OFWs off to Jordan, with dreams and anxiety

OFWs off to Jordan, with dreams and anxiety

AMMAN, JORDAN – “So this is a country in the desert but why is it so cold here?” Jeany Munoz said out loud, menacingly sarcastic, without meeting Alice’s eyes.

It was not only cold, it was actually freezing, so that Jeany stood up from the steel seat at the arrival area of the international airport and walked back and forth, back and forth. Something else could not make her sit still aside from the cold. "Where is my employer? Why has he not come yet? Who is going to take these mangoes?" She must have been talking to herself only and she asked nobody in particular as she kept muttering these questions.

A staff from the recruitment agency told Jeany their link in Amman would come to pick up the basket of ripe mangoes she had hand-carried from Manila before her employer would come to fetch her.

Alice Camello was also cold, she slumped and curled herself on one of the few cold seats at the arrival area of the Queen Alia International airport. She actually felt embarrassed since it was she who told Jeany that desert cities like Amman are very warm, especially at this time.

She mistakenly thought Amman would be like Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates where she stayed for five years in the 90s. Alice wore a short-sleeved knitted shirt over her denim pants. Alice never thought that the spring winds wafted from the Wadi Qelt and Negev desert by twilight at springtime can still be freezing.

They had been waiting for more than two hours now since they arrived from Abu Dhabi, and still nobody had come to pick them up.

A few hours ago, their greatest fears was that they would have abusive employers and who could rape them and who they would kill in self-defense. Now they are most afraid no one would claim them and they would have to be sent home in the next plane back to the Philippines.

Jeany and Alice had arrived from a long trip from Manila. For Jeany, it is her first ever from home. The first leg of the flight brought them to Abu Dhabi for a 17-hour stop-over.

At an airport hotel in Abu Dhabi where they were billeted overnight, Jeany met Alice, and two others, Ruth Dalanon and Vanessa Napat-a, who like her, were destined for Amman.

As they shared supper of grilled chicken served in a bed of vegetables and an assortment of fruits for dessert, they found out they also share the same future: they would work as domestic helpers, seven days a week, with a single day off every month, with a salary of US$150, for two years. Then, they could come home and visit by 2006.

The first four months, they would not be able to claim their salaries, because these will all go to the recruitment agency. That was the arrangement under a fly-now –pay-later plan.

As this Filipina quartet in Amman began their house-based overseas work, the International Labor Organization (ILO) meets this June to address the human rights of about 86 million migrant workers, 52 million of whom are, like them, in a developing country. The ILO stressed that there is still no international agreements to regulate migration or protect immigrants.

The Philippines, a long-time global exporter of human labor, has a nine-year-old Migrant Workers Act. Signed on June 7, 1995 by then-President Fidel Ramos Pepublic Act 8042 is supposed to help protect the rights of Filipino overseas workers. But still, notwithstanding the law, several stories of woe, abuse, insanity and death continue to abound and could fill anthologies, prompting advocates of the welfare of OFWs to urge for amendments inorder to plug loopholes.
As the ILO mulled on the rights of migrant workers worldwide, it poses a survey showing that there is “a shortfall in protection for migrant workers, particularly in middle-income developing countries, (like Jordan)” which together see 46 percent of global migration.

Another hour of waiting and Alice kept her cool. In a few minutes, someone came to pick up the mangoes and left Jeany a call card, assuring her that the young couple who hired her would be here soon. Soon, Jeany’s name was indeed called out. Alice would be the last to be taken and she had a difficult time because the guy who got her doesn’t speak a single English word, and they had to rely on hand signals to communicate.

Hours ago, back at the Abu Dhabi airport hotel, Alice had told her acquaintances she would not have wanted to work again away from home since she has just gotten a degree in accounting but her daughter, a love child she begot a year after her stint in Abu Dhabi, was turning four and soon would have to get to school.

Ruth, an orphan, feels she’s been steeled by her life as on-call 24-hours-a-day servant in her aunt’s house and bakery. She sent herself to school for a degree in economics. The star shone indeed on Ruth that first night in Amman. Her employers came, a couple with a toddler, one of her two wards, in tow.

Jeany left Mindanao without finishing her course in computer technology in Pagadian City. But she doesn’t miss school but she would miss the Heartbreak Band, for which she plays the percussion, and with whom she had gone on gigs in Ipil, Margosatubig and Kabasalan, in Zamboanga de Sibugay.

But her parents lost everything in a fishing business that flopped. So she borrowed some money from her best friend’s mother and left for Isulan, Sultan Kudarat, a day’s bus trip down South, where she heard they can send a recruit to Jordan within a month’s time. It took less than that for her to get the call for Manila.

Jeany and Vanessa left the Philippines with not much orientation from their recruiters. Ruth and Alice were luckier as they have a relative working with the recruitment agency.

Both were also given new mobile phones with an international connection that would enable them to send text messages (SMS) to their kin in the Philippines.

But among themselves, at the airport and in the plane, they generously swapped tips and lessons. To lock the doors of their sleeping quarters, to make sure they are not alone with males in the households, to please the woman and never to make her jealous. To take care of the master’s suit and the woman’s silk dresses. To learn how to handle the washing machines and the cooking range. To pamper their wards, sing them Filipino lullabyes.

Among the Middle Eastern nations, Jordan still pays the lowest rates for domestic helpers. The pay in United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, US$1,000; Saudi Arabia is US$800.00; Israel, US$500; and even Lebanon, $250. But it is also much easier to get to Jordan.

“I worry about my two kids who are with my mother-in-law. She’s drinks,” Vanessa said. She got married halfway through her freshman year with a classmate. Both of them stopped going to school.

Her husband works in a construction firm building classrooms and condominiums in the mountain city while she helps her mother-in-law tend a vegetable garden growing asparagus, strawberries and chayote. She said she doesn’t want to tend vegetables forever so she thought of coming over, save a lot of money and go home and tend a small convenience store in the neighborhood.

The stories of this foursome is typical of the Filipino migrant worker early in this century – female, young and a bit educated. Migrants from the Visayas and Mindanao, where Ruth, Alice and Jeany came from, are steadily being feminized, than the rest of the country.

Despite pronouncements of the brain drain, most of the migrants, 58 per cent, continue to be in the service sector, like domestic helperss, and it is also this sector that sends back most of the dollar remittances to the Philippines.

Before the waiting game in the freezing Joradan weather, Jeany had giggled hard when,reading through Khalig Times, she saw a member of the Back Street Boys with his twin sisters. Ruth and Vanessa were nonchalant, saying they prefer Westlife and N’ Sync. But they asked with so much worry in their voices: Would our employers let us listen to this kind of music? Would they allow us to watch TV? Would they allow us to use our mobile phones to send text messages home? Would we survive and send money home? Could we ever head home from here?