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.”

“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.

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.

[photos by Luis Liwanag]

EACH TIME I open a balikbayan box, the first thing that always strikes me is a fragrance whose source I still have to figure out up to now. Is it the Ivory soap or the Finesse shampoo? Maybe it’s the Jergens lotion? Could it be the whiff of clean American air that somehow gets trapped in that huge box? Or is it a blend of all of the above? I really don’t know. All know is that for some strange reason, the scent sticks to everything made in America — the T-shirts, the jeans, the towels, and even the sneakers — that the sender carefully labels, packs, and ships back home. The smell would surely have seeped into the Goober Grape peanut butter if not for the thick glass bottle it comes in. Actually, the Hershey’s Kisses sometimes do taste odd.

I have been a recipient of ‘Stateside” goods since my childhood in the 1960s when my aunt, a nurse who had joined the wave of migrants to the United States a decade earlier, was sending stuff home to the Philippines. Back then, there was no such thing as a balikbayan box yet, and door-to-door cargo had still to reach these shores. But I had no interest in finding out just how the items got to our home, so long as the toys and other knick-knacks didn’t lose their way coming from my aunt’s house and into my eager little hands. I’ve since been told my aunt sent many other things, from bed sheets to towels to Hills Bros coffee, usually through returning fellow Filipinos. At one point, my grandmother even started making smooth fluffy pancakes that could not have possibly risen out of her favorite old kawali but had to be the result of being cooked in the amazing new Teflon pan sent over from San Diego, California.

Like many others who came ahead of her and after, my aunt sought out well-paying nursing jobs in the United States, starting around New Jersey in the East Coast before marrying a fellow Filipino and ending up on the opposite side of the continent. In the early years, when she sent parcels or brought her young family home to Manila, she talked about the questions her baffled children asked that provided clues to what she and other Filipinos were sending home: “Don’t they have sausage in the Philippines? Do Filipinos brush their teeth? Don’t they have toothpaste there?”

But the packages were never really about their contents. The gifts, whatever they were, were a way of reassuring folks back home that relationships remained intact despite the distance, that they had not been forgotten and were wished well. At the time, probably no one foresaw that in just two decades, that practice would spawn a multibillion-peso industry.

By the 1970S and 80S, other members of our clan had migrated to America, among them a sister-in-law who left Manila to be a nurse in Florida, on the crest of another wave of migrations. By then, things had changed. There was more frequency and regularitY to the arrival of packages that came mostly hand-carried by friends and co-workers of those abroad. As more nurses left, more were also returning for annual vacations, moving then President Ferdinand Marcos to coin a special term for them, balikbayan, even giving them their own special queue at the immigration counters.

It was these balikbayan nurses who came home with the inevitable pasalubong (homecoming gifts) squeezed inside bags bursting at the seams. While many of the gifts were for their own expectant relatives, a good number were also for those of their Filipino friends in the States. They didn’t have to deliver the gifts personally; instead, the intended recipients would show up and claim them. My family, for instance, would get a phone call, which would soon have us headed for the Metro Manila address of a balikbayan-friend of a US-based relative. Once we got there, all we had to do was to present ID cards as proof we were who we were supposed to be so that our pasalubong would be given to us. When it was our relative’s turn to come home for a vacation, she would be sought out as well by the beneficiaries of her friends’ own generosity.

AT THE START, we would look for addresses that often turned out to be small apartments in seedy, crowded neighborhoods in Malibay, Pasay, or Sampaloc. But soon, many balikbayan families were invading suburbia and holing up in middle-class villages with names like Susana Heights or Don Antonio Heights, aptly signaling their climb up the socio-economic ladder and away from the maddening masa.

These days, however, I need not leave the house in search of some balikbayan‘s new abode to claim the gifts or pasalubong from relatives in America. Neither to do I have to wait for the yearly or once-in-two-years’ homecoming of family members lugging the two balikbayan boxes per person that Philippine Airlines allows. All I have to do is hang around the house on the day the delivery man is supposed to show up at our doorstep, ask for ID, and dump in our living room a huge 20 x 20 x 20 balikbayan box, the one that took all of three weeks to cross the Pacific Ocean from California to Manila.

Cargo forwarding is the way Filipinos go global these days, thanks to the unabated exodus of Filipinos to America and other parts of the world — which can no longer be called waves but rather tsunamis of migration — and their need to send pasalubong home to family. There are dozens of cargo forwarders in the United States alone catering to the three million or so Filipinos there. For years now, these companies have specialized in the door-to-door delivery that allows Filipinos to send bits and pieces of the United States back home in a box, in between actual homecomings. Since shipping charges are estimated by size and not by weight, senders can fill every available space with goods of all shapes and sizes, light or heavy, as long as these do not include firearms and explosives, perishables, drugs, or jewelry. Money in a balikbayan box is also a no-no, since there are safer and speedier ways of sending cash across the seas.

