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.

Non-Jewish migrants could offer immense benefits to Israel

Boosting the Israeli nation

Yaron London
http://www.ynetnews.com
Published: 09.15.09

In contemporary Hebrew, a “Filipino” is not a woman who hails from the Philippines, but rather, one who takes care of the elderly and disabled. I already heard someone utter the phrase “my Filipino is Polish.” However, the one who lives with us really is Filipino. Her name is Ninette, just like the popular Israeli singer, but our Ninette does not sing. She speaks softly and infrequently.

Our Ninette is devoted, kind, honest, and wise. We speak in Hebrew and broken English. In Manila, she earned a degree in Management Administration, and even though I have been unable to elicit any word about management theory from her, I know that she plans her family’s life for the very long term.

She is married and a mother of two. Her husband, who stayed in their home country and takes care of the kids with what we refer to as “motherly” devotion works in construction. Her overall salary is $1,100 per month. Half of it is invested in the children’s education. The parents decided to send them to an expensive private school.

I see them through the Internet and Ninette’s laptop. I do not understand their language, but I hear the mother’s and children’s tone of voice. My heart breaks.

Three years have passed since she arrived in Israel. The sum she paid the mediators equals a two-year salary. At fault for this robbery are the authorities that abandon work migrants in the hand of predators. A little more than two years are left before her work permit expires. Her expenses are slim, and therefore I estimate that she will transfer about $25,000 to her family. She believes she’s lucky.

The other day I asked her what she’ll be doing when she returns to her homeland. “I’ll try to complete an MA in Psychology, distinguish myself, and teach at college,” she said. We like to flatter ourselves and say that studies have been the heartfelt aspiration of Jews for generations, yet I’m doubtful whether you will find amongst us a person who scarifies so much in order to acquire education for herself and her children.

Immense benefits

I asked Ninette a question that I ask almost any work migrant I encounter: “If you could, would you acquire Israeli citizenship, with all the obligations this entails?” As you can guess, the answer is almost always an excited “yes.” Had we been up to this challenge, Israel would have gained a large group of young and determined immigrants who are both enthusiastic and loyal. This is the typical profile of work migrants everywhere.

People are flexible creatures. They easily get accustomed to foreign cultures and turn into patriots in their adopted country. This will happen to our neutralized work migrants. Within a decade, their children will do a project at school to remind themselves where their parents came from.

However, the soul of the Jews, the most flexible nation in the world, sizzles with racism, which does not allow them to level-headedly consider the immense benefits of work migration. Over the weekend I found two references to it: An immigration policy proposal presented by the Metzilah Center, and another notion addressed in Dan Margalit’s new book.

The Metzilah document’s weakness has to do with the fact that its authors view immigration as danger and almost completely ignore the benefits inherent in it. Meanwhile, Dan Margalit writes that he encourages his many friends to establish a conversion center in “Europe or America” that will absorb no fewer than 100,000 people into the Jewish nation every year. But why do it in a capital located in the northern hemisphere? Is it because of the skin color of potential converts? And besides, why convert immigrants? And if we do convert them, then why should we offer them “expedited conversion?” And if we do go for expedited conversion, why don’t we start with the roughly 700,000 “non-Jewish Russians” and work immigrants that live amidst us?

From banana cue to real estate for the global market

By Arnel Medrano
Inquirer
August 29, 2007

SHE SPENT PART OF HER YOUTH IN MALABON, selling sugar-coated banana-on-stick just to send herself to school and support her younger siblings, not knowing she was destined to sell much bigger things.

Selling, she still does, but no more banana cues for her. And she plies her trade no longer in Malabon but in the world: the US and far beyond.

Susan Barlin has made it big selling prime real estate in various parts of the world to the global marketplace.

This former small entrepreneur is making a name no longer for herself but for the Philippines — selling the country and the rest of tropical Asia as the world’s premier second-home and property investment destination and retirement haven.

Her efforts have caught the attention of the Department of Tourism, which has appointed her as its special envoy for investment and tourism promotion.

“After all, that’s what I’ve been doing all these years,” Barlin says, referring to her trips around the world year-in and year-out to promote the Philippines and Asia’s tropical region to the international market.

Voice of real estate

“That’s part of my business as a certified international property specialist,” Barlin says in Filipino. “Making the Philippines and Asia as the focal point of my sales pitches is part of my being a Filipino and an Asian.”

Barlin is the chief executive officer of the Barlin Group of Companies, which comprises the Barlin & Associates Realty Inc., Barlin International Group, Barlin Commercial Property Management, First Home Loans Inc., Media Consultants Inc. and Advance Graphix Design & Print, all based in the US.

Both owned and run by Barlin, Media Consultants Inc. is the publisher of South Bay Balita, Planet Philippines and Loans 101 Magazine, while Advance Graphix publishes and manages the Kababayan Homebuyers’ Guide magazine.

Barlin is also the editor in chief of the International Real Estate Magazine, which is circulated in 27 countries worldwide.

Her achievements made her an easy pick for the post of president/liaison to the Philippines for the 1.3 million-strong National Realtors Association, the voice of real estate in the US and an influential member of the International Confederation of Real Estate Associations (ICREA), an alliance of 24 international realtor associations worldwide.

