Trade-offs of a Diaspora

The government, under past and present administrations, has been proud of its deployment of around eleven million Overseas Filipino Workers.  Almost all administrations trumpet this exodus of Filipinos abroad.  Without this deployment, the Philippine economy would have sunk in the pit long ago.

What help us tide over the financial global crises are the remittances of our overseas workers.

This Filipino Diaspora is more of an indictment of how Philippines had been badly governed.  Instead of being proud, any administration should bow its head in recognition of its failure at governance.  There is nothing to be proud about of having to send Filipinos abroad for greener pasture since there may be no pasture to speak about back home.

The foreign currency remittances have been the price tag of the trade-offs these modern day heroes have to endure.  In some countries such as Hong Kong, the word Filipina is synonymous with domestic helper. We have heard of tales of the cruelties our new heroes suffer under foreign employers.   Even foreign governments treated our fellowmen abroad harshly: just recall Flor Contemplacion, and Sarah Balabagan.

These sensational cases involving OFWs are not as destructive as the ill-effects the Diaspora have on the basic social unit of our society – the family.  Cases like those of Contemplacion and Balabagan received the most attention, and the parties involved usually are beneficiaries of the dole-outs of our image conscious politicians.

Suffering silently and without media hype is the Filipino family.

Parents leave small children to the care of relatives so they can work abroad, and earn decent living to support the children, and even the extended family. But parental care has no substitute.  Children of the OFWs suffer the psychological stigma of being left to their own, not to mention the pain they endure as they miss the embrace of their loving parents.

If you have eleven million OFWs, just multiply this with two children – the least a family has considering that the national average is three children per household – you readily have twenty two million children, without one or both parents in the household.  Twenty two million is already a big portion in our eighty million population overall.

The fate these children suffer under the set-up is only one facet of the story.

The marital woes must be taken into account when we speak of the trade-offs.

When both parents work abroad, the children suffer the most. When only one goes abroad, the marital problem multiplies a thousand fold.

The difficult part of working overseas is not the work or adjustment with the new culture.  Filipinos are known to be resilient and hardworking.  These are not issues to them.

Loneliness abroad is gnawing.  We are used to chit-chats, share jokes, and laugh with our neighbors even with the most mundane issue of the fighting spiders.  That we are by nature a cheerful and happy people despite the economic hardships should be conceded.

Being uprooted and thrown into lands where even the fellow-next-door is a stranger contributes largely to the loneliness of our OFWs.

Loneliness and being alone are strong emotions that prod one to seek for a company in a foreign land.  Under these circumstances, marital infidelity is almost unavoidable.

Try to take a census of your friends, relatives, and neighbors, the tales of broken marriages are most common.

I don’t have many friends whose spouses are working abroad.  The numbers do not exceed ten.  Of these few friends, there are four broken marriages.  Of the four friends, two received divorce papers almost at the same time.  One friend who followed his wife in the US was shock to learn the sorry news of his wife’s pregnancy.

Broken marriages and children without one or both parents in their growing-up years, these two are just the right elements for the destruction of the family.

The government should not take pride in sending Filipinos overseas. The trade-off in this Diaspora is the sacrifice of the family in the altar of foreign currencies. We may survive economically the present but we may have unwittingly bargained away the future generations of Filipinos.

Our nation without the strong family as the bedrock is doomed to fail in the long run.  The trade-offs may not be worth the sacrifice at all.

To top it all, we seem not to recognize the real trade-off.

the kids

meet my kids: (left to right) lynette, matt steve, lesette; second, the youngest, and eldest respectively.

i really dont know what to write, how to start, and in the first place, why i am blogging about my kids. anything about the kids conjure a whole gamut of emotions, that one can hardly differentiate one from the other; but the moment a parent starts to write about the kids, there is no stopping, as there is no range limit to the full orchestra of paternal love for his kids.

let me start about what i am learning from my kids. the individual pursuit of happiness cannot be defined by the parents. The moment parents tell the kids what interests to pursue, the kids cease to be their own, and as they live life not of their own making, they cease to have an individual persona, their identity.

lesette, 13 years young, the eldest, is one kid a conventional family treats as the black sheep: one who does not conform with the expected behaviour. She started prep school at the age of five, from then on she showed lack of interest in studying her lessons nor listen to her teachers. but while in prep school, she befriended the security guard, all the teachers, the principal, school directress, and all the students of that schol. The school was small so everybody knows each other, so a I thought. but when i transferred her to a university, she easily went on to be the most popular student. One afternoon, i was suprised when she asked her mom to prepare snacks because she had a meeting with the officers of kids’ association in our subdivision. she organized the group and she was ten years old then. though apparently she lacks the textbook lessons, she is learning well in the university called life.

lynette , 12 years young, is the exact opposite. at the age of four, we had to enroll her in the prep school because she would cry if we did not. she went on to top her classmates from prep to her elementary years. but unlike lesette, she is a home body and tends to keep a small circle of friends. she is hard to befriend with. but unlike lesette who indulges in different interests, lynette is focused and if i may say, fiercely driven. at an early age, i had her tutored for piano lessons which she excelled. i did not introduce her to my passion – tennis – as she appears to be very poised at a very young age, and her complexion may be burnt by the searing sun. to my surprise though, she took the tennis racket and insisted that she be taught. she started june of 2006, and yesterday, she was a champion in the 12 under category in a tournament participated by the seasoned players in Mindanao, Philippines. she has overtaken tennis players who have played for not less than five years already. let me show off her trophy( hehehe) hereunder:

matt steve , six years old, on the other hand is combination of the personalities of her two sisters. gragarious enough to have many friends, but not quite as driven as lynette. i was surprised though when i saw his grades to be 90% above in all subjects, even though i have not seen him study his lessons. but he is ferociously driven about computers. he can play 24/7 in a computer.

my friends will always compare my kids from each other, specially lesette and lynette , whose personalities are exactly opposite each other. but as a father, and knowing that life is not only IQ and grades, i never compare my kids. education is not merely about the lessons in the classroom but also , if nor more, of the the outside world. in the end, what matters is the kind of journey in life they will take, and whether they can hurdle the obstacles in their respective journeys.

my apologies if i indulge you in a cheering spree for my kids. but if not me, who else? (hehehe)

to live is to discover life, and the realization of one’s full potential in the pursuit of his own meaning and happiness. i don’t play my kids’ lives, nor tell them to choose one path from another. i am only their coach of the kind of life they want to live.

i dont know what my children would become with the kind of parenting i practice. my only philosophy in life is that i should pursue the kind of life i find meaning with. i may fail, but at least, i don’t appear successful to the multitude but inside is bereft of meaning. If i hold that philosophy, how can i not let my kids seek and live a life they can relate to, and be fullfilled with?

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Monday June 4, 2007 – 09:47am (CST) Edit | Delete

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