Not everyone with kin in the United States gets a visit from the door-to-door delivery van, of course. The clientele of the cargo business in America actually fits a certain profile. Forwarders and local handlers say that the Filipino who sends home balikbayan boxes is usually either of two types. One is the elderly, usually retirees or parents of immigrants with other (grown-up) children left in the Philippines. This type has the time to comb the malls or stake out Wal-Mart and Costco for items like chocolates, toiletries, canned goods, and clothes on sale — and then wrap the items up, tack names of intended recipients on them individually, and “consolidate” the goods in a balikbayan box.

The other type is the newly arrived worker, such as the recently hired nurse who is just starting out in the States. Long-time California resident Dan Concepion describes this type of balikbayan-box sender as “still attached” to the homeland, and more likely to succumb to that Filipino trait of indiscriminate gift giving. “Pag-alis ang dala pangako, pagdating ang dala pasalubong (They leave promising all sorts of things, and once they arrive here they have to send those back as gifts),” says Concepcion.

BEFORE HE put up his own cargo-forwarding company in 1993, Concepcion was into property management in the US, running his family’s apartment buildings in California. But he said he noticed something amiss among existing freight forwarders: there were no fixed departure and arrival dates of shipments, and senders could not commit to relatives back home, who waited forever for the delivery vans to show up.

“I studied the industry and I introduced new features. I introduced certainty,” explains Concepcion, whose company Alpha Cargo is a holder of an NVOCC (Non-Vessel Operating Common Carrier) license. The company’s shipments left and arrived on a set schedule, and if timetables were botched by unforeseen circumstances, clients were informed immediately. For those living in America and whose lives are ruled by the clock, these things mattered, Concepcion says.

Now, he says, Alpha Cargo has overtaken much older competitors in Northern California, and is at the top of the heap, at least in that part of the United States. In an interview conducted at the impressive family mausoleum that Concepcion built at the Holy Mary Memorial Park in his hometown of Angeles City, the businessman analyzed the habits and profile of the typical balikbayan box sender. He explained his company’s marketing strategy as he toured me around the gleaming mausoleum built partly from the profits of the balikbayan box business. The mausoleum is divided into rooms, which have crypts made to look like beds and marble panels that conceal the interred remains of various family members.

Alpha Cargo, says Concepcion, targets apartment dwellers, immigrants who have yet to start mortgage payments on a new house and can still allocate portions of their salaries to regular balikbayan-box shipments. Once they decide to acquire property, immigrants are left with neither the time nor the money to send pasalubong home since they usually end up taking two jobs just to meet the payments.

The market of the cargo-forwarding business is just a tenth of all Filipinos in America, since, according to Concepcion, 70 percent are already citizens who have brought their families with them, while the remaining 20 percent are undocumented residents or workers. Yet the business is highly lucrative. Alpha Cargo, for instance, ships either a 20-ft or 40-ft container every three days out of the port of Oakland in Northern California; the 20-ft container holds 180 boxes while the 40-ft version can take as much as 400. With a fee of $65 charge per box, the sum of all freights makes for a very profitable venture. Alpha Cargo also ships out of Los Angeles and Chicago.

Gino Galang, who operates a local handler, ERG Express, says that while it’s a small market, there is a regularity to the shipments. “Hahabol sila sa fiesta o kaya sa graduation (They’ll try to send something in time for fiesta or graduation),” notes Galang, whose company receives balikbayan box shipments and delivers them to recipients. The busiest time for balikbayan box arrivals is obviously Christmas, when migrant workers still hope to play Santa Claus to extended families in the Philippines.

Galang’s company handles shipments from cargo forwarders in the United States and Canada, and has yet to tie up with those in Europe where business is slower, one reason being the distance and consequently, the higher cost of shipping. From the United Kingdom, for example, the shipping charge for a Manila-bound box can go anywhere from £45 to £100, which converts to about $83 to $189-definitely a lot of money, even ifboxes originating from there are usually bigger than those coming from elsewhere.

But the frequency of shipments may yet pick up, Galang notes, because “nurses are already entering Europe,” and it is they who seem to make the kind of money that allows room for regular pasalubong shopping and shipping.

NURSES OR not, though, Filipinos take gift giving to the extreme, especially when they get the chance to travel and sometimes buy items for no particular occasion and with no specific recipient in mind. They tend to storm the malls during sales, buying things they don’t need just because they’re cheap, observes Concepcion. The inclination is to spend, rather than save. Instead of putting their money on long-term investments, they splurge on consumer goods, used and brand new. It can even be argued, that the gift-filled balikbayan box has slipped from being part of a practice employed to maintain ties across the seas and has been reduced to an excuse to indulge in the Filipino addiction to shopping.

