Filipino Migration challenge for mission

“DH” for the Hong Kong domestic helper... “Japayuki” for the Japanese entertainer... “Katas ng Saudi” for the fruits of Filipino men’s Saudi Arabia labor. These are some of the new vocabulary that has been invented in the Philippines to describe today’s “global” Filipino. Name any service–oriented job and a Filipino migrant worker is most probably engaged in it. Go to even a seemingly God-forsaken country and you will likely find a Filipino toiling the day away. From Africa to Oceania…Russia to Australia…Jordan to Saipan…America to Asia…these millions of Filipinos are actually part of a massive Filipino labor migration phenomenon.

Today, almost 10% of the Filipino population of more or less 80 million is outside the country and around 70% is affected by migration. [1] Moreover, Filipino migrant workers are in 193 out of the 224 UN-registered countries in the world. Such is the density, velocity, and multi-directionality of contemporary Filipino labor migration that it has captured the imagination of the international community which has started to call the Filipino migrants’ community a “diasporic” community. Today also, this Filipino labor migration is getting more and more concentrated in Asian destinations and experiencing intense feminization. From Hong Kong to Singapore…Saudi Arabia to Malaysia…Taiwan to Japan…Filipino women migrant workers are shifting from the West to the East and migrating in tens of thousands to work mainly in the service sector.

How do you talk about God in a context where isolation, alienation, and discrimination constitute the very fabric of one’s living conditions? How do you speak about the Divine in a situation where one’s faith is put to extreme test with the host country’s religious repression, e.g. Saudi Arabia, and migrant marginalization? How do you minister to a people whose faith is challenged by exposure and immersion not only to unbridled secularization and urbanization but also religious and cultural pluralism? Lastly, how do we recognize and deal with the renowned Pinoy religiosity which refuses to be stifled and is manifesting itself tenaciously in and across international borders? From the limitation of the practice of one’s religion in Islamic Middle Eastern countries… the chop-chop body of Japayuki Maricris Sioson…the execution of Flor Contemplacion…to the liturgical celebrations in the churches of Europe and the gyms as well as auditoriums of Singapore and Hong Kong… we have to admit that this phenomenon is creating a new missiological situation. If we truly listen to this complex situation that Filipinos, especially Filipino women find themselves in, I see two possible challenges to doing mission.

First, mission has to be contextual and liberational. In a situation where poverty and alienation rips the very fabric of people’s dignity even when one is outside the country, mission needs to be done with the primary consideration of the context and from the perspective of liberation. This means to say that empowerment is the ultimate goal. It should not just be pastoral in the sense that we give stop-gap solutions, e.g. counseling and legal assistance, which are not really long-term solutions in that they only take care of the effects and not the causes of the problem.

At home in the Philippines, there is a need to conscientize and strengthen not only the socio-economic and political institutions but also the people who make and break these institutions. This is very much needed among our government leaders who have become very vulnerable if not gullible and willing victims of the elitist economic globalization. This global phenomenon and the other factors which have driven millions of Filipinos to leave “home” e.g. misinformed culture of migration, must be responded to if one is to combat the roots or sources of the oppression. Outside the country, the Filipino migrant also cries out for justice and compassion. As such, preventive solutions are sought not only from the sending country and sending Church but also from the receiving country or receiving Church.

Mission, as it is in the biblical tradition, has inescapable social implications. It entails social justice. As the Synod document Justice in the World says: “Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of preaching the Gospel, that is, of the mission of the Church for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation.” So, if mission is to be rooted in the biblical tradition, especially Jesus’ mission, it must be contextually liberational.

I also believe that Filipino mission today has to be dialogical and translocal. Moreover, it must be inter-culturally and inter-religiously dialogical on a translocal level. The Filipino diaspora has put one out of every five Filipinos in a more multi-ethnic and multi-religious milieu. As such, it is imperative that migrant Filipinos who come from a predominantly Catholic Christian country and are usually rural in origin are equipped with the dispositions and skills needed to live in societies marked by cultural and religious pluralism. It is also important that the sending Church (the Philippine Church) works with the receiving Church qualitatively and continuously. The Philippine Church, for instance, tries to minister to migrant domestic helpers or DHs by giving a pre-departure orientation seminar or PDOS. In Hong Kong where most of the DHs go, the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong has created the Diocesan Pastoral Center for Filipinos in recognition of the tremendous need for apostolate for the Filipina DHs. But I believe that these are not enough. There not only has to be continuous and critical international collaboration between Churches regardless of denomination. The Churches should also actively seek and fight for the transformation of the very structures that contribute to the oppression and migration of migrant Filipinos.