“As such, traveling becomes part of my life’s routine, and the best way that I can make it relevant to my country and region is to promote them wherever I go,” Barlin says.

Top 12 choices for 2nd home

It was in one of her trips that the prospect of the Philippines and Asia becoming a second home and retirement hub dawned on Barlin.

“I’ve realized that we (tropical Asia) have as much, if not more, to offer than Central and South America and the Mediterranean region to the world’s millions of second-home buyers, a trillion-dollar market that we cannot afford to miss,” Barlin says. “Otherwise, our own property industry will be left out in this global craze for vacation and retirement homes.”

At present, the world’s top 12 choices for second homes are Panama, France, Malta, Mexico, Romania, Italy, Nicaragua, Uruguay, New Zealand, Belize, Spain and Chile.

“But that’s because the global second-home market hasn’t heard or seen much about tropical Asia, particularly the Philippines, which ought to be on top of that list,” she says.

“Ours is a beautiful country and region with very affordable real estate, competitive labor costs, lower cost of living and nice tropical climate where the icy world can run to during cold winter and where many speak English.”

She says that in the Philippines, for example, a foreigner’s regular dollar income can afford him a driver, house help, even a nurse if he’s a retiree.

“And he can live like a king while enjoying the beauty and bounties of our country’s nature and the hospitality of our people. At the same time, the dollars these foreigners will spend in the Philippines can create jobs and help improve our economy.”

Barlin says this sector of the tourism market may seem new to Filipinos, pointing out the Philippine real estate industry is not even represented in the Sima (Salon Imobiliario de Madrid).

Bringing the world to Asia

She describes Sima as Europe’s biggest annual real estate expo and conference, offering 38,000 square meters of exhibit space and attracting thousands of industry professionals and exhibitors yearly. It had 140,000 attendees in 2005 and 156,000 in 2006.

“An event of this magnitude, when held in the Philippines, could boost both our tourism and real estate industries,” Barlin says.

She says Europe is getting very expensive for the average exhibitor or second-home buyers.

“So, why not hold an event like Sima in more affordable Asia, or in the Philippines. And since I’ve been promoting the Philippines and Asia to the world, I’ve thought of bringing the world to Asia, instead,” Barlin adds.

This was how she arrived at the idea of staging the 1st Asian Real Estate Expo and Conference (AIREEC) at the Philippine International Convention Center on Dec. 6-10 this year. (Event details at www.aireec.com).

Hard work, studies

AIREEC is projected to bring in more than 5,000 visitors from some 50 countries worldwide, according to the US-based Expo and Convention Promotion Inc. (ECPI), whose support Barlin has gained for her vision.

ECPI president Leon Katz has signed a memorandum of cooperation with Tourism Secretary Joseph Ace H. Durano for that project.

“Now all three of us—ECPI, DOT and the Barlin Group—will just have to pull our act together to make AIREEC successful,” Barlin says.

Barlin didn’t get to the peak of her career in a single bounce. From her humble beginnings in the Philippines, she beefed up her credentials through hard work and studies.

Hard work as a real estate broker paid off, not just in millions of dollars worth of sales, but more so in numerous prestigious awards she has earned as an exceptional entrepreneur and outstanding business and community leader in California.

Barlin is also a member of the CEO Clubs Worldwide, which has over 10,000 members in the US, China, Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan and the Middle East.

A Filipino tour guide to the Holy Land

By Volt Contreras
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 04:26:00 08/11/2009

MANILA, Philippines—With a name like Exaltacion Cruz-Schlossberg, she was meant to take you on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, bringing you to places where Jesus Christ walked, suffered and died, and where, based on ancient beliefs, the Second Coming would commence.

With her trademark “sunflower” umbrella keeping her cool under the Judean sun (and making it easier for her touring group to spot her in the crowd), Schlossberg said she believes she has fulfilled God’s calling.

“This not just a job, [it’s] more of a calling; [it’s] what God wants.” she said.

Known among Israeli friends as Romema, which is Hebrew for Exaltacion, she is the only Filipino tour guide licensed by the Israeli government.

If her visitor-clients are willing to listen, she can transform the Holy Land itinerary of sacred stones, iconic churches and olive groves into a poignant spiritual retreat.

Along with a keen knowledge of Jerusalem’s history, Schlossberg carries a Bible from where she reads a verse or two to help illuminate what Christ said or did at a particular site, and what His believers today can draw from the place apart from a souvenir photo.

At the place known in the Gospels as the Garden of Gethsemane, for example, she quoted passages from Matthew and then explained: “This is the place where Jesus could have said “no” to his crucifixion.

“I always encourage [tourists] to pray here because this is where Jesus had His last temptation,” she told the Inquirer during a recent tour.

Top spots

At the Basilica of the Agony, Schlossberg said the structure shelters the rock where Jesus perspired blood while in deep prayer. Nearby is the spot where Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus with a kiss.

