In this issue

• Dig this
• A mess of mines
• The Canadian quandary
• Of tribal leaders and dealers
• Thailand’s continuing crisis
• Mike Arroyo claim stalls land reform in Negros
• Every 6 hours, pirates seize a Filipino seaman
• House opposition seeks cap on Gloria’s spending habits

THIS month alone, one Filipino shipping crewmember has been taken hostage every six hours somewhere in the world, according to an official running count by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) that is now being updated by the day, if not by the hour.

The unpleasant statistics — the worst ever recorded in a month — underscore not just the surge in piracy off the largely lawless East African coast. The numbers also underpin how feeble Philippine government measures are in keeping Filipino seafarers from harm’s way.

Over the last two years, pirates have seized 39 shipping vessels, including eight in the last two months alone. Aboard smaller vessels but now better armed, they are now staging daytime assaults on bigger ships, where they used to attack only in the dead of night before.

The Philippines is among the world’s top sources of shipping crews, accounting for about a fifth of the 1.2 million international ship workers. In 2007, a total of 266,553 Filipinos left home to work in international passenger ships and cargo vessels under employment contracts lasting about a year.

The shipping industry has long been considered one of the most dangerous in the world. Recently, however, piracy has risen up in the list of menaces faced by seamen.

Indeed, the number of Filipino seafarers being seized by sea pirates who hijack ships and vessels for ransom in different parts of the world has climbed to 70 in just three weeks up to November 18, bringing the cumulative total for the year 2008 to 213.

134 Pinoys in custody

Of the Filipinos taken hostage, 134 are still being held by pirates, the highest number ever according to the DFA. The rest, or 79 seafarers, had been freed, yet typically only after the payment of ransom by their shipping companies.

The International Maritime Bureau (IMB), the private sea-piracy watchdog, reveals that the number of reported hijackings on the high seas has spiked to 83 cases in the third quarter this year compared to the same period in 2007. There were 53 cases recorded in the first quarter of 2008, and 63 in the second quarter.

The IMB also estimates that a total of 581 shipping crewmembers were held hostage all over the world in the first nine months of the year.

As a consequence, the number of Filipino seamen taken captive by armed men in Africa rose multiple-fold — from less than two per month on average from January to June, to almost 40 a month from July to September.

The sharp rise apparently startled Manila to start considering measures to address the problem. In August, Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto Romulo proposed to disallow the deployment of Filipino seamen in ships and vessels passing through waters where sea piracy is rife.

The Philippines, after all, routinely imposes both temporary and long-term bans on sending Filipino workers to war-torn countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon.

Romulo’s proposal was forwarded to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), the government agency that regulates the lucrative recruitment industry. But the agency’s board of trustees rejected the proposal, following opposition from ship operators and manning companies that argued that a ban could kill a significant segment of the recruitment industry.

Some leaders of seafarers’ unions similarly nixed the proposal, saying it would deprive Filipino seamen of employment opportunities.

POEA tries a new tack

In 2003, a PCIJ investigative report examined how the government and manning companies were trying to persuade Filipino seafarers to give up some of their employment benefits in order to remain “competitive.”

This time around, the POEA adopted measures that in its view would help protect the rights and welfare of Filipino sailors in ships sailing through dangerous waters.

Last October 7, the POEA’s board of trustees issued Resolution No. 4 that doubled the daily compensation and death and illness benefits of Filipino crewmembers whenever their ships pass through the so-called “high-risk” area in the Gulf of Aden. The resolution was to take effect immediately.

The POEA also revised the standard employment contract for Filipino seafarers and gave them the option to get off any ship that plans to sail into waters beset by piracy and hijackings.

If one goes by the numbers so far since, however, the new POEA policies are hardly keeping Filipino seafarers from falling into the hands of African pirates.

This month, or just weeks after the new policies were put in place, the average number of Filipino seamen being seized by pirates each month has almost doubled to 70 — and counting — from the previous figure posted between July and September 2008.

The PCIJ tried to contact the POEA by fax and by phone call, but as of press time, there was still no response from the agency.

In the meantime, Migrante International, the leftist support group for overseas Filipino workers, says it is not surprised that the policy has been rendered effete.

Reverse results

John Leonard Monterona, the Saudi Arabia-based Middle East coordinator for Migrante, says the POEA’s decision to double the pay and benefits of seafarers at risk yielded an unwanted result: encourage more Filipino seamen to sail on in waters prone to pirate attacks.

“The double hazard pay scheme is simply saying ‘Welcome aboard, Filipino seafarers; let all of you be kidnapped but what we need are your precious remittances,’” Monterona laments in an emailed statement.

Seafarers, who are better paid than other overseas Filipino workers, send higher than average remittances. In 2007, seafarers sent home $2.2 billion, about 15 percent of the $14.5-billion total remittances from Filipino workers overseas. That is comparatively huge since they make up only three percent of the 8.7 million Filipinos working and living abroad.

Too, their remittances continue to be sent home to the Philippines even when the seamen are being held captive. Under the POEA’s standard employment contracts for Filipino seamen, ship operators and manning companies automatically send to the seaman’s families a big portion of his monthly salary.

The doubling of hazard pay and benefits has elicited mixed reactions from Filipino seamen.

Kobe Romulo, for one, says he will volunteer for duty in a ship sailing through dangerous waters and risk being hostaged by pirates in return for higher pay and benefits.

“I’ll go ahead despite the risks,” says the 28-year-old deck hand from Davao who is training to be a third officer. “It’s difficult to find good paying jobs these days.”

Close encounter

Although he is single, Romulo says he is supporting two siblings through school. He also says he has had a close encounter with Somali pirates when a chemical tanker where he worked as an able-bodied seaman was given a chase by a pirate ship somewhere in the Gulf of Aden in August this year. But he reasons, “These things really depend on chance and fortune. There’s nothing you can really do about them.”

Yet there are also those like Carlos Campos, 51, a fitter, who says not even the doubling or tripling of pay or benefits will make him work in a ship passing through the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden.

“I’m retiring in the next few years. I can’t risk anything happening to me,” says Campos, who has put three children through college, built a house for his family, his parents, and his wife’s parents after working for three decades welding and repairing ship parts at sea.

Besides, he adds, he can now choose which ship company to work for because a surge in hiring for Filipino crewmembers in the last few years meant there’s more demand than can be met by the supply of qualified seamen.

“I recently signed up for a cargo vessel that won’t be passing through Somalian waters,” Campos says, adding that average seaman’s wages have also gone up in recent years because of the rise in demand.

Neither practical nor desirable

But he admits he is in the minority when it comes to seafarers who are steering clear of ships headed for dangerous waters. Most Filipino seamen, says Campos, would be attracted by the doubling of pay and benefits, and volunteer for duty in a ship sailing through the Gulf of Aden.

Still, both Campos and Romulo agree that a policy banning deployment of Filipino seamen in ships passing through the Gulf of Aden is neither practical nor desirable. “It will just encourage Filipino seamen to seek work abroad without passing through POEA,” says Campos.

They are also pinning their hopes for improved security — not from the Philippine government but from a US-led coalition of 10 countries, including Russia, that is working to secure sea lanes beset by pirates off the Eastern African coast.

“The coalition should deploy more naval patrols to ward off the pirate ships, which usually pretend to be fishing boats, and secure the international ships and vessels passing through the Gulf of Aden,” says Campos. He adds that intensified naval patrols by Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia also helped cut piracy in the Malacca Straits, which was a piracy hot spot until a few years ago.

Reputedly the highest paid Filipino in Saudi Arabia, Bolos decided to head home and put up his own business here in 2005. Never mind that he might never earn the same income he had as an accountant and chief financial officer; all he wanted was to invest the money he had earned for 25 years in his hometown of Guagua, Pampanga, a bustling town north of Manila.

Using the managerial techniques he had learned overseas, Bolos now runs a spa in Manila and the first and only mall in Guagua. But it was no easy task, he shares, since he had to learn how to save and invest his money well.

Another returnee, Roderico Cane, also shares how setting up his catsup factory in 1996 required a lot of hard work and discipline. A backyard business that he started in Butuan City in Mindanao, Joy Banana Catsup is now producing 1,000 gallons of catsup per day and has gross annual sales of P15 to P16 million. Cane proudly says that he has the best catsup there is and at the lowest prices — a 250-mg pack of Joy Catsup costs only P4, or about three pesos cheaper than what the multinationals offer.

Not everyone, however, is as lucky.

For one, both Bolos and Cane were already adept at handling finances and knew how to start a business. They are the few rare cases among the hundreds of OFWs who had already returned home. And the government’s inefficient implementation of a proper reintegration program, much less coming up with an effective one, is largely to blame.

In a 2005 policy paper of the International Labor Organization (ILO), it reported that the post-employment problems of OFWs were mainly due to lack of opportunities.

But a law passed in 1995, the Migrants Welfare Act, is supposed to protect them from such troubles. The law reads that the State “does not promote overseas employment as a means to sustain economic growth,” adding that it must “continue to create local employment opportunities.”

The ILO, however, said the government has no adequate employment program, and even the pre-departure orientation, which is supposed to prepare the OFW for his eventual return, is ineffective.

But while it reported that the Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration and the Department of Labor and Employment did have entrepreneurship and livelihood programs, observers say the programs had little success since barely a few knew they were being offered. Even Bolos and Cane weren’t aware that there was such a program.

As for those who had tried availing such programs, they said the procedures were complicated and the loaned amounts were just too small.

A failed promise

There are also those like Jimmy Avila, a former mechanical engineer in Jeddah, who says he didn’t get help from the government at all, at least not after he got the loan for his machine shop from a government bank.

Encouraged by the OWWA to come home in 1996, with a sweet promise that there were business opportunities for workers like him, Avila resigned from his job. Setting up the shop was pretty easy, he says. “The hard part came when I realized I couldn’t market my products. I didn’t know how to get clients.” (see the PCIJ’s 1999 report, “For Many Overseas Filipino Workers, Home is Where the Hurt Is.”)

Avila has since managed to survive and feed his family with the meager income he earns. He did try to seek help from the government, but he says it couldn’t offer any good options. He, however, remains optimistic. He has in fact sought the assistance of a nongovernmental organization, the Entrepinoy Chamber of Small and Medium Enterprises.

With the free business courses the group offers, Avila hopes that he will be able to market the organic fertilizer he will be producing, that is, once he has managed to build the bioreactor, a machine that turns waste into compost. “Hopefully, with funding I can finally come up with my own version of a bioreactor.”

OWWA, however, says that it continues to come up with ways to help the returnees. It has even recently created a National Reintegration Center for OFWs (NRCO) , a one-stop shop for all reintegration programs and services for the government. When asked what it has so far accomplished, the NCRO merely said it was still consolidating all OFW programs and couldn’t give any report yet.

And there is of course the issue of funding. The OWWA has accumulated P9 billion in its trust fund over the last 12 years, but a report says only P45 million had so far been spent.