The Church’s or the Community of the People of God’s compassionate and healing presence is also urgent for the uprooted people and diasporic communities of Filipino migrants. Thus is needed not only in helping them deal with their experiences of injustice but also in how to cope with the oppressive situation and witness to their faith amidst different cultures and religions. For one, Filipino migrants experience not only cultural alienation but also religious alienation even within their own religious communities. The Hong Kong Catholic Church, for example, says that as they appreciate the contribution of the Filipinas to the Church of Hong Kong, there are difficulties in establishing a Church that is both Filipino and Chinese. They identify what is at the heart of the problem when they say: “We are aware that we still need to inculcate among our Chinese people that the Church is universal and that two cultures can proclaim the same faith in the same Church, in different ways and languages…and [that] the Diocese of Hong Kong would like to see the Chinese and the Filipinos join one another at Mass and gatherings, as equals and as friends.”[2]

Migration, whether forced or voluntary and exacerbated by globalization, I believe, is the new context and future of mission. In as much as migration ultimately has negative repercussions, it may be considered as an inevitable phenomenon. Increased poverty and mobility brought by globalization makes this all the more inescapable. The challenge then is for us to is to creatively draw from this situation since Filipino migrants are also missionaries themselves. In most of the 193 countries where they are present, the church is the principal site of celebration of Pinoy identity and community making migrancy a very potent source of missionary activity by the Filipinos today.

Filipino migrants are perceived by a number of their receiving communities to be creating some kind of ecclesiogenesis. They, especially Filipino women migrants, have been known not only to be breathing new life into their host countries’ faith communities but also forging a new way of being church. In Europe or countries of the North, they bring a new dynamism to churches ravaged by secularism. In Hong Kong and Singapore, temporal gyms and auditoriums are transformed once a week into homes of prayer for the Filipina pilgrim workers. And this hunger for and witness to the faith is not only about going to Mass either. For example, aside from the regular prayer meeting with their numerous faith groups, the Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong even attend Theology classes and do outreach work during their one and only off-day which they usually arrange to be on a Sunday. This new way of being church and as such a new way of doing mission finds its testament in the very statement of the Hong Kong Church:

Our churches are very alive on Sundays because of their presence. The Filipinos have brought their religiosity and faith to the Church of Hong Kong – they enhance the faith of our local people with their presence, witnessing hospitality, joy, and love for music. The diocese is truly blessed in many ways because of the Filipinos, and their dynamism will keep alive the faith in the territory…In short, the Filipinos are to be called missionaries first before they are labeled as domestic helpers (emphasis mine). [3]

At the heart of the biblical tradition and Jesus’ missionary vision is the gift of a “home” – a place and space where justice is done and love and respect unites everyone. Today, poverty worsened by economic globalization and migration are redefining all our notions of “home” and challenging our very understanding and approach to mission. The call therefore, especially in the context of Filipino migration, is to engage in a mission that brings about contextual borderless liberation – one that is in dialogue with other cultures and religions. Mission in the face of globalization should be a mission beyond inculturation but a mission of interculturation – one that respects or embraces differences, especially in cultures and religions, and enables people to live in harmony with diversity. It is only when mission is both contextually liberational and dialogically translocal that mission can truly respond to the cry of the Filipino in general and the Filipina in particular.

The cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have also seen how the Egyptians are oppressing them; so come now, let me send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring my people, the Israelites out of Egypt (Exodus 3: 9-10)<WM

[1] Latest statistics even peg the Filipino diaspora to as high as 12%. The Philippines has also displaced Mexico as the world’s labor exporter par excellence.

[2] See “Filipino Migrant Workers in Hong Kong,” Asian Migrant Vol. 7, No. 1 (January-March 1994): 7.

[3] Ibid., 6-7.

