinos didn’t lead the pack, despite the 2007 finding that nearly 20% of the population would take the next plane for another country -- any country -- if they could, and Philippine airports’ being choked daily with the 6,000 people who’re either leaving for jobs abroad or permanently relocating elsewhere. Ahead of everyone else was the population of sub-Saharan Africa, of which 38% was most anxious to pack up and go.
Sub-Saharan Africa is a vast region south of the Sahara desert which includes practically every country (50) in the continent except the six countries that comp0se North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Western Sahara).
With a total population of around 650 million (or some 10% of the world’s total), the region includes some of the poorest -- and most volatile and conflict-ridden -- countries in the world, including such headline grabbers as Somalia and the Congo.
Sixty percent of all people with HIV -- the virus that causes AIDS -- are from the region, with an estimated 22 million men and women infected out of the global total of 32.9 million. Seventy-five percent of all deaths from AIDS worldwide occurred in the region in 2007.
With poverty, AIDS, ethnic cleansing, and such other woes as piracy and the proliferation of armed groups of various stripes as part of daily life in many countries of the region, it’s a wonder that the number of those who want to leave isn’t higher.
In contrast to Sub-Saharan Africans, Asians wanted least to leave, with only one in 10 of those polled saying they would, despite the number of Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Indians. Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Filipinos, etc. who’ve left their countries to drive in New York or to scrub toilets in London.
As a sub-group, Filipinos are among the most likely Asians to leave. Some go as mail-order brides who end up sitting out winters in the US mid-West, others as truck drivers and construction workers braving improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers in Afghanistan. Large numbers of professionals, especially the doctors and nurses of which the Philippines has a shortage, also leave each month for jobs in other countries. While others leave as immigrants, the most preferred country being the United States, where there were 600,000 documented Filipinos in 2008, practically everyone who leaves for the US, Canada, or any other developed country would prefer to stay there permanently.
As for the undocumented -- the "TNTs" of Filipino migration lore -- they’re not only in the United States but also in places as diverse as Italy, the Middle Eastern countries (Dubai and Saudi Arabia, for example), and even Croatia.
Despite what seems to be the obvious answers (poverty, limited economic opportunities), why Filipinos leave has been a perennial subject of debate in talk shows, newspaper columns, and academic forums.
Some commentators attribute it all to greed. One broadsheet (not the BusinessWorld) excoriated a soon-to-be medical graduate who was planning to immediately leave for the United States for wanting to live in luxury and for his lack of patriotism, in a display of the self-righteousness the more comfortable in these parts share -- "comfort" being defined in terms of a house in a (flood-prone) Manila suburb, a car in the garage, and a six-figure salary at least.
The migration-as-greed thesis does have some validity -- but only in some cases, in which leaving the country for, say, the United States, is primarily driven by the immense propaganda impact of Western, mostly US, cultural fare to which allegedly "English-speaking" Filipinos are exposed 24/7. While more and more Western countries are adopting stricter immigration laws, the TV shows, movies, and music they blanket the world with daily continue to entice millions with dreams of an earthly paradise in New York or Sydney.
But while among the lower middle classes the desire for some level of luxury otherwise unattainable in the Philippines moves some Filipinos to leave, at least one other factor accounts for middle-class migration. It’s the desire for order and predictability, which in turn has a bearing on a family and its children’s future. If you can’t predict what will happen next year, or even next month, planning for the future doesn’t make sense. (Those who invested in college assurance plans, for example, found this out soon enough when the companies they had put their money in went bankrupt.)
One Filipino academic, asked why he moved to the US, quoted Benito Mussolini’s boast about fascist Italy: at least the trains run on time. Indeed the trains run on time, the mail’s delivered on schedule, and the garbage collected regularly in such places as much of Europe, the United States, Australia, Japan, Canada, and that emerging destination of choice, New Zealand. But it comes at a price, like having to live with racism and random violence.
If some Filipinos leave out of choice, many more do so because they have to. To this category belong migrant workers from poor families who can’t get jobs, or who do have jobs but still can’t provide their families with medical care, shelter, and education. More and more of these are women, and they’re the ones who’ve had to bear long hours of work, abuse, and even being beaten and murdered for the sake of parents, siblings, husbands, and children back home.
Mail-order brides are, on the other hand, not always solely driven by dreams of comfort. Many leave for countries they may not even know anything about so they can send home something for brothers, sisters, and parents. They’re not Out There in search of a place where the trains run on time and the mail’s delivered on schedule. They’re there because they need to be.
Comments and other columns: www.luisteodoro.com
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Filipino with 6.145 kilos of cocaine nabbed in Peru
MANILA, Philippines—A 35-year-old Filipino trying to smuggle in 6.145 kilos of cocaine alkaloid was caught in Cusco, Peru on September 30, the Philippine embassy in Santiago said.
In a statement released through the Department of Foreign Affairs, Philippine Ambassador to Chile (with jurisdiction in Peru) Maria Consuelo Puyat-Reyes said this most apprehension followed the separate arrests of a Filipina on June 2 in Arica, Chile, and of another Filipina on May 24 in Ecuador, on the same charges of drug trafficking.
“These are seemingly more daring and brazen attempts by drug syndicates in the region to use Filipinos to transport banned substances across international borders,” the ambassador said, describing the use of Filipino drug mules in South America as “especially alarming.”
The newest arrest was made at the Alejandro Velasco Astete Airport, where the suspect had the illegal drugs on both his person and his hand-carry baggage. The suspect, whom the embassy did not name for privacy reasons, was headed for Lima, Peru and to other intermediary points, with Hanoi, Vietnam as the alleged final destination.
The suspected Filipino drug trafficker is now in jail at the Quencoro Men’s Penitentiary at Cusco, where he will begin a prison sentence of six years and eight months, including payment of fines, after accepting a plea bargain agreement with the Peruvian authorities.
Ambassador Puyat-Reyes thus warned Filipinos intending to travel to South America “to be wary of drug syndicates enticing travelers to transport illegal drugs, no matter how lucrative the ‘handling’ fee may appear.” - INQUIRER.net, November 13, 2009
A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves
The New York Times (nytimes.com)
April 22, 2007
By JASON DePARLE
On June 25, 1980 (a date he would remember), a good-natured Filipino pool-maintenance man gathered his wife and five children for an upsetting ride to the Manila airport. At 36, Emmet Comodas had lived a hard life without growing hardened, which was a mixed blessing given the indignities of his poverty. Orphaned at 8, raised on the Manila streets where he hawked cigarettes, he had hustled a job at a government sports complex and held it for nearly two decades. On the spectrum of Filipino poverty, that alone marked him as a man of modest fortune. But a monthly salary of $50 did not keep his family fed.
Home was a one-room, scrap-wood shanty in a warren of alleys and stinking canals, hidden by the whitewashed walls of an Imelda Marcos beautification campaign. He had borrowed money at usurious rates to start a tiny store, which a thief had plundered. His greatest fears centered on his 11-year-old daughter, Rowena, who had a congenital heart defect that turned her lips blue and fingernails black and who needed care he could not afford. After years of worrying over her frail physique, Emmet dropped to his moldering floor and asked God for a decision: take her or let him have her.
God answered in a mysterious way. Not long after, Emmet’s boss offered him a pool-cleaning job in Saudi Arabia. Emmet would make 10 times as much as he made in Manila. He would also live 4,500 miles from his family in an Islamic autocracy where stories of abused laborers were rife. He accepted on the spot. His wife, Tita, was afraid of the slum where she soon would be raising children alone, and she knew that overseas workers often had affairs. She also knew their kids ate better because of the money the workers sent home. She spent her last few pesos for admission to an airport lounge where she could wave at the vanishing jet, then went home to cry and wait.
Two years later, on Aug. 2, 1982 (another date he would remember), Emmet walked off the returning flight with chocolate for the kids, earrings for Tita and a bag of duty-free cigarettes, his loneliness abroad having made him a chain smoker. His 2-year-old son, Boyet, considered him a stranger and cried at his touch, though as Emmet later said, “I was too happy to be sad.” He gave himself a party, replaced the shanty’s rotted walls and put on a new roof. Then after three months at home, he left for Saudi Arabia again. And again. And again and again: by the time Emmet ended the cycle and came home for good, he had been gone for nearly two decades. Boyet was grown.
Deprived of their father while sustained by his wages, the Comodas children spent their early lives studying Emmet’s example. Now they have copied it. All five of them, including Rowena, grew up to become overseas workers. Four are still working abroad. And the middle child, Rosalie — a nurse in Abu Dhabi — faces a parallel to her father’s life that she finds all too exact. She has an 18-month-old back in the Philippines who views her as a stranger and resists her touch. What started as Emmet’s act of desperation has become his children’s way of life: leaving in order to live.
About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state — migration nation — it would rank as the world’s third-largest. While some migrants go abroad with Ph.D.’s, most travel as Emmet did, with modest skills but fearsome motivation. The risks migrants face are widely known, including the risk of death, but the amounts they secure for their families have just recently come into view. Migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world’s foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums — “remittances” — bring Morocco more money than tourism does. They bring Sri Lanka more money than tea does.
The numbers, which have doubled in the past five years, have riveted the attention of development experts who once paid them little mind. One study after another has examined how private money, in the form of remittances, might serve the public good. A growing number of economists see migrants, and the money they send home, as a part of the solution to global poverty.
Yet competing with the literature of gain is a parallel literature of loss. About half the world’s migrants are women, many of whom care for children abroad while leaving their own children home. “Your loved ones across that ocean . . . ,” Nadine Sarreal, a Filipina poet in Singapore, warns:
Will sit at breakfast and try not to gaze
Where you would sit at the table.
Meals now divided by five
Instead of six, don’t feed an emptiness.
Earlier waves of globalization, the movement of money and goods, were shaped by mediating institutions and protocols. The International Monetary Fund regulates finance. The World Trade Organization regularizes trade. The movement of people — the most intimate form of globalization — is the one with the fewest rules. There is no “World Migration Organization” to monitor the migrants’ fate. A Kurd gaining asylum in Sweden can have his children taught school in their mother tongue, while a Filipino bringing a Bible into Riyadh risks being expelled.
The growth in migration has roiled the West, but demographic logic suggests it will only continue. Aging industrial economies need workers. People in poor countries need jobs. Transportation and communication have made moving easier. And the potential economic gains are at record highs. A Central American laborer who moves to the United States can expect to multiply his earnings about six times after adjusting for the higher cost of living. That is a pay raise about twice as large as the one that propelled the last great wave of immigration a century ago.