“The interest alone should be more than enough to fund more reintegration projects,” says Jackson Gan, vice president of the Federated Association of Manpower Exporters, in a recent Philippine News Agency article. Most of the projects, he says, were small-scale stores, advocacy, and seminars.

At the moment, NGOs like Entrepinoy are doing a fine job helping OFWs like Avila, who may not be as business savvy as Bolos or Cane.

There are also organizations like Unlad Kabayan, which can pool in the money of five to 10 OFWs, do feasibility study to determine which business is suitable for a community, and train OFW families to manage the business, teaching them skills like bookkeeping. This type of set-up helps the OFWs cope way before they decide to return home.

“We are squandering a lot of opportunities. OFWs have a lot of money yet we’re not utilizing them properly,” laments Bolos. “But realistically speaking we can’t expect much from government.”

FILIPINO fathers are said to be a little bit more nurturing than those in other cultures, especially when it comes to dealing with daughters, of whom they are often very protective. [photo by Alecks P. Pabico

Father and daughter relationships are difficult to characterize. For every father who deserves the “best dad in the world” award, there is a deadbeat, absent, or abusive father.

For every positive father and daughter relationship, one that is close, nurturing and emotionally fulfilling for both parties, there is one that is distant and cold, fraught with tension and resentment.

Just like elsewhere in the world, Filipino fathers are seen as the family breadwinner and provider, with female interviewees often describing their own dads as strict but kind, fair but a disciplinarian. But Pinoy fathers are also said to be a little bit more nurturing than those in other cultures, especially when it comes to dealing with daughters, of whom they are often very protective. And while circumstances such as a busy work schedule may sometimes “bury” that nurturing side of the typical tatay, the lack of the usual support systems in a strange, new place can bring the doting father back to fore.

When families migrate overseas, a rift is sometimes formed between generations, with the older set unable to understand and accept the new ways of the younger ones. But there are also instances when family members who are suddenly forced to spend more time with each other do experience a “rediscovery.” Here in Canada, where there are now more than 300,000 Filipino immigrants, many tatays have renewed their bonds with their children, especially with their daughters. Without the help of extended family members or maids to count on, and with the mother also often with work of her own, the immigrant Filipino father has had to step up and help tend to the children. And while it seems still difficult for Pinoy fathers to connect with their sons, looking after their daughters has become more of a mission of sorts now that they are in a foreign land.

Father and daughter Joseph and Pia Lim, for example, say their relationship changed when the family moved to Vancouver over a decade ago. According to Joseph, the traditional role of the father he used to play in the Philippines left him little room to interact with his children, which included his one and only daughter, Pia. Yet when asked which parent had the greater influence on her, Pia, now 29, says unhesitatingly: “Papa.”

This is the same girl who as a toddler would actually run away crying or hide behind her mother’s skirt whenever her father tried to play with her. Reared mostly by her mom and a succession of yayas (nannies) and maids, she seemed scared of her own father. Recalls Joseph: “I used to feel a little hurt before. But I know it wasn’t personal.”

AS THE First Man in a daughter’s life, a father’s behavior and treatment and attitude toward a daughter can shape the aspirations and attitudes of a lifetime. But back in Manila, Joseph was at work managing the family business from seven a.m. to six p.m. daily, except Sunday. Pia herself says that when she was growing up, her father was a distant figure, someone who went to work during the morning and came back home at night. “I used to have to tiptoe around him,” she says. “Mom always said I need to be quiet because Papa is tired after work and deserves rest. I always thought he was a killjoy.”

The dad as killjoy figure was maximized by her mom, Lydia, who often used Joseph as a bogeyman. “She’d say ‘do your homework or I’ll tell your dad and he’ll use his belt on you’,” recalls Pia.

In homes where the mom is soft on physical punishment, the dad is often the disciplinarian — or at least portrayed as one. As a result, the children in these homes sometimes grow up in fear of their dad. Pia, however, clarifies, “It’s not that I was afraid of him. But he is more stern and demanding. My mom would cajole me, but Papa put his foot down.”

Then came the move to Canada, which coincided with Pia’s teen years. Although the typical father-and-daughter relationship normally has a clashing of wills, this is especially so during the impressionable and turbulent adolescent years. Pia, however, seems to have welcomed her father’s interest in what she was up to after they migrated. She recounts, “I think once I hit high school, he started paying more attention to me. But he became stricter. He was worried for me all the time — love life, education, and just in general.”

Joseph the immigrant also became more involved with household matters. “He just became more hands-on,” says his daughter. “He became more motherly, in fact. He started to cook and do laundry too. He would putter about in the garden, and he became very makulit (a nag) and maasikaso (doting), like my mom.”

And so while Pia says her mother taught her more in terms of day-to-day tutoring, she also began listening more to Joseph, who eventually gave her guidance in developing her academic and professional career.

A businessman who believes entrepreneurship is the key to a stable, rewarding future, Joseph pushed his daughter to take commerce and business administration in university. Pia followed her father’s wishes. “It’s not something I love,” she now says. “But it’s practical, you know. It makes sense, and I can use it.”

She says she toyed with the idea of majoring in archaeology or classical history. But her dad, she says, “told me to be more practical. What was I going to do with classical history, he’d say.”

Like most Filipino fathers, Joseph believes it is his responsibility to make sure his daughter is ready for the rough and gritty reality of life. He says, “I want to make sure she’s ready for the world. Of course you want to shelter her and protect her, but at the same time, you know you can’t, so you don’t want her naïve.”

He also believes he has an obligation to ensure Pia’s future. The very Filipino desire of dads to leave their children with an inheritance, however modest, upon death is still very much with Joseph. He has clung to it even after more than 10 years of living in Canada, in a culture where independence and self-sufficiency are paramount. Joseph had to sell his business when they moved here so he says he has nothing to pass on to his children. But he insists he will make sure Pia will be well-provided for; by being able to give his daughter a financial safety net, he feels he is being a good father. Joseph says with a chuckle, “These (Canadians) here, the parents are lucky. Once the kids move out, they take care of themselves. They’re just on their own.”

“But I don’t agree,” he adds after a moment. “I wouldn’t do that to my kids. You always want what’s best for them, and if you can help out, then why not, right?”

IT’S A concern that Joseph most probably shares with Tom Padilla, who with his two children — nine-year-old Nina and eight-year-old Mark — migrated to Canada just a year ago. Right now, however, the 42-year-old Tom is more preoccupied with getting his kids fed, cleaned up, and clothed properly – things that he would usually leave to his wife Marina to worry about when they were still in the Philippines. But Marina has been left behind in Manila to take care of the family hardware business. Although far away, she has become the breadwinner in the family; Tom is the stay-at-home dad.

Tom also had his own business in Manila, but there the care of the children was strictly his wife’s domain. “My mother, the children’s grandma, lived with us and she and Marina were in charge of the children, and we had a yaya for them too,” he says. But in Victoria, British Columbia, where he and the children now live, he is the primary caregiver.

“It’s strange,” says Tom, taking a break from stir-frying some vegetables for dinner. “I never thought I’d be a househusband.”

Suddenly the former car mechanic who used to work with roaring engines and greasy tools is in charge of cooking dinner and washing greasy pans. He makes the kids’ school lunches and walks them to school. He does laundry and even irons, sews buttons, and goes grocery shopping. Tom admits he has conflicting feelings toward his new role, and that the loss of breadwinner status is a significant blow to his ego. But he says this is tempered by an improved and closer relationship with his children. “It’s the best thing to come out of this living arrangement,” he says.

For his little girl, the big difference between life in Manila and life in Canada is that here she sees her dad a lot more. He’s the one who wakes her up in the morning and tucks her into bed at night. When she wanted to buy some dangly earrings, he was the one who said no; when she wanted pink nail polish, he was the one who also said no, never.

“Daddy’s around more,” says Nina. “I see him a lot. He helps me with homework, which mama used to do before.”

She still sees him as “strict” and “frightening” but less so since they moved, she says. Indeed, in Filipino migrant families, the father is likely to be the disciplinarian between the two parents. But the immigrant father’s duties also expand to encompass things that would have remained out of his “turf” in the Philippines. And as he rediscovers his nurturing role, he also becomes more approachable and less distant. Too, the constant close proximity forced on the family members by their new set-up encourages a closeness between the parents and their children that they might not have enjoyed back in the Philippines.

“Here, I’ve become more like their mom,” says Tom. “Nina says I am very makulit, always telling them to do their homework or brush their teeth.”

MORE THAN likely, Tom will be on Nina’s case for years — maybe even decades — to come. Or at least until she gets married.

Joseph Lim says it was also his responsibility that his unica hija was safely and happily wed. “Then I (could) wash my hands off her,” he jokes.

Pia has been married for two years now and lives separately from her parents. Her dad approves wholeheartedly of her husband, David Ang, another Filipino immigrant who Pia met in university.

Pia says although she is now a wife and mother, her father’s opinion and thoughts still matter the world to her. “It’s a good thing he and Dave get along well,” she says. “Otherwise I’d be torn.”

She sees the care and concern her father had for her mirrored in her husband and their two-year-old baby girl, Deanne. But she says it is a very different father-and-daughter relationship from the one she had with her dad. Unlike her father, David has been more hands-on from the beginning; Pia is unsure whether the difference is caused by the generational gap, or because there is no barrier brought about by nannies and maids.

Both Pia and David work. They alternate driving Deanne to daycare and picking her up in the afternoon. Pia works Monday to Friday in an investment banking firm. Last year, David took a pay cut from his engineering job for the city so that he could have two days in the week during which he is Deanne’s primary caregiver.

David grew up in the Philippines and migrated to Canada just a few years ago. He believes traditional parenting roles are less delineated in Western society, and this allows him to take a more active parenting role with Deanne. He says he wouldn’t want it any other way. “I like the fact that I’m taking care of her,” he says. “It’s part of being a dad.” He says his own father was a “non-presence” in his life when growing up and he wants to make sure that this will not the case with his daughter.

“The old excuse of love being shown through money? That the father works hard and that’s how he shows his love? I don’t buy it,” says David. “Being there and being involved is more important.”

But Pia disagrees with her husband. “It’s a valid reason,” she insists, perhaps seeing in her husband’s description the father she knew in Manila. She says she doesn’t believe her dad loves her any less than her husband loves their daughter, and remarks, “It’s a different time and a different place. But he loves me in his own way. He just has a different way of showing it.”

But the Tsinoys want to make sure people can discern the differences between the jiuqiao and xinqiao, and several of them have even written papers to help ensure this.

Both terms trace their roots to the word Huaqiao, or “Chinese sojourner,” from Hua, a term used by the Chinese to refer to their country, and qiao, which means “to stay away from home somewhere temporarily.” Xin means “new” in Mandarin and jiu means “old.” Thus, xinqiao means new migrants and jiuqiao, old migrants.

Jiuqiao, according to a report by Wesley Chua, are those who immigrated before World War II, those who fled from mainland China in 1949 before the communist army took over, and the refugees who left their homeland during the early stages of the communist rule there. The Tsinoys — the third and fourth-generation ethnic Chinese who have become integrated into the Filipino mainstream — are the descendants of the jiuqiao.

