Editor’s Musings

The following article was part of OFWJC's special publication 'Move.' The magazine was given to all delegates of GFMD Philippines.

THE song about stopping the world and melting with somebody kept playing in my head while working on this magazine, especially on the cover story “Free Movement.”
The song’s lyrics may be about this thing called love but Mr. Jeremaiah Opiniano’s story sums up the level that Filipino migration achieved since the early 80s, the so-called second wave.
We have seen, felt, and moved with the changes in every wave: from the trickle of engineers to Middle Eastern countries to the surpassing by women of the number of workers going out.
While it remains suspect if these changes are getting better “all the time,” one thread links all these waves of migration—the human being’s dream of a better life, which as the song goes, “the kind which never hate.”
That dream is dreamt not only by the migrant Filipino already in any of the 190 countries she or he is in but also by his or her neighbor in a ramshackle house beside the migrant family’s semi-bungalow home. This is the point of Dr. Filomeno Aguilar in his story “Houses of Representatives.”
That dream is dreamt also by advocates for migrant welfare who ironically are working to erase their reason for existence by forcing the state to implement the law and serve its course. Read “Sheltered Lives” by OFW Journalism Consortium’s new reporters Luis Carlo Liberato and Ruben Jeffrey Asuncion to peek at this dream.
There are also dreams realized, unwittingly by forces beyond migrants’ control or shaped as they move forward with their lives. This was what Candice Cerezo tried to capture in her story about a caregiver-turned-millionaire, in “Caregiver, millionaire.”
Other stories here are equally palatable, as is the magazine’s aim of bringing migration policy debates to the level of human suffering and salvation.
That is our promise to the Embassy of the Royal Netherlands here, which forked the money for this project and to whom we are grateful.
We are equally grateful to the writers who accepted the task despite knowing the magazine’s budget excludes a promise of compensation.
Editing the stories here is like embarking on a pilgrimage where the sights and sounds encountered are both pleasing and rueful.
The latter you may find in any story is mostly the editor’s faults while the former—all the best details in the story—are the writer’s inherent skills.

DENNIS D. ESTOPACE
Resident Editor



Supported by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in the Philippines

and

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung

Free movement

By Jeremaiah M. Opiniano

The following article was part of OFWJC's special publication 'Move.' The magazine was given to all delegates of GFMD Philippines.

PARIS, FRANCE—TERESA winced as if the camera flash hit her—just like she did when two men mauled her in her room here early morning three years ago.
“It just feels like it happened yesterday, you know, because I’m still illegal, undocumented, irregular, whatever,” she said, waving her arms as if the bad memories could be waved off like fruit flies.
I stopped taking pictures of her and started taking photographs of Parc-du-Saint-Cloud, the residence of Marie Antoinette before she was guillotined during the French Revolution.
It was the last stop of a free tour Teresa gave me after meeting at a Filipino store that she frequents.
“C’mon, it’s a good day to walk; I’ll show you around,” she said hours earlier and led the way to the Eiffel Tower and then to the Trocadero station.
It was windy that early afternoon but she would take her hands out of her wool jacket pocket to point at the places tourists frequent.
She walked briskly, as if the wind were sweeping her towards Trocadero.
“This is where most migrant workers’ life Paris begins,” Teresa said, nodding her head towards the station.
“What do you mean,” I asked.
Before she could reply, a group of Filipinos waved to Teresa and raised a thumb.
“See? During peak seasons for tourists here, Filipinos like them walk up to you and talk you into staying,” Teresa said.
That was how it went with her.
Brought to the City of Lights with her globe-trotting Saudi Arabian employer, Teresa struck a conversation with a fellow Filipino.
“She convinced me to run away, which I did, because she promised to help me find a job here. It was that easy.”
While sitting at the steps of where a mob could have dragged down Marie Antoinette to her death, Teresa continued her story.
Her story reveals there has never been a time than now when it’s easier for workers to move around despite of, in spite of, and even against greater state control over migration.
While many labor-sending and -receiving countries have tried time and again to restrict or manage labor flows, they have failed to impose such control over people like Teresa who, incidentally, is on her sixth year in France.
What many migration control schemes may have missed, or continue to miss, is that the human instinct for survival grows in proportion to the level of hope that migration offers.
***
THEY’VE been called “undocumented,” “irregular,” or “illegal” migrants and they form nearly 9 percent of the total 7 million permanent residents and temporary workers outside the Philippines.
That figure was last year’s and is based on government estimates. The number could go higher as Filipinos discover newer and newer ways of getting out of the country.
The Philippine government has identified a dozen schemes that Filipinos use to cloak their passage and secure employment overseas.
Among Southeast Asian countries, the absence of a visa requirement, for one, allows migrant workers to jump from one country to another within and outside the region.
Visa-free privileges are being used as alternatives to recruiters, thereby spawning irregular migration, a report by the Commission on Filipinos Overseas said.
Malaysia, for instance, doesn’t even require embarkation cards.
At Kuala Lumpur’s International Airport, a male immigration officer just placed the page of my passport bearing my photo under a beam of blue light that I guess could either be a portable camera or scanner.
“We are computerized, and our database can easily spot overstaying foreigners,” he said as he stamped my passport with the date of my arrival and the expected date of my departure from his country.
As it is easy to enter Malaysia, it is also easy for one to leave –boarding a train on a non-stop travel to the airport. The system even allows travelers to check in their luggage from the train station.
“Foreigners are welcome in our country, but they should not overstay,” a consul at the Philippine embassy in Kuala Lumpur quoted Malaysian counterparts as saying.
For countries that require embarkation cards, like Vietnam, stepping on the welcome mat is also a walk in the park.
The card sports a red seal –stamped by an immigration officer in olive-green uniform– which is a golden ticket to pass through the gates and drink up the work rhythm of the Vietnamese, exemplified by the endless flow of motorcycles.
“That’s why we work hard and unwind once a week here,” textile firm employee Cresliejoy Abiang said at the Latino Bar at the third floor of Hanoi’s posh Melia Hanoi Hotel.
The honking of motorcycle horns on the streets is muted inside where Filipino performers work out the crowd to a dancing frenzy with their music.
“See, it’s already late in the evening, and you can still sense the Vietnamese going somewhere to do something important,” Abiang said as we stepped out of the hotel to escape the cigarette smoke engulfing the bar.
That’s why, she said, “Vietnam is visibly progressing, unlike the Philippines.”
It is the hard work of Abiang and her co-workers that moves an economically-struggling Philippines.
The country’s army of workers in France, Malaysia, Vietnam, and 190 other countries allowed the Philippine government to enjoy the billion-dollar remittance bonanza, according to economist Ernesto M. Pernia.
Countries poorer than or as poor as the Philippines have also reaped benefits.
International migration is “the single greatest poverty reduction effort in human history,” said social work professor Cindy Hunter, at a conference in Tours, France.
***
“THEY came when I was still in bed, shaking off the post-evening kinks,” Teresa said.
The two Filipinos kicked down the door to her room and took turns punching and slapping her while half of Paris was still asleep.
Teresa suspects the two men attacked her on orders of the husband of her landlady, the Filipina who convinced her to go underground in Paris.