That is why those at the receiving end of balikbayan-box shipments get all sorts of stuff. I thought my family was already getting the motherlode. But one of my co-workers, Yolly Nicolas, has a network of close and not-so-close relatives, friends, and neighbors working or living in the United States, Japan, and Europe who send anything and everything imaginable that can be packed in a balikbayan box. A sibling’s sister-in-law who works as a domestic helper in Greece ships bigger items that have, in the past, included a chair, an ironing board, huge pieces of Tupperware plastic containers, and large cooking utensils. Another distant relative who is a singer in Japan once managed to I fit a used PC in that country’s tiny version of a shipping box. A sister-in-law who works as a nurse in California sends two balikbayan boxes each year that contain huge jars of coffee, rubber shoes that have their insides stuffed with assorted cosmetics, freebies from McDonalds, cans of corned beef, towels, bags, and chocolates, which are pasalubong perennials.

For some reason, the boxes contain even ordinary items that can be purchased locally like spaghetti, sotanghon (rice noodles), and sugar. Nicolas says, “Siguro mga sobra lung nila any mga ‘yon at wala na silang maipadalang iba (Maybe those are extras from their own shopping and there is nothing else they can think of sending).”

Then again, grocery items are among the most common contents of a balikbayan box, in large part because they probably give the sender the feeling he or she actually contributes to the sustenance of those left behind. Cargo- forwarding company Forex Manila, which is based in the East Coast, even offers a service through which Filipinos can order prepacked boxes called either bulilit box or medium box, with standard contents the company takes charge of packing for the busy sender. The bulilit box, which can be ordered online and costs a total of $85 if shipped to Manila, and $92 if shipped to the provinces, has the following items:

• 1 box Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate/Cocoa
• 3 cans Spam
• 3 cans Libby’s/Palm Corned Beef
• 3 cans Tulip Luncheon Meat
• 3 cans Libby’s Vienna Sausage
• 2 can Libby’s/Del Monte Fruit Cocktail
• 1 bag Hershey’s Assorted Miniature Chocolate
• 1 bottle Taster’s Choice/Folger’s Coffee
• 1 box Chips Ahoy
• 1 can Nestea Iced Tea Mix
• 6 packs Instant Noodles
• 1 can Pringles or 2 cans Piknik
• 1 can Prago or 2 cans Hunts/Del Monte Spaghetti Sauce
• 1 10-lb sack of Jasmin Rice

There are also those who send hand-me-down clothes in varying states of usefulness and wearability. Nicolas, for one, has received her share of used clothing, which she says look like they could have been meant for ukay-ukay or second-hand stalls.

INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH, ukay-ukay is a touchy subject among cargo forwarders. It seems that some do engage in the ukay-ukay business and use the shipment of balikbayan boxes only as decoy. This enables them to charge rock bottom prices for the service. The danger, however, is the boxes could be confiscated and disappear once the forwarder is caught by local customs officials.

But that’s not the only way balikbayan boxes could “disappear.” A couple of years back, a scandal broke out when it was discovered that a Canada-based forwarding company was still accepting boxes for shipping to Manila even though it had long gone bankrupt; in other words, a ghost company was collecting fees and promising delivery of balikbayan boxes.

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) was deluged by complaints from frustrated local recipients who never got their much-awaited boxes.

“The lesson is not to trust fly-by-night companies, and not to surrender to marketing gimmicks that are too good to be true,” says Galang, who assisted in the investigations conducted by the DTI. Galang says his company helped track down the local counterparts of these questionable forwarders, whose containers were later found abandoned, the boxes’ contents looted.

Such incidents give cargo forwarders a bad name and drive away consignees, which is what the senders are called in the business. At any rate, industry insiders say business has slowed down since the 9/11 bombings in New York, which affected many industries that were forced to layoff workers or push them into voluntary retirement, Filipinos included. That, coupled with rising cost of living in the United States, has compelled many Filipinos to drop the habit of sending balikbayan boxes.

Besides, “people are sick and tired of corned beef already,” laments Concepcion. Many food items that have become balikbayan-box staples are also cheaper and easily available in the Philippines. Plus there’s the fact that “90 percent of goods in America are made in China,” says Concepcion; these will cost only one-fifth their US price if bought in Manila. Moreover, it seems people’s priorities have changed, and their relatives back home would rather receive tangible tender loving care in cash than in kind. Concepcion’s Alpha Cargo is in fact now working out arrangements with the Philippine telecommunications giant Globe to be an agent for “Globe Padala,” a money-remittance service.

But Concepcion isn’t ready to give up on the balikbayan box just yet. His company has been training its sights on the new arrivals to the United States, of which there still seems to be an endless supply. Alpha Cargo offers them the certainty that their boxes will arrive within 20 to 27 days for Luzon-bound packages and 27 to 35 days for those headed for the Visayas and Mindanao. Being a licensed cargo forwarder with a steady clientele, Alpha Cargo does not have to wait long for its containers to fill up because there is usually a deluge of boxes. It also keeps to the departure and arrival dates of the ocean-going vessels that carry the precious balikbayan cargo.