At Shepherds’ Field chapel in Bethlehem, which tradition holds to be the spot where an angel announced the birth of Christ to shepherds, Schlossberg got her group to sing Christmas carols—never mind if it was still a few months away.

On the slopes of the breezy Mount of Olives, on the site called Dominus Plevit, “this is where Jesus wept for Jerusalem,” she said. Behind her stretched the low-rise panorama of the Old City and its most famous landmark, the golden Dome of the Rock.

With this breathtaking backdrop, she retraced how the great city rose, fell and rose again through centuries of invasions and conflicts while uniquely becoming host to three major religions—Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

“This city has seen so many conflicts up to this day, that if there would be World War III, it would probably start here,” Schlossberg said in half-jest. ”I pray to God it will never be divided again.”

Tragedy in the air

Schlossberg, a native Manileña, began her life-changing trip to Jerusalem, up in the clouds.

In September 1983, a Soviet jet fighter shot down Korean Airlines (KAL) Flight 007 when it strayed over prohibited Soviet airspace, killing all 269 passengers and crew, including Schlossberg’s father Alfredo and cousin Edith.

Schlossberg was then a successful accountant based in New York: the University of the East accounting graduate migrated to America in 1971 and married Bert Schlossberg, an American whom she met in a Bible study group in 1975.

Devastated by the tragedy, her widowed mother Roberta asked the Schlossberg couple to accompany her on an eight-day “consolation tour” of Jerusalem.

Where she belongs

“After the tour, on our flight back to the US, I could not stop crying on the plane. I shed more tears on that flight than on the day I left the Philippines,” Schlossberg said. ”My mind cannot understand it, but my heart could not deny it.”

When her husband asked why, her reply was plain yet firm: “I belong to Israel!”

Three years later, the “intense longing” was still there. By then, Schlossberg had taken to playing Hebrew music at home and “was still bugging” her spouse.

“Perceiving that there must be something beyond this longing, Bert said we should ask our Church [community] to pray with us as we seek direction from the Lord. He said that probably the Lord was leading us to immigrate to Israel.”

Moving to the Holy Land

The couple and their four young children (then aged between 2 and 12 years old) finally “uprooted” themselves, rented out their ”beautiful home” in America and moved to the Holy Land in 1988.

Although her husband Bert is a Jew born in Brooklyn who became a Christian in his teens, Schlossberg said “it was difficult when we started again.”

“The culture shock, the language difficulty, the high cost of living, the loneliness of having no family and friends, the absence of Christmas which ironically is not really celebrated [the way Filipinos do it] here,” she said.

Schlossberg herself lost 18 pounds adjusting to her new life. No longer was she the “ambitious ‘Exie,’ the Filipina in mini skirt,” of her New York days.

In that former life, she once literally fell ill due to stress and office intrigue following a quick promotion, she said. She often “felt empty inside” if not for the Bible studies.

The verse

In 1992, she thought of resuming her accountancy profession in Israel until she read this verse: “Go back to your own people and tell them the wonderful things that God has done for you.”

Did God, after taking her to America and then to Israel, want her to go back to the Philippines? she then wondered. She realized later that the verse meant fellow Filipinos in Israel.

“I dropped the idea of registering in an accounting school. I [asked] the Lord [for a sign]. I asked Him [for] a chance to meet the Philippine Ambassador. I had no idea who the ambassador was,” Schlossberg said.

Two days later, she bumped into then Ambassador Rosalinda de Perio Santos during Mass at Notre Dame Church in Jerusalem.

“That opened the door to a new beginning for me. ‘Amba’ and I became very good friends and had weekly Bible study meetings at her home in Herziliya,” she recalled.

She became more involved in the activities of the Filipino community in Israel.

She played host to visiting compatriots, among them the UP Singing Ambassadors and the late Sen. Blas Ople. She provided temporary shelter for Filipinos left homeless by employment problems, and gave spiritual counsel to Filipino patients in hospitals.

Tour guide

How she got an Israeli license to be a tour guide was also a result of Bible consultations and unexpected events.

Schlossberg had inquired about the job with the Ministry of Tourism in August 1994 although she was already a month late. Nevertheless, she had this inexplicable feeling that she could still make it.

A few days later, Bert came home with some big news: “Honey, there are two applicants who did not pass. You can still apply!”

She took the entrance test and worried about her Hebrew language skills. Yet one woman in the examining panel averred that somehow she “understood every word I said, and that changed the mind of the others [in the panel], including the archeologists.”

Touring nonbelievers

Schlossberg went on to finish the two-year course on tour guiding.

She said she enjoys her job, which she considers a calling. The only time it becomes “difficult” she said, is when she’s giving a tour to “nonbelievers” or tourists “who just want to hear the history... This is where Jesus prayed, and that’s it. It’s like the fire inside me is [being] suppressed,” she said of the experience.

She once accompanied a “group of mayors” from a communist country who warned her early in the tour: “No Bible, no Bible!”

Favorite pilgrims

Her favorite pilgrims, of course, are the Filipinos. “When we come together, we all sound like happy birds perking with life and excitement.”

