Filtered By: Topstories
News

Philippine News: The price of remittances


Perhaps the major accomplishment of the current Philippine government is the impressive improvement of the economy which has seen the peso increase in value from 54 to 1 under the previous government to the current 45 pesos to 1 dollar, requiring the government to expend less of its resources to pay off its foreign debt, and leaving more money for infrastructure improvements. By all accounts, this improvement in the economy is owed chiefly to the $15-B in remittances that overseas Filipino workers (OFW) annually send back to the Philippines. But what is the price that OFWs have to pay for these Philippine economy-saving remittances? Two reports about the Philippines, which appeared this past week in the mainstream media, provide us with the answer. Youtube (www.youtube.com) posted on July 26 video clips from a U.S. House hearing where two witnesses testified about the brutal conditions that 51 Filipino workers were subjected to in Baghdad while working on the $600-M U.S. Embassy construction there. An American medical technician, Roy Mayberry, was hired by the First Kuwaiti Company to work as an emergency medic. On the first day he reported to the company in Kuwait, he was brought to a room with 51 Filipinos who told him they were bound for Dubai to work in hotels there. They showed their plane tickets to him which showed Dubai as their destination. After they boarded the plane and the pilot announced that next stop was Baghdad, “all you know what broke loose on the plane", Mayberry reported, as the Pinoys screamed and demanded to be returned back. They returned to their seats only after security officials pointed their MP-5 submachine guns at the men and ordered them to do so. “I believe these men were kidnapped by the First Kuwaiti Company to work on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad," Mayberry told the congressional committee. These men could do nothing, he said, but accept their fate. Their passports had been taken away from them in Kuwait. Their fate was to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, with only short breaks in between. They could complain only on pain of being verbally and physically abused, or fined with huge wage deductions. “They had no IDs, no passports, and were being smuggled past U.S. security forces," Mayberry said. He also testified that while he had his own trailer at the construction site, the Filipinos were packed 20 to 30 people in one trailer. This wholesale kidnapping of Filipinos occurred a year ago but was only revealed to the world during the July 26 congressional hearing. When pressed about this disclosure, a First Kuwaiti Company spokesman denied that it had any Filipino employees. The second report on Filipinos came on August 8 when Dateline NBC devoted a full hour on prime time to the dramatic rescue of Lannie Ejercito, a 22-year old Filipina “sex slave" in Malaysia. NBC Dateline host Ann Curry reported that the girl, “just one among hundreds of thousands of girls who are poor, helpless and naïve preyed on by human traffickers" had one thing going for her. She had an aunt, Ravina, who is married to “Troop" Edmonds, a retired former U.S. Marine officer living in Oregon. On October 5, 2006, they receive a panicked call from overseas. “Get me out of here" was the anguished plea. The call came from Ravina’s niece, Lannie, whom they had financed through nursing school. When she failed the national nursing exam, she pursued her career as a singer and was eventually contracted to sing in Malaysia. But singing was not on her Malaysian employer’s mind who confiscated Lannie’s passport and forced her to sign an eight-year contract that required her to work until she paid back the $80,000 which her employer said he had paid for her. It would be work, not as a singer, but as a prostitute. Ravina told her husband to go to Malaysia and rescue Lannie and not to come back without her. With that assignment, Troop recruited a buddy who was a retired FBI agent and, together with a Dateline NBC film crew, flew to Lannie’s hometown of Cebu to obtain clues on Lannie’s whereabouts. After interviewing a Pinay who had recruited Lannie, the Americans and the TV crew went to Kuala Lumpur. With clever sleuthing and with the reluctant aid of the local police, they managed to safely rescue Lannie. There were 15 other Filipino “sex slaves" similarly living in “debt bondage" with Lannie in an apartment, Lannie reported, but the American pair decided that it would be too risky to stay in Malaysia and attempt to rescue them as well. They quickly departed Malaysia and safely returned Lannie to her parents in Cebu. At the end of the Dateline NBC program, I cried as I did when I watched Mayberry’s report about the Filipinos in Baghdad. Is the price of huge remittances from Filipinos abroad worth the pain and suffering many have to endure? - Philippine News

LOADING CONTENT