Xinqiao refers to those who arrived in the Philippines during the last three and a half decades, or from the late 1970s to the present. They are those who benefited from the opening of formal diplomatic relations between the Philippines and the People’s Republic of China in 1975. But there is nothing diplomatic at all with the term several Tsinoys use to refer to them: TDK or tai diok ka, which means simply “mainlander” in Hokkien yet takes on a pejorative flavor when jiuqiao use it.

“I thought of the xinqiao as harbingers of trouble for the Tsinoy community,” confesses Krysty Choi in Tulay, a Chinese-Filipino newsletter, “I would hear the word tai diok ka — or the even shorter term ‘TDK’ — and the image of a cocky, swaggering illegal immigrant would immediately leap to mind.”

The ethnic Chinese account for 1.2 percent of the total Philippine population, according to the National Statistics Office. That translates to a little over a million jiuqiao and xinqiao altogether, although the figure does not include the illegals, who are assumed to belong to the latter group.

Citizens of the People’s Republic of China rank first in the Bureau of Immigration (BI)’s list of undocumented foreigners. From January to May 2007, there have been 20 Chinese nationals detained by authorities after being found without the necessary papers.

Danilo Almeda, BI’s Alien Registration Division chief, says they really cannot tell just how many illegal Chinese migrants there are in the country. Teresita Ang See, head of the nongovernmental organization Kaisa Para Sa Kaunlaran, meanwhile estimates that there may be 80,000 to 100,000 Chinese illegals in the country. Such figures, she says in a 2004 paper, were “culled arbitrarily from the number of deportations carried out each year and in the discrepancy between the figures of arrivals and departures.” Of these, she adds, “70 to 80 percent are said to be Chinese citizens.”

“Some Tsinoys point out that many of the new immigrants are illegal from head to toe,” Chua writes. “Many don’t have proper residency documents. They engage in retail trade without a license. They don’t have business names for the store, or else use a fictitious name. They’re not registered with the Bureau of Internal Revenue or, if registered, do not issue sales invoices or receipts because they don’t know English.”

It’s not only because many xinqiao do business illegally in the country that they irritate the jiuqiao. The truth is they pose a threat to the earlier migrants’ businesses. Although perceived as being ill-mannered and “uncivilized,” many of the xinqiao are said to be better educated, wealthier, and with more business savvy than the jiuqiao. They are also daring, says Chua, with “business practices that verge on the unethical and shock the conservative Tsinoy.” Most xinqiao went into retail trade and opened stores in bargain malls like Tutuban, 168, and Greenhills, as well as in the markets of Divisoria, Baclaran, and Quiapo, but Chua says, “most of their goods may have been smuggled.”

Just recently, Customs agents swooped down on Binondo’s 168 Shopping Mall, which is known for goods that are dirt-cheap. The raid was prompted by complaints from the Philippine Retailers Association, which regarded the mall’s very low prices as highly suspicious and a possible indication that the goods may have been smuggled or that the businesses there are mere fronts for drug trafficking. K9 teams were deployed for the raid; 20,000 sacks of goods were seized, but media reports said that no drugs were found.

Still, the alleged links of xinqiao to drug trafficking are nothing new. In her 2004 paper, Ang See noted that “100 percent of laboratories manufacturing illegal drugs raided by the Philippine Drugs Enforcement Agency were owned and run by Chinese nationals. Of the cases filed in court, involving drug busts of a hundred kilos and above, close to 90 percent involved Chinese nationals.”

If the jiuqiao are wary toward the xinqiao, the new migrants are not all that impressed with the oldtimers either. Most of the xinqiao, in fact, refuse to join local Tsinoy associations. In Chinese schools, children of new immigrants refuse to fraternize with Tsinoy students. Chua says that the newcomers regard the Tsinoys as “fools who do not want to take shortcuts to earn fortunes.” In addition, he says, the xinqiao “look down on Tsinoy’s lack of proficiency in the Chinese language.” Meaning Mandarin, of course. Among Tsinoys, speaking Chinese means talking in Hokkien.

When no one was looking, Koreans came by the planeload, and now they seem to be all over Metro Manila, Baguio, and God knows where else. Every year, there are always hundreds of Indian nationals applying for immigrant status while Chinese is the mother (and only) tongue of many of the stall owners at 168. There is a significant number of Nepalis enrolled in our universities, many of the collegiate basketball teams are starting to sound like a United Nations roster, and in Boracay, the population at the beachfront is usually predominantly Caucasian. It seems people from elsewhere find the Philippines attractive enough to visit — and some of them wind up staying put — even as Filipinos keep leaving this country in droves. If not for our high birth rate (we rank fourth in Southeast Asia, after Laos, East Timor, and Cambodia), it probably wouldn’t be long before we would begin looking like that Disneyland attraction, ‘It’s a Small World.’

This is nothing new. Even before Ferdinand Magellan sailed into the waters off Cebu and was turned into shish kebab by Lapu-Lapu, these islands were already among the usual landing spots of traders from other lands. Unlike Magellan, they were welcomed by the natives and were treated to the precursor of our now well-known hospitality. In fact, some of them must have felt so at home they decided to establish roots here. Or, perhaps just like British writer James Hamilton-Paterson, they were just curious to see how it was to live in such a “strange and wacky place.”

Of course, we haven’t been always nice to newcomers. (Magellan’s organ failure by way of a very sharp weapon thrust through his insides was just one example of what can happen when we turn nasty.) Then again, neither have we been nice at all times to people whose forefathers most probably set foot before ours on what would later be part of Philippine soil.

For the month of July, i Report looks at the aliens in our midst, including those who have been around for generations. Some of them have actually ceased to be strangers, really, but others are still painfully so. Yet while the reports may well be a reintroduction to this country’s past and present outsiders, they may also end up taking the Pinoys among our readers on a journey within.

“If you don’t die from jumping, you die from nervousness,” recalls Flores, a 25-year-old domestic helper from Bacolod City. She chose to jump. She says that when she hit the ground, she thought it was the end. The pain in her legs assured her it wasn’t.

Still, she ran and ran until she somehow found her way to the Philippine embassy in central Beirut. Flores says she had been locked up by her employers. “This was my last chance to escape,” she says.

Flores is one of around 20 Filipinas in Lebanon so far who have taken a leap — literally. Like Jezebel Guillermo, a 31-year-old domestic helper from Isabela, Flores is grateful she survived her fall. But at least one other worker has not been as lucky; in another case, it’s not clear whether the worker jumped or was deliberately pushed to her death. Five others are feared to have gone mad.

Flores and Guillermo’s decision to jump came largely from fear of being war casualties. Yet according to nongovernment organizations, Filipino workers in Lebanon have been jumping off buildings even before the recent war broke out.

In 2004, six Filipinos working in Lebanese households died under “mysterious” circumstances after falling from buildings — “mysterious” because while their employers claim the workers committed suicide, their fellow workers say some of them may have been thrown off the buildings by their employers. Apart from the Filipinos, 47 Sri Lankan workers are also reported to have committed suicides in 1997 alone.

Helen Dabu, who is with the Kanlungan Center Foundation, an organization that has dealt directly with victims of abuse from Lebanon and elsewhere, says the women jump off buildings out of despair. In 2000 alone, the last year a database was compiled by the Lebanese Pastoral Committee for Afro-Asian Migrant Workers, there were over 400 reported cases of physical and sexual abuse against migrant workers, half of the victims Filipinas.

Filipino workers suffer from abuse all over the world. But while it is difficult to accurately say whether Filipinos are better off or worse off in Lebanon than in other OFW destinations, Dabu says that the Middle East (including Lebanon) is the region from where they receive the most number of complaints about abusive employers. Such cases outnumber those reported in Hong Kong, Singapore, or Malaysia where the complaints involve more contract violations rather than rape or maltreatment. Dabu’s assessment is supported by Philippine labor attaché to Lebanon Ma. Glenda Manalo, who says this is also the view of many other diplomats working in the region.

Tenth most popular destination

Lebanon is the tenth top destination of Filipino workers abroad, although Philippine Ambassador to Lebanon Francis Bichara himself admits that they can’t actually say for sure how many Filipinos are in the country, since many are smuggled in. Research done by Kanlungan, however, indicates that the number could be as high as 50,000. Filipino workers have been arriving in Lebanon since 1978 but it was only in the last eight years, after the end of the civil war, that Filipinos have been coming here in droves. Last year alone, over 14,000 are known to have entered the country. According to Manalo, up to 99 percent of those who come here work as domestic helpers, almost all of them women.

This is why it was mostly women who wound up in a Roman Catholic school-turned-processing center for Filipinos evacuating from the war. Since Israel’s aggression started on July 12, over 4,000 Filipino migrant workers — majority of them women — have passed through the center, waiting for the next bus to Damascus, where they would then take the plane home.

Most of their employers had refused to let them go. As the women workers tell it, their respective bosses said they would be released only if they paid back the $2,000 their bosses had given to recruitment agencies for each of them. The women also surrendered their passports to their employers upon arrival in Lebanon, so many of those who have managed to make it to the center do not have any travel documents with them.

Ironically, the war — and the unprecedented public attention that came with it — has given workers an opening not just to flee from the bombs but also to free themselves from their abusive masters. One of them is Jonalyn Malibago, 26, from Quirino province, whose face is still swollen as she recounts her tale.

Working from five in the morning to midnight every day — without a single day off – for the last six months, Malibago says her employers had been treating her so badly that she had been wanting to return home for months. But she couldn’t because she didn’t have enough money: for the first three months, her salary went directly to the employment agency that got her here. Promised $200 a month when she was still in Manila, she found out — as most other Filipinas do when they arrive in Lebanon — that she was to get only $150 instead.

As the war dragged on, Malibago found the reason and the courage to tell her employers she was leaving. Her employers replied by beating her up, rendering her unconscious. Malibago had to be taken to the hospital afterward. Yet she tried asking again, threatening to jump off their building if they refused.

The employers seemed to relent and got her into the car. Then the entire family — husband, wife, two teenage sons — also entered the vehicle, but instead of driving her to the Philippine embassy or the church, they beat her up again so bad her arms and legs are still deep blue and violet.

Her masters then threw her out of the car and direct into a garbage dump. Barely conscious, Malibago somehow picked herself up and walk away, eventually ending up at the center.

Approaching ‘indentured labor’ conditions

“You’re safe now, they can’t touch you here,” a domestic worker who signed up as a volunteer says to Mary Jane Garcia, 26, a newly arrived escapee who had walked out into the highway in the middle of the night and hitchhiked her way to the center.

Earlier, at the receiving area, Garcia’s employers had caught up with her and — in front of everyone — accused her of stealing. They ordered her to go back home with them, but Garcia was adamant. Denying their allegations, she stood her ground and shot back at her employers angrily, managing to insert some Arabic phrases: “You make me work from six a.m. to four a.m. You also make me work at the factory. Even when I was sick, you made me work.”

