Losing Filipinos Physically, Losing Filipinos Eternally

Losing Filipinos Physically, Losing Filipinos Eternally

A person not satisfied with something would continue to search the world for the perfect substitute that would give him or her the satisfaction he or she could not find with what he or she initially had. A man not satisfied with his mobile phone equipped with a 1.3-megapixel camera would unceasingly dream for another phone that has a 2-megapixel camera, with more space for messages and phonebook entries. A woman not satisfied with the shoes she owns would save up so she could buy more and more shoes. An employee not satisfied with his or her salary would try to look for another job that would give him or her a satisfying salary. A citizen not satisfied with his or her life in the country where he or she is in would move to another country to find satisfaction.

In the Philippines, unsatisfied citizens like the one mentioned above are not uncommon. They are like the undisciplined drivers of the country - you encounter them everywhere you go. College graduate from small provinces becoming domestic helpers in Kuwait, engineers turning into nannies in America, and doctors becoming nurses in the United Kingdom are some of those Filipinos who move to other countries because they are not satisfied here. According to Maruja M.B. Asis of the Scalabrini Migration Center-Philippines in her article, "The Philippines' Culture of Migration" on January 2006, "As of December 2004, an estimated 8.1 million Filipinos - nearly 10 percent of the country's 85 million people - were working and/or residing in close to 200 countries and territories."

However, we cannot blame those Filipinos. Describing life here in the Philippines as hard is an understatement. Almost every month, we discover controversies and anomalies in the administration. People power revolutions and rallies are constantly being held all around the country. The prices of goods and services also continue to rise but the minimum wage doesn't. Most of the Filipinos clearly have no choice but to do the not-so-easy-but-financially-rewarding alternative - forget their diplomas and have jobs abroad that they never intended to have. For them, nothing really is wrong with doing so because not only can these Filipinos help themselves, but they can also help their families and their country financially. On the same article by Asis, one of her data showed that the remittances brought by these Filipinos on 2004 reached US$8.5 billion. Unfortunately, their help usually ends on the financial part.

The value of close family ties has always been important to the Filipinos. In a family, children are expected to grow up with their parents - the father "the provider", while the mother "the light of the home". Parents are supposed to be the ones who would teach their kids proper manners and traditional religious practices. They have destined roles to play as parents. But with the growth of labor migration, these roles and functions are slowly being erased because one of them or both of them would have to leave their young children. This is something negative first, because this would mean that some children would grow up not knowing exactly the traditional Filipino values and would depend on the irresponsible media for identity, and second, this would mean that Filipinos are also starting to erase their history and culture.

According to my friend, Kia Alli, a junior majoring in Psychology, children look up to their parents as they grow up - imitating their parents'