Her husband thought I squealed to his wife that he was banging another Filipina, the 32-year-old Teresa said.
“How can I do so when his wife was getting plugged by another Filipino?”
Undocumented Filipino migrant workers sleeping in other rooms woke up and forced Teresa’s attacker to flee a possible mob lynching.
Her fellow workers goaded her into reporting the attack to the French police.
She was trembling when they were taking photos of her bruises, but not because of the violence she was subjected to.
Her employer would pay a hefty fine for employing an illegal migrant.
“I was telling myself, ‘No matter what happens, I’m not going to tell the police who my employer is,’” Teresa said. At the time of the attack, Teresa was working as a babysitter.
She was surprised, she said, when the police informed her they knew she was undocumented.
“They just told me to assert my rights – to organize.”
One of her attackers was arrested and was deported. His partner, according to Teresa, was on the wind.
“He knew how to disappear.”
Most irregular migrants do and are able to do so because of two networks: the train system and the social network.
While applying for a Schengen visa takes a month, it takes less than 24 hours to arrive at the Amsterdam Airport Schipol in the Netherlands –the gates of Europe.
Nearing midnight, the place is a veritable ghost town.
When I raised my head after bending to pick up my shoulder bag, the people I was with in the airplane and in the line to the immigration counter vanished like vapor.
I never felt so alone as I pushed my 35-kilogram worth of bags and luggage up several non-operating escalators –the airport shuts these off to save electricity.
I felt so lonely as I counted each rung the soles of my leather shoes kissed: 30.
When I reached Paris by train, I hit the sack right away. The combination of sitting inside a floating steel tube for 12 hours across two time zones and pushing a luggage while reading a map was confounded by walking alone in the world’s supposedly busiest airport.
But the trains are a delight to foreigners in France. As it is easy to get lost within the system of overlapping trains and metro routes in Paris, it is also easy finding the right station to alight.
With the Schengen visa and train money, foreigners can easily disappear in five countries adjacent to France. Teresa’s assailant may be roaming Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, or even Switzerland.
Except for the last, all are members of the European Union, where the Schengen visa applies.
***
IRREGULAR migrants are those who leave their countries without proper documentation like valid residence or work permits, or even those with proper documentation but who eventually lost their legitimate status or have overstayed in foreign countries.
France follows the United States and Malaysia as among the top five destinations of irregular Filipino migrants.
Most of these countries are immigration-restrictive regimes suffering labor shortages.
To understand that concept, I went to the 16th Area in Paris where the wealthy French and foreign businessmen live.
Here, capital is abundant. So are female and male Filipino cleaners and baby-sitters.
Filipinos walking along Victor Hugo Avenue have imbibed the French culture of not talking to strangers.
I gathered up courage and ambled to a group of talking Filipinos.
“Kamusta (How are you)?”
They told me they just appear snobbish because most of them are always on guard for raids and for things like what happened to Teresa.
They couldn’t be blamed; the work and the perks are also abundant here.
So said Cris, who gets 10 euros an hour from a woman with a business in Florida, United States, for cleaning her four-storey house in the 16th Area.
The rate for a dinner party with 150 guests is different. “She bought me two signature suits,” the worker of four years narrated, “when she told me I should be a waiter for a party at her home.”
Days later, the employer and the employee met.
“By the way,” Cris recalled her employer saying, “have my Pentium Centrino duo laptop: It’s old.”
Employees in the 16th area, where Cris lives, are lucky; employers can be generous.
The annual independence day event last July gathered more than 3,000 Filipinos – including hundreds of them pushing strollers carrying their own children, and others carrying children of their employers.
One Filipina gave finger food to a one-year-old blonde girl in a stroller. Another Filipina was beside her baby when the toddler’s parents came and carried the kid out of her stroller.
“Thank you so much,” said the couple in struggling English. “Go have some fun out here.”
Jean-Pierre Garson of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calls the 16th Area the “street of immigration”
Rue La Muette, also in the 16th Area, is quiet on the outside and “clean on the inside,” added Garson, OECD’s international migration section head, “due to the hard work of foreigners.”
The foreign workers there are “very well organized,” he added.
***
SOCIAL capital plays a major role in the ease of mobility and the ability of workers to shake off the fetters of state control on migration.
Teresa said that without the trust built among fellow migrants as workers, as Filipinos, and as women, she may have had second thoughts at running away from her employer.
There’s a strong support network among migrant Filipinos that facilitate the survival of any migrant, whether they be irregular or not.
According to Benjie Donguez, a former Philippine team athlete of the Malay sport pencak silat, that social capital extends to employers.
Donguez said one of his former employers had “connections” and used that network to secure for him a carte de sejour or French residency and work permit.
“I escaped after I joined a tournament in Belgium in 2005; I went to France to search for a job,” said Donguez at the steps of a foreign embassy in Paris where he works as a security officer.
Now a legal resident, Donguez said he won the trust of his French employer in cleaning a three-storey house everyday.
But while Donguez is confident now with his status, the move by current EU chair and French president Nicolas Sarkozy to control immigration in Europe and send home the “illegal” workers worries Cris and Teresa.
It’s a plan that Garson laughs off.
“That’s ‘pfffttt.’ How realistic is that to be implemented here in France?,” Garson said.
“That proposal has been saddled many times in the past.”
Real-life situations, like what’s happening daily in Paris’ streets of immigration “is much more complex,” explained Garson.
If the female domestic worker from Mauritius leaves, and the French employer can’t find a replacement for her, “what’s next [for the employer]?”
Garson pointed to the street outside his office at 2 Rue du Conseiller Collignon to prove his point.
“Rich French will all the more get foreign workers to clean their homes, and they have been happy with their (foreigners’) work.”
Recently, France suddenly scrounged for nurses and technology workers from the Philippines through a bilateral arrangement.
However, Philippine ambassador in Paris Jose Abeto Zaide said they have yet to finalize the details of that agreement.
“We will use quiet diplomacy [in dealing with EU immigration officials], but we are on top of the situation,” Zaide said when asked about Sarkozy’s threats.
Openly discussing such comforts and problems associated with global migration is what the world should continually do, Garson said.
“Countries may recognize these variances brought about by migration and discuss everything. Hopefully, countries will lessen complaining at each other,” he said.
While dialogues are being sought, and as host countries try to control migration, global mobility will remain rapid and easy as it is today.
Travelers like Filipinos and other nationals will thus continually search for convenience and comfort, and for reaping the possible benefits from finding fortunes elsewhere.
There is always hope, Teresa said, wiping her eyes with the back of her palm.
Her fiancée, a security officer, suddenly appeared beside her and they spoke in French.
Teresa patted her fiancée’s hand to say that everything’s alright and I was not the cause of her discomfort.
She said marrying him would ensure she gets her carte de sejour.
“I will try to go back home in Misamis Oriental, maybe in February. I miss my parents and my sisters and brothers. And then I’m going back here, not as an illegal anymore; not afraid anymore of what tomorrow will bring.”
She didn’t cry when she said that.
“I am months away from making it; I am almost there.” OFW Journalism Consortium, with support from the Royal Netherlands Embassy in the Philippines