“Did I ever hit you?” the male employer turns to Mary Cleofe Libunga, 35, who worked with Garcia in the same household. Libunga just looks at him accusingly, but says nothing.

Enter Chona Lamberte, 26, from Bohol, crying inconsolably. She tells the volunteer at the reception that her employers forbade her to leave and they still don’t know she had ran away. She’s scared, she says. They might come and get her.

These scenes are typical, says Rina Velasco, 26, a volunteer in charge of filing the evacuees’ travel papers that are being issued in lieu of missing passports. While there are also tearful goodbyes from those who had been lucky enough to be with kind employers, she says, “over 70 percent of Lebanese employers treat their employees badly.” Another employee at the embassy, a Lebanese national, thinks the figure is closer to 99 percent.

“Rare is an OFW with a positive experience in Lebanon,” says Kanlungan’s Dabu. Indeed, prohibited from even saying “hello” to fellow Filipinas in public places, made to sleep on the kitchen floor, and placed on call to do their masters’ bidding 24 hours a day, the conditions of these workers approach that of “indentured labor, even white slavery,” says UP Professor Walden Bello, who interviewed dozens of OFWs in Beirut as part of an international delegation.

With this kind of relationships they have with their employers, the parting scenes at the evacuation center have been anything but friendly. At one point, says Velasco, the bodyguard of a general drew a gun and threatened to shoot a Filipina worker if she refused to go back with them.

Protection of rights prove tricky

At least these days the Philippine government seems ready to help the workers as much as it can. Prior to the war, it didn’t look that way to some people here. According to Dabu, way before Israel began dropping bombs on Lebanon, Filipina workers had been knocking on the embassy’s door for help. But instead of giving them shelter, embassy officials took the workers back to their employers, she says. Abandoned and with nowhere else to go, some of them would eventually decide to jump off buildings, recounts Dabu.

In September 2004, Kanlungan helped some abused workers file cases against the then Filipino labor attaché in Lebanon. The cases are still with the Ombudsman, while the attaché has since been transferred to Rome. Current labor attaché Manalo, who assumed her post here in June last year, maintains though that the embassy never had any abused worker returned to their employer.

In any case, most of those who ran away from their employers eventually began going to churches or to NGOs for refuge, says Dabu. The name of Sister Amelia Torres, a Filipino nun who has been with the Daughters of Charity here in Lebanon for the past 18 years, is on everybody’s lips and is known to most as the person to go when the going gets tough.

Tina Naccache, a Lebanese social worker who has been working on migrant workers’ issues for years, relates how their organizations once proposed enforcing a common contract that would have laid down the minimum working conditions and compensation that should be guaranteed to workers.

But the agencies opposed this and insisted instead that that they be included as a party to the contract. This would have given them more power over workers, Naccache explains. What shocked Naccache, however, was when the representative of the Philippine embassy endorsed the agencies’ position.

The present labor attaché says that they see the inclusion of the agencies in the contract as a “temporary” arrangement. “While the Lebanese government is still very weak on protecting migrant workers,” Manalo says, “we have to hold the agencies responsible for the workers.”

Migrants’ organizations are skeptical of this arrangement since agencies — having had already collected the $2,000 placement fee from the employers — simply do not have the financial incentive to be responsible. In fact, they point out, agencies have often taken the side of employers in disputes with workers. They would also be the first to force runaway workers to return to their employers; otherwise these employers would demand that the fees they paid be returned.

Fortunately, says Naccache, the proposal has been blocked by the Lebanese labor minister who happens to belong to the Hezbollah, the armed political party that is the target of Israel’s ire. Unlike the other parties, she says, the Hezbollah has no ties to employment agencies and their members often don’t employ domestic workers in their household. Another social worker who refused to be named says that for all of his disagreements with the Hezbollah, it is the only Islamic group he respects because of their position toward migrants.

Manalo, however, points out that the Lebanese labor ministry couldn’t even compel Lebanese employers to compensate workers for unpaid services, much less make them accountable for abuses they commit. This is because Lebanese labor laws do not cover migrant workers. Saying she has been “saddened” by the plight of OFWs in Lebanon, Manalo has recommended temporarily suspending workers to the country while they “cleanse” the recruitment and placement industry of agencies found to have violated contracts or condoned abuses against workers.

Power relations

Meanwhile, stories of abuse are bound to continue to pile up for as long as Filipinas are forced into a relationship in which their employers wield ultimate power over them. These power relations are especially tilted against Filipinas in the Middle East, where women are often seen as inferior and where citizens from third-world countries are often viewed with contempt. Here, points out Irynn Abaño of the Center for Migrant Advocacy (CMA), Filipina domestic helpers are vulnerable to overlapping forms of gender, race, and class discrimination.

Having paid for the domestic helpers’ services in advance, employers often see these workers as nothing more than commodities to be used as they please. Filipinas, for their part, voluntarily enter into these relationships because they have few more liberating options at home. Having pursued economic and social policies that reduced or eliminated job opportunities at home — but at the same time benefiting from the dollar remittances that workers abroad infuse to the local economy — the Philippine government encourages these relationships and has, since the 1970s, deliberately promoted the export of labor. The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, points out Abaño, has explicitly announced its target of deploying one million Filipino workers abroad annually. Workers running away from their employers do nothing to reach this target.

In an effort to curb abuses against Filipinos abroad, the CMA and other groups have been pushing the government to demand that OFW-receiving countries sign an international covenant that guarantees the rights of migrant workers. But even Abaño concedes that this “covenant” has no enforcement mechanisms and prescribes no penalties. They have, however, also demanded that Manila pursue bilateral agreements with host-countries.

Yet as Abaño herself recognizes, the Philippine government really has no bargaining power because host governments know fully well that it is desperate for jobs. Hence, it will do everything and accept anything that will provide employment opportunities for the locally unemployed and that will earn dollars to pay for the countries’ imports. Offered overseas employment opportunities for its citizens, the Philippine government will not walk away, even if these leave Filipinos vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

Millions of its citizens are also willing to take the risk. With few employment opportunities waiting for them, many of those waiting here for the buses to take them home to the Philippines confess they are not sure what future awaits them back home. Some are resigned to come back to Lebanon when the fighting stops. “You think you’ll be away long? You’ll be back soon!” one Filipino taunts them half-jokingly.

The long-term solution to reduce and prevent abuses is to extricate Filipinas from the relations of powerlessness that they find themselves in. “Ultimately,” says Abaño, “the real solution to the problem of abused OFWs is for the government to pursue full employment policies and to work for genuine development at home so that working abroad will just be one option.”

Until then, Israel’s missile launchers may fall silent, but Filipina workers may still find that jumping off buildings in lands far away from home may be the only way to escape their troubled lives.

Herbert Docena is a researcher with Focus on the Global South, an international research and advocacy organization.

SURVIVING SAUDI. The author clowns with friends, fellow migrants to whom Saudi Arabia’s conservative culture is alien and unforgiving. [photos by Jose Torres Jr.]

THERE WAS no saying no to Ramon. He invited me to his one-room apartment one day in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan. There was no work for a week and most shops were closed during the day. There was nothing to do but watch television. Ramon, a Filipino who had worked in Saudi Arabia for 10 years, was my driver, guide, and friend. He said he wanted to show me something that I would enjoy.

He turned on the television and inserted a videotape in the VHS player. On the screen appeared Ramon in all his naked glory, and an equally naked woman on his bed. The video was obviously taken from a camera hidden somewhere in his room. My friend was laughing. “Can I pass as a porno star?” he asked, grinning.

He said the woman, a Filipina with a daughter and husband back in the Philippines, had been his sex partner for the last two months. She had been working in the Kingdom as a domestic helper for six years and went home to the Philippines only once every two years. Ramon was also married and had two children back home.

“We do it once a week,” Ramon said. But he added that she wasn’t his girlfriend. “We just spend time together to fight the loneliness,” he said. “We love to experiment and we’re looking for someone because she wanted to have two partners. Are you interested?”

I wanted to laugh but Ramon was serious. “I make do with lotion,” I said quickly. Fortunately, he left it at that.

But reality was harder to shake off. We were in a place so alien that the word “loneliness” did not even come close to capturing what one ended up wallowing in for days on end. That’s why the need for physical contact was so acute, and that’s why many OFWs like ourselves sometimes did things they wouldn’t even have thought of doing back home. I hadn’t gone as far as Ramon had at that point, but I felt the need just the same. And by then I knew that even in a very conservative country, there existed, for OFWs, a seething sexual scene underneath a seemingly placid surface.

A British pilot was supposed to have been jailed after he told passengers in jest to set their watches 500 years back when they were about to land in the Kingdom. It was a story I had heard from friends, and I had dismissed it as an exaggeration. That was before I went to Saudi myself and saw and lived the kind of life OFWs were enduring in the middle of the desert, where time seemed to have stood still.

SAUDI ARABIA is home to Islam’s two Holy places, Makkah (Mecca) and Madinah (Medina). It is a country where women are still fighting for the right to drive and unmarried couples who mix in public risk the anger of the mutawah, the stern-faced religious police armed with thin wooden canes. It is a country where words like alcohol, sex, rape, mini-skirt, prostitute, Christmas, communism, and anything that connotes Christianity, “immorality,” or godlessness are taboo and not allowed to appear in newspapers and magazines. It is also a country that has hired fun-loving and eager Filipinos by the hundreds of thousands at a time for the last three decades. Up to now, no day passes without a Filipino boarding a plane to work there.

Many OFWs spend several years working in Saudi Arabia. But they never get used to its culture. All alcoholic drinks, for instance, are prohibited in the Kingdom, not exactly comforting for Filipinos used to the delights of San Mig after a hard day’s work. Yet these delights can still be had, although very expensively, including the sadiqui, a concoction of rice and yeast that tastes like lambanog (a fiery drink made from the nectar of coconut flowers) and that Filipinos have managed to source secretly.

For most Filipinos, the Kingdom is a confusing country of contradictions. While drugs are prohibited, for example, kababayans say it could be had more easily there than in Manila. “And it is cheaper,” one Filipino told me. Multiple partners would also seem common in a place where the law allows a man to have up to four wives at anyone time, so long as the women are given equal treatment — from the size and design of their respective homes to the number of visits each gets from their husband. But even as intimacy with other women outside of marriage is high on a long list of taboos, some have figured out ways to wriggle out of the rules. When I was there, some “marriage brokers” offered men “trapped in unhappy marriages” an easy and safe escape — the so-called “marriage in passing” or zawaaj al-misyaar in Arabic.

Friends said that they had tried calling the five telephone numbers listed in a fax message. Once they got through, a female voice instructed the caller to punch in a secret code “to learn more.” That done, this was what the caller would hear next: “My dear brother, may God help you find a wife to compensate for your troubled life. Know that the broker charges these prices. Five thousand riyals for a virgin. Three thousand riyals for a nonvirgin.” A leading Muslim cleric described the process to me this way: “The man can pass by anytime, in the morning, afternoon, or evening. And he does not have to stay over.”

