MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Foreign Affairs said 124 overseas Filipino workers and children were repatriated last week from crisis-hit Lebanon.
The Philippine Embassy in Lebanon helped bring the group home on March 30 through a chartered sweeper flight that also picked up distressed Filipino workers in Kuwait before landing in Manila.
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“This is the Embassy’s first mass repatriation program of the year after bringing home around 3,400 nationals since the free voluntary mass repatriation started in 2019,” the embassy said in a statement.
Some of those on board the flight were not fully-vaccinated. The embassy’s assistance-to-nationals (ATN) team, the DFA’s Office of the Undersecretary for Migrant Workers Affairs, and Overseas Workers Welfare Administration took charge of coordinating with agencies for the quarantine of unvaccinated individuals.
The embassy said it will continue to assist Filipinos and their dependents while Lebanon experiences its economic crisis.
According to the World Bank, the economic crisis in Lebanon might be part of the top “most severe economic collapses worldwide since the 1850s.”
A Reuters explainer said Lebanon’s economy crippled as its government debt piled up, most of which was incurred in a mishandled attempts of “sectarian elite” to rebuild the country after the civil war in 1975 to 1990.
The crisis there is worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic and the explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020. — Kaycee Valmonte