Houses of Representatives

The houses that migrant workers build (but do not live in)

By Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr
Contributor

The following article was part of OFWJC's special publication 'Move.' The magazine was given to all delegates of GFMD Philippines.


Editor’s note: This story is from an ongoing study that the Ateneo de Manila University president, Fr. Bienvenido F. Nebres, S.J., commissioned the author to do.

THERE’S a remarkable landscape sculptured in the upland villages of Batangas province, more than a hundred kilometers southeast of Manila.
Except for the meandering road, these villages emit a very urban feel and air about them, dispelling the urbane notions toward rustic towns located uphill from the coast.
One of these is the village we’ll call Sumilang, where brightly-painted houses offer an explosion of colors – cream, light blue, orange, red, white, and yellow.
Roads are well-paved and most houses are made of concrete.
Some of the houses are quite imposing. Their design, style, size, and color are truly contemporary; some very Mediterranean. While some houses have the expensive type of iron sheet roofing, others use the pricier colored-lacquer tiles.
These effect the sensation of being inside one of the gated middle-class residential enclaves in Metro Manila.
Similarly, Sumilang is rather too quiet in the daytime. The silence is unbroken by playful shrieks and giggly shouts of children running around the streets –common in the countryside and in middle-to-lower-income urban communities.
It is as if all adults were off to work and all children were in school.
At night, lights slice brightly through windows, creating what residents call a “happy” atmosphere.
Despite the lighted houses, however, the individuals who have gone off to work have not returned, and will not be returning for a very long time.
Many of these brightly-lit houses are empty, like the street that separates them.
The people who spent to build these houses are out of the country.
***
OVERSEAS labor migration, which started in the 1980s, has transformed Sumilang.
The village used to be an agrarian, artisanal, and petty-trading village, located some five kilometers inland from the coastal town center. Today, a large segment of its population of nearly 2,000 persons works overseas, mostly in Spain and Italy. A sizeable number of them also work in the Persian Gulf states, Canada, and Taiwan.
Why these absent workers send money for building houses they do not and would not live in continues to baffle many observers of the Philippine labor migration phenomenon.
A few who consider migrants as poor deem the construction of a costly house in the “middle of nowhere” as a case of misplaced values, if not a waste of scarce resources.
If not houses, some buy electrical appliances like refrigerators and washing machines, even when the village has no electricity. Anecdotes abound of migrant workers who introduce such modernity to their remote villages.
Some economists explain such spending as stimulating demand for consumer goods and services, which ultimately increases production.
While various studies worldwide suggest that large proportions of migrants’ remittances are spent on construction of houses, there is still no consensus on whether such spending should be viewed as investment or as consumption.
A case can be made for house construction as productive and as enhancing human capital, particularly if migrants and their families occupy the improved accommodation.
However, the cases of migrants building houses that they and their families would not live in, in the immediate or even distant future, are particularly intriguing. Such economic behavior could be brushed aside easily as irrational.
Evoking their own perspective, the people of upland Batangas use the English word “investment” to talk about the houses that migrants build—as if it were a way of keeping money.
The house has become a sort of piggybank.
They also say that if labor migrants do not put their money in houses, then the income they earn can be dissipated easily in all sorts of small and inconsequential purchases.
“Before you know it, the money is gone,” said Veloso, father of overseas worker Helen.
A house, hence, is a tangible evidence of the fruits of one’s overseas work, much like a trophy.
***
STRICTLY speaking, however, there is no market for houses in Barangay Sumilang. And in most of the Philippine countryside, a market for houses that have been occupied by a previous set of owners is nonexistent.
In Sumilang, no one has ever bought any of the migrant houses and no migrant intends to sell the house that she has built. On that note, resources poured into house building cannot be considered as an investment in a marketable asset.
Rather, house building is a form of investment of a different kind.
To understand this type of investment, we need to understand economic behavior from the perspective of the local culture. We must also remember that economic actions are embedded in social relationships.
Let us take the case of Helen, Veloso’s daughter.
Her parents’ house is in the middle of a residential lot where their sinaunang bahay (ancestral house) once stood.
Veloso used to work in Manila, but decided to retire from his job and return to Sumilang. He wanted to build a house but his savings were insufficient.
“Luckily,” Veloso said, “Helen was able to leave for Spain.”
Veloso claims Helen supported his goal of building a house.
“Sige tatay, magtuloy na tayo ng pagbabahay at may kinikita naman tayo nang kaunti. Basta itatayo natin iyan.” [All right, dad, let’s proceed with building a house because we’re also earning some income. Anyhow, we’ll build it].
Veloso went ahead and had a plan drafted to which, he said, Helen agreed.
Construction began October 2003 after Helen sent a large sum of money. By December of that year, Veloso and his wife moved in to the basic structure that had been completed.
Helen’s husband, meanwhile, lives with his own parents in another town.
For over three years, Veloso’s house resembled the neighbors’ with its bare and unpainted exterior, as many houses in Sumilang were being completed according to the availability of funds.
Veloso said he wanted to have the house painted “but an engineer-friend suggested making some changes.”
Veloso said he called Helen who again agreed to foot the bill.
He said he always “consulted” her on matters such as design and paint color.
She, in turn, would give instructions on things she would like done, Veloso claims.
He added he would also send Helen photographs of the work in progress.
Thus, beyond providing the funds, Helen, while working as a domestic worker in Spain, participated transnationally in building the house, which has since been completed.
***
IN SUMILANG, often the impetus to improve the original structure or build a new house comes from parents who live in the home village.
Parents like Veloso say they seek first their children’s consent in pursuing the project.
Migrants usually do not deny parental wish.
By supporting house building, migrant workers like Helen demonstrate that they are dutiful daughters who live up to parental expectations. The house suggests that the absence of children has not meant neglect of parents.
Even a partially completed house conveys the message of filial duty that is in the process of fulfillment. The house serves as a memorial to parents and to the wider community that migrant children have not forgotten.
A migrant’s investment in a house gives face or esteem to parents [bigay mukha or bigay galang]. Their parents, hence, reap higher social status locally.
Although there is no clear or strict rule on filial duty, in many families the youngest daughter is expected to care for the parents.
Helen, however, is the only daughter, and her only other sibling, a younger brother, works in Manila.
Her funding of the parental house eases the tension between her physical absence and her obligation to care for them. Had she not worked overseas, she could have cared for her parents but not given them face in the community. There has been an exchange in the choice of alternatives.
***
AMONG the large, modern houses in Barangay Sumilang, many remain unoccupied, such as that of Digna’s.
Her house was built across the road from her sister’s house, a larger one on the lot once occupied by their parents’ old house. Digna’s sister and her children are in Italy, so her sibling Norberto and his wife live in that house, which otherwise would have been empty.
Digna and her husband were already based in Spain when work on their own house began. Their three children were still living in Sumilang during the construction of their house.
It took a while for the house to be completed, receiving its coat of paint only in 2003.
Digna’s three children moved into their house upon its completion and when it was fully furnished and equipped with appliances.
The three children would spend the day in their house but would cross the road at night to sleep with Norberto’s family, rendering the two houses as a single unit.
Digna’s youngest child was the first to leave for Spain, followed by the middle child, with the eldest finally leaving in 2005.
She hired a caretaker among the villagers to keep the house clean and to switch off the lights in the morning and switch them on at night.
“Doing so prevents ghosts from colonizing it,” the hired help said echoing the community’s belief.
As in the case of Digna’s unoccupied house, migrants do not sell their houses but maintain them through a paid caretaker. Remittances pay for minimal utility bills and incidental expenses.
These houses are hardly lived in, except during rare visits by the migrant family.
People say it would not be nice if migrants would not have a home when they return to visit. It is not simply because there is no hotel in Sumilang, but because return migrants must have their “own” place.
“Kaya nga may ipinagawa ay para may sarili silang bahay pag-nauwi.” [That’s why they built a house so that they have their own place when they come home.]
It is as if not having one’s own house would render a migrant’s homecoming as incomplete; they would not have a “home” to return to.
Although not places of regular habitation, these houses are kept and maintained as cultural statements.
By clinging to the house and ensuring its regular upkeep, the absent family says in effect that their origins in upland Batangas have not been forgotten, even as the houses are showcases of a diasporic life.
Pointing inwards to the village, these houses serve to remind kin and village residents that the families that own them are still part of the community despite their physical absence. The non-migrants reciprocate by still considering absent migrants and their families as members of the community.
Overseas migrant workers who own houses in Sumilang can console themselves with the thought that they still have a foothold in the homeland. The unoccupied houses are like anchors of stability, amid the dislocations and instabilities of overseas labor migration.
The thought of a nice house in the origin village may be most salient because the migrants’ own accommodations abroad–a small room in the employer’s house or even a small rented flat–are nowhere as spacious and comfortable as the houses in the origin village.
In the cultural context of upland Batangas, the houses that migrants build–but do not live in– are transnational investments in family ties, kin relations, community membership, status competition, village roots, and cultural identity. The gains from such investments are immeasurable.
Maybe someday they may finally retire in those houses. Maybe.
OFW Journalism Consortium, with support from the Royal Netherlands Embassy in the Philippines