“They are the easiest to guide and this opinion is shared by almost all tour guides in Israel. They are the most sought-after by guides, maybe in the same way that Filipino caregivers [in Israel] are most desired by elderly citizens and Filipino women are most pursued by Israeli men,” Schlossberg said.

For her kababayan (compatriots), she reserves a piece of Holy Land trivia: At the Church of the Pater Noster, written on its walls are versions of the “Our Father” in 116 languages, including four Filipino dialects— Tagalog, Pampango, Ilonggo, and Cebuano.

Filipinos are therefore amply represented at the Pater Noster, which also stands on the Mount of Olives, where according to ancient beliefs Christ “will come back, riding on a cloud.”

He’s made millions from ‘balikbayan’ boxes in Australia

By Martin Andanar
Inquirer
First Posted 12:34:00 10/31/2006

IT WAS 1987 when Pablo Tagle, a native of El Nido, Palawan, became convinced that the future of his family in the Philippines was becoming dimmer and dimmer. Faced with political uncertainties, Pablo – Boy to his friends – packed his clothes, withdrew his savings of P160,000 pesos, and brought his wife and two children to Sydney, Australia.

He had actually been given three opportunities to leave the Philippines. The first time was in 1972. “I was invited by my sister to Australia.” The second was in 1976, when he had the chance to migrate to the United States. He ignored both opportunities. “I was idealistic and naive then,” he says.

But in 1987, when coup attempts began troubling the administration of President Corazon Aquino, he felt that the country’s future, and his own with it were going nowhere. “I just had to leave when the third one knocked on my door.”

Boy left a promising marketing career in a pharmaceutical company in Manila, swallowed his pride and worked in menial jobs in Sydney. He began as a laborer in a soda and juice warehouse and later as a letter-sorter in the Australian Post Office.

First job

It was tough and heart breaking. “I had to work standing in the warehouse from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m.,” he says. Like most educated Filipino migrants, he faced the reality that not all Philippine college degrees are recognized in Australia. “So a laborer’s work was the only answer and it became so frustrating, considering the job I had in the Philippines."

Boy Tagle’s first break came in 1990 when his friend Mario Tan, a leading remittance businessman in Manila, offered him a business partnership in Sydney. Tan wanted Boy to help him establish a remittance center Down Under.

Birth of an OFW firm

“In the beginning, clients came few and far between,” says Boy. “I would wake up in the wee hours of the morning, answering phone calls of friends working in shifts who wanted to remit money to their families back home.”

Soon his Filipino clients would inquire whether he also offered balikbayan box services. He saw the opportunity, grabbed it, and BM Express International was born. BM, for Boy and Mario, was a major success. Only one company was in the balikbayan box business then and clients had to bring the boxes to the store themselves. “So I offered to pick up the boxes in their homes using my old station wagon,” says Boy.

Little did he know that he would next be bombarded by phone calls from Filipinos he didn’t even know, all wanting their balikbayan boxes picked up. Heeding the call for more efficient service, he next organized the first network of balikbayan boxes drop off points in the entire city of Sydney – a first from an enterprising new kid on the block.

From 200 kilos of balikbayan boxes a week in 1992, Boy and his wife Connie soon faced an insurmountable 3,000 kilos of balikbayan boxes a week.

Exponential growth

“At first officials of the airline carrier wouldn’t give a cent to notice me,” he says. “But they changed their mind when I was offering 3,000 kilos.” Soon his boss at the post office would complain about his habitual absences. His neighbors would also complain of the many boxes stored in front of their houses.

“We eventually had to buy a warehouse on Wiltshire Street and quit our jobs to work on the boxes full time,” he says.

BM Express International is now a household name not only in New South Wales but also in South Australia, Adelaide, Queensland, and Victoria. It has also expanded into several branches of groceries in New South Wales and importation, food processing and packaging.

Boy says that the majority of Filipino-Australian households now have Filipino-made products all over Australia – among them noodles, corned beef, bagoong, balut, kawali and even walis tingting - that are either imported, processed, or packaged by BM International Express. The Tagles are thinking of franchising their businesses to Filipino-Australians.

In 2000 the Filipino Australian Business Association named Boy the top businessman in New South Wales. “Ang sikreto ko ay sipag, katapatan at ang pagiging patas sa kapwa, (My secret is hard work, honesty and fairness with my fellows,” he tells the Inquirer.

Despite his success Down Under, 59-year-old Boy remains a true blue Pinoy. While his children Tristan and Trisha operate the business in Australia, Boy devotes most of his time in the Philippines, creating employment as he establishes a food processing and packaging plant in Antipolo, develops a resort he calls BM Lamuro in El Nido, and sets up a school for the needy natives in his hometown El Nido in Palawan.

World-class RP seamen a force in Japan

goodnewspilipinas.com at inquirer.net
First Posted 16:16:00 03/04/2009

FILIPINO seamen are world-class and over 70 percent of Japanese maritime operations are now manned by Filipinos.

Toshitaka Hagiwara, senior advisor of Komatsu Ltd., said this rousing statement during the 28th joint meeting of the Japan-Philippines Economic Cooperation Committee.

