HONG KONG — They gather in California churches, in Hong Kong shopping malls, at prayer vigils in Bahrain and on hastily launched Facebook pages. Philippine overseas workers, cut off from home after a super-typhoon killed thousands, are coming together to
HONG KONG — They gather in California churches, in Hong Kong shopping malls, at prayer vigils in Bahrain and on hastily launched Facebook pages. Philippine overseas workers, cut off from home after a super-typhoon killed thousands, are coming together to pray, swap information and launch aid drives.
Above all, many of the more than 10.5 million Filipinos abroad — some 10 percent of the country’s population — are desperately dialing phone numbers that don’t answer in the typhoon zone, where aid is still only slowly trickling in and communications have been largely blown away.
Sending $21.4 billion back home last year alone, Filipino overseas workers are a major part of their country’s economy, with their remittances equaling nearly 10 percent of gross domestic product. Spread out over more than 200 countries, they work as nurses in Europe, sugar cane laborers in Malaysia, housemaids in Hong Kong and construction workers in the oil-rich Middle East.
For Filipinos abroad, the price of earning a living for family back home has always been separation, and for many, that has never been felt so keenly over the past week as they watched helplessly from afar as the typhoon ripped apart entire communities.
“Filipinos have an incredible resilience, an incredible ability to survive anywhere in the world,” said Ted Laguatan, a Philippines-born lawyer in San Francisco who specializes in immigration cases.
The Associated Press
and has written essays on the Filipino diaspora.
. “We are used to hardship, from oppression to natural disasters, and we understand suffering.”
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Johnson reported from Mumbai, India. AP writers Gillian Flaccus in Los Angeles, Reem Khalifa in Bahrain, Hussain al-Qatari in Kuwait City, Kuwait, and Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia contributed.