Caregiver, millionaire

Ramona Alvir as told to Candice Y. Cerezo


I WILL never forget Edward Fabish; he made me rich.
I never thought things would turn out this way. Eight years ago, I was working as a stenographer at the Manila Prosecutors’ Office in City Hall.
When I left my job, my bosses –all prosecutors, my colleagues, and fellow stenographers never thought I would take the job of a caregiver. They said I was not the type.
An officemate warned me not to take the job of caring for the elderly because I might become intellectually obtuse.
They learned three years after I set foot in the United States of America that I became a millionaire.
I didn’t know I was the talk of the town until I got back in the country and someone told me people from my workplace were talking about my luck. News, indeed, travel fast.
But what happened to me, I guess, changed their prejudices on menial jobs, like caregiving.
I also never planned on being a caregiver.
***
I ARRIVED in San Francisco December 13, 2000, after my husband, a Filipino born and raised in the US, petitioned me.
I met him in the Philippines, though his family is based in the US.
Three days after I arrived, I started working in my husband’s office. The job was very temporary and I could not get work in law firms since I don’t have a local experience as stenographer or court employee.
Then I heard from our landlady’s friend that someone needed a caregiver. At once, I applied for the job.
I started working “under the table,” or without credentials, earning $90 a day for staying five straight days in an elderly’s house.
On weekends, I took another caregiving job. I was rarely home during those days.
After three months, I was employed by a Filipino-owned agency where I got a higher rate of $145 a day taking care of another elderly woman. It was fortunate because I was looking for a much better salary.
The agency derives income from 5 percent of each caregiver’s monthly income. The good thing is that the commission they get from caregivers is very low. Caregivers also directly receive pay from clients before turning in the agency’s share.
On hindsight, my situation was better than other caregivers whose income is coursed through an agency. In other agencies, the cost of caring for an elderly is double its worth while in commission-based agencies the cost is lighter on the pockets.
But my service for the elderly woman was brief. It was fortunate, too, because “sakit sa ulo yung alaga kong yun” [She gave me headaches].
The agency then assigned me the third elderly I cared for, with the rate of $120 a day during weekends. That elderly was Edward Fabish, my first male patient.
***
EDWARD was of German-Irish descent and a Catholic like me. He was 88 and lived in West Portal, Bay Area of San Francisco. He used to be a railroad worker, doing heavy, manual labor until he had a hip fracture.
I took care of him for four-and-a-half days a week with the rate of $170 a day.
I cleaned his house, gave him medicine, cooked for him, and even washed his clothes. Though some of these chores were not required by the job, I did them nonetheless since I used to do them in the Philippines.
My first week with Edward was difficult. He couldn’t accept his condition and would shoo me away.
“I will jump from the window if you don’t let me go down by myself!” he yelled at me when I blocked his way at the top of the stairs going down to his garage.
“Go ahead, jump!” I yelled back. Though I never really meant what I said; I never moved from my spot. As a caregiver he hired, I was responsible for him. I would have to answer for whatever happened to him.
Edward was at the stage of denial because he used to be strong and able, judging from the framed photographs on the shelves and on the walls. Most of the pictures showed him in tip-top shape built through hard work.
***
EDWARD was unmarried and childless and with no other relatives except his younger sister who was also with a caregiver. Their brother, the youngest, had died before them.
Aside from his hip fracture, he had a catheter, a tube attached to his side where his urine passed through. He had it when I started taking care of him until the day he died. Whenever I would clean him, I would also clean the catheter and the catheter bag.
Taking care of him also meant encouraging him to do the things he used to do, like gardening and driving. I admit, though, I got nervous with him driving; we almost had two accidents. But he wanted to drive despite his physical limitations.
Edward was not that difficult to take care of, mind you, but I always had to be there with him. He would have fallen several times had I failed to hold him up. Despite my being just above 4 feet, with Edward’s just a few inches taller, I was still able to help him walk or stand. If I had to go on an errand, I brought him with me – I walked beside him as he rode a scooter.
***
WHEN Edward’s sister, a spinster, died, he had my husband Gary and I live with him since he had no one. I volunteered to pay rent for our room because I didn’t want him to think I was abusing his kindness or that I was guilty of elderly abuse.
I also wanted to avoid the moment he becomes “goopy.”
You see, the elderly tend to become “goopy,” or start to lose themselves, suddenly changing attitudes.
Sometimes they would say their illness has returned, causing them pain. Sometimes it would come to a point where they would accuse you of robbing or taking advantage of them.
From my experience, that’s how the elderly are. You really have to be patient with them.
But, yes, there are many cases of elderly abuse in America. If you’re found guilty, you’re dead. If the elderly does not feel like eating, you cannot force him to eat. If you leave or neglect him, dupe money out of him, verbally abuse him, you could be charged with elderly abuse.
That is because the elderly may not be able to report abuses done to them unless somebody, sometimes a fellow Filipino, reports it.
So I paid Edward $300 in monthly rent, aside from sharing in paying the water, electricity, and telephone bills. That time, my job with the agency became seven days a week. I rarely rested.
Since I could not just leave him alone in his house, I brought him to family gatherings, usually hosted by my in-laws.
One day, the agency sent a reliever to take care of him on weekends.
“I fired her,” Edward said when I came home not finding my reliever around.
He said he felt my reliever was not sincere and was after his money. That was how I ended up working 24/7 for Edward.
At night, whenever I slept in his room, I would be so exhausted I’d fail to notice I was already slumped on the floor. I would be so tired that the moment my back touched the floor, I would be in a long-deep sleep. I relied on an alarm clock to wake me up.
One time, he heard me coughing.
“If only I could sleep on the floor, I would have traded places with you,” Edward said from his bed.
I told him not to worry since we Filipinos are used to sleeping on the floor.
When he was about to die, he always wanted me beside him.
He got used to having me sleep on the floor at the foot of his bed he wanted me beside him up to his death.
He got angry one time when he didn’t find me in his room to answer his demands.
***
BUT Edward was thrifty, so much so he didn’t buy anything for himself. With his extreme frugality, I never thought of him having money to spare.
When I started taking care of him, he had three pieces of underwear that had holes in them.
He didn’t even want to buy a recliner chair he needed to lift his swollen foot because he didn’t want to pay the $25 delivery charge! I paid for it instead just so he could get that chair.
So aside from buying him food, I shopped clothes for him: long sleeves, pants, shoes, and underwear.
When he got really sick, I brought him to the hospital. He was about to die and was already with an oxygen apparatus and yet he wanted to go home because an aspirin would cost him $2. He even removed his oxygen mask and insisted on going to the bank to pay his taxes.
I didn’t know if he turned purple at the bank because he had to pay taxes.
It surprised me, hence, when he gave me $5,000 during the first Christmas we spent together.
“This is for the kids,” Edward said. He explained he held on to it because he was afraid I would spend the money gambling.
We had been frequenting casinos that time.
It’s a common gesture for the elderly to give their caregivers money. They would say they are satisfied with how they’re taken care of and that they feel the sincerity of the caregiver.
Filipino caregivers exude this characteristic because most of us really know how to take care of our own elderly.
Of course, there are some who hope to find luck while taking care of a well-off elderly and be rewarded for what they have done. That is not only true of Filipinos but of other nationalities as well.
It did not occur to me, however, that he would reward me with anything because he was too frugal.
But one day, Edward asked me if I wanted to receive a monthly allowance from him or include me in his will.
I told him to just put me in his will. I was not one to decline his offer. Alangan namang tanggihan ko di ba? [I would be a hypocrite if I said no.]
He did not know he had left as much as $2.5 million when he died.
He gave me 25 percent of the inheritance while he gave the rest to charity.
***
OF COURSE, a lot of caregivers hope they will be rewarded for their service. Almost everyone wants that to happen.
But not all elderly give allowances to their caregivers; it’s for them or their family to decide.
If you are a caregiver, you have to be sincere and patient since the elderly already have memory lapses. They get easily irritated and are lonely most of the time.
Sometimes, to make Edward happy, I cooked chicken adobo. He called it “bobo.” It became his favorite dish.
Other Filipino dishes he learned to love and which I cooked for him were pancit bihon, lumpiang shanghai, and sinigang.
Edward’s staple food was a small serving of rice or oatmeal in the morning and steamed chicken and beans during full meals.
One time after a full meal of beans, he wanted to cut a branch of a tree on his front yard.
I was behind, holding onto his belt to keep him steady him while he climbed a ladder. And then he released gas.
I almost dropped him.
I still fed Edward beans but his tree-branch cutting days were over.
Still, caregiving is easier than office work where you have to be early everyday, dress up, rush things, and spend for your transportation.
In my experience, caregivers need only to go to their workplace and leave after a week. It’s a practical and financially-rewarding job.
Of course, there are sacrifices. You can only be with your family during weekends. The most you can do is call them. I go to work on Monday mornings and I go home on Saturday mornings.
***
EDWARD might have known he would die soon as his physical condition worsened.
His lungs had been retaining water. He had congested heart failure. He had cancer on the skin and face.
He must have felt his time was nearing when we were cleaning his sister’s grave.
Soon after, we arranged everything for his burial. The costs for the burial were also included in his will.
We could not go to church on Sundays anymore. In his last days, the priest would come by the house everyday to give him communion.
I saw him through his deathbed.
Edward died at the age of 89 at his home, where he wanted to be.
Coincidentally, my husband Gary was rushed to the hospital for appendicitis at the time Edward breathed his last.
I could not be there for my husband because no one else was there to take care of Edward’s funeral.
Gary, with the care of my in-laws, recuperated without me by his side. He got out of the hospital just when Edward was about to be buried.
Edward’s lawyer told me I received 25 percent of what he left behind.
I didn’t know then how much he had or if he was rich because he held on to money with closed fist.
***
WHEN I got the money Edward left me in 2003, I was surprised; it was worth P30 million.
The money was that much that by October of that year, I was able to buy five houses in Sacramento, California, and put them up on the market for lease.
When Edward was still alive, he wanted to give me his house.
“Do you like this house?” he once asked.
“It’s up to you,” I replied.
But his lawyer said the will was already done.
“Besides, whatever you provided her would be enough for her to buy her own house,” his lawyer added.
I didn’t insist because I felt it was wrong for me to aspire for more. What Edward gave me was really more than enough.
His house, worth $0.575 million, was liquidated and the rest of his money went to his church and other charity groups.
I consider myself really, really lucky that after all the hardships, Edward came into my life so suddenly.
Although things did not come easy working for him, he gave me a good life.
I can help my family now. I can send my nieces and nephews to private schools. I can give my daughters a good life when I, myself, grew up in hard times.
I never thought of owning houses in the US because I never even had a house of my own in the Philippines.
My mother used to wash clothes for a living and my father was an employee, so I have never experienced studying in a private school either.
I have my two duplexes rented and earning well; the same with the two other houses. We are living in my third house.
Real estate prices, however, have gone down because of the recession and as the US dollar weakened. Some tenants have been causing me problems since they can’t pay on time unless I give them penalty for the delay.
But I’m a kind landlady; my penalty’s just 5 percent of the monthly rent.
***
MY time will come – I am 40 and my husband is 49 – so I still need to work hard for my family.
Yes, we are workaholics.
My husband and I flew here in the Philippines together but he’s already back to work now after a week stay.
By now our three daughters –Hazel, 19, my daughter from a previous relationship, and Princess, 13, and Reyna, 12, Gary’s daughters from his previous relationship– are used to not having us around the house. I’m usually out for 12 straight days.
I also have a child patient who is dying of cancer of the lymph node. He is 14 years old. I have been helping in his medication since 2006.
When my mother is not with my children, we pay a day care center near where we live $50 a day for the kids.
I may build a foundation in Edward’s name for the education of street children in the Philippines. Maybe I can do that when my children, nieces, and nephews are done with their schooling.
I still work because I help my siblings send their sons and daughters to school. All in all, I help send 14 students to private schools.
The eldest of my scholars has entered college while the rest are in grade school and high school.
Supporting them financially for their education is the only help I can give them. I advise all of them to take up nursing because that’s where the money is.
I would have wanted to study again and enroll in nursing but I am already doing so many things. So what I did was enroll in a Certified Nursing Assistant course, which is a step higher than caregiving.
If you are a CNA, you can work in a field nursing facility such as a nursing home and take care of six to eight patients. The salary is higher but the job is much harder. Itong liit kong ito lalo akong liliit. (I bet I’d get even smaller if I do the work of a CNA.)
If you are a caregiver, you only take care of one elderly. It’s a lighter load than a CNA’s but still earns big.
Job and money are always there for caregivers because the US will never run out of old people that need care.
Today I’m living a good life, but I’m still a caregiver.
OFW Journalism Consortium, with support from the Royal Netherlands Embassy in the Philippines