Still, it’s been more than a year since I last got a balikbayan box from the States. Just recently, however, the postman delivered a smaller box, right in time for my daughter’s postgraduation beach bonanza. She got a towel, sunglasses, two pairs of shorts, and a T-shirt. There were also two evening bags, but they came too late for her to pick one for her senior prom. And of course there were chocolates, which in our family are always appreciated, and are reminders that someone far away is wishing us well.

INDISPENSABLE. The yaya is a fixture in many Filipino homes where she is surrogate mother, reliable servant, and pillar of domestic harmony. [photo by Vinia M. Datinguinoo]

SOME MONTHS ago, a Danish couple living in Australia created a tempest of sorts when they posted this message on the website philippines.com.au, an online forum for Filipinos Down Under:

Danish family is looking for a part time (3 days a week) amah in Jindalee…live out. Must be 100% trust worthy, independent, love our 2 chinese kids / 9 year old retriever and master of cleaning. Prefer non-smoker and QLD drivers licence.
Start late Jan 2005.
Email Sten & Ella

Sten and Ella didn’t realize that their innocent posting for a Filipina yaya or nanny in December 2004 would unleash an avalanche of emotional responses. They had unknowingly hit on the rawest nerve of the Pinoy community in Australia and probably elsewhere as well. An irate member of the Web forum, whose email identity was Ronkers, reacted with a virtual scream: “Sten & Ella, You are in the wrong forum! Don’t you know that you are insulting people here in the forum? Judging by the posts here, I can assure that these people are well educated. So pissed [sic] off!”

The couple promptly apologized, but the discussion didn’t end there. Bagoong, another forum member, attempted a sober defense of his countrymen: “Working as a maid does not equate to being uneducated. Most of our compatriots abroad working as nurses and nannies in Asia, Europe, and Middle East are highly educated. They are tertiary qualified graduates who are forced to leave as there are no jobs for them in the country. I guess that the connotation of a ‘maid’ as a second-class citizen remains in our psyche.”

Many others wrote back, among them TruBlu, who included memories of her own childhood, “I still have a lot of affection for my yaya, who looked after me and my siblings…definitely, I do not consider our yaya as a second-class citizen.” Roobie had his own observations on nannies and social class: “The idea of a domestic helper being a lowly commoner is largely due to the attitudes of the rich that span back in some cases, hundreds of years.” This view was seconded by Richard who said, “I’ve noticed there is a very clear class distinction among the Philippine people.”

This email exchange provides a window as good as any to how conflicted Filipinos are when it comes to overseas migration. This ambivalence — on one hand, embarrassment, if not shame, at being known as a nation of nannies, and on the other hand, a grudging acceptance that the yaya sisterhood keeps families and indeed, the economy, back home alive — haunts Filipinos everywhere. Whether in their country or overseas, Filipinos are forced to confront the reality that millions of their countrymen, or more precisely, countrywomen, are toiling in homes, hotels, and hospitals across the planet and however homesick and miserable they are there, millions more at home are dying to be in their shoes.

The issue of OFWs — overseas Filipino workers — is an emotional one because it reflects our torment, or at the very least, our unease about the migration of so many of our citizens. Nearly eight million or one in every 10 Filipinos is abroad. The economic benefits of such large-scale migration (we are second only to Mexico in terms of the number of migrants) are well known: in 2003, OFWs plowed back $7.6 billion in remittances through formal channels; if money sent through informal channels is included, the figure could reach $9.5 billion. Either way, overseas work is the country’s main source of foreign exchange and is a major driver of the local economy.

The social cost of this in terms of separated families, especially a whole generation of children growing up without their mothers, is also well known; it has even been immortalized in popular culture through films like the heart-rending Anak (Child). The loneliness and homesickness that migrants suffer, not to mention the discrimination and prejudice they often encounter, cannot be quantified in monetary terms. Neither can anyone convert in any currency the pain, longing, and neglect that scar motherless children.

We are a nation that is centered on family, and for sure, the Filipino family has borne the brunt of the costs of migration, although it, too, has reaped the benefits. This is why the ambivalence about migration resides in the very heart of the family itself. Migration, therefore, cannot be anything but an emotional issue in this country. No other concern can cause so much grief, as many officials have found when they were forced to deal with the public outcry over the government’s indifference to abused OFWs. No other issue can rake the coals of so much collective guilt — after all, if our society were better able to provide, there would be no need for mothers to leave in droves. Moreover, as the heated exchange in philippines.com.au so vividly illustrates, no other issue can stir up all the Pinoy hang-ups about race, gender, and social class.

