(2nd of three parts)

INFIDELITY, drugs and other social problems plague OFW families

AFTER years away from home, an overseas Filipino worker (OFW) returned to the Philippines to find his wife pregnant by the family driver.

Furious, he fired the driver but tried to save the marriage.

"Matod Pa Sa Lola ni Noy Kulas." Join the story-writing contest on Cebuano folklore and win prizes.

Thus did Fr. Ulyses Desales describe the dark side of local unemployment: the forced separation of spouses for long stretches of time straining relationships, as breadwinners take jobs oceans away.

Desales, port chaplain of Apostleship of the Sea (AOS)-Cebu, considers “illicit affairs on both sides” as among the three common problems of OFWs, along with work injuries and financial mismanagement of the OFWs’ earnings.

An arm of the Archdiocese of Cebu, AOS-Cebu reaches out to seafarers through legal and family counseling. It also does values and conscience formation for seafarers’ families.

Unfaithful

Desales estimated that some 30-40 percent of seamen are unfaithful to their spouses, down from 60 percent just three years ago, he said, as seamen “became more professional and started to love their work” and AOS accommodated seafarers’ requests for masses aboard vessels.

Gerry Gonzales, Visayas regional coordinator of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines-Episcopal Commission for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People (CBCP-Ecmi), said some nurses working abroad also find that their husbands in the Philippines have cheated on them, or worse, already have other families of their own.

Asked why the husbands don’t join their wives abroad when it is relatively easy for nurses to bring their families with them to their overseas postings, Gonzales said the husbands don’t want to go because they have an easy life in the Philippines, not working and just living on the dollars their wives send them.

Locals have a term for such men, “HRD” or “Husband Receiving Dollars.”

Poverty

Studies by the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) show that poverty is the main reason why people migrate, followed by unemployment.

In 2006, the daily expenditure was P681 for a family of five in Metro Manila, but the daily minimum wage was only P325, said the CFO.

Today, about 40 percent of Filipino families are migrant-related, 68 percent of which have one parent absent, and 32 percent having both parents absent.

The numbers are unnerving, as parental absence forces children of OFWs to seek direction in life from other sources, such as their extended family or the environment.

If the father is abroad, CFO data show, the influence of the extended family and the environment on the child of the OFW is 39 percent. This rises to 62 percent if it is the mother who is abroad, and to 84 percent if both parents are abroad.

Suffer the children

The effects on families have been devastating.

For every 10 families with OFWs, Desales estimates, some six to seven will have problems with their children, usually with the boys in the family.

These problems include children not listening to the parents and not taking their schooling seriously because they have much money to spend (from the remittances of their parents) or because there was no one to supervise them in their studies.

Desales said drug taking was a familiar problem with male children.

“Drug lords target the children of seafarers” as a market, knowing they have cash, he said.

CBCP-Ecmi’s Gonzales also said some girls get pregnant while still in high school.

Incest

But what is worse is the problem of incest between the fathers and daughters left behind by a rising number of Filipino mothers working abroad, said the nongovernment organization (NGO) Kanlungan Center in a national report.

A representative of a local NGO working with OFWs’ families in the Visayas said there are five cases of incest in Bohol.

“I heard it’s here in Cebu also, but it’s kept hidden,” said the representative, who requested anonymity.

Organizing families

The CBCP-Ecmi tries to help OFWs and their families in whatever way it can, even up to coordinating to provide paralegal services if needed.

But mainly, it organizes spouses of OFWs into groups for better information dissemination of OFW updates and training, including livelihood skills training. It also helps families understand migration realities so they can better deal with them.

There was an educational campaign in Cebu public schools and Catholic schools from 2002 to 2004 explaining to the children of OFWs why their parents had to work abroad and teaching them to save money.

Actually, Gonzales said, the children already know why their parents left, but they still ask why.

“They say they don’t need money but their presence,” he said.

So for those seeking a better life abroad, a caveat: For while many Filipinos who took overseas jobs in the name of the families they loved found the gold mine they were looking for, some also lost their families in the bargain, as relationships and values crumbled with the distance that turned OFWs into strangers and mere cash machines.