Caregiver, millionaire

Ramona Alvir as told to Candice Y. Cerezo


I WILL never forget Edward Fabish; he made me rich.
I never thought things would turn out this way. Eight years ago, I was working as a stenographer at the Manila Prosecutors’ Office in City Hall.
When I left my job, my bosses –all prosecutors, my colleagues, and fellow stenographers never thought I would take the job of a caregiver. They said I was not the type.
An officemate warned me not to take the job of caring for the elderly because I might become intellectually obtuse.
They learned three years after I set foot in the United States of America that I became a millionaire.
I didn’t know I was the talk of the town until I got back in the country and someone told me people from my workplace were talking about my luck. News, indeed, travel fast.
But what happened to me, I guess, changed their prejudices on menial jobs, like caregiving.
I also never planned on being a caregiver.
***
I ARRIVED in San Francisco December 13, 2000, after my husband, a Filipino born and raised in the US, petitioned me.
I met him in the Philippines, though his family is based in the US.
Three days after I arrived, I started working in my husband’s office. The job was very temporary and I could not get work in law firms since I don’t have a local experience as stenographer or court employee.
Then I heard from our landlady’s friend that someone needed a caregiver. At once, I applied for the job.
I started working “under the table,” or without credentials, earning $90 a day for staying five straight days in an elderly’s house.
On weekends, I took another caregiving job. I was rarely home during those days.
After three months, I was employed by a Filipino-owned agency where I got a higher rate of $145 a day taking care of another elderly woman. It was fortunate because I was looking for a much better salary.
The agency derives income from 5 percent of each caregiver’s monthly income. The good thing is that the commission they get from caregivers is very low. Caregivers also directly receive pay from clients before turning in the agency’s share.
On hindsight, my situation was better than other caregivers whose income is coursed through an agency. In other agencies, the cost of caring for an elderly is double its worth while in commission-based agencies the cost is lighter on the pockets.
But my service for the elderly woman was brief. It was fortunate, too, because “sakit sa ulo yung alaga kong yun” [She gave me headaches].
The agency then assigned me the third elderly I cared for, with the rate of $120 a day during weekends. That elderly was Edward Fabish, my first male patient.
***
EDWARD was of German-Irish descent and a Catholic like me. He was 88 and lived in West Portal, Bay Area of San Francisco. He used to be a railroad worker, doing heavy, manual labor until he had a hip fracture.
I took care of him for four-and-a-half days a week with the rate of $170 a day.
I cleaned his house, gave him medicine, cooked for him, and even washed his clothes. Though some of these chores were not required by the job, I did them nonetheless since I used to do them in the Philippines.
My first week with Edward was difficult. He couldn’t accept his condition and would shoo me away.
“I will jump from the window if you don’t let me go down by myself!” he yelled at me when I blocked his way at the top of the stairs going down to his garage.
“Go ahead, jump!” I yelled back. Though I never really meant what I said; I never moved from my spot. As a caregiver he hired, I was responsible for him. I would have to answer for whatever happened to him.
Edward was at the stage of denial because he used to be strong and able, judging from the framed photographs on the shelves and on the walls. Most of the pictures showed him in tip-top shape built through hard work.
***
EDWARD was unmarried and childless and with no other relatives except his younger sister who was also with a caregiver. Their brother, the youngest, had died before them.
Aside from his hip fracture, he had a catheter, a tube attached to his side where his urine passed through. He had it when I started taking care of him until the day he died. Whenever I would clean him, I would also clean the catheter and the catheter bag.
Taking care of him also meant encouraging him to do the things he used to do, like gardening and driving. I admit, though, I got nervous with him driving; we almost had two accidents. But he wanted to drive despite his physical limitations.
Edward was not that difficult to take care of, mind you, but I always had to be there with him. He would have fallen several times had I failed to hold him up. Despite my being just above 4 feet, with Edward’s just a few inches taller, I was still able to help him walk or stand. If I had to go on an errand, I brought him with me – I walked beside him as he rode a scooter.
***
WHEN Edward’s sister, a spinster, died, he had my husband Gary and I live with him since he had no one. I volunteered to pay rent for our room because I didn’t want him to think I was abusing his kindness or that I was guilty of elderly abuse.
I also wanted to avoid the moment he becomes “goopy.”
You see, the elderly tend to become “goopy,” or start to lose themselves, suddenly changing attitudes.
Sometimes they would say their illness has returned, causing them pain. Sometimes it would come to a point where they would accuse you of robbing or taking advantage of them.
From my experience, that’s how the elderly are. You really have to be patient with them.
But, yes, there are many cases of elderly abuse in America. If you’re found guilty, you’re dead. If the elderly does not feel like eating, you cannot force him to eat. If you leave or neglect him, dupe money out of him, verbally abuse him, you could be charged with elderly abuse.
That is because the elderly may not be able to report abuses done to them unless somebody, sometimes a fellow Filipino, reports it.
So I paid Edward $300 in monthly rent, aside from sharing in paying the water, electricity, and telephone bills. That time, my job with the agency became seven days a week. I rarely rested.
Since I could not just leave him alone in his house, I brought him to family gatherings, usually hosted by my in-laws.
One day, the agency sent a reliever to take care of him on weekends.
“I fired her,” Edward said when I came home not finding my reliever around.
He said he felt my reliever was not sincere and was after his money. That was how I ended up working 24/7 for Edward.
At night, whenever I slept in his room, I would be so exhausted I’d fail to notice I was already slumped on the floor. I would be so tired that the moment my back touched the floor, I would be in a long-deep sleep. I relied on an alarm clock to wake me up.
One time, he heard me coughing.
“If only I could sleep on the floor, I would have traded places with you,” Edward said from his bed.
I told him not to worry since we Filipinos are used to sleeping on the floor.
When he was about to die, he always wanted me beside him.
He got used to having me sleep on the floor at the foot of his bed he wanted me beside him up to his death.
He got angry one time when he didn’t find me in his room to answer his demands.
***
BUT Edward was thrifty, so much so he didn’t buy anything for himself. With his extreme frugality, I never thought of him having money to spare.
When I started taking care of him, he had three pieces of underwear that had holes in them.
He didn’t even want to buy a recliner chair he needed to lift his swollen foot because he didn’t want to pay the $25 delivery charge! I paid for it instead just so he could get that chair.
So aside from buying him food, I shopped clothes for him: long sleeves, pants, shoes, and underwear.
When he got really sick, I brought him to the hospital. He was about to die and was already with an oxygen apparatus and yet he wanted to go home because an aspirin would cost him $2. He even removed his oxygen mask and insisted on going to the bank to pay his taxes.
I didn’t know if he turned purple at the bank because he had to pay taxes.
It surprised me, hence, when he gave me $5,000 during the first Christmas we spent together.
“This is for the kids,” Edward said. He explained he held on to it because he was afraid I would spend the money gambling.
We had been frequenting casinos that time.
It’s a common gesture for the elderly to give their caregivers money. They would say they are satisfied with how they’re taken care of and that they feel the sincerity of the caregiver.
Filipino caregivers exude this characteristic because most of us really know how to take care of our own elderly.
Of course, there are some who hope to find luck while taking care of a well-off elderly and be rewarded for what they have done. That is not only true of Filipinos but of other nationalities as well.
It did not occur to me, however, that he would reward me with anything because he was too frugal.
But one day, Edward asked me if I wanted to receive a monthly allowance from him or include me in his will.
I told him to just put me in his will. I was not one to decline his offer. Alangan namang tanggihan ko di ba? [I would be a hypocrite if I said no.]
He did not know he had left as much as $2.5 million when he died.
He gave me 25 percent of the inheritance while he gave the rest to charity.
***
OF COURSE, a lot of caregivers hope they will be rewarded for their service. Almost everyone wants that to happen.
But not all elderly give allowances to their caregivers; it’s for them or their family to decide.
If you are a caregiver, you have to be sincere and patient since the elderly already have memory lapses. They get easily irritated and are lonely most of the time.
Sometimes, to make Edward happy, I cooked chicken adobo. He called it “bobo.” It became his favorite dish.
Other Filipino dishes he learned to love and which I cooked for him were pancit bihon, lumpiang shanghai, and sinigang.
Edward’s staple food was a small serving of rice or oatmeal in the morning and steamed chicken and beans during full meals.
One time after a full meal of beans, he wanted to cut a branch of a tree on his front yard.
I was behind, holding onto his belt to keep him steady him while he climbed a ladder. And then he released gas.
I almost dropped him.
I still fed Edward beans but his tree-branch cutting days were over.
Still, caregiving is easier than office work where you have to be early everyday, dress up, rush things, and spend for your transportation.
In my experience, caregivers need only to go to their workplace and leave after a week. It’s a practical and financially-rewarding job.
Of course, there are sacrifices. You can only be with your family during weekends. The most you can do is call them. I go to work on Monday mornings and I go home on Saturday mornings.
***
EDWARD might have known he would die soon as his physical condition worsened.
His lungs had been retaining water. He had congested heart failure. He had cancer on the skin and face.
He must have felt his time was nearing when we were cleaning his sister’s grave.
Soon after, we arranged everything for his burial. The costs for the burial were also included in his will.
We could not go to church on Sundays anymore. In his last days, the priest would come by the house everyday to give him communion.
I saw him through his deathbed.
Edward died at the age of 89 at his home, where he wanted to be.
Coincidentally, my husband Gary was rushed to the hospital for appendicitis at the time Edward breathed his last.
I could not be there for my husband because no one else was there to take care of Edward’s funeral.
Gary, with the care of my in-laws, recuperated without me by his side. He got out of the hospital just when Edward was about to be buried.
Edward’s lawyer told me I received 25 percent of what he left behind.
I didn’t know then how much he had or if he was rich because he held on to money with closed fist.
***
WHEN I got the money Edward left me in 2003, I was surprised; it was worth P30 million.
The money was that much that by October of that year, I was able to buy five houses in Sacramento, California, and put them up on the market for lease.
When Edward was still alive, he wanted to give me his house.
“Do you like this house?” he once asked.
“It’s up to you,” I replied.
But his lawyer said the will was already done.
“Besides, whatever you provided her would be enough for her to buy her own house,” his lawyer added.
I didn’t insist because I felt it was wrong for me to aspire for more. What Edward gave me was really more than enough.
His house, worth $0.575 million, was liquidated and the rest of his money went to his church and other charity groups.
I consider myself really, really lucky that after all the hardships, Edward came into my life so suddenly.
Although things did not come easy working for him, he gave me a good life.
I can help my family now. I can send my nieces and nephews to private schools. I can give my daughters a good life when I, myself, grew up in hard times.
I never thought of owning houses in the US because I never even had a house of my own in the Philippines.
My mother used to wash clothes for a living and my father was an employee, so I have never experienced studying in a private school either.
I have my two duplexes rented and earning well; the same with the two other houses. We are living in my third house.
Real estate prices, however, have gone down because of the recession and as the US dollar weakened. Some tenants have been causing me problems since they can’t pay on time unless I give them penalty for the delay.
But I’m a kind landlady; my penalty’s just 5 percent of the monthly rent.
***
MY time will come – I am 40 and my husband is 49 – so I still need to work hard for my family.
Yes, we are workaholics.
My husband and I flew here in the Philippines together but he’s already back to work now after a week stay.
By now our three daughters –Hazel, 19, my daughter from a previous relationship, and Princess, 13, and Reyna, 12, Gary’s daughters from his previous relationship– are used to not having us around the house. I’m usually out for 12 straight days.
I also have a child patient who is dying of cancer of the lymph node. He is 14 years old. I have been helping in his medication since 2006.
When my mother is not with my children, we pay a day care center near where we live $50 a day for the kids.
I may build a foundation in Edward’s name for the education of street children in the Philippines. Maybe I can do that when my children, nieces, and nephews are done with their schooling.
I still work because I help my siblings send their sons and daughters to school. All in all, I help send 14 students to private schools.
The eldest of my scholars has entered college while the rest are in grade school and high school.
Supporting them financially for their education is the only help I can give them. I advise all of them to take up nursing because that’s where the money is.
I would have wanted to study again and enroll in nursing but I am already doing so many things. So what I did was enroll in a Certified Nursing Assistant course, which is a step higher than caregiving.
If you are a CNA, you can work in a field nursing facility such as a nursing home and take care of six to eight patients. The salary is higher but the job is much harder. Itong liit kong ito lalo akong liliit. (I bet I’d get even smaller if I do the work of a CNA.)
If you are a caregiver, you only take care of one elderly. It’s a lighter load than a CNA’s but still earns big.
Job and money are always there for caregivers because the US will never run out of old people that need care.
Today I’m living a good life, but I’m still a caregiver.
OFW Journalism Consortium, with support from the Royal Netherlands Embassy in the Philippines

