Filipino diaspora: Our leaders’ greatest sin
I’m happy that you’re home, papa,” said my 6-year-old son when I arrived home and started playing with him last Friday. I left the house early and came home in the evening that day because it was a particularly busy work day for me. As a result, I broke my daily routine of bringing him to school and picking him up after. His words stung because I was about to explain to him that I would be away on an overseas trip for more than a week.
Last Monday, I left for Europe to attend a lawyers’ seminar. During my bachelor days, I always looked forward to trips abroad, whether for work or vacation. But family transforms us in so many ways. Our priorities and desires change. Foreign trips—even with all the excitement of new sights, fresh experiences, and delightful food—no longer hold the same allure as before, if taken without family. My wife, who works in the province and who gets to join me and our son in the city only during the weekends, has consistently complained of the constant loneliness she feels being away from her family for most of the week. I get a taste of the emotional ache that she speaks about whenever I’m away on trips.
The first leg of my flight brought me to Dubai in the Middle East, as a stopover. More than half of my co-passengers were overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) who most likely left behind children and spouses. Just before we took off, I overheard a mother seated behind me making a last-minute phone call giving instructions and bidding goodbye to her children, assuring them that she would call them every day. It was heartrending to hear the mother uttering words of love to her children and consoling them.
The separation my wife and I experienced is way nothing compared to the long stretches of family disconnection that our OFWs endure. Millions of our fellow Filipinos are forced to work overseas, leaving their children and spouses at home. They don’t see their families for years, and in worse cases, for more than a decade. Their children grow up deprived of the emotional support and connection with their parents who, under normal circumstances, should be constantly by their side. The societal impact of a large swath of our people who become adults denied the presence, guidance, and sense of security that can only come from a complete set of family, cannot be trivial. It represents a major restructuring of the family as the crucial nucleus of our communities.
Our son is a hyperactive little kid, who’s like a sponge absorbing and mimicking his parents’ words and actions. And just like any child of his age, he tests the limits of what he’s allowed to do, taxing our patience oftentimes. Children are shaped by this constant absorption from and pushing of boundaries against their parents who are the two persons in this world with the biggest concern for their well-being. In addition to bringing them into this world, molding our children into the future human beings that we want them to become, are the closest that we, their parents, can get to being gods. We shape the personalities of our children because we are deities in their eyes. Children who grow up deprived of the presence of one or both parents are denied the ministrations of the indispensable pair of gods who should be jointly shaping their lives.
Many of us may think that the biggest harm caused by the bad leaders that we have are those that we see—unreliable public services, defective infrastructure, and the like. But those are merely the tip of the iceberg or surface damages that our country suffers from because of the kind of people who crowd our corridors of power. The most harmful consequences of having bad leaders, however, are the diaspora of millions of our people and the deprivation of parental models forced upon the children they leave behind. Our country has been bleeding profusely with people so to speak, and the mass exodus that’s going on is wreaking havoc on the kind of citizens that will define our future. This is the unfathomable damage, lurking beneath the surface, that’s redefining our society.
The morning after I arrived in the Netherlands, I went down to the hotel restaurant to have breakfast. A buffet with a variety of delectable meat, cheese, bread, fruits, and milk byproducts greeted me. Eating by my lonesome, I longed for a bangsilog breakfast with my wife and son.
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