Hagiwara is JPECC chairman. Komatsu Ltd., for which he serves as senior advisor, is a world leading manufacturer and distributor of construction and mining equipment, utilities and industrial machineries. The company has been operating in the Philippines for decades.

“Over 200,000 Filipino citizens now live in Japan. In addition, and this is not so widely known, Japanese maritime shipping operations now rely on Filipino sailors for about 70 percent of their crewmembers,” Hagiwara said.

“Almost all major Japanese shipping companies have opened maritime crew training facilities in the Philippines, expecting to develop ready access to highly qualified Filipino sailors from hereon,” Hagiwara said.

Under the JPEPA, Hagiwara said Japan also has widely opened its doors to Filipino nurses and caregivers.

Even before the ratification of JPEPA, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has likewise been acknowledging Japan’s trust and confidence on Filipino seamen, many of whom have become management level ship officers such as masters and chief engineers.

Filipino seamen comprise a major segment of the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) sector and have consistently been a major source of dollar remittances that help prop up the country’s domestic economy for years now.

Doris Magsaysay-Ho, president and chief executive officer of Magsaysay Maritime Corporation, the largest manning company in the country, said there are over 28,000 Filipinos currently working on Japanese ships who remitted over more than $3 billion last year.

With more than 25 years of maritime partnership between Japan and the Philippines, Ho said Filipinos now comprise 55 percent of the membership of the All Japan Seaman’s Union and are classified as non-domiciled special members.

Japanese reflections

Highblood

By Juanito P. Jarasa
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: December 15, 2008

I AM 71 years old and people say I look Japanese. I cannot help but feel at home in Japan because there are so many aged people like me in that country.

When I was in Tokyo in early September, Japanese government statisticians released the information that the number of Japanese people aged 70 or older exceeded the 20 million mark for the first time, while those aged 65 and over increased to 28.19 million. Japan registered the biggest number of centenarians in the world at 36,276 with the oldest person, a woman, confirmed to be 113 years old. The Japanese people also hold the record for longest life expectancy, 86 for women and 79 for men.

Such longevity has been attributed to a confluence of factors, foremost among them the so-called “healthy Japanese diet”—predominantly vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, soy products in their natural form, fish, rice and noodles. A Japanese female writer calls it a paradox that Japan is the world’s most food-obsessed nation but has the lowest obesity rate in the industrialized world and the longest longevity on earth. The Japanese also do themselves a favor by walking a lot.

My wife and I are converts to the Japanese diet and to walking. Every year since 2003, we spend time with our daughter who is an attaché at the Philippine Embassy in Tokyo. My daughter’s apartment is just a small block away from Shiba Park where the Tokyo Tower is located. Just below the tower is a wooded nook with a few benches. It is an oasis of serenity ideal for recollection, reflection, meditation or even introspection.

I can still vividly recall that in early December 1965, I made a stopover in Tokyo on my way to Honolulu, my first foreign assignment in our diplomatic service. My late good friend, Bonifacio “Bonnie” Arribas, met me at the Haneda Airport. Domingo L. Siazon Jr., the embassy’s translator/interpreter, and Romeo Arguelles, the commercial attaché, happened to be with Bonnie at the airport. Siazon was kind enough to help me clear through immigration and customs. He took and passed the Foreign Affairs Officers (FAO) examination in 1966 and this became his passport to eventually reach the position of foreign secretary, the first from the career corps to do so. Siazon is now on his second stint as ambassador to Japan and my daughter works at his embassy. Arguelles and I passed the FAO exam in 1969. Romy is now on his second tenure as ambassador to the Netherlands where I was assigned prior to his first posting there.

Diplomatic posting must be lovelier the second time around, or so it seems. In any case, the cycle of life in our foreign service is truly amazing.

It was just over a year since Tokyo hosted the Olympic Games in 1964 when I stopped over in that city. That Olympiad was Japan’s rite of passage to the developed world. Tokyo is now bidding to host the Olympic Games in 2016.

That time, I stayed overnight at the Tokyo Prince Hotel in Shiba Park. Since my onward flight to Honolulu was taking off in the late afternoon, I did a little sightseeing at the nearby Tokyo Tower, which was built in 1959 and, at 333 meters, touted to be a few meters taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It never occurred to me that 38 years later my daughter would stay in an apartment near the very same tower. I have a new postcard from one of the souvenir shops of the tower and it shows the remarkable transformation of the area over the years. The $4-billion Roppongi Hills with the 54-story Mori Tower as its centerpiece and the nearby one-year-old Tokyo Midtown complex are the most prominent developments in the area.

This brings me to those luxury, upscale and themed condominium and mixed-used development projects in Metro Manila that are being conspicuously advertised in Philippine newspapers. These projects appear to be approximating, if not equaling, property developments in Tokyo and other cosmopolitan cities.

One cannot help but wonder whether these projects are warranted by or sustainable under the present degree of our country’s economic development. If the intention here is to show that we are on the way to First World status, we should first think hard about how to get there. The signposts indicate that we are not headed in that direction anytime soon. A little introspection would, perhaps, be useful especially since the present financial crisis besetting the United States and the world does not augur well for high-end projects.