Trading Places

Buying, selling may be key to Asian migrants’ unity

By Jeremaiah M. Opiniano

The following article was part of OFWJC's special publication 'Move.' The magazine was given to all delegates of GFMD Philippines.

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA—THE Kota Raya shopping mall here on Sundays reflects that Asian migrant workers understand each other if their heads of state allow the market as a platform for communication.
Here, words melding with nods and a thumbs-up sign are easily understood as agreement on a certain price for hand-woven silk or hand-sewn leather sandals.
Two palms up and shoulders raised mean the seller –a Malaysian, Indonesian, or Filipino– can no longer lower the price of his product.
And the English is abrupt and staccato: “Two for a hundred,” “What price you want?,” and “Hey!”.
Foreign workers in t-shirts and jeans, sarong, and batik-print short sleeves, weave up and down the four-storey mall. For a day, at least, the 30-year-old building’s walls protect them from what some of them feel as discrimination from Malaysian employers.
Nepalese workers break out in laughter on one side; Filipinos do soon on the third floor. Chirpy Indonesian conversation streams across the second floor while the ear picks up here and there a mix of several Asian languages.
Through purchases and friendly encounters with compatriots, Kota Raya is where Filipinos manage the stresses of daily labor at least once a week in Kuala Lumpur.
When we go back to their household and office workplaces, we have to contend with how lowly Malaysians look at us, a foreign worker explains on the freedom inside the mall.
Kota Raya is one tacit face of overseas migration in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Asean groups two labor-sending countries (the Philippines and Indonesia), four labor-receiving countries (Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand), and four other countries (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam).
Especially on Sundays, the Malaysian-owned mall bustles with buying and selling and exchanges between and among nationals of most of the 10 Asean-member countries and from other Asian countries like Nepal.
Kota Raya, located at Kuala Lumpur’s Jalan Silang and Jalan Cheng Lock junctions, is renowned as the beehive of foreign workers.
The mall’s 30- and 60-square meter shops glitter with products imported from the countries of these workers.
Indonesian movies in digital video disk formats are displayed prominently as well as remittance signs of the IME Impex, which targets Nepalese workers.
The offices of American money transfer business Western Union, however, dominate the ground floor.
***
ON the third floor is the Bayanihang Pinoy (Filipino unity), a 60-sqm shop selling products from the Philippines.
Garlic-flavored junk food, flavoring mixes for soups, vinegar and soy sauce, tissue paper, and packed noodles are arranged in a row inside a wood-and-glass cabinet.
“This place is really like this –jampacked– on Sundays,” stall owner Pilar De la Cruz-Sangaran said a bit apologetically.
Sangaran’s shop, which she continued even after the demise of her Malaysian husband, doubles as an office of a migrant savings group she started leading since 2002.
Her shop and their group called Samahang Impok Bayan (literally People’s Savings Group) are examples of how property rights factor in the formal mobility of foreign labor and capital.
For one, foreigners can only open a business if a Malaysian is the lead investor.
For another, Sangaran said they had to register their group with their official representative institution, in this case, the Philippine embassy.
“The Malaysian government cannot [and doesn’t] allow foreigners to register cooperatives or savings groups. It is difficult to institute such a savings scheme for us here, given how the host country looks at foreigners like Filipinos.”
Sangaran’s passionate vilification comes from her belief that foreign workers should keep money for themselves and avoid sending everything to their families in the home country.
“Doing so is also for our and our family’s future when we do decide to go home for good.”
Having the savings group office side-by-side her business, however, makes it difficult for Sangaran because the SIB advocates “forced saving”.
Domestic workers come here and give their money to Sangaran who records the deposit in white passbooks carrying the SIB seal.
As of May this year, SIB has a total deposit of 84,235.09 Malaysian ringgit from 400 members.
This fund is reserved for hospitalization and mortuary assistance and emergency loans for migrant Filipino workers in dire financial need.
Sangaran admits the savings consciousness is still slow-going among migrant workers who feel responsible for sending money to their loved ones.
Likewise, having such savings structure inside the Kota Raya shopping complex doesn’t appear helpful at all.
Kota Raya, to note, was cited by the Asian Development Bank as having a “well-entrenched remittance system.”
Hence, the shopping mall will remain the beehive of foreigners like Filipinos, for as long as Malaysia allows the entry of foreign labor.
***
THE Asean is progressing over the years to become an economic force.
Data from the International Monetary Fund shows that Asean’s trade value in 2006 was worth $1.458 trillion, behind the $9.165 trillion of the European Union and the $4.960 trillion of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Thus, developed Asean countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Brunei Darussalam have attracted, and continue to attract, foreign workers.
It will thus be interesting to find out how an evolving Asean will deal with labor migration, said Filipino scholar Filomeno Aguilar of the Ateneo de Manila University.
Aguilar, a former professor at the National University of Singapore, points to one “positive sign” to Asean’s inter-governmental look at labor mobility – the 2006 Asean Declaration on Migrant Workers.
The Philippine government, which instigated the signing of that 2006 declaration, calls it a “good example” of a regional approach to deal with overseas migration.
But Asean member-countries have varied interests, cultures, and political systems, and Aguilar thinks Asean countries will deal with labor migration or other Asean issues “in different ways and means”.
“Remember,” Aguilar added, “Asean states have their own forms of individuality” –and many times, the tenor of handling issues in Asean “is non-interference”.
Malaysia did not sign that declaration and continues to deal with illegal Indonesian and Filipino workers through deportation.
A consul at the Philippine embassy in Kuala Lumpur said when pressed for more rational treatment of such workers, “Malaysian immigration officials will simply tell us they welcome foreigners ‘but these should not overstay.’”
Malaysia’s deportation of these overstaying foreign workers, however, has spawned a support network that is under the government’s radar, according to Sangaran.
“We survive through friends and support groups.”
Likewise, Malaysia’s immigration control also forces migrant workers to create ingenious methods as what some from South Asia reportedly do, disguising themselves as students and taking on blue-collar jobs without work permits.
Philippine government officials, hence, are banking on the 2006 declaration as the silver bullet to solve irregular migration problems.
Aguilar believes other structures of unity can be tapped to support such goal.
“There are also various forms of ethnic alliances and formations in Asean. Inter-ethnic relationship also has a historical precedent, and is deeply rooted.”
Such dynamism is currently enjoyed in Kota Raya, where migrant workers shop happily every Sunday.
OFW Journalism Consortium, with support from the Royal Netherlands Embassy in the Philippines

Sheltered Lives

By Luis Carlo S. Liberato
and
Ruben Jeffrey A. Asuncion

The following article was part of OFWJC's special publication 'Move.' The magazine was given to all delegates of GFMD Philippines.