“GUEST WORKERS” like the Filipinos, however, have to find their own means of salving their own tortured souls and aching libidos. Those who were married but didn’t have their spouses with them found bedroom buddies soon enough, partners without strings attached.

For some single Filipinas, meanwhile, marriage to a male kababayan was the only way they could live outside their assigned quarters. But not all the men who made themselves available to these women were single; the “marriages” took place because some consulate or embassy official was eager to “help,” for a fee. It was not uncommon to have married Filipino men having another “legitimate wife” in Saudi.

In Jeddah, the shopping malls and restaurants in the Balad district became popular meeting places for homesick Filipino men and women who slipped each other bits of paper with their names and telephone numbers.

These days I am told they use text messages to arrange meetings in the family sections of restaurants, where the mingling of sexes is allowed.

Not everyone, however, sought racy outlets for their frustrations. Sports was a popular form of release; so were karaoke parties. The more artistic expressed themselves in poetry or theater. Although I wasn’t particularly athletic, I took karate and aikido lessons to relieve the boredom.

I also had my lotion, as I had told Ramon. I learned about the “lotion solution” three days after arriving in Saudi Arabia. I stayed with Filipino male workers in one of their “villas” while looking for a place of my own, and I noticed that all of them had big tubes of Jergens lotion beside their beds or inside their bathrooms.

“You’re becoming vain here with all the lotion,” I commented to a construction worker. He laughed, saying cryptically, “You will learn soon enough.”

THIS WAS back in the mid-1990s, when I had joined the hordes headed for the Middle East. Like most OFWs, I had been infected with the dream to work abroad and earn dol lars. I, too, wanted a house filled with the latest video and audio entertainment systems, a microwave oven, a washing machine. I wanted to have a room with pictures of camels and Bedouins on the walls and with large Persian carpets strewn on the floor.

I woke up from the dream when the first searing desert wind blasted my face as the aircraft’s doors opened in Dhahran, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was just a stopover before the plane proceeded to Jeddah, my final destination, but Dhahran’s heat melted whatever dream was floating inside my head. By the time I landed in Jeddah, it had practically evaporated.

I should have known working in Saudi was going to be rather rough when, as part of the application process, a stranger made me part my buttocks so she could have a better look at my butthole.

There we were, about 15 of us, inside a small room in a clinic somewhere in Makati. The medical attendant had just finished taking two vials of blood from each of us. Earlier, we had submitted our stool and urine samples. Next was the required “physical exam.”

A nurse in her mid-20s entered the room. “Line up and face the wall,” she commanded.

“Remove your pants and your briefs,” she next said, still in an authoritative tone. Somebody giggled somewhere in the room. “Shut up,” the nurse said. Then she ordered, “Raise your shirts, bend forward, and open your asses.”

She peered into our bottoms looking for hemorrhoids.

Some of us could not hold our laughter, but the nurse wasn’t laughing. “Face front!” she barked. Then she pulled out a ruler, which she used to poke our balls. “Wala ba kayong luslos (Anybody has hernia)?” she asked. Nobody answered. “You can now put your clothes on,” she said.

I had no idea what kind of jobs the others had applied for, but I was going to work in a newspaper as an editor, and I couldn’t figure out what my butt or my balls had to do with journalism. Of course, had I read “Lawrence of Arabia” or seen the film, I would have known about the predatory instincts of men trapped in the desert heat, and I would have probably pulled up my underwear and pants pronto and never even boarded that plane to Jeddah.

Intimate relations between men have long been illegal in the Kingdom. The punishment for sodomy is death. But even now there is no dearth of men looking for possible hookups, even in malls and supermarkets, where they are said to be on the alert for Filipinos. According to one news report, a street in Jeddah has become the most accident-prone area in the city because it is the most popular place to pick up gay Filipinos who strut their stuff on the sidewalk in tight jeans and cut-off t-shirts.

Some Filipinos actually find the Kingdom a place for the fulfillment of desires and lifestyles they could hardly afford in the Philippines. Gay men hold secret parties and fashion shows almost every other week. Most of them have foreign partners. Some even live together like family. Then and now, there have been OFWs who have made money out of these men’s attraction to Filipino males.

AS FAR as anyone knew, however, Isagani David, a contract worker from Sorsogon who was working for the Saudi Consolidated Electric Company, was not among such OFWs.

David was picked up by two police officers around one o’clock in the morning in October 1998. He was on his way home from a game of chess at a friend’s house. Fifteen minutes later, David was brought to the AI-Alaya General Hospital dead, his hands tied with plastic strips.

Hospital records on the cause of David’s death were not available. There was also no autopsy done, although the body was held frozen in the hospital’s morgue for more than a month.

The police officers were arrested, although they were later released after claiming that David accidentally died when he struggled to free himself from the grasp of the arresting officers. The policemen claimed that David “fell forward” and hit the ground, causing his death.

But the Filipino community in the Kingdom believed that the policemen killed David after he refused their advances. David was described by friends as “good looking,” the type that gay men wanted to have as partners.

I don’t think it was a story that ever made it to the papers here, but those of us in Saudi Arabia pondered over David’s tragedy for days. At the very least, it gave us something to occupy ourselves with, especially during the long stretches of empty hours we had in between work. With no bars, no discos, no movie houses, not even churches to go to, often there were just our rooms, which soon felt very, very small.

With a lot of time to kill, one could turn melodramatic, religious, or kinky. But with the second option hard to carry out in Saudi Arabia unless you happen to be Muslim, there really are just two choices left. If you’re a Filipino male, there is just one.

One old-timer of an OFW volunteered the information that “some women are selling themselves cheap.” At the time, the going rate for a night of clandestine fun ranged from 300 to 500 Saudi riyals, which was then equivalent to P3,300 to P5,500. Friends also confided that airline attendants “cost more” than domestic helpers, dressmakers, and illegal aliens.

For those who had no money to spare but were not content with the “lotion solution,” a relationship was easy to be had, both for men and women. A woman domestic helper I met at the Philippine consulate called me up at my office one day when she learned that I was about to go home for a vacation. She asked me to buy her a pair of panties and a bra. The “sexy type,” she said.

“One that you would like to see me wearing,” she added. When I asked in jest if she wanted me to put them on her, she said, “Sure.” I bought the underwear she wanted but I never got to see her wear them.

I’ve been home for the last seven years. I don’t think I’d want to work in Saudi Arabia again. These days some friends who are still in the Kingdom say they pass their time in front of computer monitors, having virtual sex with their wives or girlfriends. But Net access can cost quite a bit. Then again, there are still the pirated pornographic movies, kinky letters from home, and the ever-reliable tubes of Jergens.

Jose Torres Jr. worked as sub-editor of Saudi Gazette , Saudi Arabia’s national daily, for almost three years in the mid-1990s. While in Jeddah, he organized the Overseas Filipino Press Club and the Tanghalang Gitnang Silangan. He was an officer of Kasapi, an alliance of OFW organizations in the Kingaom that lobbied for the passage of the absentee-voting law.

SEARCH FOR ROOTS. After months of studying in Manila, Mikhail and Tristan (extreme left and second from left) and Jo (extreme right) find that their other homeland has much to teach them.

THE QUEZON City apartment, like many others on the same street, has a thick grill gate meant to deter break-ins. Just as I ring the doorbell, about six children, perhaps around the ages of three to seven, surround me, saying, “Sira ang doorbell! Kakatukin na lang namin siIa (The doorbell’s broken. We’ll just knock on the door)!. Before I can muster a response, all the kids squeeze their little heads into tight openings in the grill gate; in less than 3O seconds, they have made it to the front door. “Ate Jo! Kuya Tristan! May bisita kayo (You have visitors)! they yell.

“You have a unique doorbell system here,” I tell Tristan and Jo when they let me in. The children disappear instantly. But later, they just as quickly scale the walls surrounding theapartment, repeatedly waving their arms and calling the names of the apartment’s residents: Filipino-Americans Olivia Kardos (23), Joy quiambao (21), Tristan Ignacio Hurlburt (22), Ivy Dulay (20), and Mikhail Gaetos (20), plus tier Japanese-American friend Miwako Ohara. All are college students enrolled at UP Diliman for a year.

Media hype has painted most “‘Fil-Ams” as celebrities — as MTV VJs, movie starlets, basketball players, and pretty faces on Edsa billboards. But many more are here in the Philippines, not to break into the movies or television but to nurture a longing for “home.”

As Miwako prepares and serves a Sunday brunch of tocino, eggs, rice and bibingka, Tristan, Olivia and I sit on the living room floor discussing identity, language, racism, and reasons for wanting to visit their parents’ homeland. Ivy and Mikhail join us later.

Tell me about yourself. Where did you grow up? What is your family like/ Did you gtow up in a predominantly Filipino community?

Jo: I grew up in Woolridge, Virginia. Most of the Filipinos I encountered were from the church. In my high school graduating class, there were only four Filipinos, myself included. Both my parents are from Tarlac City. My Dad works for the post, office, my Moms a teacher in a Catholic school. Growing up, my parents J would speak to us (children) in English, while they’d speak to each other in Kapampangan. My Mom was afraid we would fall back in school so she spoke to us in English. They never really taught us anything about the Philippines. If we asked them, my mother wouldn’t say much, other than (describe) the house she grew up in, and the school she went to. My dad would say even less.

Tristan: I grew up in Palo Alto, California. There was a Filipino community center close to where I lived. I was a “weekend Filipino.” During weekends I’d be with Filipinos, mostly my relatives. There were 10 Filipinos in my high school graduating class.

My father is white, he can trace his roots to the Mayflower — he’s that white! (Laughs). My (maternal) grandfather is Ilokano. He went to Hawaii in the 1930s at age 17, as a contractualfarm laborer. He was supposed to stay 18 months but left to move to California. There, he was a migrant agricultural worker, he followed the crop. By chance, he met this white family that took him in, sent him through high school, in exchange for being their houseboy. The day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, he enlisted in the US army and joined the Filipino American infantry that was sent to Cotabato. At the end of World War II, he visited his family in Ilocos, where he met and married my grandmother. He returned to the States, to re-enlist in the army after his first term. He did that so he could bring his family to the States. (Prior to WWII, Filipinos, then called “nationals,” were barred from acquiring US citizenship and were unable to bring their families.) So my grandma had a daughter (from a previous marriage) born iin the Philippines, a son born in the US army base in Okinawa, a daughter born in the US army base in Germany, and my Mom was born on the army base in Colorado.

My Mom is second generation (Filipino-American). Growing up, they had the “English Only” rule because grandpa wanted everyone as American as can be. When I was a kid, I never really asked my grandparents questions (about the Philippines) because I was afraid I’d disappoint them. They would be so happy when their grandchildren would speak accent-less English and eat whatever they cooked with American table manners. They really liked that. But no matter how American they tried to act — they are still Filipino. Like, we ate only Filipino food at home. I never had a babysitter, or was ever sent to daycare. When my parents were at work, I’d be with my grandparents, or cousins while all my friends would go to a babysitter or daycare.