With about one Filipino worker in seven abroad at any given time, migration is to the Philippines what cars once were to Detroit: its civil religion. A million Overseas Filipino Workers — O.F.W.’s — left last year, enough to fill six 747s a day. Nearly half the country’s 10-to-12-year-olds say they have thought about whether to go. Television novellas plumb the migrants’ loneliness. Politicians court their votes. Real estate salesmen bury them in condominium brochures. Drive by the Central Bank during the holiday season, and you will find a high-rise graph of the year’s remittances strung up in Christmas lights.
Across the archipelago, stories of rags to riches compete with stories of rags to rags. New malls define the landscape; so do left-behind kids. Gain and loss are so thoroughly joined that the logo of the migrant welfare agency shows the sun doing battle with the rain. Local idiom stresses the uncertainty of the migrant’s lot. An O.F.W. does not say he is off to make his fortune. He says, “I am going to try my luck.”
A kilometer of crimson stretched across the Manila airport, awaiting a planeload of returning workers and the president who would greet them. The V.I.P. lounge hummed with marketing schemes aimed at migrants and their families. Globe Telecom had got its name on the security guards’ vests. A Microsoft rep had flown in from the States with a prototype of an Internet phone. An executive from Philam Insurance noted that overseas workers buy one of every five new policies. Sirens disrupted the finger food, and a motorcade delivered the diminutive head of state, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who once a year offers rice cakes and red carpet to those she calls “modern heroes.”
Bleary from the eight-hour flight, a few hundred workers from Abu Dhabi swapped puzzled looks for presidential handshakes on their way to baggage claim. Roderick de Guzman, a young car porter, took home the day’s grand prize, a “livelihood package” that included a jeepney, life insurance, $1,000 and a karaoke machine. Too dazed to smile, he held an oversize sweepstakes check while the prize’s sponsors and the president beamed at his side and a squad of news photographers fired away. When it comes to O.F.W.’s, politics and business speak with one voice. Message: We Care.
On the way to the photo op, I squeezed into an elevator beside Arroyo. A president and daughter of a president, she is a seasoned pol who attended Georgetown University (Bill Clinton was a classmate) and has a Ph.D. in economics. I asked why she called migrant workers “heroes” and gathered from her impatient look that it was all she could do to keep from saying “du-uh.”
“They send home more than a billion dollars a month,” she said.
“O.F.W.’s get V.I.P. Treatment, Treats,” reported the next day’s Philippine Daily Inquirer, which runs nearly 600 O.F.W. articles a year. Half have the fevered tone of a gold-rush ad. Half sound like human rights complaints.
“Deployment of O.F.W.’s Hits 1-M Mark.”
“Remittances Seen to Set New Record.”
“Happy Days Here Again for Real Estate Sector.”
“5 Dead O.F.W.’s in Saudi.”
“O.F.W. 18th Pinay Rape Victim in Kuwait.”
“We Slept With Dog, Ate Leftovers for $200/month.”
Nearly 10 percent of the country’s 89 million people live abroad. About 3.6 million are O.F.W.’s — contract workers. Another 3.2 million have migrated permanently, largely to the United States — and 1.3 million more are thought to be overseas illegally. (American visas, which are probably the hardest to get, are also the most coveted, both for the prosperity they promise and because the Philippines, a former colony, retains an unrequited fascination with the U.S.) There are a million O.F.W.’s in Saudi Arabia alone, followed by Japan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan. Yet with workers in at least 170 countries, the O.F.W.’s are literally everywhere, including the high seas. About a quarter of the world’s seafarers come from the Philippines. The Greek word for maid is Filipineza. The “modern heroes” send home $15 billion a year, a seventh of the country’s gross domestic product. Addressing a Manila audience, Rick Warren, the evangelist, called Filipino guest workers the Josephs of their day — toiling in the homes of modern Pharaohs to liberate their people.
For the sheer visuals of the O.F.W. boom, consider Pulong Anahao, a village two hours south of Manila that has been sending Filipinezas to Italy for 30 years. Cement block is the regional style, but these streets boast — the only verb that will do — faux Italianate villas. For the social complexity, turn on “Dahil sa Iyong Paglisan” (“Because You Left”), a Tagalog telenovela. Each show explores a familiar type. “Dodgie,” a driver in Dubai, is livid at his wife’s profligacy. “Dennis” gets fleeced by crooked recruiters on his way to Singapore. “Carlos,” with a wife in Riyadh, is a hapless househusband; he cannot cook or wash, and his son is left out in the rain.
Manila Hospital was aflutter one morning with the taping of the episode about “Wally.” A seafarer home from Greece, he demanded to know where his money had gone, only to discover that his pregnant wife had spent it on antiviral medication. His port-of-call promiscuity had given her H.I.V.
“Qui-et!” the director bellowed, with Wally about to learn of his own infection. It took the actor five takes to summon a sufficiently chilling mix of fear and remorse. A giggly nursing student, fresh from a cameo, paused to chat. She was getting a degree to — what else? — “go abroad and try my luck.”
While the Philippines has exported labor for at least 100 years, the modern system took shape three decades ago under Ferdinand Marcos. Clinging to power through martial law, he faced soaring unemployment, a Communist insurgency and growing urban unrest. Exporting idle Filipinos promised a safety valve and a source of foreign exchange. With a 1974 decree (“to facilitate and regulate the movement of workers in conformity with the national interest”), Marcos sent technocrats circling the globe in search of labor contracts. Annual deployments rose more than tenfold in a decade, to 360,000.
The “People Power” revolution of 1986 replaced him with Corazon Aquino, who as the widow of his slain rival was a figure as un-Marcosian as they come. But the surge in labor migration continued. By the end of her six-year term, annual deployments had nearly doubled. There is no anti-migration camp in Filipino politics. The labor secretary, Arturo Brion, greeted me by saying that he, too, had been an O.F.W., having worked as a lawyer for seven years in Canada. When I asked how a nationalist candidate might fare with a vow to keep workers home, he looked confused. “Nobody would vote for him,” he said.
The political issue is not migration but migrant safety. The formative moment in O.F.W. history, its Alamo, was the 1995 hanging of Flor Contemplacion, a Filipina maid in Singapore. Though she confessed to killing another Filipina maid and a Singaporean child, she did so in an uncertain mental state with weak legal representation; an 11th-hour witness fingered someone else. President Fidel Ramos’s calls for mercy failed, and the martyred maid’s coffin received a hero’s welcome at home. Congressional elections followed, and the new Legislature passed what is variously called Republic Act 8042 and “the migrant workers’ Magna Carta.” It pushed the government’s responsibilities beyond migrant deployment to migrant protection.
Woe now to the Filipino pol who appears not to have migrant welfare in mind. After a Filipino truck driver was kidnapped in Iraq in 2004, Arroyo not only banned all contract work there but also withdrew from the American-led military coalition. Even state visits have the tenor of bail runs. The president triumphed in Saudi Arabia last spring when King Adbullah freed more than 400 workers who had been jailed for petty crimes. But the war in Lebanon last summer threw the Arroyo government into a crisis by displacing thousands of Filipina maids. They returned home with harrowing tales of prewar abuse, including beatings and rape, endured in pursuit of salaries that averaged $200 a month. Embarrassed (and seemingly surprised), the government proposed a “Supermaid” program, a short-term training regimen that would lift the maids’ skills and demand a doubling of their wage. Those not cringing at the name fretted that a pay raise would leave the maids displaced by Bangladeshis.
While every country’s migrants face risks, what makes the Philippines unique is a bureaucracy pledged to reduce them. There is no precise analog for the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration — O.W.W.A. — or its savvy director, Marianito Roque, who is one part international rescue worker and one part domestic fixer. A bureaucratic survivor who rose through the ranks, Roque understands the imperative of making the president look good. Christmas offered plenty of opportunity. With legions of workers coming home, Roque staged thank-you fiestas nationwide.
I pictured them as sedate affairs until I arrived at a mall in Cebu City. Five thousand people pressed against police barricades, aiming cellphone cameras at a fluttering pop star who urged them to buy her music and clothes. O.W.W.A. has its own chorale, which offered the workers “Lady Marmalade” — “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” — an odd choice in a country saturated with fears of overseas adultery. Roque raffled off a mountain of rice cookers and electric fans, and the crowd responded with game-show shrieks. He caught an early-morning flight the next day and stormed through two more fiestas.
When the last rice cooker had been claimed and the last voulez-vous belted out, I spotted a man grinning mischievously, as if he were in on his own private joke. An attractive woman hung on his arm with what I mistook as reunion bliss. The bliss, she happily explained, was in the pay. The man, Pepito Montero, boasted that he earned $8,000 a month on a Saudi oil rig, and a flicker of doubt must have crossed my face. His smile broadened at the chance to produce his retort — a mass of $100 bills the size of a tennis ball.
Emmet Comodas migrated to Manila before he migrated abroad. His parents, tenant farmers in the province of Leyte, died before he finished grade school, and he was handed off to an aunt in the capital, 600 miles away. She lived in a muddy squatters’ camp called Leveriza. The alleys were ruled by drunks and gangs, but Emmet wore his geniality as a shield and was quick to make friends. Drawn to commerce more than to school, which he left at 16, Emmet spent much of his youth dodging traffic to sell newspapers and cigarettes. When he grew weary of his aunt’s strictures, he slept on a city bridge.
Among his favorite vending sites was a nearby stadium, Rizal Memorial, though without a sales license he had to sneak in early and hide before events. The canteen manager, admiring his pluck, hired him as a cook. With a bounce in his step from his first real job, Emmet was walking home to Leveriza one day when he spotted a woman, beautiful but frail, in an alley ironing clothes. He was afraid to say hello.
Teresita Portagana came from a higher echelon of the Filipino poor. Her father was a farmhand in nearby Cavite province who managed to buy a few acres of coffee trees. Tita was raised on the farm, the oldest of 11 kids in a close-knit family who shared a single thatched hut. She left school after sixth grade to help her mother manage the growing clan, and when she turned 16 her father sent her to work in a Manila glove factory. She would live with an aunt and send home most of her pay.
Her excitement at the prospect of city living vanished when she saw her aunt’s neighborhood. Leveriza was not just crowded and dangerous; it stank. Stagnant estuaries, which doubled as sewage pits, were filled with discarded bundles of waste dubbed “flying saucers.” When her father learned that Tita was drawing looks from Leveriza boys, he hurried to Manila and moved her out. “One relative in Leveriza is enough,” he said. By then Emmet was pressing his case. Tita considered him plain-looking and “poor as a rat,” but his persistence carried the day. They married on the farm and moved back to Leveriza, where Emmet would be close to work. He was 23, and she had just turned 21.