I GREW UP in Quezon City, with five other siblings, cared for by a succession of yayas. The most memorable among them was Soling, a bubbly Igorota from Kiangan, deep in the Cordillera, who was raised in mission schools and so could speak English far better than Tagalog. I remember her as being so good humored that when she had to bathe my two youngest brothers (I have four) and they put up a fight, she merrily ran after and fought mock battles with them just to get them to the shower. Soling said she came from a village that was a three-day walk from the nearest highway. Her stories always had a landscape in them — rivers, trees, and mountains. It is only now that I realize how foreign the suburbs of QC must have been to her.

The yaya phenomenon — women leaving their families to care for the children of others — has been with us a long time. Since at least the 19th century, Filipino women have ventured outside their native villages to go to towns and cities to work as servants for the more affluent. They were often compelled to do so by poverty, a lack of other opportunities, and a desire to help their families. There was, of course, also the lure of the big town or city.

The reality is that a lot of Filipino women have been able to pursue careers, fight causes, even become presidents or flaming feminists (or, for that matter, investigative journalists), because there were other women who took care of the children, cooked the meals, and cleaned the toilets. Because millions of Filipinas have been working as helpers or literally katulong in the homes of others for a long time, generations of Filipino children have been reared by yayas. This is why katulong characters populate popular culture. In films and TV programs, they are portrayed as comic figures with laughable accents and ignorant about the city and modernity. Sometimes, they are also cast in tragic mode, as innocent women seduced by their male employers or treated cruelly by jealous mistresses. Every soap opera worth its name has a katulong character, either to provide comic relief or to act as confidante to the virtuous and weepy woman in the lead role. Commercials abound with maids, so that even Sharon Cuneta’s yaya, although not quite the megastar that her mistress is, has now also become a TV icon.

Popular culture reflects the reality that the yaya is a central figure in the Filipino home. As surrogate mother, reliable servant, and pillar of domestic harmony, she is indispensable. The yaya is a fixture not just in the mansions of the wealthy, but also in middle- and lower-middle-class homes where mothers work and so rely on yaya for child care. Indeed, the yaya represents one archetype of Filipina femininity: self-sacrificing, loyal, with lots of EQ, even if sometimes lacking in IQ.

The same factors that have forced women to find employment as yaya for decades are the same ones that compel millions of Filipinas today to go overseas to work. A 2004 Asian Development Bank study estimated that 65 percent of OFWs are women, most of them working in the service industry, providing various forms of nurturing and caregiving, whether as domestic helpers, nannies, chambermaids, nurses, hospital attendants, or even as entertainers and bar companions. The numbers are so high (200,000 Pinay maids in Hong Kong; 150,000 in Singapore; 100,000 in Taiwan; close to a million in the Gulf; and perhaps over half a million in Europe) that in many of these countries, the stereotype of the Filipina is that of a nanny.

Some years ago, when the Oxford English Dictionary listed among the many definitions of the word “Filipina,” one that said nanny or maid, Filipinos were in an uproar, accusing the venerable OED of casting a slur on the national dignity. The problem was that there was, everyone knew, an element of truth in what the OED had printed. That was why it hurt so much. With our collective ego already so bruised, to be called a nation of nannies was so psychologically devastating, the only way to salvage our dignity was to put up a fight to defend not so much the honor of nannies, but that of a psychologically battered nation.

BRUISED EGOS aside, a certain double standard appears to be at work. Filipinos raise a howl when a domestic helper is abused in Kuwait or Singapore, but the protests are muted when the abuse takes place in Makati or Alabang. Maids here are paid a pittance even in affluent homes and often work long hours and take no days off. Compare that to the US$500 a month with one day off a week that domestic helpers are guaranteed in Hong Kong. In Canada, caregivers are paid even more — from US$240 to $400 for each 44-hour workweek — and are entitled to two weeks paid vacation every year. Little wonder that trained Filipino teachers and nurses are only to willing to give tip relatively high-status, if poorly paid, careers here to work abroad as domestic helpers.

Apart from the financial rewards, work overseas can be liberating for many Filipinas who find themselves freed from the confines of unhappy marriages and demanding families where they as expected to be dutiful wives, mothers, or daughters. Overseas, on their own, they enjoy a certain autonomy and independence they could never have at home. Working abroad, despite the foreign culture and the harsh winters, can be an adventure: the stimulation and mind expansion that Filipinas experience, despite the drudgery of domestic labor, should certainly be factored in among the benefits of overseas work. There is also the rise in self-esteem and social status. Now their families’ main breadwinners, Filipinas overseas not only become more confident of themselves, but also start asserting their power in the family, vis-a-vis parents, husbands, and children. The shift in gender roles, with men staying behind to care for children, is also bringing about a power shift in the Filipino family.

