OFW tales

I knew many overseas Filipino workers because many of my relatives were OFWs themselves. We were then living in Basa Air Base, Pampanga, where my father worked as a soldier and my mother taught music. One day, we received an airmailed letter from my uncle who had not kept in touch in years. He said he was working in South Vietnam and would send money to my grandmother. It was his first remittance in many years.

When my father returned from Guagua, Pampanga, he had the money with him – plus a Seiko watch he had bought as a gift from my uncle. And so it came in intermittent fashion, the monthly manna from overseas that made my lola smile. With the money she bought her medicines and her Tagalog komiks that we both read, and the rest she put in her savings account. My other uncle was also an OFW, a sea-based one who lived in ships anchored in the arctic North Sea. One day his son got seriously ill and died, and my aunt asked my father what to do, should they send a cable and tell my uncle his eldest son is gone? My father cautioned them from doing so, and my uncle only learnt his son was gone when he came home and found the young man’s room empty.

On my mother’s side of the family, the OFW stream led to the West. First were the spinster aunts who settled in Canada, and I still remember sending them off in the old airport at MIA, where we would enter a well-wishers’ lounge and wave at auntie – wrapped in her unseasonable thick jacket in the heart of summer, her eyes hopeful but also bewildered – until she turned her back and was soon swallowed up by the plane.

Afterward my cousins left, to study Medicine in upstate New York, or to work as nurses in Maryland, or to migrate to Canada. Then were followed by my sisters, who also went to the USA. Now everyone, everyone was soon gone except me. Some of them would ask, “What is a bright, young man with university degrees abroad doing in a country of grotesque poverty?” I stayed here not out of a sense of duty but a sense of love: I had two old parents to take care of and a sister with Down’s Syndrome. I also figured out that if I stayed here, taught at the university, did journalism, and wrote my books, I would not starve. I would certainly not live in Forbes Park but I would live in Fairview, but that is okay.

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I was coming home from more than a year’s stay in Scotland to do my postgraduate studies when our Cathay Pacific plane had a stopover in Dubai. I went to the Duty Free Shop, a big mall all by itself, and I could hear the tittering of women a hundred meters away. I walked closer to them and then they asked me if I were a Filipino? I said I am. The women had been working there for ten years, and one day, they said, a wealthy Filipina did her shopping at the Duty Free. Her male bodyguards followed her, carrying the items, the many expensive items, that she bought. And who, I asked, was this rich Filipina? The women said it was the former First Lady. “Was it Ming Ramos?” I asked, and they said no, their laughter filling the cavernous hall.

When I studied in the US, I also met many OFWs, but the ones in the American heartland went there to live. They were a hardworking lot and always chatted me up; they were hungry for news from home. But one of the conundrums of their lives was when they would offer me a job here, or give me an employment tip there, and I would just politely tell them that, “No, I am just passing through. I am coming home.”

So at home, in this poor but beautiful country, I stayed most of my life, except for brief scholarships abroad. I stayed for one year in Malaysia on an Asian Scholarship Foundation grant from 2002-2003, and met many domestic helpers at Kota Raya, an old mall near Chinatown. On weekdays, the women dressed simply and worked at their master’s houses. But on Sundays, voila! One of them, Rita, was my Chinese friend’s helper and I did not recognize her when I saw her in Kota Raya. She was wearing a red tube blouse, black leather mini skirt and red stiletto heels, with lipstick the color of strawberry! I wanted to tease her that a pair of black, leather boots would have been better, were it not the tropical heat of Kuala Lumpur. She told me later she was looking for an Indian man from Malaysia, whom she could marry so she could stay there and, as it were, climb the social ladder. Now, 14 years later, I am back in Malaysia to teach at the University of Nottingham campus here, and the Indian men had been replaced by Bangladeshis.

Singapore was cool and efficient and its National University was world-class. I stayed there as a Visiting Researcher from April-June of 2004 and was given a big office, computer, printer, and a sofa whose mattress was so soft and thick you felt you were sitting on a bed of feathers. I volunteered to teach English at the Bayanihan Centre every Sunday, and my module was for domestic helpers applying as caregivers in Canada. They would be landed immigrants in two years and they could then bring their families there. I taught them Basic English, gave them interview tips, and ways on “dealing” with foreigners.

At the end of my fellowship I immediately came home, and my Philippine Air Lines plane was full of OFWs because it departed from Saudi Arabia. Many of them have not been home in five years, and so the men beside me ordered beers and talked aloud while I listened. They were a gregarious lot, but when the pilot spoke in Filipino and announced that we had just entered Philippine territory and would soon be home, the men fell silent. I took a sideward glance, and saw tears streaming down their faces.

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