Similar slums were spreading across the developing world, greeting provincial migrants with welcome mats of squalor. How people survived, and at what cost, was a mystery and a concern. As Tita and Emmet were settling in, F. Landa Jocano, an anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, moved nearby in search of answers, which eventually formed a noted book, “Slum as a Way of Life.” The setting of his Leveriza-like camp was predictably grim — “wet and muddy,” with a “nauseating smell” and “cardboard hovels” holding six to nine people to the room. But what really stood out were the social conflicts. Despite the Filipinos’ reputation for prizing social accord, husbands beat wives, gangs murdered gangs and tsismis — gossip — was a constant preoccupation. “Envy, jealousy, hatred and other forms of ridicule” coursed through the alleys, and it took a special deftness to thrive. Tita, lacking it, withdrew into herself. “I was talkless,” she said.
Tita and Emmet had three children in four years, and two more later. Their second child. Rowena, was born seven weeks early with a heart defect that went undiagnosed for years. All they knew was that she was constantly sick. The family lived in rented shanties until Emmet won $90 on a horse race and bought a shanty of his own. It was so bug-infested that he burned the walls and rebuilt with secondhand wood. He moved to a pool-cleaning job at the stadium and sold cigarettes on the side.
Still, the holes in the roof meant the children got wet on rainy nights. When she lacked money for vegetables or fish, Tita served the children rice, and when she lacked enough rice for three meals, she served two. A Sikh they called the “boom-bay” lent money at the standard interest rate, 20 percent per month. Emmet borrowed about $130 to open a tiny grocery store, which he planned to run as a sideline with Tita’s help. The thief who robbed it during Holy Week seemed to know that they were busy with a marathon reading of the “Pasyon,” a 24-hour life of Christ. A few months later, Tita became pregnant with their fifth child.
By then the Marcos labor decree was five years old, and the machinery was humming. Saudi Arabia was modernizing overnight. It needed roads, schools, apartments, hospitals and laborers to build them. Filipinos worked hard, spoke English and took orders. Tita and Emmet had seen the workers coming home with the Look — leather jackets, Ray-Bans and enough gold around their necks to turn their skin yellow with a case of Saudi “hepa.” But most of the jobs were controlled by recruiting agencies, which charged placement fees of a month’s salary or more. Only the privileged among the poor could leave.
In the spring of 1980, Tita’s brother Fortz took a loan from his father to try his luck in Riyadh. He had just landed when Emmet’s boss asked if he wanted to do the same pool-cleaning work in Dhahran. “Yes, yes, yes,” Emmet said. The firm that managed the stadium had a contract there, so there were no recruiters’ fees. Tita’s brother Fering came the following year, and soon after, her brother Servando. Of the 11 siblings in her generation, nine either became overseas workers or married one.
“First timers” have it rough. Emmet shared a comfortable company apartment and a cook with three other Filipinos, but the loneliness was worse than anything he had known. Outside of work, there was nothing to do. Alcohol and churches were banned. Looking the wrong way at a Saudi woman was an invitation to arrest. (That is one theory behind the Ray-Bans.) Emmet paced Dhahran malls and stared at Dhahran skies, fantasizing that the planes overhead had come to take him home.
Tita’s loneliness was costly, too, but she had Emmet’s earnings. With a monthly salary of $500, he made as much in two years in Dhahran as he did in two decades in Manila, and he sent two-thirds of it home. Tita bought better food, and she bought Rowena medicine. She bought each child a second school uniform, so she would not have to wash every night. She bought an electric fan and a television — her habit of watching through a neighbor’s window was a source of alleyway discord. Emmet, who talked to the family on cassette tapes, surprised Tita by sending one with a $100 bill inside.
When Emmet got home in 1982, he gave himself a party, patched the walls and replaced the leaky roof. Then he signed another two-year contract. After his second tour, he replaced the wooden walls with cement block and added an upstairs. After his third contract, he paid the government $2,000 and got title to the land. Though neither Tita nor Emmet finished high school, all five children started college; four got degrees. Emmet, overseas paying the bills, missed every graduation. It takes a lot to move him to anger, but even now he gets furious when someone says that overseas workers leave their children to grow up without love. “You cannot look at each other and say it’s love if your stomach is empty,” he said. “I sacrificed!”
I first met Tita and the kids in 1987, as Emmet was finishing his third contract. I had a fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation to study urban poverty; a Leveriza nun, Sister Christine Tan, introduced us, and Tita agreed to let me move in. With Cory Aquino finishing her first year, the country was in transition, and Tita was, too. She was no longer quite so talkless. I awoke in the mornings to the blare of Tagalog news radio and once found her studying an English newspaper with a dual-language dictionary. “What’s imperialism?” she asked. When Congress wanted a witness for a hearing on urban poverty, Sister Christine had Tita testify. Tita told me she had been asking God, “Why are so many Filipinos poor?” When I asked if God had answered, she laughed. “Not yet,” she said.
Much of the credit belonged to Sister Christine, who had organized a network of prayer groups and cooperative stores and groomed Tita as a lieutenant. Tita bought and distributed 2,000 eggs a week for the group’s co-op stores, placing them under a fluorescent light at night to keep the rats away. The unpaid work, undertaken in the spirit of community service, brought Tita new confidence. But so perhaps did the modest comforts made possible by Emmet’s wages. By now she had a toilet.
Her oldest two children spent less time mulling the meaning of life — Rowena, still poised between sickness and health, was addicted to celebrity gossip — and her two youngest were little boys. But Rosalie, the middle child, was on a quest. At 16, she was ambitious, sometimes brooding, beautiful and devout; while her sister squealed about movie stars, Rosalie wrote Tagalog plays about class conflict. One depicted Imelda Marcos conniving to raze Leveriza and put up a discothèque.
Emmet returned a few months into my off-and-on stay. He had missed half the life of his 11-year-old, Roldan, and nearly the whole life of the 7-year-old, Boyet. He wanted to stay. With jobs scarce, frustration rose all around. Emmet scolded Tita for running up the light bill with her stewardship of the eggs. Tita got angry when she heard Emmet urge their oldest child, Rolando, to join the U.S. Navy, and furious when she caught him encouraging Rosalie to go abroad. Emmet wanted her to be an O.F.W.; Tita wanted her to be a nun. Though Emmet found a temporary job, he was back in Riyadh within a year.
One day he opened the door to find his son Rolando on the steps. He had quit tech school to try his luck as a driver for a Saudi family. His luck proved mediocre. The salary was low, his hours were long and his secret courtship of a Filipina maid could have landed him in jail. He quit after his second contract. By then, Rosalie had finished nursing school in Manila, a milestone for the family. She had set her sights on a job in the United States, but narrowly failed the licensing exam. Four years after graduation, she still earned $100 a month. Saudi hospitals paid nearly four times as much. After borrowing the recruiters’ fee from an aunt, Rosalie was Jeddah bound.
No one fully understood that a baton was being passed. With the kids grown, Tita soon rented out the house in Leveriza and started building another on her share of the family farm. At 55, Emmet had given his prime years, nearly 20 of them, to a succession of Arabian pools. Rosalie, renewing her contract, insisted he go home. The responsibility of supporting the family was hers.
As an Islamic state that bans socializing between unmarried women and men, Saudi Arabia held out few hopes for marriage or kids. Rosalie approached her 30th birthday resigned to a dutiful life alone. She celebrated at a Jeddah restaurant with Filipino friends; one of them, knowing they had a private room, disregarded the gender rules by bringing along her nephew, a construction engineer. The nephew, Christopher Villanueva, took Rosalie for an after-dinner walk, trailing her by a few paces in case the religious police happened by. “I was trembling!” Rosalie said. With both of them living in guarded single-sex dorms, their 18-month courtship occurred largely by cellphone. When they flew home in 2002 to marry, they had never been alone.
In the Philippines the following year to deliver her first baby, Rosalie saw an ad seeking nurses in Abu Dhabi. At $1,100 a month, the job paid twice what she made in Jeddah, and Abu Dhabi had no religious police. She aced the test and caught another plane to the Middle East, this time as a mother. Christine — “Tin-Tin” — was 7 months old when Rosalie tore herself away. The baby stayed on the farm and soon called her Aunt Rowena “Mama.” When a second daughter, Precious Lara, followed, she considered Rowena her mama, too. The girls cried when Rosalie held them on visits, filling her with worry and regret.
Overseas prosperity is a gift and an obligation. “Everyone needs help, and you cannot say no,” said Rosalie, who seems not to mind. She paid to complete her parents’ new house and sends them $400 a month. She sent money for her cousins’ school supplies and helped her uncle buy a cow. She lent hundreds of dollars to godparents, knowing she would never be repaid. Migration operates like compound interest, building upon itself. Capitalizing on permissive visa laws, Rosalie has now brought a cousin and three siblings to Abu Dhabi. Rowena will soon start a secretarial job, and Roldan and Boyet are working with computers. Rosalie has also gotten Tin-Tin back, though not without some continuing distress: the girl, now 4, still treats Rowena like her real mom.
Already the family benefactor, Rosalie recently got a big promotion. As a charge nurse at the Al Rahba Hospital, she now earns $2,000 a month — 20 times what she earned a decade ago when she left the Philippines. Plus she has free health care and housing. Nonetheless, she is determined to stamp one more visa on the passport page. After a decade of trying, she has passed the American nursing exam and will soon retake the English test, which she narrowly failed. “The U.S. is the ultimate,” she said. “If you make it to the U.S., there is no place else to go.”
Once upon a time — say five years ago — remittances were considered small potatoes, and possibly rotten ones. Experts saw them as minor amounts, “wasted” on consumption, and to the extent they came from professionals, as reminders of brain drain. That began to change early this decade, when research by the Inter-American Development Bank (commissioned by a remittance enthusiast named Don Terry) showed the amounts in Latin America were three or four times higher than supposed. That work got people talking, but interest surged in 2003 when Dilip Ratha of the World Bank showed the eye-popping sums extended across the globe. Migration has been a prominent development topic ever since. Of the $300 billion that migrants sent home last year, about two-thirds came through formal channels like banks, while the rest is thought to have traveled informally, in pockets or cassette tapes. By contrast, the world spent $104 billion on foreign aid. While the doubling of formal remittances in the past five years partly reflects improved counting, Dilip Ratha argues that most of the gain is real. There are more migrants; their earnings are growing; and plunging transaction fees encourage them to send more money home.
The Philippines, which received $15 billion in formal remittances in 2006, ranked fourth among developing countries behind India ($25 billion), China ($24 billion) and Mexico ($24 billion) — all of which are much larger. In no other sizable country do remittances loom as large as a share of the economy. Remittances make up 3 percent of the G.D.P. in Mexico but 14 percent in the Philippines. In 22 countries, remittances exceed a tenth of the G.D.P., including Moldova (32 percent), Haiti (23 percent) and Lebanon (22 percent).