QUEZON CITY, PHILIPPINES—RAIN is pouring in buckets as Imelda Rebate steps inside the office of Kanlungan Centre Foundation, the oldest nonprofit group for abused women migrant workers.
Across the drenched porch, a younger woman is at a peach-colored table, her head slightly bowed and eyes fixed on an open tattered and yellowing folder.
Her mouth moves while she reads, as if praying silently that this case will not add to the folders of cases –some 248 of them– that remain open.
“Good morning,” Rebate says and the woman, her fellow social worker, waves her fingers in acknowledgement.
Rebate eases forward to the garage that Kanlungan transformed into a conference room where one of the people in those folders, Jennie, is waiting.
Rainwater is seeping on the walls of the 30-year-old bungalow housing the institution that, for two decades, has been helping migrant women in distress like Jennie.
While remittances of these migrant workers shelter the Philippine economy from shocks, Kanlungan has been sheltering those getting shock treatments from their employers.
It has never been an easy work for those like Rebate, a mother of two.
Her pocket planner is filled with appointments, except for Sundays which are saved for her family.
“My schedule is full from Monday to Saturday, especially on Saturdays, when I visit the families.”
Rebate belongs to the latest generation of Kanlungan’s manpower. While the staff of Kanlungan remains small, the bulk of work they do has risen in proportion to the number of women that have left the country for work overseas.
Those whose mothers left two decades ago are now in their teens or nearly as old as Kanlungan.
“While migration may be financially rewarding, it leaves a large gap in terms of family relations.”
Ironically, she adds, these workers try to fill in this gap only through money.
“These workers may earn enough money from their overseas job but the money they sent does not compensate for their absence. Sending money is a short-term measure to fill in the gap in their families.”
Kanlungan tries to fill the gap when the migrant workers’ attempts at compensating that absence don’t work.
***
“LET’S buckle down to work,” Rebate says to herself before greeting Jennie with a smile that seems she only gives to clients and dispels whatever gloom Jennie has brought together with the rain.
Today, Rebate will review Jennie’s and other “open” cases, some of which date back to the time when Kanlungan’s founder Virginia M. Alunan was still alive.
Alunan, a native of the southernmost Philippine city of Ozamiz, formed the center in 1989 after the increase in the number of Filipino women going abroad for work upped the number of reported cases of abuse.
That time, the Philippines was still recovering from an economy that collapsed after being plundered by President Marcos’s family and cronies.
Had it not been for money sent by overseas Filipino workers, the government of President Corazon Aquino, which replaced Marcos’s, wouldn’t have survived, economists have said.
Pressured to lift their families from the claws of poverty, women left in droves, eclipsing the number of male migrant workers. This characterized the start of the country’s third wave of migration, called the feminization of labor export.
With that, the number of distressed women calling for help also poured like rain in buckets, prompting Alunan and other women activists to rent a house and establish a crisis center.
“We were getting calls up to and long after midnight,” Alunan’s friend and Kanlungan board member Nena Fernandez has said.
“Gina and most of us sometimes just went home to get fresh clothes and come back to the office; the phones ringing even before we place our bags down.”
Gina’s mother, Eufemia Alunan, has said that her daughter would stay out late at night waiting at the airport for hundreds of Filipino domestic workers flown home during the 1991 Gulf War.
The names and files of these workers are still in a computer database of cases that Kanlungan began building in 1990.
It was only five years later that lawmakers would establish formal welfare response structures via Republic Act 8042.
***
THE story of Jennie, 28, is one of those cases.
This rainy day, she huddles with Rebate to check her progress in getting over her experience in human trafficking.
Jennie, not her real name, was only 16 when she was flown to Kuwait in 1995.
After her rescue and return to the Philippines, Jennie was adopted by a family in a Quezon City village where Kanlungan is active.
“Listen, Jennie, can we at least look at things from a broader perspective? Let’s step back, shall we?” Rebate asks.
She wants to go into business, a burger stand, Rebate will explain later.
But Jennie’s traumatic experience in trafficking is impeding her progress. Her last business, a variety store, went bankrupt.
Rebate says Jennie is asking for P15,000.
After an hour of negotiations, she relents and gives the office the go-signal to release P10,000 to Jennie.
Only three-fourths of that amount is needed if Jennie puts up the business in front of her house and P9,000 if she rents a space, Rebate explains.
After Jennie leaves, “Wilma” arrives. The two women exchange glances briefly but knowingly; the older Wilma, 42, also survived human trafficking.
After working as a domestic helper in Bahrain and Kuwait on slave-wage, I got fed up, Wilma says.
When she got a chance to go home, Wilma did in November 2006.
Like Jennie, she also put up a small business, an eatery, to sustain her family’s daily needs.
“We asked her for a business plan because what she told us over the phone is vague,” Rebate says.
Kanlungan plans to help 80 women victims of trafficking in tapping other sources of income by giving grants or extending loans.
Since starting the program in 2007, Kanlungan has extended help to 24 women.
Funded by the Japanese government, the project will end in January 2009.
Kanlungan helps applicants to be psychologically and emotionally prepared and draft a comprehensive business plan.
***
KANLUNGAN’S three-bedroom bungalow could be considered a landmark in this tree-lined street in the neighborhood across the bridge from New York Street, Cubao.
The sweet soya factory across the center’s street has long since closed even before Kanlungan expanded its service from crisis intervention to community organizing.
Later on, Kanlungan bought the house and built a second floor where migrant workers can stay for free for a week or two while preparing for their eventual return to their families living outside the city.
Taking cue, the Philippine government’s Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration bought a building and allocated some floors into a halfway home of sorts for both outgoing and returning migrant workers.
While Kanlungan operates on foreign funding, the OWWA uses the money migrant workers pay for insurance and welfare benefit coverage for the government agency’s daily operations.
Rebate has been commuting 60 kilometers everyday to and from her home and the Center. This was not part of her original plan for work after graduation, she says.
With a degree in social work from St. Joseph’s College, Rebate first worked with nongovernment Tanglaw Family Healthcare Project and Philippine National Red Cross for seven years. It was only in 2001 when she joined Kanlungan.
Tanglaw is an advocacy center for children’s rights and welfare while the PNRC is a charity group. Rebate says she applied for the current position she holds today because it was the only one vacant when she was looking for work in 2001.
It takes a lot of experience and interpersonal skill for a person to become an advocate of women migrants’ rights and welfare, she says.
“Also, the work requires us to have an adequate grasp of the laws and issues pertaining to migration; likewise, a great deal of patience in managing migration-related cases.”
That patience allowed Rebate and the Center to organize what they call “Structures of Care” in each of the eight communities in three cities within Metro Manila.
“Structures of Care” are groups that Kanlungan organized in the communities that have high populations of migrant workers’ families, and whose leaders support the move to organize such type of groups.
“The residents help us whenever we face problems during our community organizing activities. In fact, they also refer our group to other nongovernment organizations if the situation is complicated,” Rebate says.
The only major problem that they encounter in their field work is when they are faced with a hostile neighborhood. This was the case during their organizing project in the Salam Mosque compound in Culiat, Quezon City, when, in the course of their reaching out to the residents of the area, they found out that majority of them were illegal recruiters.
***
THE rain stops and sunlight hits the mural on one of Kanlungan’s concrete walls.
Some of the colors have faded. Chips of cement and cracks on the wall are also noticeable.
Still, it captures the indefatigable spirit of women migrant workers and Kanlungan, the group that tries to shelter them from the storms of labor export.
With several hours still open on her work day, Rebate excuses herself and sits behind a peach-colored table where she places two tattered and yellowing folders.
Her head slightly bowed, she fixes her eyes on one folder and begins writing.
Maybe it is about her talk with Jennie and the other folder about Wilma. The files are kept confidential and only case workers and the lawyer assigned to the case can read these folders.
Her mouth moves while she reads, as if praying silently that this case will not add to the folders of cases that remain open.
Outside the seven-foot walls and the green gates of Kanlungan, the tree-lined neighborhood stirs to life as the sun keeps the rains at bay.
Today, that is a welcome sign.
OFW Journalism Consortium, with the support of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in the Philippines

Market Reins

Government auditors rule failure of migration policies in protecting OFWs

By Madelaine Joy A. Estrada
and
Jeremaiah M. Opiniano

The following article was part of OFWJC's special publication 'Move.' The magazine was given to all delegates of GFMD Philippines.

