Christmas is family

a story of our overseas workers



Christmas is another holiday when families try to come back and see their relatives here.

Many just come from Manila but all too many travel from overseas, since well paying jobs are hard to find here, and so one or two persons will go overseas and then send money home for school fees and a decent house etc. Many are women working as caregivers or nurses (here, they advertise nursing school as a way to get such overseas jobs: IF your marks are high, it is a ticket to the US/Canada/Australia/UK, but even if your marks are lower, it means working as a nurse in the Middle East, or as a caregiver for either children or the elderly, all over the world, including affluent Asian countries like Hong Kong and Korea.

and then there are jobs in factories: Korean language schools for example, so you can work there in factories (at a lower wage than locals want to work).

Name a country, and you will find Filipinos there.

Because of lack of good paying jobs, most of our family is overseas working, but luckily most are in the UK/Canada/USA where they can bring their children with them and get citizenship. In the Middle East, where there are more than 1 million OFW's, that is not always possible, and the work is often short term contracts, although some stay for years on repeated contracts, they rarely can become citizens there.

Lolo as a doctor could immigrate, and arranged for much of his family to work in the USA after they got their MD or RN.

But his son returned to the Philippines to run the farm and rice business here, and kept his Filipino citizenship and married a local lady.

Now their daughter is in Canada in an international High school... her first year there (tenth grade), on a full scholarship, and alas very very homesick.

So her mom will fly out tomorrow to stay with her at a friends house near her school.

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this is one reason I am aghast at the threat of being too strict with immigration laws and sending home those who worked for years in the USA albeit illegally. For as long as I can remember, illegal immigration was accepted by everyone, and winked at, and now they are clamping down on law abiding citizens?