Despite fears that the money goes to waste, a growing literature shows positive effects. Remittances cut the poverty rate by 11 percent in Uganda and 6 percent in Bangladesh, according to studies cited by the World Bank, and raised education levels in El Salvador and the Philippines. Being private, the money is less susceptible to corruption than foreign aid; it is also better aimed at the needy and “countercyclical” — it rises in response to slumps and natural disasters. By increasing reserves of foreign exchange, remittances reduce government borrowing costs, saving the Philippines about half a billion dollars in interest each year. While 80 percent of the money sent to Latin America is spent on consumption, that leaves nearly $12 billion for investment. And consumption among the poor is hardly a bad thing.
The downside is the risk of dependency, among individuals waiting for a check or for rulers (like Marcos) who use the money to avoid economic reforms. The cash could have a stultifying effect, like the “curse” of too much oil. No country has escaped poverty with remittances alone. “Remittances can’t solve structural problems,” said Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington research group. “Remittances can’t compensate for corrupt governments, nepotism, incompetence or communal conflict. People have finally figured out that remittances are important, but they haven’t figured out what to do about it.”
Drawing boards are filled with schemes to leverage the money for development, in ways large and small. A small Manila nonprofit group, the Economic Resource Center for Overseas Filipinos, has a plan to get overseas workers to buy cows; a dairy farm in the Philippines would raise them, splitting the profits and creating jobs. More grandly, commercial banks in Turkey and Brazil have used the expected flow of future remittances as a form of collateral to issue billions in corporate bonds. This lowers the banks’ borrowing costs and increases the amounts they can lend, making it easier, in theory at least, for businesses to borrow and expand.
A goal atop everyone’s list is getting more families “banked.” Opening an account (as opposed to just wiring money) lets migrants establish credit histories for future mortgages or business loans. The deposits expand capital pools. And bank accounts boost savings rates. Some banks turn migrant deposits into tiny loans to village entrepreneurs, linking remittances to the popular realm of microfinance.
Migrants contribute to development in ways that go beyond remittances. Many countries tap their diasporas for philanthropy. Affluent migrants make investments back home. And the increasingly circular nature of migration means that some migrants return with knowledge and connections. This is a countertrend to brain drain — “brain gain” — with Taiwan the most obvious case. The Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park, a government-subsidized Silicon Valley, has lured home thousands of skilled Taiwanese with research and investment opportunities. The key is having something to lure them to; brain gain has not come to, say, Malawi.
Casting migration as the answer to global poverty has some people alarmed. It risks obscuring the personal price that migrants and their families pay. It could be used to gloss over, or even justify, the exploitation of workers. And it could offer rich countries an excuse for cutting foreign aid and other development efforts. “This is a new version of trickledown theory,” warned Stephen Castles of Oxford University at a recent conference in Mexico City. “It wants to make the poor pay for development.” Rodolfo GarcÃa Zamora, a professor at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico, warned the conference against remittance “fetishization.” Even in the remittance-happy Philippines, national law states that the government does not see migration as a development strategy — though it obviously does.
Certainly, soaring remittance tallies cannot measure social costs, to migrants or to those left behind. (So many Africans die at sea each year trying to reach European soil that the Straits of Gibraltar have been dubbed “the largest mass grave in Europe.”) I was with Emmet and his brother-in-law one day when they broke into a nostalgic version of “It’s So Painful, Big Brother Eddie,” a Tagalog classic from the 1980s that immortalizes every migrant’s fear:
My child wrote to me
I was shocked and I instantly cried.
“Father come home, make it fast
Mother has another man
She’s cheating on you, father. . . .”
But what’s painful, I’m wondering
Why our two children are now three?
Among the biggest worries, in the Philippines and beyond, are the “left behind” kids, who are alternately portrayed as dangerous hoodlums and consumerist brats. Some people fear that their gadgets and clothes, sent from guilty parents abroad, corrupt village values. A U.N. envoy, examining Filipino migration, had a different concern: “Reportedly children of O.F.W.’s are more likely to become involved in delinquency or early marriage.” (Note “reportedly.”) One episode of “Because You Left,” the television show, depicts an adolescent boy whose father is abroad, leaving no one to help him with his first crush. He bonds with the school bully, steals from his mother and tries to rob someone. In addition to the “left behind,” researchers speak of a more disadvantaged class — the “left out.” Lacking the money or connections to go abroad, they are marooned on the wrong shore of what is, among the poor themselves, a growing divide.
Fear about the children is inevitable (and laudable), but the modest social science that exists offers some reassurance. At least three studies have examined “left behind” families in the Philippines. All found the children of migrants doing as well as, or better than, children whose parents stayed home. The most recent, from the Scalabrini Migration Center in Manila, involved a national survey of 10-to-12-year-olds. The migrants’ kids did better in school, had better physical health, experienced less anxiety and were more likely to attend church. “For now, the children are fine,” it concluded. Joseph Chamie, editor of The International Migration Review, an academic journal, calls the finding typical. “There’s not much scientific evidence that children have developmental difficulties when a parent migrates,” he said.
One theory is that remittances compensate for the missing parent’s care. The study found migrants’ kids taller and heavier than their counterparts, suggesting higher caloric intake, and much more likely to attend private school. The extended family can also act as a compensating force. And so can modern technology in an age of cellphones and Webcams. There is no doubt that migration has costs. “We don’t have a focus group without people crying,” said the Scalabrini researcher, Maruja Asis. The point is that not migrating has costs, too — the cost of wrenching poverty.
The Philippines, more than most places, claims to be skilled in managing these costs. As the rare bureaucracy devoted to migrant care, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration draws admirers from across the globe. Any agency pledged to tame a force as brutal as labor migration is bound to have its failures. O.W.W.A. has 300 employees to watch over 3.6 million workers. The general Filipino view is that the agency does a serviceable job during crises abroad (it evacuated 30,000 workers from Kuwait during the first gulf war), while playing politics at home — investing funds in cronies’ businesses and helping politicians get out the vote.
But there is an especially sordid chapter of migrant history that this forgiving account omits, the shipment of bar girls to Japan. Spotting a growth market a decade ago, Philippine recruiters marched armies of young Filipinas through short courses in song and dance, then sent them off to Japanese clubs, with the Philippine government certifying them as “overseas performing artists.” Club owners typically grabbed their passports and told them to do what it took to keep customers drinking; what it took was a mix of tableside affection, off-duty dating and outright prostitution. As both governments lent a hand, Filipinas in skimpy clothes became an export commodity. Their numbers rose from 17,000 in 1996 to more than 70,000 in 2004, as remittances from Japan hit more than $350 million.
Sex work is often a byproduct of extreme poverty. “A man is on top of me,” writes Corazon Amaya-Cañete, a Filipina poet in Hong Kong, in the voice of a woman who distracts herself by resurrecting a childhood habit of counting sheep.
In exchange for this is money for Mother’s
medicine
Building the house and
Buying food for my six siblings
Clothes, shoes, books and tuition for school . . .
Seventy-seven white sheep!
Seventy-seven white sheep!
The Tagalog wordplay emphasizes the cruelty of her fate: she starts life as a girl counting tupa and awakens to find herself a puta. “Oh! I am prostitute!” she screams. (The poem, “Seventy-Seven White Sheep,” was published in a Webzine of Filipino diaspora writings, Our Own Voice.)
It was not the Philippines but Japan that finally cleaned things up. It acted only after the U.S. State Department placed it on a 2004 watch list of countries lax toward human trafficking. The embarrassed Japanese now demand two years of performing experience for an entertainer’s visa, which has cut the flow of Filipina bodies by about 95 percent. Remarkably, it did so over the objection of the Philippine government, which sent a protest delegation to Tokyo.
Or perhaps it is less remarkable than it seems. A handful of advocates condemned the flesh trade, but most Filipinos see it as a consensual, if regrettable, economic exchange, and inevitable in a country where nearly half the population lives on less than $2 a day. Gina gawa ko dahil para sa familya ko goes the Tagalog saying. “I do this for the sake of my family.”
I asked Nito Roque, the country’s chief migrant protector, how to square the sex trade with the government’s pledge (in Act 8042) to protect workers’ “dignity and fundamental human rights.” His answer says something about the limits of migrant protection, in the Philippines and beyond. “The contract does not say anything about prostitution — that is a private matter between the employer and the employee,” he said. “Nobody forces anybody to go abroad. It’s the applicant who comes forward and applies for the job.
“Do they know what they’re getting into? I think so.”
About 30 miles south of Manila, just outside the town of Silang, a dirt road ends at a residential compound carved from a small coffee farm. For decades it held nothing but the thatched hut where Tita and her 10 siblings were raised. Now a dozen cement blockhouses are clustered in a U, some little more than shells and others, like Tita and Emmet’s pink cottage, boasting faux marble tile and lace curtains. One look at each home yields a fair guess of how long the owner worked abroad. Nine families in the compound sent workers overseas, and collectively those workers stayed for 131 years (and counting). A walk across the compound cuts through a century of rewards and regrets.
Tita’s brother Fering is thankful that he returned from Saudi Arabia in time to see his children’s first days of school. Another brother, Fortz, is one of two men in the family (by some counts, three) whose extramarital affairs overseas produced kids. He left for Saudi Arabia with a daughter named Sheryl and returned with another named Sheralyn. Conscripted as a stand-in mom, Tita raised the girl for 10 years — resentfully at first, because of the cost — and wept when her real mother took her away. “She is like having another child,” she said.
Tita’s sister Peachy learned that her husband had a girlfriend — and a son — when she received a package meant for them. The first time I asked her whether the time apart had strained their marriage, she politely lied. “No — we’re loving each other for ever and ever!” she said. The following day she sought me out with a more candid account. Peachy is a large, cheerful woman, who seems as if nothing could daunt her. “I almost died,” she said. “I couldn’t lose my husband to someone else. That was the saddest moment of my life.”
Peachy’s sister Patricia thought all was well until a stranger called two years ago and said her husband was having an affair with his wife. “Your husband and his mistress,” the man wrote on the photograph that followed. When Patricia called her husband in Saudi Arabia, he denied all and then stopped taking her calls. He sends little money, and she suspects he has a new child. Their son Jonvic, a dimpled 9-year-old, renders judgments of his father with innocent cheer. “What he did to us was worse than if he died, because he violated the Ten Commandments of God,” he said.
It was not infidelity that moved another relative to tears but fidelity at any cost. We were breezing through the family photo album when she pointed at a picture from Saudi Arabia that showed her husband at an evangelical church. Church? That is a ticket to deportation or worse. Alarmed that her slip might place him in greater dangers, she started to sob. “I can’t stop him — that’s where he found his happiness,” she said. When I reached him, he encouraged me to mention his preaching, saying it was his way of thanking God for the chance to work abroad. “I promised the Lord I’ll share the Gospel under any circumstance,” he said.