But these changes are fraught with grief. Every mother forced to live apart from her children so she can feed, clothe, and school them while caring for the offspring of others knows the anguish of separation. These moms make up for their absence by showering their children with material things, to compensate for the motherly attention the kids do not get. Pinay mothers send back balikbayan boxes filled with everyday necessities like toothpaste, Spam, cooking oil, even Q-tips. It is as if they were still doing the groceries at home. They call, text, or email to keep up the virtual mothering. But the tears and the anxiety — on both sides of the ocean — are real.

Studies ranging from the technocratese-filled tomes churned out by multilateral institutions to the earnest research conducted by NGOs warn that overseas mothering gives rise to families who indulge in consumption funded by remittances. The result: a crippling dependency on overseas income.

That observation may also be true for the nation as a whole. As the ADB noted in a 2004 study: “Migration is also said to have been perpetuated a culture of dependence on remittances not only on the part of beneficiary families but also the sending country which may conveniently postpone needed structural reforms to put the macroeconomic house in order.” The study says that overseas money presents amoral hazard, as recipients may tend not to engage in economically productive work if assured of income from abroad.

In many families, the Ate (older sister), Tita (aunt), or Nanay (mama) who is abroad ends up carrying the financial burden for the entire clan. Afterall, from childhood, Filipinas are raised to be responsible and to take care of others. Ate helps out in the kitchen or in the laundry, while Kuya (older brother) and the other boys are out playing.

My own family, raised by a Kapampangan mother, was certainly like that. While I was made to watch the kare-kare simmer, my brothers never had to stand up from the dining table during meals, not even to fetch a pitcher of water, not even when they were already dying of thirst. While my mother, despite her Kapampangan genes, never insisted that I learn how to cook, it was expected that the girls run errands and help out with the household chores and the care of younger siblings. As for the boys, well, they were boys.

This sense of responsibility is so deeply ingrained that the Filipina’s measure of self-worth, as noted by sociologists and psychologists, often comes from how well she takes care of her husband, children, and indeed, the rest of the clan. Noted clinical psychologist Lourdes Arellano-Carandang says the Filipina is brought up to be tagasalo, literally the catcher, meaning the one who props up the others and ensures they do not fall. Every Filipina has an inner Ate or Nanay that compels her to take the responsibility for others. Filipino men, meanwhile, are perfectly comfortable in the role of nagpapasalo or the ones taken care of and propped up. Thus, the stereotype of the Filipina as a natural caregiver, having been taught since childhood to take care of others.

The combination of nature and nurture, together with the pull factor of an expanding global service industry and the push factors of a stagnant economy and constricting job opportunities at home, set the stage for large-scale Filipina migration for years to come. Writer Jessica Zafra says, tongue in cheek, that the Philippine strategy for world domination is to take over the kitchens and nurseries of the world.

There may be a kernel of truth in that. For isn’t it true that the hand that rocks the cradle also rules the world? In the 1980s, when Cory Aquino went on a state visit to Italy, her host, the prime minister, had one concern at the top of his mind: the passport woes of his Filipina maid. Princess Diana herself had a trusted Pinay maid, as do various other members of the global glitterati and political aristocracy. While the class and race divides in these instances are clear, the relationships between master/mistress and maid are complex. The rich and superbusy turn over the running of their domestic affairs to their household help, without whom, they are, well, helpless. Just look at the novels, films, and plays that probe the master-servant relationship. All of them reverse the power equation: in the end, they all reveal that the wiser, more humane, and indeed, more powerful characters are not the masters but their servants.

Ultimately, though, this only means that the Filipina is caregiver not only to millions of families abroad who cannot do without her but also to the families left behind here and to a motherless and rudderless nation that needs constant propping. Let’s face it, overseas migration has not only brought us money, it has bought us time. It is a safety valve. By providing an outlet for the frustrated aspirations of the poor and the middle class, it has snatched us from the jaws of class rebellion. We have the Yaya Sisterhood to thank — or to blame — for that.

Cover photo by Jose Enrique Soriano

In all, the booming global services industry is providing job opportunities for Filipinos seeking employment overseas not just as health workers but also as caregivers, entertainers, domestic helpers, and chambermaids. The result has been the migration, in droves, of Filipino women who now make up 65 percent of those going abroad to work.

The female diaspora has changed the Filipino family in profound ways. Millions of families are now financially better off, as they can rely on overseas remittances to pay for everything from concrete houses to tuition fees and mobile phones. But at the same time, the migration of mothers has brought untold agony to the families left behind. Today an entire generation of Filipino children is growing up motherless.

No doubt, female migration is causing a shift in gender roles, as fathers attempt not always successfully to perform the tasks traditionally taken on by mothers. There is also a power shift taking place in the Filipino family, as women are now the main breadwinners in many homes. Communication within families is likewise changing. Today, much of what passes as family life among migrants is experienced virtually, through mobile-phone messages and Internet chats.

Back home, the mogration of health workers is causing a crisis in hospitals. Patient care is deteriorating because of the shortage of doctors and nurses, many of whom are queuing for jobs overseas. Still, many others are left behind, doing heroic work with meager resources and caring for those in far-flung areas or in marginalized communities that need help the most.

