Far and away from home

BERNARD KARGANILLA

‘They belong to a society where larger families spend less per child in education and health and the incidence of hunger increases with increasing family size.’

FAR and away from home are the OFWs (overseas Filipino workers).

Their home is the Philippines, which is now the 12th most populous nation in the world, where 60% of population live in urban areas, and whose population growth rate is the second highest in the Asean region. They belong to a society where larger families spend less per child in education and health and the incidence of hunger increases with increasing family size. They temporarily left a country where every ten Filipinos of working age have six dependent children. They will return to a Philippines, which has less than 10% of its forest cover and coral reefs remaining, and where only 1,907 cubic meters of fresh water are available to each person each year. [Esperanza I. Cabral, M.D., Senior Policy Adviser, UNFPA, "State of the Philippine Population," Using the PSA Methodical Guide, 2011]

Tired are the OFWs like the twenty-something waitress who works 12 hours straight six days a week. She holds a bachelor’s degree in nursing yet toils in a pastry shop in the Rotten Apple. If she sends money home, then she is one of the eight million kababayans who remit $18.8 billion for the loved ones who miss her dearly.

December 18 is for her and the other lost souls who displaced themselves in the numbing pursuit of a "better life" – a day set aside by the United Nations, leading global efforts to ensure respect for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all migrants

This full-blooded Filipina is one of the "South-to-North" migrants with tertiary education aged 25 or over in OECD countries. This would-be nurse counts among the female migrants constituting nearly half of all migrants worldwide, and also as one of every five migrants in the world living in the United States of America.

Our diplomated OFW is easily lost among the 191 million international migrants transplanted in just 28 countries. She was lured by the income differentials among countries. Though deeply afraid of personal poverty, this misplaced Filipina came from a middle-income household. The poorest people generally do not have the resources to bear the costs and risks of international migration.

She believes that she is compelled to seek employment abroad because of social conflicts and violations of labor rights in her land of birth and in the expectation that decent work can be had in the high-income host-country. However, her chosen place of exile, the United States of America, is the fountainhead of the global economic crisis, especially New York where the Occupy Wall Street movement was born.

Surrounded by the fickle and the corrupt, her legal status is in limbo, and she might end up as "TNT," hoping that Homeland Security will be asleep at the switch. In 2006, two percent of all unauthorized immigrants in the United States were from the Philippines.

Her untenable presence in Obama’s legalistic America makes her vulnerable to exploitation at the hands of former Filipinos who push her to do overtime but pay her below the minimum. Thus must she find her true compatriots from the ranks of the Filipino and other Asian migrant organizations who in 1997 began celebrating and promoting the 18th of December as the International Day of Solidarity with Migrants. This date was chosen because it was on 18th December 1990 that the UN adopted the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrants Workers and Members of Their Families.

Can our overworked and underpaid OFW find succor from the Philippine government? In June 1988, President Corazon Aquino issued Proclamation No.276 institutionalizing the commemoration of the Month of Overseas Filipinos (MOF) every December, and then in October 2007, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo created the Inter-Agency Committee for the Celebration of MOF and International Migrants Day through Administrative Order No. 202. Can the divorced adulterers apply for the Model of the Family of the Year Awards? Can the drug-addled and liquor-fueled nihilists compete for the Bagong Bayani Awards?

The UN proclamation of the International Migrants’ Day is indeed a rallying point for the protection of OFWs, but the worker, on her own, must defend the dignity of her labor and not be brought down low by the crabs whose mentality is petty, envious anddeadly. Jose Rizal himself, who lived and worked abroad, never tired of warning his fellow activists in the Solidaridad that the Filipino colony in Spain andthe rest of Europe had a moral duty to discard their vices and honor their native land with hard work, conscientious study and clean behavior.

Rizal’s lament echoes to the 21st century: "With regard to the dreams that we talked about before at a pre-Christmas Mass. I’ve not forgotten them andin fact they have always regulated my conduct. Many of these who are here are always lacking in spirit and vigor, but I don’t understand why they have no fixed purpose... There are some here who are so exceedingly dull that they are the laughing stock and shame of their companions. Why are they allowed to go abroad?" [Letter to Paciano Mercado, Madrid, 13 February 1883]

Rizal studied abroad for his nation and profession, aware of the hardships of foreign living. "With 50 pesos one can live in Paris, without smoking, without drinking coffee, or going to the theater, or ordering clothes... Paris is the most expensive capital city in Europe; I can live in this city when I already have a profession and I can devote myself to some work that will earn me a livelihood... Inquire from foreigners who come from Europe these days and they will tell you the same. One can live cheaper if he eats horsemeat, cat instead of rabbit, goes to the taverns where one can eat for one peseta and 50 cents. I’m keeping up this bravado that brought me here out of self-respect." [Letter to his brother, 124 Rue de Rennes, Paris, 20 July 1883]

Rizal, as a Filipino overseas, missed family get-togethers and hometown celebrations. Come home, one must, for Christmas.