The nine families of overseas workers raised 35 kids, some of whom scarcely saw their fathers. Their combined stories could fill a whole season of “Because You Left.” One became pregnant at 17 and is now a single mother. Another became addicted to video games and dropped out of school. Yet another started drinking after his father disappeared. One of Tita’s sisters sold a house and a cow to place her son in a Taiwan factory. The son squandered his parents’ life savings within a few months, and his drinking and gambling got him expelled from the country.
By any measure, the price was high, yet there it stands — a semicircle of blockhouses where there once was a mere thatched hut. Bookshelves sag with encyclopedia sets. More diplomas appear each year on freshly plastered walls. There are bunk beds and Bugs Bunny sheets, cellphones, stereos and big televisions. Having nearly lost her marriage to labor migration, Peachy is scarcely heedless of its social costs. “A good provider is someone who leaves,” she said, without ambivalence.
One irritant of life in the compound has been the shared well, which dries up and causes contentious waits. Three of the families have drilled wells of their own, with electric pumps. One belongs to Peachy, a gift from her daughter, Ariane, who used her father’s overseas earnings to get a degree in hotel management and earns $1,000 a month as a maid on a cruise ship.
Another tank belongs to Tita and Emmet, whose cottage is the compound’s jewel. It has a patio, a beamed ceiling, a tiled sala floor, two kitchens and two toilets that flush. It was built by Rosalie and is a monument to the tenacious child who wrote plays about the rich exploiting the poor and willed her way into the nascent middle class. Although she is thousands of miles away in Abu Dhabi, she hovers over the compound; no household there is heedless of her example or generosity.
The house is nicer than any that Tita and Emmet have known but quieter too, with four of the couple’s five children a continent away. “I am sad,” Tita said, “because they’re in a far place.” She is often weak with ulcers, and Emmet’s hearing has started to fade. They had a chance to sell the fixed-up house in Leveriza for a princely sum, $16,000, but unwilling to part with the place where their children were raised, they rent it to relatives. Restless without work, Emmet is especially susceptible to nostalgia for the bad old days. “I was happier then because I was with my children,” he said.
Going abroad is difficult, but so is coming home. Since Emmet returned for good, the kids have noticed less tenderness between their parents and more quarreling. They each grew accustomed to being the boss. One reason Rosalie left her second daughter, Precious Lara, in the Philippines is that she thinks her parents need a child to love. Tita and Emmet sleep beneath a malaria net with the 18-month-old beside them, and Rosalie often calls home two or three times a day. She and her husband have an infant son, Dominique Edward, in Abu Dhabi, whom her parents have never seen. Armed with her first cellphone at 60, Tita has sent so many text messages that she has worn the numbers off the keys. Yawning one night, she laughed and said of herself, “Low batt!”
Off the sala is a guest bedroom with a large framed photograph of Rosalie, taken on her wedding day. The woman in that picture shows no trace of a birthright of poverty. She turns to the camera wearing an enormous gown and a confident face. Two generations of labor migration have given her more education, more money and more power and prestige than her mother could have dreamed of on her own wedding day. Precious Lara rarely plays in that room and hardly knows the face, much less the sacrifices her mother has made for the blessings of a migrant’s wage.
Jason DeParle, a senior writer for The Times, last wrote for the magazine about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
April 22, 2007
By JASON DePARLE
On June 25, 1980 (a date he would remember), a good-natured Filipino pool-maintenance man gathered his wife and five children for an upsetting ride to the Manila airport. At 36, Emmet Comodas had lived a hard life without growing hardened, which was a mixed blessing given the indignities of his poverty. Orphaned at 8, raised on the Manila streets where he hawked cigarettes, he had hustled a job at a government sports complex and held it for nearly two decades. On the spectrum of Filipino poverty, that alone marked him as a man of modest fortune. But a monthly salary of $50 did not keep his family fed.
Home was a one-room, scrap-wood shanty in a warren of alleys and stinking canals, hidden by the whitewashed walls of an Imelda Marcos beautification campaign. He had borrowed money at usurious rates to start a tiny store, which a thief had plundered. His greatest fears centered on his 11-year-old daughter, Rowena, who had a congenital heart defect that turned her lips blue and fingernails black and who needed care he could not afford. After years of worrying over her frail physique, Emmet dropped to his moldering floor and asked God for a decision: take her or let him have her.
God answered in a mysterious way. Not long after, Emmet’s boss offered him a pool-cleaning job in Saudi Arabia. Emmet would make 10 times as much as he made in Manila. He would also live 4,500 miles from his family in an Islamic autocracy where stories of abused laborers were rife. He accepted on the spot. His wife, Tita, was afraid of the slum where she soon would be raising children alone, and she knew that overseas workers often had affairs. She also knew their kids ate better because of the money the workers sent home. She spent her last few pesos for admission to an airport lounge where she could wave at the vanishing jet, then went home to cry and wait.
Two years later, on Aug. 2, 1982 (another date he would remember), Emmet walked off the returning flight with chocolate for the kids, earrings for Tita and a bag of duty-free cigarettes, his loneliness abroad having made him a chain smoker. His 2-year-old son, Boyet, considered him a stranger and cried at his touch, though as Emmet later said, “I was too happy to be sad.” He gave himself a party, replaced the shanty’s rotted walls and put on a new roof. Then after three months at home, he left for Saudi Arabia again. And again. And again and again: by the time Emmet ended the cycle and came home for good, he had been gone for nearly two decades. Boyet was grown.
Deprived of their father while sustained by his wages, the Comodas children spent their early lives studying Emmet’s example. Now they have copied it. All five of them, including Rowena, grew up to become overseas workers. Four are still working abroad. And the middle child, Rosalie — a nurse in Abu Dhabi — faces a parallel to her father’s life that she finds all too exact. She has an 18-month-old back in the Philippines who views her as a stranger and resists her touch. What started as Emmet’s act of desperation has become his children’s way of life: leaving in order to live.
About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state — migration nation — it would rank as the world’s third-largest. While some migrants go abroad with Ph.D.’s, most travel as Emmet did, with modest skills but fearsome motivation. The risks migrants face are widely known, including the risk of death, but the amounts they secure for their families have just recently come into view. Migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world’s foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums — “remittances” — bring Morocco more money than tourism does. They bring Sri Lanka more money than tea does.
The numbers, which have doubled in the past five years, have riveted the attention of development experts who once paid them little mind. One study after another has examined how private money, in the form of remittances, might serve the public good. A growing number of economists see migrants, and the money they send home, as a part of the solution to global poverty.
Yet competing with the literature of gain is a parallel literature of loss. About half the world’s migrants are women, many of whom care for children abroad while leaving their own children home. “Your loved ones across that ocean . . . ,” Nadine Sarreal, a Filipina poet in Singapore, warns:
Will sit at breakfast and try not to gaze
Where you would sit at the table.
Meals now divided by five
Instead of six, don’t feed an emptiness.
Earlier waves of globalization, the movement of money and goods, were shaped by mediating institutions and protocols. The International Monetary Fund regulates finance. The World Trade Organization regularizes trade. The movement of people — the most intimate form of globalization — is the one with the fewest rules. There is no “World Migration Organization” to monitor the migrants’ fate. A Kurd gaining asylum in Sweden can have his children taught school in their mother tongue, while a Filipino bringing a Bible into Riyadh risks being expelled.
The growth in migration has roiled the West, but demographic logic suggests it will only continue. Aging industrial economies need workers. People in poor countries need jobs. Transportation and communication have made moving easier. And the potential economic gains are at record highs. A Central American laborer who moves to the United States can expect to multiply his earnings about six times after adjusting for the higher cost of living. That is a pay raise about twice as large as the one that propelled the last great wave of immigration a century ago.
With about one Filipino worker in seven abroad at any given time, migration is to the Philippines what cars once were to Detroit: its civil religion. A million Overseas Filipino Workers — O.F.W.’s — left last year, enough to fill six 747s a day. Nearly half the country’s 10-to-12-year-olds say they have thought about whether to go. Television novellas plumb the migrants’ loneliness. Politicians court their votes. Real estate salesmen bury them in condominium brochures. Drive by the Central Bank during the holiday season, and you will find a high-rise graph of the year’s remittances strung up in Christmas lights.
Across the archipelago, stories of rags to riches compete with stories of rags to rags. New malls define the landscape; so do left-behind kids. Gain and loss are so thoroughly joined that the logo of the migrant welfare agency shows the sun doing battle with the rain. Local idiom stresses the uncertainty of the migrant’s lot. An O.F.W. does not say he is off to make his fortune. He says, “I am going to try my luck.”
A kilometer of crimson stretched across the Manila airport, awaiting a planeload of returning workers and the president who would greet them. The V.I.P. lounge hummed with marketing schemes aimed at migrants and their families. Globe Telecom had got its name on the security guards’ vests. A Microsoft rep had flown in from the States with a prototype of an Internet phone. An executive from Philam Insurance noted that overseas workers buy one of every five new policies. Sirens disrupted the finger food, and a motorcade delivered the diminutive head of state, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who once a year offers rice cakes and red carpet to those she calls “modern heroes.”
Bleary from the eight-hour flight, a few hundred workers from Abu Dhabi swapped puzzled looks for presidential handshakes on their way to baggage claim. Roderick de Guzman, a young car porter, took home the day’s grand prize, a “livelihood package” that included a jeepney, life insurance, $1,000 and a karaoke machine. Too dazed to smile, he held an oversize sweepstakes check while the prize’s sponsors and the president beamed at his side and a squad of news photographers fired away. When it comes to O.F.W.’s, politics and business speak with one voice. Message: We Care.
On the way to the photo op, I squeezed into an elevator beside Arroyo. A president and daughter of a president, she is a seasoned pol who attended Georgetown University (Bill Clinton was a classmate) and has a Ph.D. in economics. I asked why she called migrant workers “heroes” and gathered from her impatient look that it was all she could do to keep from saying “du-uh.”
“They send home more than a billion dollars a month,” she said.
“O.F.W.’s get V.I.P. Treatment, Treats,” reported the next day’s Philippine Daily Inquirer, which runs nearly 600 O.F.W. articles a year. Half have the fevered tone of a gold-rush ad. Half sound like human rights complaints.
“Deployment of O.F.W.’s Hits 1-M Mark.”
“Remittances Seen to Set New Record.”
“Happy Days Here Again for Real Estate Sector.”
“5 Dead O.F.W.’s in Saudi.”
“O.F.W. 18th Pinay Rape Victim in Kuwait.”
“We Slept With Dog, Ate Leftovers for $200/month.”