How I wish the MMDA, DPWH, PLDT, Maynilad Water and other “diggers” in our country could follow the Japanese way of doing things. Whenever any repair, maintenance or digging work has to be done in Tokyo streets, Japanese workers often do it at night when traffic is light, with properly lighted barricades and directional signs. The next morning, the spot is spick and span, as if nothing had happened.

Tokyo is a sprawling concrete jungle, yet one hardly sees any squalor. Tokyo is a virtual city-state of 28 million people and its annual budget is bigger than the national budget of many developing countries.

Despite its vastness, Tokyo has a reputable quality of life. It is clean, environmentally safe and sound, and pollution is nowhere near the magnitude of Beijing’s. One’s personal safety is assured even if he is out in the wee hours of the morning. It is a delight to experience many things working with clockwork precision. Tokyo’s transportation network is punctual, efficient and probably unmatched by any other city.

Japanese culture recommends itself in many ways so that immersion is irresistible. It is also easy to be fascinated by things Japanese.

But toward the end of each stay in Tokyo, there is always that longing for home. Home, really, is where the heart is. We have our own “little castles” as well as “castles in the air” in our perpetually developing country. Despite the difficulties, misery and indiscipline in our midst, the Philippines is home to a number of Japanese and thousands of Koreans.

Juanito P. Jarasa, 71, served as ambassador to Hungary, India and South Korea before retiring in 2003.

A banker’s tale of two cities

By Vanessa Hidalgo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: December 01, 2008

THE LAST 20 YEARS have been the most fruitful and rewarding years of Rolando Cruz’s life. Not only did he become one of the most inspiring success stories; he also changed the face of investing for the future for his fellow-Filipinos in Hong Kong.

Born on Feb. 15, 1957, humble beginnings in San Fernando, Pampanga inspired him to become an instrument of change. After graduating with the degree of AB Economics from the University of the Philippines in 1978, he worked as a research assistant at the UP College of Business Administration. In 1979, he took his dreams to greater heights and took the bank examination for posting with the Philippine National Bank.

In 1980, he finally became a part of PNB, starting as a clerk at the Financial Management Office in Escolta. He then became the analyst for the Asset Liability Management and Corporate Planning to handling Special Projects on Kapiti Banking application.

Catchy slogan

In August 1988, he decided to leave for the vibrant cosmopolitan city of Hong Kong to assume the position of chief accountant, PNB International Finance Ltd, an affiliate bank subsidiary. It was then that the influx of Overseas Filipino Workers was beginning in Hong Kong.

With Cruz at the helm, PNB HK expanded its branch network and established its remittance arm. From then till now, he would sustain the company’s market leadership. Catchy slogans – “Ang Bangko ng bayan, tunay na kaibigan (A nation’s bank, a real friend) ” and “Ang bangkong kilala mo, lumapit na sa iyo (The bank you know has now come close to you.”— marked the launching of PNB’s partnership with the retail convenience store 7-Eleven in Hong Kong.

Cruz also coined the slogan “Mag-PNB Remit sa ATM na malapit (Bank where an ATM is near) ” when they partnered with institutional giant HSBC, allowing OFWs to make use of the latter’s ATM facilities to remit to PNB accounts. He also encouraged OFWs to send their remittances through official bank channels with another slogan, “Sa bangko, sigurado kayo.”

The creative Rolly Cruz was also the architect of the PNB Pangarap (Dream) account. This brand is a self-saving account where OFWs can open Philippine-based deposits at any PNB Branch where they can withdraw funds when they return home. When asked why he used the word “Pangarap” to name this brand, he replied, “The word Pangarap is close to the heart of every OFW.” It’s also an acronym for ‘PANG-sariling deposit account sa hinahARAP (personal account for the future).’”

Now the PNB Pangarap account is becoming a product of choice for OFWs for other PNB offices in Singapore and Italy.

Besides being a banker, Rolly Cruz is also a family man – a loving husband to Tonette; a supportive father to Jeneth, Hector, Michael, Corelene, Khorina, Allysa and Jroland; And a doting lolo to MJ and Justin Kyle. Like every other OFW, however, he has sacrificed time away from his family.

But a grave tragedy would bring them all together again.

Why life is worth living

In 1991, Rolly received news that a calamity struck his hometown in Pampanga. With the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, lahar had poured in from the rivers and devastated areas along its path. Among those severely affected was the Cruz family. He immediately flew back to the Philippines to be with them.

“I was there when the afternoon Pampanga sky became an eerie, grayish, war-zone-like environment. The earth shook many times. Rocks were falling. Everyone was praying and neighbors were running and shouting like it was the end of the world. I had to shovel out the finest dust from our rooftop,” Cruz recalls.

He did not regret working abroad when calamity befell his family. “It was a reason for me to prepare bringing them to Hong Kong,” he said. “My family is the reason that makes my life worth living for. The support of a loving wife and children plays a pivotal role in my work.”

Hong Kong changed with the passing of time and so did the life of Cruz when he finally decided to bring his entire family there. He distinctly remembers that the language barrier became the greatest challenge for him and his family. “Not many people then knew English so I had to learn (a) few Cantonese phrases, especially when shopping around or going to the market,” he said.