INSURANCE agent Lilian Baltazar couldn’t put illegal recruiter Joel behind bars – he already is.
The ability to operate a scam in prison highlights what government auditors discovered in its appraisal of Philippine policies on recruitment for overseas work. The Commission on Audit concludes a state policy failure in arresting illegal recruitment.
Take Baltazar’s experience as anecdotal example.
She said she was thrilled upon hearing from the neighborhood grapevine about reported job vacancies for caregivers in New Zealand.
Baltazar enrolled and passed a short caregiving training course.
She said her neighbor then gave her the mobile phone number of a certain “Joel” who won her trust so much she gave him her address in Novaliches, Quezon City.
He spoke a language “that seemed too realistic, true, and sincere,” Baltazar said.
Then “Susan” came to her home, introduced herself to Baltazar as a Thai national, and accepted P50,000 as processing fee.
Baltazar withdrew her savings, borrowed money, paid Susan, and together with her neighbors flew to Hong Kong where Joel said he would give them their papers.
Days passed and Baltazar’s group was stuck at the Crown Colony.
“It was the biggest mistake of my life,” Baltazar rued.
While preparing a legal case against Joel in the hope of getting back her money, Baltazar discovered Joel is already languishing in jail for estafa.
He was running a scam using mobile phones and contacts outside prison.
While Baltazar’s predicament is largely her own making, her story mirrors COA’s findings that the Philippine government “may not be considered effective” in regulating the overseas recruitment market, especially in providing responsive services to potential overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).
For a labor-sending government that manages daily overseas departures reaching 3,000, the COA’s first appraisal of the country’s overseas workers welfare program reveals the Philippine labor migration bureaucracy’s weak spots.
Curbing illegal recruitment is one of these inefficiencies, as efforts by the POEA “may not be considered adequate,” wrote COA in its 107-page audit that covered the years 2005 and 2006.
Lesser numbers of entrapment operations (a total of 54 covering the two years) and of people manning these operations (only three) targeting reportedly erring recruitment agencies were noted in the COA audit.
Surveillance operations at erring agencies were also less in number than what POEA itself targeted: 300 every year. The operations even dropped, from 215 in 2005 to 78 in 2006.
The 26-year-old POEA was also observed not to maintain a database of recruitment agencies that are to be subjected to inspection.
While there are also regular agency inspections, these agencies are not examined for quite some time, thus “could not be readily ascertained, and their violations not at once detected.”
The POEA inspected 1,178 recruiters in 2006, more than the agency’s annual target of 1,040. But the government agency couldn’t detect properly if these recruiters complied with existing rules and regulations on overseas employment, according to the COA report.
Our human and financial resources are limited, POEA officials were quoted as saying in COA’s report.
However, the six-person COA team led by Ma. Dolores Ilagan said that the decrease in the number of surveillance operations “could not be attributed to the decrease in the number of operatives.”
***
LIMITATIONS in monitoring recruitment agencies and spotting and nabbing illegal recruiters are just among the “ineffective policies and lapses in the implementation” of the Philippines’s overseas workers welfare program.
The ineffective policies COA noted include uncollected fines from erring recruitment agencies, and the maintenance of escrow deposits for these agencies. These deficiencies were then compounded, COA adds, by illegal recruitment, lack of database of recruitment agencies, slow resolution of cases against recruiters, money claims and benefits for victimized OFWs, selective deployment of workers to safe countries, coordination between POEA and the Philippine Overseas Labor Offices (POLOs), and expenses for workers’ repatriation.
COA reviewed OFW-related policies and rules, verified the processing of overseas employment contracts, analyzed the accomplishment reports of five agencies involved in the overseas employment program, assessed the release of money claims to OFWs, and interviewed key government officials in the Philippines and in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
It marked the first time that COA audited the country’s overseas employment program as part of a government-wide and sectoral performance report (GWSPA).
The Department of Labor and Employment and its attached agencies POEA, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, and the National Labor Relations Commission were audited. The Department of Foreign Affairs’s Office of the Undersecretary for Migrant Workers Affairs (Oumwa) was also audited.
The five agencies spent P1.737 billion in 2005 and P1.626 billion in 2006, as the government deployed 981,677 and 1,062,567 workers in 2005 and 2006, respectively.
DOLE and DFA officials acknowledged the comments of COA, and are in the process “of initiating such improvements.”
In the meantime, illegal recruiters remain undetected and continue to victimize would-be and current OFWs.
“The ability to better serve customers (i.e., OFWs) is founded on sound regulation (and) there is a need to ensure that such regulations are strictly enforced.”
Since labor migration continues, COA’s team recommended that POEA impose “stringent policies” especially since these do not compel recruitment agencies “to strictly abide with existing rules and regulations.”
In general, the government auditors place on the hands of the state the welfare and protection of OFWs and potential migrant workers.
OFW Journalism Consortium with the support of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in the Philippines

Trade Advantage

By Jeremaiah M. Opiniano

The following article was part of OFWJC's special publication 'Move.' The magazine was given to all delegates of GFMD Philippines.
Reporting from Tours and Paris, France and from Binangonan, Rizal Province, Philippines

IN TOURS, France, they buried the fountain of youth.
In this garden city south of Paris is where a quarter of a million people speak the country’s purest French. Visibly, the elderly walk slowly through Tours’s tourist spots, enjoying the crisp air and light dazzling sun.
A lady, maybe in her early 70s, stepped outside the city’s inter-city train station on black size five ballet flats.
She was at home among the crowd of old people. Her pace is as measured as the others as she troops toward Place Plumereau, where Tours’s working population wine and dine almost nightly, they said.
After capturing in celluloid the renowned Tudor buildings, the lady from the train walked a hundred meters on Plumereau’s cobblestone sidewalks to Cathedrale-Saint-Gatien.
Every structure in this garden city south of Paris is majestic, and old, like the tourists still fortunate to stand before the portals of the past.
Tours mirrors the major demographic problem of France and other European countries—there are more elderly than young people.
“We can expect more migration as Europe grapples with a ‘super aging’ population,” Henry Schumacher said in a conversation with reporters.
Schumacher, executive director of the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines, explains that with or without the financial meltdown, countries in the European Union will still confront the consequences of such demographic trend.
“Most Europeans don’t like to do certain jobs, so where can they turn to?” Schumacher said.
He added that he expects the demand for health professionals will continue as a consequence of the demographic pressure.
The pressure is already building up in Paris, a three-hour, north-bound train ride from Tours.
France’s capital remains the host of tourists, locals, and foreigners of wide-ranging age groups, forming Paris’s two million people.
Near the Eiffel Tower, there’s a hidden congregation of Filipinos. Stade La Muette becomes a Filipino town every July for the Philippine Independence Day celebrations. Rue La Muette is quiet on the outside and “clean on the inside due to the hard work of foreigners.”
Jean-Pierre Garson of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said he couldn’t imagine what these places would be like if foreign workers get booted out.
“Who will replace them?”
That question and other questions arising from migration the European Union Commission will attempt to answer at the meeting of the EU Council this October.
* * *
THIRTEEN flight-hours away, one of the sources of the answer to that conundrum was clapping as her young nieces gyrated to pop singer Shakira’s ministrations on video.
“Lucky that I love a foreign land; For the lucky fact of your existence,” the tots sang along.
They could be summarizing how the Sablayan clan regards the sisters Mila, Aurora, and Tess, who come home from France every year.
Every July, the Sablayan house atop a hill in Binangonan, in the Philippines’s Rizal province, is filled with siblings, nieces, and grandchildren when the sisters go home for an annual vacation.
“We are 60 in the clan,” said younger sister Tess, “and from our family, two have already died, four are here (like me), three are in the US, and four are in France.”
Like Tours, Binangonan is a town replete with history dating back to the revolution of Filipinos against Spain. But unlike Tours, Binangonan teems with people of divergent age range.
An elderly woman holds onto the elbow of a granddaughter in the flea market. Vendors peddling red and white onion bulbs conquer sidewalks. Motorcycles with cabs for two careen to and fro, deftly avoiding pedestrians and shiny cars along the road. Honks and beeps compete and meld with shouts of glee of children playing tag.
Inside the subdivision where the Sablayan house is, the similarity begins again.
It is usually quiet there and the architecture of some houses smack of French influence.
For that day, however, the Sablayan sisters didn’t mind the noise.
Said 24-year Paris resident Aurora, “If we did not go abroad, all of us would not have been as blessed.”
Mila sends money home to her four other sisters to bankroll the maintenance of her three-storey home at St. Monique Valais subdivision. Mila’s already a French citizen. having stayed in Paris for nearly three decades.
Mila’s second daughter Abegail, who joined her mother and Aurora in the recent family trip to the Philippines, was simply happy with her gain—six items worth a total of €100, the price of just one branded bag in Paris.
Filipino workers seeking to go to France may also find the country’s set of child care packages for French citizens and foreigners attractive.
The Sablayan sisters said these packages are made to attract French nationals and naturalized citizens to bear more babies.
Mila’s three children, when they were in pre-school, have availed of the most extensive child-care support in Europe.
Foreigners who have worked longer years in France, and who became naturalized citizens, can even claim their social security and pension funds while they are abroad, explained Muriel Muller de Tannegg, a director at France’s National Pension Fund for Employees.
De Tannegg explained a check is sent to those who avail of this incentive.
***
“MORE people, more migrants,” writes the Commission on Population in the recently-released primer of the Fourth State of the Philippine Population Report.
“What is [interesting]… may not yet be so much the impact of the numbers going abroad to the totality of the population, but the underlying effect of population size and growth on migration decisions.”
As richer countries grapple with less people to sustain their growth, here comes workers from abundant Philippines with its own population juggling act. Where to place excess labor within and outside of a country that can’t keep pace with the entire population’s growing needs?
There’s France.
French ambassador to Manila Gerard Chesnel is now working with Philippine officials to finalize an agreement to send Filipino workers to help fill up France’s electronics, information technology, and health care industries.
While Philippine ambassador to Paris Jose Abeto Zaide said that negotiations are ongoing, France is romancing a specific group of Filipino workers: nurses.
“This is the population (nurses) we would like to welcome,” writes Chesnel in an official press release.
The Sablayan sisters aren’t nurses, but they’re proof of the romantic lure of the French employment opportunity.
Mila’s daughter Abegail, for example, works as a teacher in an elementary school in Paris.
She said from their income, they are still able to send home money monthly.
“We also carried a lot of heavy stuff going here because it was the seventh birthday of our niece.”
France and 26 other countries, says a Borderless Workforce Survey by the global consultancy firm Manpower Inc., need skills such as those of laborers, engineers, and production operators.
But will Chesnel’s boss, Sarkozy (who wants a firm EU-wide immigration policy that includes, among other items, jailing and deporting illegal immigrants), be as welcoming?
Garson has heard that storyline for many years: “What happens in reality is much more complex.”
Staying in Tours for six days, one can count the number of children in its the streets—only 17 of them, including those in baby carriages.
For Filipinos witnessing grease-smeared, grime-covered children stretching their arms for alms in almost every street of some cities in the metropolis, Tours is like stepping out of a pipe dream.
But a French receptionist of a student dormitory in Tours said they’re used to having few people.
Whether that will apply to the Sablayan community in Binangonan rests on how Europe will grapple with its demographic problem.
Until such time, as that continent continues to accept foreigners from countries like the Philippines, migration will alter the entire population structure of societies.
(Reporter’s note: French censuses do not also allow questions regarding ethnicity and religion, so it is difficult to determine the ethnic composition of France’s people, says French social security officials I’ve talked to) OFW Journalism Consortium, with the support of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in the Philippines