Nearly 10 percent of the country’s 89 million people live abroad. About 3.6 million are O.F.W.’s — contract workers. Another 3.2 million have migrated permanently, largely to the United States — and 1.3 million more are thought to be overseas illegally. (American visas, which are probably the hardest to get, are also the most coveted, both for the prosperity they promise and because the Philippines, a former colony, retains an unrequited fascination with the U.S.) There are a million O.F.W.’s in Saudi Arabia alone, followed by Japan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan. Yet with workers in at least 170 countries, the O.F.W.’s are literally everywhere, including the high seas. About a quarter of the world’s seafarers come from the Philippines. The Greek word for maid is Filipineza. The “modern heroes” send home $15 billion a year, a seventh of the country’s gross domestic product. Addressing a Manila audience, Rick Warren, the evangelist, called Filipino guest workers the Josephs of their day — toiling in the homes of modern Pharaohs to liberate their people.
For the sheer visuals of the O.F.W. boom, consider Pulong Anahao, a village two hours south of Manila that has been sending Filipinezas to Italy for 30 years. Cement block is the regional style, but these streets boast — the only verb that will do — faux Italianate villas. For the social complexity, turn on “Dahil sa Iyong Paglisan” (“Because You Left”), a Tagalog telenovela. Each show explores a familiar type. “Dodgie,” a driver in Dubai, is livid at his wife’s profligacy. “Dennis” gets fleeced by crooked recruiters on his way to Singapore. “Carlos,” with a wife in Riyadh, is a hapless househusband; he cannot cook or wash, and his son is left out in the rain.
Manila Hospital was aflutter one morning with the taping of the episode about “Wally.” A seafarer home from Greece, he demanded to know where his money had gone, only to discover that his pregnant wife had spent it on antiviral medication. His port-of-call promiscuity had given her H.I.V.
“Qui-et!” the director bellowed, with Wally about to learn of his own infection. It took the actor five takes to summon a sufficiently chilling mix of fear and remorse. A giggly nursing student, fresh from a cameo, paused to chat. She was getting a degree to — what else? — “go abroad and try my luck.”
While the Philippines has exported labor for at least 100 years, the modern system took shape three decades ago under Ferdinand Marcos. Clinging to power through martial law, he faced soaring unemployment, a Communist insurgency and growing urban unrest. Exporting idle Filipinos promised a safety valve and a source of foreign exchange. With a 1974 decree (“to facilitate and regulate the movement of workers in conformity with the national interest”), Marcos sent technocrats circling the globe in search of labor contracts. Annual deployments rose more than tenfold in a decade, to 360,000.
The “People Power” revolution of 1986 replaced him with Corazon Aquino, who as the widow of his slain rival was a figure as un-Marcosian as they come. But the surge in labor migration continued. By the end of her six-year term, annual deployments had nearly doubled. There is no anti-migration camp in Filipino politics. The labor secretary, Arturo Brion, greeted me by saying that he, too, had been an O.F.W., having worked as a lawyer for seven years in Canada. When I asked how a nationalist candidate might fare with a vow to keep workers home, he looked confused. “Nobody would vote for him,” he said.
The political issue is not migration but migrant safety. The formative moment in O.F.W. history, its Alamo, was the 1995 hanging of Flor Contemplacion, a Filipina maid in Singapore. Though she confessed to killing another Filipina maid and a Singaporean child, she did so in an uncertain mental state with weak legal representation; an 11th-hour witness fingered someone else. President Fidel Ramos’s calls for mercy failed, and the martyred maid’s coffin received a hero’s welcome at home. Congressional elections followed, and the new Legislature passed what is variously called Republic Act 8042 and “the migrant workers’ Magna Carta.” It pushed the government’s responsibilities beyond migrant deployment to migrant protection.
Woe now to the Filipino pol who appears not to have migrant welfare in mind. After a Filipino truck driver was kidnapped in Iraq in 2004, Arroyo not only banned all contract work there but also withdrew from the American-led military coalition. Even state visits have the tenor of bail runs. The president triumphed in Saudi Arabia last spring when King Adbullah freed more than 400 workers who had been jailed for petty crimes. But the war in Lebanon last summer threw the Arroyo government into a crisis by displacing thousands of Filipina maids. They returned home with harrowing tales of prewar abuse, including beatings and rape, endured in pursuit of salaries that averaged $200 a month. Embarrassed (and seemingly surprised), the government proposed a “Supermaid” program, a short-term training regimen that would lift the maids’ skills and demand a doubling of their wage. Those not cringing at the name fretted that a pay raise would leave the maids displaced by Bangladeshis.
While every country’s migrants face risks, what makes the Philippines unique is a bureaucracy pledged to reduce them. There is no precise analog for the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration — O.W.W.A. — or its savvy director, Marianito Roque, who is one part international rescue worker and one part domestic fixer. A bureaucratic survivor who rose through the ranks, Roque understands the imperative of making the president look good. Christmas offered plenty of opportunity. With legions of workers coming home, Roque staged thank-you fiestas nationwide.
I pictured them as sedate affairs until I arrived at a mall in Cebu City. Five thousand people pressed against police barricades, aiming cellphone cameras at a fluttering pop star who urged them to buy her music and clothes. O.W.W.A. has its own chorale, which offered the workers “Lady Marmalade” — “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” — an odd choice in a country saturated with fears of overseas adultery. Roque raffled off a mountain of rice cookers and electric fans, and the crowd responded with game-show shrieks. He caught an early-morning flight the next day and stormed through two more fiestas.
When the last rice cooker had been claimed and the last voulez-vous belted out, I spotted a man grinning mischievously, as if he were in on his own private joke. An attractive woman hung on his arm with what I mistook as reunion bliss. The bliss, she happily explained, was in the pay. The man, Pepito Montero, boasted that he earned $8,000 a month on a Saudi oil rig, and a flicker of doubt must have crossed my face. His smile broadened at the chance to produce his retort — a mass of $100 bills the size of a tennis ball.
Emmet Comodas migrated to Manila before he migrated abroad. His parents, tenant farmers in the province of Leyte, died before he finished grade school, and he was handed off to an aunt in the capital, 600 miles away. She lived in a muddy squatters’ camp called Leveriza. The alleys were ruled by drunks and gangs, but Emmet wore his geniality as a shield and was quick to make friends. Drawn to commerce more than to school, which he left at 16, Emmet spent much of his youth dodging traffic to sell newspapers and cigarettes. When he grew weary of his aunt’s strictures, he slept on a city bridge.
Among his favorite vending sites was a nearby stadium, Rizal Memorial, though without a sales license he had to sneak in early and hide before events. The canteen manager, admiring his pluck, hired him as a cook. With a bounce in his step from his first real job, Emmet was walking home to Leveriza one day when he spotted a woman, beautiful but frail, in an alley ironing clothes. He was afraid to say hello.
Teresita Portagana came from a higher echelon of the Filipino poor. Her father was a farmhand in nearby Cavite province who managed to buy a few acres of coffee trees. Tita was raised on the farm, the oldest of 11 kids in a close-knit family who shared a single thatched hut. She left school after sixth grade to help her mother manage the growing clan, and when she turned 16 her father sent her to work in a Manila glove factory. She would live with an aunt and send home most of her pay.
Her excitement at the prospect of city living vanished when she saw her aunt’s neighborhood. Leveriza was not just crowded and dangerous; it stank. Stagnant estuaries, which doubled as sewage pits, were filled with discarded bundles of waste dubbed “flying saucers.” When her father learned that Tita was drawing looks from Leveriza boys, he hurried to Manila and moved her out. “One relative in Leveriza is enough,” he said. By then Emmet was pressing his case. Tita considered him plain-looking and “poor as a rat,” but his persistence carried the day. They married on the farm and moved back to Leveriza, where Emmet would be close to work. He was 23, and she had just turned 21.
Similar slums were spreading across the developing world, greeting provincial migrants with welcome mats of squalor. How people survived, and at what cost, was a mystery and a concern. As Tita and Emmet were settling in, F. Landa Jocano, an anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, moved nearby in search of answers, which eventually formed a noted book, “Slum as a Way of Life.” The setting of his Leveriza-like camp was predictably grim — “wet and muddy,” with a “nauseating smell” and “cardboard hovels” holding six to nine people to the room. But what really stood out were the social conflicts. Despite the Filipinos’ reputation for prizing social accord, husbands beat wives, gangs murdered gangs and tsismis — gossip — was a constant preoccupation. “Envy, jealousy, hatred and other forms of ridicule” coursed through the alleys, and it took a special deftness to thrive. Tita, lacking it, withdrew into herself. “I was talkless,” she said.
Tita and Emmet had three children in four years, and two more later. Their second child. Rowena, was born seven weeks early with a heart defect that went undiagnosed for years. All they knew was that she was constantly sick. The family lived in rented shanties until Emmet won $90 on a horse race and bought a shanty of his own. It was so bug-infested that he burned the walls and rebuilt with secondhand wood. He moved to a pool-cleaning job at the stadium and sold cigarettes on the side.
Still, the holes in the roof meant the children got wet on rainy nights. When she lacked money for vegetables or fish, Tita served the children rice, and when she lacked enough rice for three meals, she served two. A Sikh they called the “boom-bay” lent money at the standard interest rate, 20 percent per month. Emmet borrowed about $130 to open a tiny grocery store, which he planned to run as a sideline with Tita’s help. The thief who robbed it during Holy Week seemed to know that they were busy with a marathon reading of the “Pasyon,” a 24-hour life of Christ. A few months later, Tita became pregnant with their fifth child.
By then the Marcos labor decree was five years old, and the machinery was humming. Saudi Arabia was modernizing overnight. It needed roads, schools, apartments, hospitals and laborers to build them. Filipinos worked hard, spoke English and took orders. Tita and Emmet had seen the workers coming home with the Look — leather jackets, Ray-Bans and enough gold around their necks to turn their skin yellow with a case of Saudi “hepa.” But most of the jobs were controlled by recruiting agencies, which charged placement fees of a month’s salary or more. Only the privileged among the poor could leave.
In the spring of 1980, Tita’s brother Fortz took a loan from his father to try his luck in Riyadh. He had just landed when Emmet’s boss asked if he wanted to do the same pool-cleaning work in Dhahran. “Yes, yes, yes,” Emmet said. The firm that managed the stadium had a contract there, so there were no recruiters’ fees. Tita’s brother Fering came the following year, and soon after, her brother Servando. Of the 11 siblings in her generation, nine either became overseas workers or married one.
“First timers” have it rough. Emmet shared a comfortable company apartment and a cook with three other Filipinos, but the loneliness was worse than anything he had known. Outside of work, there was nothing to do. Alcohol and churches were banned. Looking the wrong way at a Saudi woman was an invitation to arrest. (That is one theory behind the Ray-Bans.) Emmet paced Dhahran malls and stared at Dhahran skies, fantasizing that the planes overhead had come to take him home.
Tita’s loneliness was costly, too, but she had Emmet’s earnings. With a monthly salary of $500, he made as much in two years in Dhahran as he did in two decades in Manila, and he sent two-thirds of it home. Tita bought better food, and she bought Rowena medicine. She bought each child a second school uniform, so she would not have to wash every night. She bought an electric fan and a television — her habit of watching through a neighbor’s window was a source of alleyway discord. Emmet, who talked to the family on cassette tapes, surprised Tita by sending one with a $100 bill inside.
