Pack up and go July 26, 2006

IT WAS a plaintive cry from the bowels of a desperate land and the pit of a desperate heart. "Where have all the OFWs' [overseas Filipino workers'] billions in remittances gone?" That was the cry that issued from the mouth of Fr. Agustin Advincula, who runs the Church of the Miraculous Medal in Beirut, where thousands of tired, frightened and desperate Filipino domestic helpers in Lebanon have sought shelter from Israeli bombs.

It struck a painful contrast, the way other countries were sending ships and other modes of (quick) transport to pluck their nationals out of harm's way and the way the Philippine government was telling its overseas workers to "hitch a ride" to save themselves. The image that flashed in my mind with that advice was the kind of public transport in our provinces in the south, called "habal-habal," that ferries as many as a dozen people.The contraption is just a motorcycle that has a couple of wooden boards strapped behind the driver where passengers sit on both sides, balancing themselves. Sometimes it takes in more than a dozen passengers, the desperate finding miniscule spaces left in the thing to plant foot or toe on to it. It's the perfect image of the Filipino's plight, the balancingact he has to do to survive. Unfortunately there are no habal-habal in Lebanon.

Later the person-occupying-Malacañang-who-likes-to-call-herself-president would tell the OFWs to "just pack up and go." Nobody seems to have told her that unlike the folk at the foot of Mayon Volcano, no one is waiting to see if a bomb would fall nearby before they leave. Certainly, no one is waiting for their employers to give them their wages first before they leave; many have been abandoned by their employers right at their doorstep, "bahala ka na sa buhay mo" -- each (wo)man to (her)himself. All of them would like nothing better than to go, never mind pack up.

Question is: How?

Which brings us back to Father Advincula's plaintive and thundering question: Where have all the OFW millions gone? Advincula wasn't being accusatory when he asked that, as the reports clarified, but his question itself remains a finger pointing at the crooks in furious indictment.

There are many answers to that question, but one of them is the transfer of funds of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (Owwa) to the government's PhilHealth Insurance Corp. some years ago. The mandate of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, as its name suggests, is to give welfare assistance to OFWs and their families. But on Nov. 24, 2002, PhilHealth president Francisco Duque proposed another use for its funds. He wrote a memo to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo saying that the diversion of Owwa Medicare funds to PhilHealth would bear significantly on the 2004 elections. Arroyo believed him and issued Executive Order 182, transferring the Medicare Funds of the Medical Functions of Owwa amounting to P530,382,446 to PhilHealth.

The transfer was approved by the labor department, with the exception of Corazon P. Carsola, whom the OFWs may truly thank even if she fought for a lost cause. She refused to sign, objecting to the use of medical funds badly needed by the OFWs for patent electoral purposes. The very design of the new PhilHealth card proclaimed it to be so: It metamorphosed from a simple one bearing the picture of the beneficiary to one showing Arroyo cradling an infant. The infant was not its beneficiary.

Subsequently, Labor Secretary Patricia Santo Tomas declared that OFWs who had incurred medical expenses would no longer be reimbursed by Owwa.

The ironic note here is that Arroyo did not win even with that ploy. She still needed to call up Garci no less than 15 times to do so -- if one may call the result winning.

Where did the OFW millions go? That was one of its destinations. The others, well, as Franklin Drilon, a former labor secretary, points out, the Owwa has cash reserves amounting to a mind-boggling P7.6 billion. Why Arroyo should choose to allocate only P150 million to rescue the Filipinos in Lebanon from dire straits, only she can say. It is so much less than the amount she took from the Owwa, funds meant to keep OFWs alive and healthy, just so she could remain politically alive, never mind healthy, or indeed just so she could rescue herself from her desperate plight. Which didn't work anyway; she still needed the sea-unworthy vessel MV Garci to get her out of her Hezbollah.

The nationals of other countries who were promptly evacuated by their governments were not the lifeblood of their country. They were people whose jobs, bureaucratic or civilian, had simply brought them there. Yet, if you saw the footage in BBC and CNN, there they were at the docks, filing out without hurry, children and elderly in tow, some with pretty heavy luggage, climbing up the stairs in waiting ships. This was no Dunkirk. Their governments were giving them this service for no other reason than that they were citizens, their governments owed it to them for being so.
By contrast, the Filipinos who could not be evacuated by their government,who were being told to hitch a ride by the Department of Foreign Affairs and just pack up and go by the person-occupying-Malacañang-who-likes-to-call-herself-president were the lifeblood of their country. They were the maids, drivers and canal diggers whose blood, sweat and tears were keeping their country alive and its crooks fat. Their government was scrimping on them for a reason other than that they were cannon fodder. There were more of them back home eager to brave war, famine and natural and human disasters for a crack at living. A crack at living by dying, the ultimate balancing act.

Just pack up and go? It's very good advice, but wrong adviser and wrong advisee. Arroyo shouldn't be telling that to the Filipinos in Lebanon. The Filipinos in Lebanon should be telling that to her.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=11742