Tale of two OFWs
More than three years ago, two friends came home, weeks apart from each other, to the warm embrace of their loved ones in a nearby island province. They practically sojourned the seven seas as deck and engine officers of their ships respectively in order to fulfill their dream of providing comfort, if not luxury, to their families.
While most seafarers hurry home at the end of their employment contracts, these two worked hard in extended tours of duty by bridging one contract after another with almost no breaks in between. Having written a book on Marine Laws and Ship Business sometime in 1981, a chapter of which dwelt on the Spartan lives of seamen, I could imagine the harsh working conditions these friends went thru if only to lead comfortable lives afterwards.
The first returnee, shortly after his homecoming, came to Cebu City. He was in the market for a good second hand service vehicle which he planned, not just wanted, to use to bring his only child to and from school in the not so distant Poblacion. Luckily, he found an SUV that was well maintained by its former owner. At only three hundred ninety five thousand pesos, it was a very good buy.
The other OFW had a different mindset. Just after few days of making up with his family for his physical absence, he approached a rural bank (of which I am the smallest shareholder) in search of a reasonably cheap piece of land which we call as ROPOA, short for Real and Other Properties Owned or Acquired by the bank. With the bank manager's help, the seaman became an instant landowner attending a two-hectare coconut land which he paid for half a million pesos.
Presently, the first seaman is back cruising the high seas. He needs to do it in order to find the finances to complete his beautiful house. In fact, before he left, he wanted to sell his SUV because the maintenance was getting high but nobody would pay two hundred thousand pesos for it. It is parked now in the unfinished garage.
Having acquired practical and technical knowledge in making his coconut trees yield more than in the first few months following his acquisition of the asset, and in planting petchay, talong, batong and paliya, in rotation, as under crops, the second seafarer in our story is not seaman anymore. He has become a full time farmer. His coconut gives him a small earning of six to eight thousand pesos every two and a half months while he sells the excess vegetable harvest. Recently, someone offered to buy his land for eight hundred thousand pesos and this convert farmer is not selling!
Why do I write of these two gentlemen? Rather than a rare few, there are thousands of them in our midst. While sweating it out in foreign off-shore or land-based companies, they make regular remittances. There are cases where the recipients of these inflowing foreign currencies know how to make their largesse productive. But there are equally, if not more numerous situations where funds are just wasted on fanciful things or poured in wrong investments.
So we continuously witness the contrasting results of the different approaches in life exemplified by these two subjects of our write up. While their status is a product of their own will, government can do something to channel their energies and resources to more desirable ends.
Local government units, on the visionary concepts of local legislators, need to create an office to provide assistance to returning off-shore workers or guidance to persons named as their allotment beneficiaries. LGU's are more effective because in their localities, they know who among their residents are earning abroad. The office should be pro-active in meeting these people and orient them with correct values. It can provide a lot of helpful services not the least of which is to link them with financial institutions and other government agencies to make sure that funds are wisely invested. Only when the incoming foreign remittances are harnessed well can such funds help push our country even forward financially.
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