When Emmet got home in 1982, he gave himself a party, patched the walls and replaced the leaky roof. Then he signed another two-year contract. After his second tour, he replaced the wooden walls with cement block and added an upstairs. After his third contract, he paid the government $2,000 and got title to the land. Though neither Tita nor Emmet finished high school, all five children started college; four got degrees. Emmet, overseas paying the bills, missed every graduation. It takes a lot to move him to anger, but even now he gets furious when someone says that overseas workers leave their children to grow up without love. “You cannot look at each other and say it’s love if your stomach is empty,” he said. “I sacrificed!”
I first met Tita and the kids in 1987, as Emmet was finishing his third contract. I had a fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation to study urban poverty; a Leveriza nun, Sister Christine Tan, introduced us, and Tita agreed to let me move in. With Cory Aquino finishing her first year, the country was in transition, and Tita was, too. She was no longer quite so talkless. I awoke in the mornings to the blare of Tagalog news radio and once found her studying an English newspaper with a dual-language dictionary. “What’s imperialism?” she asked. When Congress wanted a witness for a hearing on urban poverty, Sister Christine had Tita testify. Tita told me she had been asking God, “Why are so many Filipinos poor?” When I asked if God had answered, she laughed. “Not yet,” she said.
Much of the credit belonged to Sister Christine, who had organized a network of prayer groups and cooperative stores and groomed Tita as a lieutenant. Tita bought and distributed 2,000 eggs a week for the group’s co-op stores, placing them under a fluorescent light at night to keep the rats away. The unpaid work, undertaken in the spirit of community service, brought Tita new confidence. But so perhaps did the modest comforts made possible by Emmet’s wages. By now she had a toilet.
Her oldest two children spent less time mulling the meaning of life — Rowena, still poised between sickness and health, was addicted to celebrity gossip — and her two youngest were little boys. But Rosalie, the middle child, was on a quest. At 16, she was ambitious, sometimes brooding, beautiful and devout; while her sister squealed about movie stars, Rosalie wrote Tagalog plays about class conflict. One depicted Imelda Marcos conniving to raze Leveriza and put up a discothèque.
Emmet returned a few months into my off-and-on stay. He had missed half the life of his 11-year-old, Roldan, and nearly the whole life of the 7-year-old, Boyet. He wanted to stay. With jobs scarce, frustration rose all around. Emmet scolded Tita for running up the light bill with her stewardship of the eggs. Tita got angry when she heard Emmet urge their oldest child, Rolando, to join the U.S. Navy, and furious when she caught him encouraging Rosalie to go abroad. Emmet wanted her to be an O.F.W.; Tita wanted her to be a nun. Though Emmet found a temporary job, he was back in Riyadh within a year.
One day he opened the door to find his son Rolando on the steps. He had quit tech school to try his luck as a driver for a Saudi family. His luck proved mediocre. The salary was low, his hours were long and his secret courtship of a Filipina maid could have landed him in jail. He quit after his second contract. By then, Rosalie had finished nursing school in Manila, a milestone for the family. She had set her sights on a job in the United States, but narrowly failed the licensing exam. Four years after graduation, she still earned $100 a month. Saudi hospitals paid nearly four times as much. After borrowing the recruiters’ fee from an aunt, Rosalie was Jeddah bound.
No one fully understood that a baton was being passed. With the kids grown, Tita soon rented out the house in Leveriza and started building another on her share of the family farm. At 55, Emmet had given his prime years, nearly 20 of them, to a succession of Arabian pools. Rosalie, renewing her contract, insisted he go home. The responsibility of supporting the family was hers.
As an Islamic state that bans socializing between unmarried women and men, Saudi Arabia held out few hopes for marriage or kids. Rosalie approached her 30th birthday resigned to a dutiful life alone. She celebrated at a Jeddah restaurant with Filipino friends; one of them, knowing they had a private room, disregarded the gender rules by bringing along her nephew, a construction engineer. The nephew, Christopher Villanueva, took Rosalie for an after-dinner walk, trailing her by a few paces in case the religious police happened by. “I was trembling!” Rosalie said. With both of them living in guarded single-sex dorms, their 18-month courtship occurred largely by cellphone. When they flew home in 2002 to marry, they had never been alone.
In the Philippines the following year to deliver her first baby, Rosalie saw an ad seeking nurses in Abu Dhabi. At $1,100 a month, the job paid twice what she made in Jeddah, and Abu Dhabi had no religious police. She aced the test and caught another plane to the Middle East, this time as a mother. Christine — “Tin-Tin” — was 7 months old when Rosalie tore herself away. The baby stayed on the farm and soon called her Aunt Rowena “Mama.” When a second daughter, Precious Lara, followed, she considered Rowena her mama, too. The girls cried when Rosalie held them on visits, filling her with worry and regret.
Overseas prosperity is a gift and an obligation. “Everyone needs help, and you cannot say no,” said Rosalie, who seems not to mind. She paid to complete her parents’ new house and sends them $400 a month. She sent money for her cousins’ school supplies and helped her uncle buy a cow. She lent hundreds of dollars to godparents, knowing she would never be repaid. Migration operates like compound interest, building upon itself. Capitalizing on permissive visa laws, Rosalie has now brought a cousin and three siblings to Abu Dhabi. Rowena will soon start a secretarial job, and Roldan and Boyet are working with computers. Rosalie has also gotten Tin-Tin back, though not without some continuing distress: the girl, now 4, still treats Rowena like her real mom.
Already the family benefactor, Rosalie recently got a big promotion. As a charge nurse at the Al Rahba Hospital, she now earns $2,000 a month — 20 times what she earned a decade ago when she left the Philippines. Plus she has free health care and housing. Nonetheless, she is determined to stamp one more visa on the passport page. After a decade of trying, she has passed the American nursing exam and will soon retake the English test, which she narrowly failed. “The U.S. is the ultimate,” she said. “If you make it to the U.S., there is no place else to go.”
Once upon a time — say five years ago — remittances were considered small potatoes, and possibly rotten ones. Experts saw them as minor amounts, “wasted” on consumption, and to the extent they came from professionals, as reminders of brain drain. That began to change early this decade, when research by the Inter-American Development Bank (commissioned by a remittance enthusiast named Don Terry) showed the amounts in Latin America were three or four times higher than supposed. That work got people talking, but interest surged in 2003 when Dilip Ratha of the World Bank showed the eye-popping sums extended across the globe. Migration has been a prominent development topic ever since. Of the $300 billion that migrants sent home last year, about two-thirds came through formal channels like banks, while the rest is thought to have traveled informally, in pockets or cassette tapes. By contrast, the world spent $104 billion on foreign aid. While the doubling of formal remittances in the past five years partly reflects improved counting, Dilip Ratha argues that most of the gain is real. There are more migrants; their earnings are growing; and plunging transaction fees encourage them to send more money home.
The Philippines, which received $15 billion in formal remittances in 2006, ranked fourth among developing countries behind India ($25 billion), China ($24 billion) and Mexico ($24 billion) — all of which are much larger. In no other sizable country do remittances loom as large as a share of the economy. Remittances make up 3 percent of the G.D.P. in Mexico but 14 percent in the Philippines. In 22 countries, remittances exceed a tenth of the G.D.P., including Moldova (32 percent), Haiti (23 percent) and Lebanon (22 percent).
Despite fears that the money goes to waste, a growing literature shows positive effects. Remittances cut the poverty rate by 11 percent in Uganda and 6 percent in Bangladesh, according to studies cited by the World Bank, and raised education levels in El Salvador and the Philippines. Being private, the money is less susceptible to corruption than foreign aid; it is also better aimed at the needy and “countercyclical” — it rises in response to slumps and natural disasters. By increasing reserves of foreign exchange, remittances reduce government borrowing costs, saving the Philippines about half a billion dollars in interest each year. While 80 percent of the money sent to Latin America is spent on consumption, that leaves nearly $12 billion for investment. And consumption among the poor is hardly a bad thing.
The downside is the risk of dependency, among individuals waiting for a check or for rulers (like Marcos) who use the money to avoid economic reforms. The cash could have a stultifying effect, like the “curse” of too much oil. No country has escaped poverty with remittances alone. “Remittances can’t solve structural problems,” said Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington research group. “Remittances can’t compensate for corrupt governments, nepotism, incompetence or communal conflict. People have finally figured out that remittances are important, but they haven’t figured out what to do about it.”
Drawing boards are filled with schemes to leverage the money for development, in ways large and small. A small Manila nonprofit group, the Economic Resource Center for Overseas Filipinos, has a plan to get overseas workers to buy cows; a dairy farm in the Philippines would raise them, splitting the profits and creating jobs. More grandly, commercial banks in Turkey and Brazil have used the expected flow of future remittances as a form of collateral to issue billions in corporate bonds. This lowers the banks’ borrowing costs and increases the amounts they can lend, making it easier, in theory at least, for businesses to borrow and expand.
A goal atop everyone’s list is getting more families “banked.” Opening an account (as opposed to just wiring money) lets migrants establish credit histories for future mortgages or business loans. The deposits expand capital pools. And bank accounts boost savings rates. Some banks turn migrant deposits into tiny loans to village entrepreneurs, linking remittances to the popular realm of microfinance.
Migrants contribute to development in ways that go beyond remittances. Many countries tap their diasporas for philanthropy. Affluent migrants make investments back home. And the increasingly circular nature of migration means that some migrants return with knowledge and connections. This is a countertrend to brain drain — “brain gain” — with Taiwan the most obvious case. The Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park, a government-subsidized Silicon Valley, has lured home thousands of skilled Taiwanese with research and investment opportunities. The key is having something to lure them to; brain gain has not come to, say, Malawi.
Casting migration as the answer to global poverty has some people alarmed. It risks obscuring the personal price that migrants and their families pay. It could be used to gloss over, or even justify, the exploitation of workers. And it could offer rich countries an excuse for cutting foreign aid and other development efforts. “This is a new version of trickledown theory,” warned Stephen Castles of Oxford University at a recent conference in Mexico City. “It wants to make the poor pay for development.” Rodolfo GarcÃa Zamora, a professor at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico, warned the conference against remittance “fetishization.” Even in the remittance-happy Philippines, national law states that the government does not see migration as a development strategy — though it obviously does.
Certainly, soaring remittance tallies cannot measure social costs, to migrants or to those left behind. (So many Africans die at sea each year trying to reach European soil that the Straits of Gibraltar have been dubbed “the largest mass grave in Europe.”) I was with Emmet and his brother-in-law one day when they broke into a nostalgic version of “It’s So Painful, Big Brother Eddie,” a Tagalog classic from the 1980s that immortalizes every migrant’s fear:
My child wrote to me
I was shocked and I instantly cried.