Yet he is still captivated by the way the Hong Kong people live their tradition and cherish their heritage. He considers this one of the rewards of working abroad. “To see a different culture mingling and living in harmony with the Filipinos and other minorities is a feel-good atmosphere.”

Still there is no place like home. He misses the “open space that it offers—more interaction with your neighbors and relatives and so many places to see and more friends to welcome you wherever you go.” The scenery and the distinct taste of Filipino food make him crave to come home every time he thinks of the Philippines.

Spiritual and Civic-Minded

But Rolly Cruz need not look any further for he has strived to be very visible in the Filipino Community in Hong Kong. He honed his socializing and gracious skills by constantly interacting with Filipinos abroad. This made him approachable and admired by most of our kababayan.

He was also a founding member and treasurer of the Confederation of Filipino Overseas Workers (COFW) and former coordinator and teacher of the New Enterprise Planning Class of UP Open University 1995-1996 at the HK Bayanihan Centre provided by the HK government for foreign domestic helpers to stay when spending regular Sundays off.

During the centennial celebration of Philippine Independence Day in Hong Kong in 1998, Rolly Cruz was part of the organizing committees. During the first Overseas Absentee Voting held in Hong Kong in 2004, he participated as a member of the Board of Canvassers. In the same year, he was chair of the Philippine Association of Hong Kong. At present, he is the chair of the Philippine Bankers Club in Hong Kong.

Rolly Cruz is also a proud member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. As a Mormon, his firm belief in Christian principles helps him weather every storm that comes his way. “I am guided whenever I make a business decision or render personal assistance to my fellow beings. It’s like pushing me to ‘choose the right’ when a choice is placed before you,” he said.

Give OFWs a future back home

Though decorated by accolades, Cruz remains grounded and proud to be Pinoy. Even as the country is beset with corruption and moral disintegration, he chooses to look ahead on a positive note. What he wishes for government to understand is that overseas employment is a temporary thing. Though working abroad remains an eminent solution to provide a better future, it has its own sacrifices.

“There is a need to formulate long-term development goals to bring all these global Filipinos back home by creating more jobs and harnessing our natural resources, building more bridges and roads and hospitals, expanding school networks to educate the less fortunate and more importantly true honesty in governance,” he said.

He believes that, “the Philippines and its leaders can really change the country and it will make me a prouder Filipino.”

Cruz sees working abroad as an opportunity to be grateful for. “OFWs must make the most out of this opportunity of working abroad. They should focus on their work as this will strengthen harmony and trust with their employer. Doing this will help in maximizing that opportunity in order for them to save and make provisions for the future,” Cruz said.

And when the plans for the future are set, one can now envision coming home to the Philippines.

Cruz, however, does need to choose between two homes – the Philippines will always welcome him home and Hong Kong will always be his home away from home.

Honest HK OFW gets ticket home

Plus start-up money and scholarship for her kids.

By Leila Salaverria
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: June 03, 2009


MANILA, Philippines—The jobless Filipino in Hong Kong who returned the HK$350,545 or P2.1 million in cash and checks she found in a garbage bin to its owner will get a plane ticket home, a start-up capital for a small business, and scholarship for her children.
All these, much more than the can of butter cookies she got from the grateful owner, were promised by Senator Francis Escudero, who on Tuesday said his office already communicated with Mildred Perez by phone Monday.

Her deed “only shows that Filipinos, however poor and lowly they may be, wherever they may be, are honest and morally upright. Perez should be emulated and recognized for what she did notwithstanding the dire financial straits she is in,” Escudero said in a statement.

For his part, Nueva Vizcaya Representative Carlos Padilla on Monday filed a resolution commending Perez for her honesty.

“By returning the money, Perez has demonstrated that the traits of honesty and trustworthiness are not lost among the Filipinos even abroad. Moreover, she has set an example, worthy of emulation which deserves the full appreciation and deep gratitude of the Filipino nation,” Padilla said in the resolution.

Husband also honest

Perez, who is from Bambang, Nueva Vizcaya, will also receive P100,000 from officials of her province who said she is not the only one in her family who has demonstrated honesty.

Her husband Eddie, a tricycle driver, also returned an envelope containing cash to a passenger several months ago, Padilla said.

The passenger, a school official, had dropped an envelope of cash in the tricycle. When Eddie found the envelope, he drove back to Nueva Vizcaya State University, and was able to find his passenger by describing her to the people in the school.

Like his wife, “Eddie did not ask anything for returning the money,” Padilla said.

Perez, 38, a mother of two teenagers, has been out of a job since 2007 when she filed sexual assault charges against her Hong Kong employer.

She had been rummaging in garbage cans to retrieve soft drink cans, cardboard boxes, and other recyclables so she could earn money for her needs and to pursue her case in court.

Hong Kong law prohibits foreigners who have sued their employers to take up employment until the case is resolved.

Cookies for honesty

On April 29, Perez and a companion found HK$350,000 in cash and checks.

