They come from different backgrounds. What they have in common is artistic talent and a strong desire to make life better for themselves and their families doing something they love and are very good at – entertaining people through the arts of song, dance and music.
Such desire and talent have brought them all to Japan where they were able to land lucrative contracts performing before Japanese audiences. These contracts have enabled all three to build their own houses, buy cars, establish small businesses, and generally provide a comfortable life for themselves and their loved ones.
Dorothy, Jennifer and Daisy are but three of thousands of young Filipinas who have chosen and made successful careers out of being overseas performing artists or OPAs. They are positive proof of the viability of the OPA profession as a career, according to Elizabeth Nieva, president of Pangarap Foundation for OPAs, a newly formed NGO.
Nieva, whose group’s mission is to provide skills training and values education to young talented Filipinas aspiring to become OPAs, acknowledged that there are still many Filipinas who go to ostensible overseas performing job stints who end up as menial workers or worse, prostitutes.
This, she said, is because most, if not all, of those who fall prey to such a fate are unskilled, illegally recruited and therefore undocumented. Moreover, victims are not equipped with the proper values to enable them to go through the rigors of OPA life, with enough money and more importantly, with their dignity intact, at the end of their contracts.
The gates to such hell for Filipina OPAs have opened wider with the recent court order restraining government from imposing controls on the deployment particularly of female OPAs, Nieva stressed.
But victims such as these represent only one side of the OPA story, one that has become the focus of media reports because they are bad news that sell as they provide gory and tragic entertainment to voyeurs among the reading public, Nieva said.
The other side of the story is the brighter one that shows Filipina OPAs making it good in their chosen career and giving the country not only a good name but $200 million in yearly remittances as well from the world labor market, she pointed out.
Such are the stories of Dorothy Jocson, Jennifer Festejo and Daisy Abungin, which must also be told in the same manner that the stories of other Filipinos who have succeeded abroad in other professions, like doctors and nurses, are told, Nieva said.
Nieva said telling the success stories of Filipina OPAs is necessary to restore the self-respect that many of them have lost on account of the bad news and the derogatory Japayuki image that they always read or see about themselves in media.
Helping OPAs regain that self-respect and their rightful place under God’s sun is one of the principal advocacy of the Pangarap Foundation for Overseas Performing Artists (PFOPA).
PFOPA seeks to take the slack that government has left in the area of providing training and qualification to Filipinos wanting to pursue a career in overseas entertainment.