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.