While the princely sum could have afforded her relief, she instead called up the company whose name was in the documents to return the money.

For her good deed, she was given a can of cookies.

“Mildred’s story reminds us all that even in the darkest of times, our ideals and principles should not falter. She could have chosen not to return the money and end all her sufferings in Hong Kong, but she chose not to,” Escudero said in a statement.

Padilla said he, Nueva Vizcaya Governor Luisa Cuaresma, and Bambang Mayor Benjamin Cuaresma decided to raise at least P100,000 to give to Perez.

Congressional resolution

“It’s not a reward. It’s a cash award for Mildred. It’s up to her if she wants to use it for the needs of her family. If we call it a reward, she might say that she was not asking for payment,” Padilla told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in a phone interview.

He said he was also working on getting the House of Representatives to approve his resolution commending Perez. The measure, filed on Monday, was read on first reading on the same day although the rules technically require that it be read on Wednesday at the latest.

Honest OFW came from honest tribe in Vizcaya

By Ben Moses Ebreo, Melvin Gascon
Inquirer Northern Luzon
Posted date: June 04, 2009

BAMBANG, NUEVA VIZCAYA—The Filipino migrant worker, who returned HK$350,545 or P2.1 million in cash and in checks she found in a garbage bin in Hong Kong to its owner, is a member of a local indigenous tribe known for its honesty.
Mildred Perez, 38, is now the toast of her provincemates for her display of honesty, a trait that has been ingrained in most members of the Isinai tribe.

“It is an honor to be honest,” said Andres Perez, 56, father of Mildred. He said honesty was an honored virtue in the tribe.

Although most of the tribal folk lack money, “poverty does not justify a person to steal,” he said.

“Money is temporary and it can vanish anytime but dignity is forever. This admirable virtue is passed on from one generation to another,” he said.

Jobless

The Isinai people rejoiced over reports that government officials were pooling funds to raise P100,000 for Perez, who has been jobless since 2007 when she filed sexual assault charges against her Hong Kong employer.

Hong Kong law prohibits foreigners who have sued their employers from taking up employment until the case is resolved.

Members of the tribe, who occupy the villages of Baag and Banggot, till the land and plant crops for a living. But the harvest is not enough to support their children’s education, thus driving some of them to seek jobs abroad.

One of them, Perez, went to Hong Kong to work as a maid so she could send her children—Jefferson, 17, and Norabel, 16—to college.

Her husband, Eddie Bunde, 37, was left to look after the children. He farms and drives a tricycle.

Husband honest, too

Less than a month before his wife returned the money, Bunde drove Elsa Tugade, administrative officer of Nueva Vizcaya State University (NVSU), who withdrew P20,000 from a bank to purchase the school’s foundation gifts on March 19.

Tugade was shocked, however, when she found that the envelope containing the money and her identification card were missing.

Bunde, a migrant from Ligao City in Albay, said he noticed the money as it was scattered, after he failed to slow down over a hump. Immediately, he looked for Tugade at NVSU and returned the amount.

“I was going crazy over the lost money. But (Bunde) is honest. I really admire his character,” Tugade said.

“We rarely see this value nowadays because of poverty.”

Proud

Bunde said he was proud of his wife for maintaining her dignity and not succumbing to temptation despite their hardships.

“I am happy that she is honest, too. Though she cannot send enough money to us, we assure her that we can get by,” he said.

On Tuesday, Bunde, along with his relatives in Barangay Aliaga, was celebrating the birthday of his mother-in-law Melda when the Philippine Daily Inquirer paid a visit.

The celebration became more meaningful when they learned about Perez’s honesty and the generosity of people who wanted to donate money to her and her family.

Assistance, resolution

Nueva Vizcaya Gov. Luisa Cuaresma and the provincial board approved on Wednesday the granting of a P50,000 initial assistance to the family of Perez.

In a resolution, the board commended Perez “for her display of exemplary honesty” in returning the money and checks.

“This laudable act of (Perez) is a trait of a true (Novo) Vizcayano that has made us all proud of and worthy of emulation,” it said.

A native of Barangay Aliaga, 19 kilometers from the town proper, Perez used to work as a maid in Hong Kong until she filed sexual assault charges against her employer.

Collecting recyclables

Out of job, Perez has since been supporting her stay in Hong Kong by collecting and selling recyclables, such as soda cans.

In one of her rounds through trash cans on April 29, she found a bag containing cash and checks worth HK$350,545. Perez traced the owners of the money and returned it. Out of gratitude, they gave her a can of cookies.

“What (Perez) has found could have already ended her misfortunes, but then the good values and the inherent honesty instilled [in her] at a young age by her honest and strict father reigned in her heart,” the board resolution said.

“That is how Novo Vizcayanos, particularly Bambangueños, are,” Cuaresma said.

Nueva Vizcaya Rep. Carlos Padilla also filed a resolution commending Perez.

“By returning the money, Perez has demonstrated that the traits of honesty and trustworthiness are not lost among the Filipinos even abroad,” Padilla said in the resolution.

“Moreover, she has set an example worthy of emulation which deserves the full appreciation and deep gratitude of the Filipino nation.”