This edition of the i report examines all these issues, but also documents other journeys. we discover second-generation Filipino-Americans searching for their roots. Our photo essay traces the joruney of a balikbayan box while a first-person account narrates how Filipinos search for companionship and surrogate love in the maddening deserts of loneliness in Saudi Arabia.

The family remains the source of the Filipinos’ identity, strengths, and the object of their aspirations and affections. [photos by Jose Enrique Soriano]

THE IMPORTANCE of family to the individual is almost an article of faith in the Philippines. I remember the bewildered look of our respondents in a research project when we posed the question, “Is it important to have a family?” It was as if we had come from another planet, since we asked a question whose answer was obvious: yes. And just in case we did come from another planet, the respondents all zeroed in on the fact that life is simply unimaginable without the family. Whether they are down and out or happy and successful, Filipinos always have their families conveniently nearby.

The family is a major thread that runs through individual Pinoy life stories. The strivings of Filipinos are rarely just about “I” or “me.” The desire to provide a better future for their families propels hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to work abroad, risking life and limb and defying wars and bans. I find myself muttering, “only in the Philippines,” when I hear contestants citing their fervent wish to help their families as a reason for joining a competition. And in their moments of triumph, a thank-you speech is not complete without mentioning God — and the love and support of family members. Just as real are the stories of those who had been abandoned, abused, and failed by their families, and the havoc this has wreaked on individual lives.

And so my (fearless) forecast is that the family will continue to be the source of the Pinoy’s identity, strengths, and the object of his or her aspirations and affection. The family, however, is not just the dispenser of nurturance and emotional sustenance. As the basic building block of society, the family is tasked with the responsibility to provide for the material support of its members, particularly the young, the frail, and the elderly. It is in this arena where many Filipino families have been struggling for decades. Past trends and present conditions suggest that Filipino families will be in for more rough sailing 10 years down the line. Given the country’s fragile economic base and the uncertain prospects ahead, securing economic support will be the major challenge that will sorely test the resilience of our most cherished institution.

There are already some 84 million Filipinos today. Our burgeoning population would have meant a viable market and more human resources if our economy were robust and could provide jobs. The search for jobs — particularly regular work, a rarity in these days of contractual employment — has become an obstacle test of sorts as new entrants to the labor market (about 800,000 a year) and past waves of jobseekers compete with each other. Unemployment rates continue to hover at around 10 percent.

The implications of our growing population given the sad state of our economy are worrisome. In 2003, Filipino women had about 3.5 children, which was among the highest in Southeast Asia — compare this with the total fertility rate of 1.3 children in Singapore or 1.7 children in Thailand. A high fertility means a young population — four out of 10 Filipinos are under 15 years old as of the 2000 census — that would require investments in health and education before they can be productive. Even if our population growth rate has gone down to 2.34 in 2004, it would take many years before we can enjoy some breathing space. Due to high fertility in the past, our population will continue to grow because future Filipino parents have already been born.

A RECENT study by the Statistical Training and Research Center indicates that under the best-case scenario, the Philippines will eventually say goodbye to poverty — but not until 2045. In the meantime, poverty is and will be very much a day-to-day reality for close to one-third of our population. Based on 2000 data, 28.1 percent, or 4.3 million families, which further translates to 26.5 million Filipinos, live below the poverty line. This was just slightly lower than the 28.4 percent of poor families as of 1997, indicating the slow wheels of development processes.

Data from other studies paint a bleak picture. Just recently, a Social Weather Stations survey found that 15 percent of our population had experienced not having anything to eat in the past three months. In 2003, expenses on food that had traditionally taken out a large chunk of the Filipino household’s budget declined while expenses on other items, such as transportation and communication, registered an increase. Apparently, families have been spending less on food to be able to cover other expenses. With the end to the economic malaise still nowhere in sight, more and more Filipino families are wondering where the next meal would come from. Shelter, education for the children, and health have become out of reach for poor families. Even the middle class — fast becoming endangered in the Philippines — is finding it increasingly difficult not to slip into the category of the new poor. No wonder that economic problems are among the major causes of stress among Filipino families.

The anxieties, insecurities, and lack of choices wrought by poverty or limited economic means can have deep and far-reaching consequences for the capacity of the family to be caring and supportive of its members. The rise of dual-earner families is, in large measure, dictated by economic need. The demands of the workplace could eat into family time, thereby reducing the time that parents and children can spend together. With the participation of women in the labor market, the family experiences a “care deficit” or the shortage of workers (traditionally mothers or other women in the family) who assume care-giving responsibilities. Presently, the care deficit pertains mostly to the care of children, but in the near future, as the number of elderly Filipinos (i.e. those aged 60 or older) increases, the family will also have to consider how it can provide the elderly adequate care and support.