“Father come home, make it fast
Mother has another man
She’s cheating on you, father. . . .”
But what’s painful, I’m wondering
Why our two children are now three?
Among the biggest worries, in the Philippines and beyond, are the “left behind” kids, who are alternately portrayed as dangerous hoodlums and consumerist brats. Some people fear that their gadgets and clothes, sent from guilty parents abroad, corrupt village values. A U.N. envoy, examining Filipino migration, had a different concern: “Reportedly children of O.F.W.’s are more likely to become involved in delinquency or early marriage.” (Note “reportedly.”) One episode of “Because You Left,” the television show, depicts an adolescent boy whose father is abroad, leaving no one to help him with his first crush. He bonds with the school bully, steals from his mother and tries to rob someone. In addition to the “left behind,” researchers speak of a more disadvantaged class — the “left out.” Lacking the money or connections to go abroad, they are marooned on the wrong shore of what is, among the poor themselves, a growing divide.
Fear about the children is inevitable (and laudable), but the modest social science that exists offers some reassurance. At least three studies have examined “left behind” families in the Philippines. All found the children of migrants doing as well as, or better than, children whose parents stayed home. The most recent, from the Scalabrini Migration Center in Manila, involved a national survey of 10-to-12-year-olds. The migrants’ kids did better in school, had better physical health, experienced less anxiety and were more likely to attend church. “For now, the children are fine,” it concluded. Joseph Chamie, editor of The International Migration Review, an academic journal, calls the finding typical. “There’s not much scientific evidence that children have developmental difficulties when a parent migrates,” he said.
One theory is that remittances compensate for the missing parent’s care. The study found migrants’ kids taller and heavier than their counterparts, suggesting higher caloric intake, and much more likely to attend private school. The extended family can also act as a compensating force. And so can modern technology in an age of cellphones and Webcams. There is no doubt that migration has costs. “We don’t have a focus group without people crying,” said the Scalabrini researcher, Maruja Asis. The point is that not migrating has costs, too — the cost of wrenching poverty.
The Philippines, more than most places, claims to be skilled in managing these costs. As the rare bureaucracy devoted to migrant care, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration draws admirers from across the globe. Any agency pledged to tame a force as brutal as labor migration is bound to have its failures. O.W.W.A. has 300 employees to watch over 3.6 million workers. The general Filipino view is that the agency does a serviceable job during crises abroad (it evacuated 30,000 workers from Kuwait during the first gulf war), while playing politics at home — investing funds in cronies’ businesses and helping politicians get out the vote.
But there is an especially sordid chapter of migrant history that this forgiving account omits, the shipment of bar girls to Japan. Spotting a growth market a decade ago, Philippine recruiters marched armies of young Filipinas through short courses in song and dance, then sent them off to Japanese clubs, with the Philippine government certifying them as “overseas performing artists.” Club owners typically grabbed their passports and told them to do what it took to keep customers drinking; what it took was a mix of tableside affection, off-duty dating and outright prostitution. As both governments lent a hand, Filipinas in skimpy clothes became an export commodity. Their numbers rose from 17,000 in 1996 to more than 70,000 in 2004, as remittances from Japan hit more than $350 million.
Sex work is often a byproduct of extreme poverty. “A man is on top of me,” writes Corazon Amaya-Cañete, a Filipina poet in Hong Kong, in the voice of a woman who distracts herself by resurrecting a childhood habit of counting sheep.
In exchange for this is money for Mother’s
medicine
Building the house and
Buying food for my six siblings
Clothes, shoes, books and tuition for school . . .
Seventy-seven white sheep!
Seventy-seven white sheep!
The Tagalog wordplay emphasizes the cruelty of her fate: she starts life as a girl counting tupa and awakens to find herself a puta. “Oh! I am prostitute!” she screams. (The poem, “Seventy-Seven White Sheep,” was published in a Webzine of Filipino diaspora writings, Our Own Voice.)
It was not the Philippines but Japan that finally cleaned things up. It acted only after the U.S. State Department placed it on a 2004 watch list of countries lax toward human trafficking. The embarrassed Japanese now demand two years of performing experience for an entertainer’s visa, which has cut the flow of Filipina bodies by about 95 percent. Remarkably, it did so over the objection of the Philippine government, which sent a protest delegation to Tokyo.
Or perhaps it is less remarkable than it seems. A handful of advocates condemned the flesh trade, but most Filipinos see it as a consensual, if regrettable, economic exchange, and inevitable in a country where nearly half the population lives on less than $2 a day. Gina gawa ko dahil para sa familya ko goes the Tagalog saying. “I do this for the sake of my family.”
I asked Nito Roque, the country’s chief migrant protector, how to square the sex trade with the government’s pledge (in Act 8042) to protect workers’ “dignity and fundamental human rights.” His answer says something about the limits of migrant protection, in the Philippines and beyond. “The contract does not say anything about prostitution — that is a private matter between the employer and the employee,” he said. “Nobody forces anybody to go abroad. It’s the applicant who comes forward and applies for the job.
“Do they know what they’re getting into? I think so.”
About 30 miles south of Manila, just outside the town of Silang, a dirt road ends at a residential compound carved from a small coffee farm. For decades it held nothing but the thatched hut where Tita and her 10 siblings were raised. Now a dozen cement blockhouses are clustered in a U, some little more than shells and others, like Tita and Emmet’s pink cottage, boasting faux marble tile and lace curtains. One look at each home yields a fair guess of how long the owner worked abroad. Nine families in the compound sent workers overseas, and collectively those workers stayed for 131 years (and counting). A walk across the compound cuts through a century of rewards and regrets.
Tita’s brother Fering is thankful that he returned from Saudi Arabia in time to see his children’s first days of school. Another brother, Fortz, is one of two men in the family (by some counts, three) whose extramarital affairs overseas produced kids. He left for Saudi Arabia with a daughter named Sheryl and returned with another named Sheralyn. Conscripted as a stand-in mom, Tita raised the girl for 10 years — resentfully at first, because of the cost — and wept when her real mother took her away. “She is like having another child,” she said.
Tita’s sister Peachy learned that her husband had a girlfriend — and a son — when she received a package meant for them. The first time I asked her whether the time apart had strained their marriage, she politely lied. “No — we’re loving each other for ever and ever!” she said. The following day she sought me out with a more candid account. Peachy is a large, cheerful woman, who seems as if nothing could daunt her. “I almost died,” she said. “I couldn’t lose my husband to someone else. That was the saddest moment of my life.”
Peachy’s sister Patricia thought all was well until a stranger called two years ago and said her husband was having an affair with his wife. “Your husband and his mistress,” the man wrote on the photograph that followed. When Patricia called her husband in Saudi Arabia, he denied all and then stopped taking her calls. He sends little money, and she suspects he has a new child. Their son Jonvic, a dimpled 9-year-old, renders judgments of his father with innocent cheer. “What he did to us was worse than if he died, because he violated the Ten Commandments of God,” he said.
It was not infidelity that moved another relative to tears but fidelity at any cost. We were breezing through the family photo album when she pointed at a picture from Saudi Arabia that showed her husband at an evangelical church. Church? That is a ticket to deportation or worse. Alarmed that her slip might place him in greater dangers, she started to sob. “I can’t stop him — that’s where he found his happiness,” she said. When I reached him, he encouraged me to mention his preaching, saying it was his way of thanking God for the chance to work abroad. “I promised the Lord I’ll share the Gospel under any circumstance,” he said.
The nine families of overseas workers raised 35 kids, some of whom scarcely saw their fathers. Their combined stories could fill a whole season of “Because You Left.” One became pregnant at 17 and is now a single mother. Another became addicted to video games and dropped out of school. Yet another started drinking after his father disappeared. One of Tita’s sisters sold a house and a cow to place her son in a Taiwan factory. The son squandered his parents’ life savings within a few months, and his drinking and gambling got him expelled from the country.
By any measure, the price was high, yet there it stands — a semicircle of blockhouses where there once was a mere thatched hut. Bookshelves sag with encyclopedia sets. More diplomas appear each year on freshly plastered walls. There are bunk beds and Bugs Bunny sheets, cellphones, stereos and big televisions. Having nearly lost her marriage to labor migration, Peachy is scarcely heedless of its social costs. “A good provider is someone who leaves,” she said, without ambivalence.
One irritant of life in the compound has been the shared well, which dries up and causes contentious waits. Three of the families have drilled wells of their own, with electric pumps. One belongs to Peachy, a gift from her daughter, Ariane, who used her father’s overseas earnings to get a degree in hotel management and earns $1,000 a month as a maid on a cruise ship.
Another tank belongs to Tita and Emmet, whose cottage is the compound’s jewel. It has a patio, a beamed ceiling, a tiled sala floor, two kitchens and two toilets that flush. It was built by Rosalie and is a monument to the tenacious child who wrote plays about the rich exploiting the poor and willed her way into the nascent middle class. Although she is thousands of miles away in Abu Dhabi, she hovers over the compound; no household there is heedless of her example or generosity.
The house is nicer than any that Tita and Emmet have known but quieter too, with four of the couple’s five children a continent away. “I am sad,” Tita said, “because they’re in a far place.” She is often weak with ulcers, and Emmet’s hearing has started to fade. They had a chance to sell the fixed-up house in Leveriza for a princely sum, $16,000, but unwilling to part with the place where their children were raised, they rent it to relatives. Restless without work, Emmet is especially susceptible to nostalgia for the bad old days. “I was happier then because I was with my children,” he said.
Going abroad is difficult, but so is coming home. Since Emmet returned for good, the kids have noticed less tenderness between their parents and more quarreling. They each grew accustomed to being the boss. One reason Rosalie left her second daughter, Precious Lara, in the Philippines is that she thinks her parents need a child to love. Tita and Emmet sleep beneath a malaria net with the 18-month-old beside them, and Rosalie often calls home two or three times a day. She and her husband have an infant son, Dominique Edward, in Abu Dhabi, whom her parents have never seen. Armed with her first cellphone at 60, Tita has sent so many text messages that she has worn the numbers off the keys. Yawning one night, she laughed and said of herself, “Low batt!”
Off the sala is a guest bedroom with a large framed photograph of Rosalie, taken on her wedding day. The woman in that picture shows no trace of a birthright of poverty. She turns to the camera wearing an enormous gown and a confident face. Two generations of labor migration have given her more education, more money and more power and prestige than her mother could have dreamed of on her own wedding day. Precious Lara rarely plays in that room and hardly knows the face, much less the sacrifices her mother has made for the blessings of a migrant’s wage.
Jason DeParle, a senior writer for The Times, last wrote for the magazine about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
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