Copyright©2003 World Mission Magazine

MIGRATING

There are always in each of us these two: the one who stays, the one who goes away…

- Eleanor Wilner -

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Hidden Agenda?

by Sonny Evangelista

THE PLIGHT OF OVERSEAS FILIPINO WORKERS – STARK VIEW FROM HOME

After working over ten years in different Middle East countries, paying regularly his membership fees to the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), including his Medicare (medical insurance), Gaddy Bautista, 35, a father of three, finds no consolation from the government agency which he thought could help him in his dilemma.

He returned from Kuwait to the Philippines last January 2003 due to the war. From the Episcopal Commission for Migrants and Itinerant (ECMI) he learned that as a member he could avail of some financial assistance from OWWA. But when he approached the agency, he was told that the social programs were indefinitely suspended. Reason: "it is further being studied."

For life?

Bautista and many other overseas Filipino workers (OFWs - numbering about 3 million around the world) have been paying their OWWA fees of US $ 25, an imposed requirement before leaving the country. This amount is paid for every contract of a maximum of two
years. (When the OWWA was created in the 1970s, at the height of the government's labor-export program, this membership was “for life” but was subsequently changed, obviously to increase OWWA assets.) As a member, you are entitled to apply for livelihood loans, scholarships, burial assistance, loans for displaced workers, among others. "He is entitled to the re-entry loan as well as for financial assistance," says a staff member of ECMI. But all these are presently not available for him or for other workers or their families. He is not even able to benefit from his Medicare. Bautista's two-year old child was born with a clubfoot and was operated on. To avoid delay for the operation, he advanced the money for the medical and hospital bills, in the hope that OWWA would refund them soonest. But this “benefit” has also been suspended. All his savings he poured into his daughter's operation.

In a void

Now he stands in a void. He even has to ask ECMI for assistance to acquire the orthopedic shoes for his daughter. Through ECMI, he was able to talk to the OWWA Administrator, Vergilio Angelo, who was of no help. Instead, Angelo referred him to a recruiting agency where he could apply. But the agency turned him down, being "over age" for any work abroad. The OWWA was created to promote the welfare of the OFWs and their families. Its existence is through the fees collected from the workers and has assets amounting to US $58 million, an amount exceeding its expenses. Further more, it collects US 120 million from the workers' medical fees. It is independent and self-reliant and does not depend on the annual government budget. Last September, it issued an Omnibus Policy, which, according to Administrator Angelo, is "the heart and soul of the Agency. to properly serve the needs of the overseas Filipino workers." It presents a long list of benefits and service for its members. But all these are merely on paper.

Where’s the money?

"Where are the funds from the membership fees?" asks Perlita de la Cruz, 32. Her husband worked as a fisherman for a Taiwanese company in 1990 until he got into an accident while at work. The physicians embedded metal bars in his broken leg. Because he is no longer capable to properly work, he received partial disability assistance from the Social Security Service. More than ten years have passed and the surgeons advised her husband to have the bars removed. From a non-government organization, de la Cruz learned, for the first time, that since her husband was an OWWA member, he could avail of medical assistance. After applying for it, she learned last October that the OWWA Board of Trustees has suspended all medical and burial assistance to former OFWs and their families. She learned that only the active workers and their families could avail of the benefits. For her and Bautista, they are practically non-existent for OWWA, until further notice.

New investors?

A few months earlier, there was a move to transfer the workers' Medicare funds to a larger pool, together with the government employees' health funds. This raised questions among the workers and non-government agencies concerned with OFWs, including ECMI. The OWWA medical funds are from the OFWs and not from government employees, they say, why put these funds together? Is there a hidden agenda behind this? Is it possible that these funds may be used for next year's presidential campaign funds? Because of their loud protests, the government's move was discontinued - at least for now. With the present suspension of OWWA's benefits and services, again the workers face another questionable situation. Recently the Central Bank of the Philippines credited the overseas Filipino workers for having remitted US $ 5.6 billion to the country during the first nine months of this year. This is 5.1 percent more then that of last year for the same period. This, despite the fact that there has been a decrease by 5.6 percent in the number of OFWs deployed this year. Remittances are expected to reach six percent more compared to that of last year's. These funds are vital to the country's international reserves, without which the country's economy will further sink. On one hand, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo praises the Filipinos working abroad, risking life and limb, calling them the "new investors", an addition to the previous title of "new heroes". But in reality, Bautista, dela Cruz's husband and many other OFWs hardly benefit from these. You cannot pay the hospital bills with fluttering words.<WM

Overseas Filipino Workers