Families used to bank on education as the vehicle of social mobility. This is why Filipino families put such a high premium on sending their children to school all the way to university (sometimes without as much regard for what type of education as long as it is a college degree); the hope was, a college education would help clinch a better job and a brighter future. Since the 1970s, however, another route to social mobility has been opened: overseas employment. The lack of employment opportunities and/or the low wages in the country have driven millions of Filipinos to leave their families to work abroad. In the last 30 years, many families have moved out of poverty or improved their economic conditions, thanks to the remittances sent by family members who work abroad. The economic benefits of migration, however, have been tempered by concerns about social costs, particularly the perceived threats to the stability of the family.

THE POTENTIAL impact resulting from international labor migration has been the subject of much speculation. The separation of family members is in itself a transgression of the ideal of close family ties. This seeming “contradiction” can be understood when we consider the motivations of Filipino migrants: migration is something that they have to undertake to improve their family’s well-being. When it was mostly the men who took up jobs abroad, their departure was seen as part of their role as providers. When women started leaving, their migration challenged the ideal of stay-at-home mothers who serve as the light of the home (ilaw ng tahanan). Moreover, their ascendance as the primary provider has shaken traditional notions of women’s earnings as simply supplementary. Because of their traditional role as the primary caregiver, when women migrate, the family goes through more adjustments than when it is fathers who migrate. In some instances, the departure of mothers has led to fathers assume caregiving responsibilities; more commonly, however, other female family members take on the caregiving function.

Changes in gender roles, the meaning of family and practices of family life, husband-wife relations, and the relationship between parents and children have been noted in our recently concluded study on the children and families left behind. At the same time, some things remain unchanged. Even if they are physically separated, the importance of the family has not diminished among migrants and their families. Children continue to regard their parents as their role models. The access to cheaper and faster communication — and the popularity of cell phones — is a major boon in sustaining family ties across the miles.

More families will continue to be separated by migration, partly because of persisting economic difficulties, and partly because the vast networks of Filipinos abroad will be a major factor in facilitating migration. The seeds of migration are already part of the life plans of young children. In our nationwide study of children aged eight to 10, 47 percent (and 60 percent among the children of migrant workers) said they would like to work abroad someday. Filipino networks, of which the “transnational network of kin” is an important component, will continue to be established in different parts of the world, sustaining and generating further migrations.

IN MANY ways, the emerging forms of family arrangements and role realignments observed among the families of overseas Filipino workers are not unique to this sector. Nonmigrant families are also going through similar transitions, except that the triggers are factors other than migration. It is perhaps in the area of changing gender relations that migrant families are showing some groundbreaking examples by suggesting that it is possible for men to be caregivers, that women can be providers and mothers at the same time (although the latter role is played out from a distance), and that children can be cared for by other family members. Although these changes are underway, the idea that parents are the best persons to care for and rear children persists; in particular, mothers continue to be regarded as irreplaceable in their role as the “light of the home.” This will be a source of burden and guilt for mothers who have to take on the role of providers and a source of emotional displacement for the children.

In the years to come, Filipino families will depart more and more from the ideal of the nuclear family consisting of two parents and their children. Marital strains and to some extent, personal choice, will give rise to more single-parent families and “blended” families (i.e., families formed by partners who had previous relationships or marriages). Through these reconfigurations, it is likely that the extended family will continue to play a major role in seeing family members through the rough spots. It will be a long time before the family, in its various forms, ceases to be the first and last — and preferred — safety net of ordinary Filipinos.

Practices of family life are in for many changes. As work demands intrude more into personal and family time, families will have to try harder or devise new ways to be family. As we are seeing now, technology — particularly communications technology — will contribute to cement family ties as Filipinos become more mobile or are increasingly drawn to the workplace and face other competing demands. Fundamental changes in gender roles (e.g., men taking a more active role in caregiving responsibilities) will still be a major hurdle, even in 2015. In all likelihood, women will get more help from time-saving devices and the expanding service industries. These options, however, will not be possible for poorer families.

The next 10 years will bring to the fore many family issues. Previously regarded as private matters, family issues will increasingly be part of public discussions. This is a healthy and needed development because many of these issues will be affected by and will affect aspects of our public lives. State support to help families achieve the number of children that they want will, hopefully, be a reality in 2015, thanks to the advocacy of various sectors. More community-based and society-wide solutions to family issues such as childcare and elderly care will have to be worked out as families struggle to balance their multiple responsibilities in a more uncertain world. We will have to brace ourselves for the challenges ahead and to take an active role in shaping families that will raise future Filipinos who will be as concerned and committed to their families as to the larger society.

Maruja Asis is Director of Research and Publications of the Scalabrini Migration Center. She is a sociologist long involved in migration studies, and a large part of her research deals with the relationship between migration on the one hand, and gender, family relations and social change on the other.