Olivia: I grew up in New Jersey. When I was 12, we moved to Pennsylvania; then I attended college at UC Santa Cruz, then UCLA. My Dad is Hungarian Jewish. My Mom is Chinese-Filipino from Echague, Manila.

In New Jersey, my older brother and I went to a traditional Jewish school because the public school system was really bad. My Mom was very much against sending us to Catholic school. So we went to this Jewish school that was supposedly a good school. But by the time I left that school in the 7th grade, I hated it.

In my house, we really did not practice Judaism. Like, to this day, I probably know more about Judaism and Hebrew than my Dad. Because the school was very religious, we had to lie a lot. Like, you’re not supposed to be driving around during the Sabbath, but we did — so we had to lie about what we did on weekends.

My Mom would drive us to school, and she’d give us bacon and sausage sandwiches in the car for breakfast. And when we got to school, my brother and I would try to pick the bacon from our teeth before morning prayer. Then I just thought it was part of life, but when I got older, I really resented the school. That’s why to this day, I’m still not into organized religion.

When did you first realize you were Filipino?

Jo: When I was in the 2nd grade, I had a white teacher who had been in the Philippines for about five years because her husband was stationed in the military. For International Week, she had us do the tinikling (bamboo dance). I didn’t even know how to dance the tinikling, and how I learned was through this white teacher who asked help from the school’s PE teacher, who was also white! I was surprised, because you know how your parents are supposed to be your teachers for life? And yet they didn’t teach me anything about the Philippines. I always asked, but they never really explained. And then this white teacher was teaching stuff about the Philippines — it was coming from a totally unexpected source. That was odd.

When I got to college, I worked in the Office of International Student Affairs. We were holding a workshop for cultural ambassadors, and I was helping with the workshop. The office director put me in a spot by having me explain the Death March. I thought, “Oh great! Oh my gosh!” I only knew so much about it. Something’s wrong. All I knew was that it was tied in with the Japanese, World War II, and I didn’t know where it started and how it began.

Tristan: For me, I always, always thought I was Filipino, since forever, before anything else. In my immediate family, we were always told, “You’re Filipino, don’t be white.” My white family (relatives), they are aIl divorced, they are all messed up and addicted to drugs. So growing up, the device for not becoming that would be “be Filipino.” So when I realized that I was different, it wasn’t realizing that I was Filipino, but realizing that I was half-white!

When I was in elementary school, I would go over to my Filipino friend’s house and their parents would call me “mestizo” to my face. It came to a point when I really hated that word for a long time, They’d say, “This mestizo boy is eating pan de sal and adobo,” But eating that was the most normal thing for me because that’s what we ate at my house! My friends’ parents who were (more recent Filipino) immigrants were mean to my mom because she was Fil-Am, and she can’t speak Tagalog. Of course my mom can’t speak Tagalog or Ilokano, she was born in Colorado! But the parents of my friends, who came after 1965, didn’t understand that. So for me, I had to learn that I was part white and I wasn’t part of the post -1965 gang, who could speak Tagalog. Suddenly, I had this realization that there were “other” kinds of Filipinos. (In 1965, immigration policies allowed professionals trained abrad to legally enter, work, and secure citizenship in the United States. A record number of Filipno professionals migrated to the United States during this period.)

Then, when I went to Hawaii for college, it was totally different again. In Hawaii, they didn’t care if I was Filipino, they just saw that I was brown, and that I looked like I was from Hawaii. So I wasn’t Asian, or Filipino, or mestizo or anything like that, I was just “local.” So I had to adapt to all that stuff, after having realized that there were other Filipinos besides (my grandpa’s) manong generation.

Olivia: I guess it was the first day of kindergarten at the Jewish school in New Jersey. And it wasn’t just skin color either. I remember my Mom dropped me off: She got me really excited; she built it (school) up trying to get me ready for it. I didn’t go to a preschool before that so it was my first formal school. I was expecting school to be fun. But when I got there, I was the only one who looked Asian, very Asian — bucked teeth, black hair with bangs. My brother was in the same school but he was older and I think was a little embarrassed by me.

Did you experience overt manifestations of racism or discrimination?

Ivy: Yeah, I experienced discrimination, discrimination from other Filipinos. I grew up in a neighborhood that had very few Filipinos so I was used to hanging out with mostly whites. Then, when I moved to California, the Filipinos there were critical — why was I with white friends? But when I tried to hang out with Filipinos, they said I wasn’t Filipino enough. I couldn’t speak Tagalog. (Ivy” parents are both Filipino.)

Mikhail: I was born in the Philippines and migrated when I was five. I grew up speaking Tagalog at home. But I had difficulty relating to other Fil-Ams because they’d look at me, and just because I spoke Tagalog, they expected me to know more about the Philippines. But then I didn’t.

Olivia: There was certainly racism in the Jewish school I went to. In Judaism, if you married a non-Jew, traditionally, he or she would have to convert to Judaism because it was taboo to marry outside the religion. My mom never did that and my Dad never expected her to. So every year the school principal would call our house to ask my Dad, “So did your wife convert yet?” And my Dad would say, “No and I’m not planning on it either.” And the principal would say, in a really nasty way, “So how much are you donating to the (school) fund this year?” I didn’t get financial aid even if I was qualified for it.

I remember that my brother Josef was barred from leading the morning prayers in school. You see, all the boys were looking forward to their bar mitzvah (a ceremony for admitting a Jewish boy as a member of the adult community, usually at the age of 13). After your bar mitzvah, you were given the honor to lead the morning prayers. It was a special chant, and Josef was really good at it; everyone thought he had a nice voice. One day, one of the teachers from the school, a Middle Eastern Jew, came to our house to talk to my parents. He said that all the teachers and students threatened to walk out of the morning prayers the following day if Josef were to lead it. He said it was because Josef and I were just “converted” Jews. We were the only converted Jews in the entire school. (Jewish lineage is passed through one’s mother, therefore Olivia and Josef had to be “converted” because their mother never became Jewish.) The teacher was sincerely apologetic and told my father he would support him if he decided to fight the school. My Dad was very angry and wanted to file a complaint. But my brother Josef didn’t want to attract more attention, so he told my father to let it go. But we all knew it was a big deal.

The kids at the school were mostly cool, it was just the parents and teachers. I remember one time, we were having a birthday party at home and this kid came over. In my house we did not eat kosher food. So my mom prepared paper plates because if you’re Jewish, you’re not supposed to eat off plates that had been served non-kosher food on. One mom sent her kid to our house with her own snacks, lunch and her own utensils. And the mom said, “So we won’t trouble you.” She had attitude about it. Who was she kidding? We’re not stupid!

What made you decide to come to the Philippines and stay here for year of study at UP?

Jo: I just thought it was time. It was my curiosity, a long period of curiosity. (You ask) why are your relatives not going back, your own Mom and Dad are not going back to the Philippines? What’s going on? Why isn’t anyone returning? I don’t think my relatives are comfortable when they get here. And when they do, they’d rather stay in Manila, not in Tarlac. If they come, they come to shop. They don’t stay for a long time; they only come for Christmas. People would tell me, “Why are you going to the Philippines? It’s so dirty there, you have to use the tabo to bathe!” What’s that all about?

Tristan: I’ve always wanted to come (to the Philippines). And when I said I was going, everybody said, I couldn’t. That made me more curious. It made me want to go even more. I’m the shit-starter in my family. So if anyone says, “don’t go,” chances are, I’d be there. All these stories — they’d cut off my hand to steal my watch. You’ll have diarrhea all day, you’ll lose weight! Look, I’m fatter now! (Everyone laughs and says, “We all are! We gained weight here!”) It was such a big deal so I told my family I was going to Japan. It became my big secret. I had this entire drawer with this packet full of papers that said I was going to the Philippines. I had my plane ticket, my acceptance letter (to UP). I just told them I was going to the Philippines a day before I left the US. It was just time.

Why was it time?

Tristan: Because all my (Filipino) cousins, they’re so “whitewashed,” so materialistic. What they had to do sucks! Going to college, picking a course that their parents wanted, graduating, they work, they buy a house, they have to buy this and that. Sometimes I want to shake them and say: It’s not that important! My cousins, they all marry white women, they have kids. And my Mom and grandma would jokingly tell them, “Oh you better teach (your wives) to be Filipino.” My Mom tries to teach them stretching exercises for their kids, Ilokano stuff. (Massaging babies and toddlers so their bones align properly.) And my cousins are like, “Oh don’t bother, they go to Gymboree.” That’s like a plastic playground that you pay for your kids to play in. That’s so stupid! Why don’t they just let the kids hang out with their cousins, play with other kids? I’m so tired of them. I see all their stupid shit. And they’re the ones who say I couldn’t come to the Philippines.

But now, because I started it (coming to the Philippines), my Mom is coming for the very first time in her life. My 86-year-old grandma is coming; she hasn’t been back since she left in the 1940s! They’re coming here next week! My brothers are coming…

Ivy: I’m curious to know why they (my parents) left the Philippines. And why my Mom isn’t so eager to come back. I know the plane ticket is expensive, but there are more reasons than that. I think it’s because she’d be so sad to see her family in the provinces are the way they are. She’ll say, ’1 can’t go because you know, they’ll ask for all this money. They think we are so rich here, when (in reality) we have all these loans. They don’t understand.” Now that I’m here, I’ve asked her to visit me. And she says, “Oh, not now. I have work.” When I know she has so many (vacation and sick) leaves (she can avail of).

Here, we’re very comfortable, we can afford to “gimmick.” But what is that amount spent compared to the minimum wage pay (of local residents). I remember in sociology class (at UP), we studied that the (children) of OFWs say, “We don’t want materialistic things. We just want the love and attention of our parents.” The reason they are able to give that answer is because they are able to get the material things. And that’s what I’m thinking about. When I go out here, I usually go out shopping. And when my family comes back, that’s what they do, they shop. But what if we didn’t have that luxury. It’s hard to explain, but I feel fortunate but in other ways guilty. To think of an average Filipino family living off the minimum wage — we learn about that, but (it’s different) to really feel and understand that.

Olivia: I think of the value of context. I remember coming here for my Lolo’s funeral with my Mom and her siblings. And she was “Ate.” Her siblings just handed her their passports and plane tickets so she’d deal with all that at the airport. Some of her siblings are grandparents already — all very responsible adults in their 50s. Mom’s 64, and she’s not even a grandparent. And here they were, relying on her to be “Ate,” asking her to buy things for them in Quiapo. I remember they were picking a stone (lapida) for the grave, and after all the discussion and excitement, she just picked one and said, “Tapos na ang kuwento (End of the story)!” And everyone just gave in, and bowed their heads. And I said, “Yeah Mom!” It was so empowering to see her that way! I think, just living among white people, I saw her as more timid, more submissive. Everyone would say, oh your Mom is so cute. That’s nice, but it also has so many implications — that she’s Asian, submissive, docile. And here, she was so bold!

And everyday things — like walking on the street, I see this (street) kid who is seven years old and is a genius compared to me, simply because he knows how to survive. Maybe he can’t recite theories on race and class, but he could outsmart me in a second. So context, putting it all in context.

