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Monday, March 14, 2005
Editorial: Martyred
When Jana heard the crying from next door, she knew her neighbor was going back to Canada, where she worked as a nurse.
Having tried working in Taiwan for a year, the mother of three understood why her neighbor chose to leave the house at dawn, before her infant son would notice her gone.
So it was the mother crying, not the child?
The children learn to stop crying for the ones who are never there, Jana told Sun.Star Cebu. The young ones call out for their grandmothers, who answer to “mama,” in the absence of women working overseas.
The older ones cope, Jana observed, by staying away from home. Just before New Year, Timothy's father left to join his mother in Dubai, after the latter showed no inclination to come home after working there for more than a decade. Jana often sees her neighbors' only child loafing around a corner store late at night, with other youths known for committing vandalism and petty theft around the village.
I will never leave my family again even if life is hard in this country, reflected the housewife whose earnings from a small store and her husband's taxi-driving sustain their needs. Working abroad, she concluded, is like feeding your family on something that will poison them in the end.
“3D” choice
Jana is an exception in a country that, according to the Philippine Migrants' Rights Watch (PMRW), sent out almost eight million Filipinos to work in 193 countries for the past 30 years.
The trend shows no signs of abating. This is collaborated by the Migrante International Executive Committee, which documented that every hour, around 100 Filipino workers are forced to work overseas. Approximately 60 to 70 of these workers are women. In 2004, Migrante recorded there were 894,661 Filipino workers exported to the so-called “3D” jobs: “dirty, difficult and dangerous.”
Women are more vulnerable to these hazards. Migrante International's Migrant Assistance Committee handled 228 cases of Filipino women migrants in distress, as of March 2005.
At 62, repatriation cases are the most numerous. This occurs usually when the migrant is “stranded” after running away from an abusive employer and is unable to return to the Philippines.
The other cases are iIlegal recruitment, 45; unpaid salary, 18; missing, 15; mysterious death, four; and sexual harassment and rape, eight.
Reported as missing for four years in Netherlands, Veneranda Paña Tenwinkel, formerly of Badian, Cebu, was found buried under the living room of her husband's twin brother. Her Dutch husband is facing a first-degree murder charge. Two other Filipinas linked to him have also been reported missing by the Dutch police.
Some 700 workers, mostly women, die each year following maltreatment by their employers, according to the House of Representatives Committee on Overseas Foreign Workers.
On the tenth death anniversary of Flor Contemplacion, hanged for double murders in Singapore, the Department of Foreign Affairs reports that there are 5,168 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) languishing behind bars, including 673 women and 50 minors. On death row are five Filipinos in Malaysia, one in the US, and 13 in Saudi Arabia.
Home sweet hell
But to hear OFWs, the hazards they face abroad are nothing compared to the fears they harbor for the families left behind.
According to De La Salle University's Dr. Stella Go, the international contract labor migration from the Philippines mirrors an “increasing feminization… where the family may encourage the migration of female member… because of the belief that they can be relied upon to send back remittances that contribute to the family's economic portfolio on a more regular basis than their male counterparts.”
The extended absence of women, many of whom are wives and mothers with young children, has exacted a high toll on the migrants' marriages and families.
Along with other social costs such as the abuse, maltreatment, and discrimination of Filipino migrant workers, the psycho-social impact of the separation of family members is incorporated in the 10-point agenda raised by the PMRW for action by the Macapagal-Arroyo administration.
But until the government acts to secure them from hazards at home and abroad, migrant Filipinos will have to bear the cross, less modern-day heroes than martyrs.
(March 14, 2005 issue)
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