Tristan: Yes, context! You know the huge migration from out of the Philippines? I’m what happens to those people’s kids. In the States, the immigrant parents did so well in making me and my mom feel so bad. But we’re all part of the same story…

Now, how do I take what I’ve learned and experienced here? How do I take that back to people I’m close to? As corny as it sounds, I’m really different now. And people that I’m really close to aren’t going to like the difference. I went home for (Christmas) break and I got a taste of that already. I came to the Philippines, I learned Tagalog. But no matter how hard I tried, my family — those who grew up in the Philippines and studied at UP — would not speak Tagalog to me. And yet I know they can speak Tagalog well! Even if I wanted to go home and tell them about the Philippines, they don’t want to hear (about) it. I don’t what to be that jerk who would say (lowers his voice): “Well, when I was in the Philippines…” But at the same time I want to share my experiences. I have perspective, and I know it, and I can share it — but, the question is, do they really want it?

AS WE EXCHANGE our goodbyes at their grilled gate, I eyed the children now noisily running the little stretch of road. “Have you lost anything here?” I ask Olivia, who had mentioned that a narrow alley leading to a slum community — home to the children — was just meters away from their gate. “Oh yeah,” she say. “On our first week here, we stupidly left our shoes outside our front door. Tristan lost his shoes one night. The following morning, this woman was at our gate. She was the mom of one of the kids. She apologized for the missing shoes. We said not to bother, it was just one of those things you have to live with. We never lost anything after that, and the kids are now our friends.”

Susan F. Quimpo is the founder and program director of Tagalog On Site (TOS), a heritage program for second- and third-generation Filipino Americans. For more information on Tagalog/Filipino language, history and culture programs, check the TOS website at www.tagalogonsite.org.

MISSING MOMMY. Macoy Leyba has learned to cook, take care of the children, and balance the family budget, but he still misses his wife everyday. [photos by Alecks P. Pabico]

AS THE youngest of the three Leyba children, McLauren gets pampered in the manner all bunso are in a Filipino family, including being able to share bedspace with his parents. And up until three years ago, bedtime meant going through a peculiar ritual to help induce him to sleep: snuggling against his mother and rubbing one of her ears, a soporific massage that she would also give him.

McLauren — or Butchoy as he is fondly called — didn’t exactly outgrow the ritual. It’s just that his mother has been working abroad for the last three years, and the nine-year-old has since been cuddling up to his father at bedtime instead. And while Maximino ‘Macoy’ Leyba loves hugging his young son back — he has balked at performing the ear-caressing routine the boy and his mother liked doing.

But everything else that wife Florence would be doing around the house Macoy has taken on without complaint, from looking after the children to cooking the meals, to doing the laundry and figuring out the household budget. It’s a setup that may be hard to imagine in a country of swaggering macho men, but in this era of large-scale transnational female labor migration, even certified barakos (toughies) are being forced to play nanay (mothers), albeit in varying degrees.

There are towns upon towns across the Philippines like Mabini in Batangas, where 12 percent of the population are OFWs, most of whom are women employed as domestic workers in Italy. In 2002, seven in 10 of all newly hired OFWs were female, according to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA). The result: many more households where the man of the house wears an apron and wields a broom.

Trust the Filipino’s practicality that allows such reversal of gender roles without necessarily resulting in the emasculation of the Pinoy macho. In her book Remaking Masculinities, sociologist Alicia Pingol studies the gender dynamics in Ilocano families with migrant wives and stay-at-home husbands. She points to the shifting definitions of masculinity that somehow lessen the threat to Pinoy manhood when husbands are forced to assume the role of caregiver for the sake of the family’s finances.

The new masculine image, says Pingol, now comes in a variety of forms, from efficiently managing their wives’ remittances to remaining loyal spouses, to attending to their children’s needs. Interestingly, another new mark of masculinity, according to Pingol, is the dogged determination of many of the men to find ways to contribute economically to the family income so as not to become too dependent on their wives’ earnings.

Danilo ‘Tatay Danny’ Guce, for example, did not stop being a port worker when wife Fidela went to Italy in 1987 to become a domestic helper, even though his earnings were nothing compared to what she was getting. “We had huge debts that we couldn’t pay fast enough with my wife’s salary,” he explains. “I kept working so that at least she wouldn’t have to worry about where we were going to find the money to feed ourselves.”

Now retired at 60, Tatay Danny tends a small backyard vegetable garden in Mabini. He intends to sell the produce to earn as additional income, or if not, for his family’s own consumption. He has in his care three grandchildren whose parents are also working in Italy.

IN BACOOR, Macoy is thinking of reopening the small store he used to run beside their house so he can contribute to the family coffers. As if he didn’t already have his hands full managing the household. Actually, the reason why he closed his shop was because his household tasks kept getting in the way. But Macoy now says he has gotten the hang of it after doing the same routine day after day for the last three years.

At least now he no longer worries too much about the eldest child Reiner, who is 20 and a recent computer engineering graduate. “He eats by himself and then goes off,” says Macoy. But there’s still Butchoy and Jam, the middle child and only daughter. Largely because of them, Macoy’s daily schedule still begins early in the morning. He wakes up at around five o’clock to prepare breakfast for Jam, who has to leave for school at seven. By 9:30, he is back in front of the stove cooking for Butchoy. Then he bathes and dresses up the boy in time for classes that start at 10.

Macoy learned to cook in Saudi Arabia, when he was assigned to oversee his company’s operations in Tabuk near the Jordan border. At the time he was a supervisor at a transport firm. Florence and the children were also in Saudi, but whenever Macoy was in Tabuk, he was pretty much left to his own devices. Sometimes he had to bring Butchoy, then a toddler, with him to Tabuk, and he would call Florence long-distance to get specific instructions on how to cook dishes like tinola. He hasn’t dispensed with the practice, though it is now his mother-in-law whom he often consults about recipes.

After the children have left for school, Macoy does the marketing. He says it’s more convenient to do that late in the morning, as there are fewer buyers and haggling for lower prices becomes a breeze.

Work slackens a bit in the early afternoon until two o’clock, when Jam returns from school. That’s the time Macoy washes and iron clothes, taking care to do the children’s uniforms first.

But it’s budgeting Florence’s remittances that often leaves the lanky Macoy exhausted. In the past, they used to allocate P20,000 for their monthly expenses — mainly food, payment of utilities, and the children’s daily school allowances. Now that amount is no longer sufficient. Confides Macoy: “It’s so hard to budget. There are so many school projects. Whenever the two younger children ask for money, my budget is ruined. My daughter says she needs shoes, but she ends up also buying a pair of pants. It’s difficult to say no.”

Actually, he says, life hasn’t been easy for him since he became Mr. Mom. “I admit it,” he says. “It’s hard for the man to become the mother. If you think about it, it’s a very heavy burden. Of course fathers can take care of their children. But I can’t do everything a mother does.”

So far, though, the kids aren’t complaining — even Butchoy, who is quite attached to Florence. Says the 45-year-old Macoy: “He’s my bedtime companion. Whenever he hugs me, I remember his mother. Because he should be hugging her. I ask him sometimes, ‘So Butchoy, is it okay that your mommy’s not here, and you’ve had to hug just me?’ And he says it’s okay.”

THE MASSIVE exodus of women — especially mothers and wives — has raised much concern about the stability of the family and the welfare of the children left behind. Mothers, after all, are acknowledged as the ilaw ng tahanan (light of the home) to complement fathers, who are the haligi ng tahanan (pillar of the home). As such, they tend to hold the family together better than the fathers. Studies have likewise shown that families have done well despite the absence of men because of the women who have taken up the slack.

Any change in the role and status of women, since they are more identified with family and domestic concerns, tends to affect the family more than that of men, who experience similar changes. There is also the perception that men cannot fully substitute for the absent mothers, however willing the husbands are to assume the roles of their migrant wives. Yet even if Macoy himself says he cannot be the kind of mother Florence is, his wife is all praises for the man whom she describes as having been “bossy” when they were just starting their family in Saudi Arabia.

A registered nurse, Florence has resumed work with the King Abdulaziz University Hospital in Jeddah, where she was last employed for eight years until December 2001, when she resolved to come home for good. She had been determined to focus on the growing children, whom the couple had sent back to the Philippines to study while they stayed behind to work in Saudi. Her decision to return to Jeddah several months later was painful for the family, but it had to be made because their savings were fast being depleted.

Given her profession, it was easier and it made more financial sense for Florence to return to the oil-rich kingdom. Macoy had abruptly left his job after attending his father’s wake and burial in 2002, and he opted to stay in the Philippines to mind the children, as well as manage the small business they were starting then, when Florence decided to go back to Jeddah. “And things just didn’t feel safe here back then,” explains Macoy. “Houses were. being burgled in this subdivision. In Saudi, all you’d hear were news about massacres. You couldn’t have any peace of mind.”

Their business venture failed, but Macoy is still keeping house — with little help from anyone else. This has set him apart from many other Filipino men with migrant wives. More often than not, the husband who has been left behind delegates many of the household tasks to female relatives, sometimes even to the eldest daughter.

This refusal to take the “second shift,” which consists of family and household chores that husbands and wives need to do after completing their regular day’s paid work (the first shift), is neither new nor unique to Filipino men. U.S. sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild popularized the phrase in 1989, using it as title for her book in which she observed how men were not spending much more time taking care of the needs at home even as women were spending more and more time at work. Here in the Philippines, the extended family has made it all the more possible for men with migrant wives to pass on some or all of the household chores to willing female relatives.

FOR SURE the traditional notions of housework and child care as “feminine” also have something to do with many of the men’s reluctance to play mother to the hilt like Macoy. Marcelino Abu, for example, insists that cleaning, cooking, and caring for the children are activities that fall under the domain of women. That thinking could have made things complicated for him had his grownup daughter not been around to manage his household while his wife Yolanda works as a maid in Italy. Marcelino, 49, also says his work as a kagawad (barangay council member) already keeps him very busy. “I hang the clothes to dry, but I don’t do any washing,” he says cheerily. “I’d be ashamed to be seen doing that by my neighbors.”

Leandro Jusi, the barangay captain in Marcelino’s neighborhood in Mabini, says that with his wife also working in Italy, he gets by with the help of a niece who takes care of his three children, as well as his grandmother and a maid. The 43-year-old kapitan, who goes around the barangay with silver bracelets jangling on his wrists and the latest Samsung cell phone hanging around his neck, says he can’t cook anything beyond rice.

“We live near my parents anyway,” says Leandro, who takes on seasonal house construction jobs as a foreman. “Sometimes that’s where we eat.”

Because their wives work in Italy, Mabini men like Kapitan Leandro, Kagawad Marcelino, and Tatay Danny have grown used to being left on their own for long stretches of time. Unlike their counterparts in Hong Kong, Filipina maids in Italy are often not covered by contracts, many of them having entered that country as illegal immigrants. To legitimize their stay, they have to wait for the processing of their papers before they can come home for a vacation. Some take five years to return, as in the case of Leandro’s wife Irene, while others, to further save up, rarely go on holiday.

Since she left for Italy 16 years ago, Yolanda Abu has returned home only twice. “I guess she doesn’t make much,” says Marcelino with some sadness. “Because there are many here who are also maids but have even been able to build big new houses.”

He says he has never asked his wife how much she makes. “Money arrives every month and that’s that,” he says. “Sometimes the amount reaches P20,000 and I divide that up among our children.”

The kagawad is not the only husband in Mabini who claims to be clueless about his wife’s earnings. So do Tatay Danny and Kapitan Leandro, who has even relegated the handling of his wife’s remittances to his sister-in-law. “It’s better to have her sister handle her money,” says the kapitan. “I just might squander it. After all, I do play tong-its (a card game) sometimes.”

Marcelino also admits to occasional gambling and drinking with his friends, but he says he does not use his wife’s remittances for things other than what these are supposed to be for. “You can’t take away the vices because we’re men,” he says. “But I have never spent her earnings on things like that.”

BUT PERHAPS the women cannot fault the men for looking for something to occupy themselves with. Small-time gambling may in fact be among the more benign pastimes. According to Pingol, the wives’ prolonged absences have forced many of the men to confront their sexual needs in various ways. In Marcelino’s neighborhood, a corner store with a billiards table has become the favorite hangout of husbands with wives abroad. For the more adventurous, yet another diversion is venturing elsewhere for paid sex.

“You can’t discount that especially among the lonely,” says Leandro. “It happens from time to time, especially when one is out with male friends. It would be a lie to say it doesn’t.”

At other times, jokes provide a veiled expression of the extreme loneliness that they feel for their wives — just like the kapitan‘s banter that his wife should be more worried that he could fall for another instead of him getting concerned that she would find someone else.

In Cavite, fulltime househusband Macoy also admits to occasionally drinking at home, either alone or with friends. At one point, he even agreed to become a board member of the village association just so he could better endure the long separation from his wife. But that meant some of his time was being diverted away from the house, which Florence took issue with, as she saw it as less time devoted to the children. Macoy doesn’t deny that, but since a new set of officers has been elected, he is no longer part of the board and is back full throttle at home — and missing Florence.

“I think of her every day, she is never out of my mind,” he confesses. “Sometimes the children see me staring into space, and it’s because I’m thinking of her. I’d ask them, ‘I wonder if your mommy has already eaten?’ I keep wondering if she’s still at work, if she has gone home, if she is safe.”

There’s no doubt Florence also wants to be home with her family. She was here recently for a month-long vacation, and could barely tear herself away from them when it was time for her to leave. She says her dream had always been to be a fulltime housewife: adding, “I’ve been abroad for so many years, I just want to wake up in the morning and go to the market, cook for my family, and serve them.” For the moment, though, it is Macoy who is doing that, and without her by his side.

ONLINE FAMILY. Carmela Magcalas schedules weekly web chats with various family members, including her parents, who are overseas.

THE SINGLE-windowed post office in the Manara District of Jeddah opens only between ten o’clock in the morning until around three o’clock in the afternoon. That would cover the time of day when the heat from the desert sun is at its fiercest and just standing outside already feels like being inside a furnace. But until a few years ago, there was always a long line of men sweating it out in front of the post office. More often than not, the line would be made up mostly of Filipino workers, literally suffering a slow burn while waiting for their turn to mail letters and voice tapes to their loved ones back home. Mailing letters was probably the only advantage female OFWs had over their male counterparts, since women did not have to fall in line and were allowed to approach the window anytime and drop their letters.

But now the line is all but gone in front of the Manara post office. Homesick Filipino workers also no longer have to wait for at least two weeks before receiving a reply from relatives and friends or spend a fortune calling long distance. Cellular phones have changed all that, and to a lesser extent, the Internet.

Technology has made the world a smaller place for family members that are far apart from one another. Today there is an evolving phenomenon of “virtual families,” in which parents and children who are thousands of miles and several time zones apart are just a mouse click or a few keypad presses away can still keep track of each other in real time.

“It’s different now,” says Hernan Melencio, an editor at the Saudi Gazette in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He says he chats with his children in Manila through a Web camera and keeps himself updated about their studies.

“Before, we have to wait in suspense to know if the children have fever or are going to school,” says Melencio, who at 43 has already logged 10 years in Saudi Arabia. “Today my wife will just send me a text message and we go online for a chat. I even see what they are eating at home although I come home for vacation only once a year.”

But Melencio says Web chatting, especially using the Web camera, is still limited in Saudi Arabia. “It’s still expensive,” he says. “Text messaging is still more popular because it’s affordable.”

THE OFWS also do not have that much access to the Internet in Saudi Arabia. But there is hardly any OFW without a cellphone, and even the prepaid cellphone cards have become part of the OFW survival kit. No wonder that last year, a group of OFWs denounced the government’s plan to impose taxes on mobile text messaging, saying text message taxation would have “grievous financial effects” on overseas workers who rely on text messaging to communicate with their families.

Jay Valencia, spokesman of OFWs Laban sa TextTax, says Filipinos overseas use text or the short messaging system (SMS) to handle family matters, such as financial management and disciplining of their children. He says an P8-10-international text message is cheaper and more efficient than sending recorded voice tapes, which usually take about a month to get to family members in the Philippines.

“There are many problems inherent to families who have members working abroad,” Valencia observes. “Many OFW-parents are now using texting to be always on top of events happening at home so that their children do not feel abandoned or left alone.”

THE FAMILY of Santos ‘Popoy’ Lamban, a human-rights worker in Manila, is certainly happy there are now gadgets that help members keep in touch with one another. Lamban is visibly pleased when he says cellular phones capable of multimedia messaging and the Internet are enabling his “global” family to “connect” with each other.

Lamban’s wife is a government welfare officer posted in Japan while their daughter, Ida, is enrolled at the Los Baños campus of the University of the Philippines. “Being together is still preferable, but we cannot prevent the advance of civilization,” says Lamban. “People have become more mobile and families have to adapt to the changing world.”

He momentarily loses his train of thought upon hearing that an Intensity 7 earthquake has hit southern Japan. In a flash he is texting his wife in that country, checking up on her. Daughter Ida, meanwhile, has just finished taking pictures on her mobile phone for her mother to show proof that her father was interviewed for an article.

“These gadgets help us continue to become family although we are worlds apart,” Lamban says as he continues pressing on his phone’s tiny keypad. “There is no way we can remain alien to technology if we want families and communities to remain intact.”

Carmela Magcalas can only agree. A freshman medical student in Manila, her father is currently working in Saudi Arabia, while her mother is in another Middle Eastern country.

“My dad even plays chess online with my boyfriend,” says Magcalas. Her boyfriend lives in the United States, where she attended college. She adds that the family chats online every week. “When I see my dad online I text my mom so that we can have a chat,” she says.

Magcalas grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where her father had brought her and her mother when she was still a child. She later went to the United States to study while her mother went home to the Philippines and then to another country to work.

“I used to write a letter to them daily and mail it every two weeks,” says Magcalas. “We talked on the phone once a week.” That was in the first half of the 1990S when cellular phones and the Internet were still newfangled thingamajigs reserved only for those with money to spend.

In the United States, Magcalas learned how to use the Internet. She told her parents about it and they started exchanging emails. The “snail mail” has since stopped — except on special occasions when Magcalas sends cards to her family and friends. “The snail mail became special,” she says. “Sending one means a lot these days because nobody seems to do it anymore.”

MAGCALAS AND her parents meet twice a year. It was during one of those reunions that they decided to buy cellular phones. “It was the ‘in thing’ and we tried it,” she says. It has since saved them a bundle, since they no longer make the weekly phone calls using landlines. Mostly, though, they use their cellphones to text each other.

With text messaging, the exchange of email is no longer as frequent. But Magcalas and her parents haven’t given up on the Net just yet, although now they use it most to chat with or without a webcam. Magcalas says her family has had “real fun” chatting. She also chats with friends and other relatives, especially after she arrived in the Philippines for her medical studies.

Magcalas says that while she has always been close to her family, “the technology enhanced my relationship with my parents.” She also found relatives in the Internet, which she uses as well to discuss lessons with her classmates.

For thousands of other families, however, the Net has become their virtual lifeline to each other, especially for those who want to see their families but cannot afford the sophisticated cell phones that would allow them to do that. In fact, a group of overseas Filipino workers and their families has taken the initiative of making cutting-edge technology affordable to members who don’t have much money to spend for communication.

Balikabayani, an organization of OFWs in Hong Kong and Rome and migrant returnees with roots in San Pablo, Laguna; Mabini, Batangas; and Pozorrubio, Pangasinan, has set up Balikabayani Centers, which offer fast and efficient forms of communication, such as email, chat, and Net meeting or videoconference to OFW families.

Established in 1999, Balikabayani (which translates roughly into “returning hero”) put up the centers in Hong Kong and Rome, where most Balikabayani members are. All the Balikabayani or BK Centers are linked via the Internet and are run and funded by the beneficiaries who pay monthly membership fees. The idea came from the OFWs themselves. Balikabayani staff members teach family members how to email, chat, and make and send personalized cards through the Internet.

The net meeting/videoconference service has become the favorite of family members because it allows them to see and talk to their relatives in other BK centers. The service is available on Sundays, the workers’ day off.

“USUALLY, IT’S very, very emotional,” says Balikabayani executive director Mai Dizon. Husbands would often become embarrassed and reduce their voice to a whisper when prodded by their wives to say “I love you.” But they say the words nonetheless.

Long-distance communication, however, is not enough and can be deceiving, says a Roman Catholic Church leader who offers guidance and support to children of OFWs. Teodora Inabayan, lay coordinator of the Lipa Archdiocesan Commission on Migration and Mission, says when children of OFWs go to Internet cafes to communicate with their parents and they see photos of their parents, they perceive their mothers and fathers as “having a good time” abroad.

The photos do not convey “what the parents feel or what their difficulties are,” Inabayan says. Consequently, she says, family members who are left behind “do not value the hard-earned money that they receive or the hardship of their relatives abroad.” At the same time, Inabayan continues, many parents working overseas do not understand that it is not just the money that they send that is important, but also that “they are needed here.”

Although she is grown up now and quite used to being on her own, Magcalas would probably want to see her parents in person more often. She says that even when it involves non relatives, she still prefers talking with people face to face. Anyway, she says, “I’m the kind of person who’s not shy.” She also thinks that relationships are better developed without “hiding behind technology and gadgets.”

But she knows all too well that she and her parents — as well as she and her boyfriend — will have to keep on relying on technology to stay connected. Melencio, for his part, says he can’t complain because he sees his family is in good health and enjoying the “fruits of my labor.” That, he says, takes away the loneliness that has become part of working away from the family. And he no longer has to turn into a crisp just to keep in touch.

Jose Torres Jr. is the former senior editor of abs-cbnNews.com and author of Into the Mountain: Hostaged by the Abu Sayyaf.