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There are eight million Filipino overseas workers. These Filipinos
have left the country for jobs abroad, mostly because they cannot
find jobs in their country. Or, they earn a better wage from jobs
based abroad. For the last few years, the profile of the Filipino
overseas worker has been changing from comparatively low paying
domestic helpers to more skilled, higher-earning professionals and
workers. Filipino overseas workers are virtually everywhere in the
world where there are jobs to be found, including in such perilous
and expressly forbidden (by the government) countries like Iraq,
Nigeria and other places of conflict and danger.
Despite the facts, the enduring image of the
Filipino overseas worker is a domestic helper. They have been
numerous and remain so. Because they are based in households, they
relate closer to their employer compared to an office or
construction worker or a professional doctor, engineer, accountant.
Some of these relationships have led to unpleasant incidents, if not
crimes, but some have been warm and fulfilling.
In 1992, one relationship with a Hong Kong
interior designer with her domestic helper whose relatives she was
sending to Bible school, led to the creation of a caring and
committed development foundation based in Hong Kong that has since
done much work in the Visayas and now in Bohol and parts of
Mindanao.
The International Care Ministries, born in 1992
when Sharon Tin Tan Pastrey, went to Bacolod City from Hong Kong to
check on her three Bible Scholars. Her visit gave her a good look at
the conditions that the rural poor in this country live in. This
eye-opening, gut-wrenching visit led her to raise resources upon her
return to Hong Kong to help alleviate the poverty and hopelessness
she saw. She tapped into people who knew or had Filipino domestic
helpers and gathered enough to start an organized effort in the
Bacolod area. In time, International Care Ministries volunteers were
expatriates in Hong Kong who worked in major corporations, mostly in
financial services. They knew how to structure their commitment to
help through organization and fundraising efforts.
So, for the last l6 years now Hong Kong-based
International Care Ministries volunteers have been coming to the
Philippines on weekends, flying directly to the Visayas upon arrival
and spending time visiting and meeting the communities they are
helping. Last year they had a P80-M budget for their activities,
which range from feeding, day care centers, education, medical care
and housing. International Care Ministries has a staff of 200
including teachers, paramedics, and community workers. They
operate in Bacolod, the mountain barangays of Negros Occidental,
Koronadal, Bilaan, General Santos, Bohol and Cebu City. They have
tapped into Protestant Churches, Gawad Kalinga, Catholic charities
to help them with their delivery of services. International Care
Ministries has no denominational affiliation; it just chooses the
people and the organizations in place in their area of work for
partners. For example, they select slum pastors of whatever
denomination whose communities need help and train them in 3-day
seminars so they can work together and deliver services.
International Care Ministries is Hong Kong-based
in the sense that the strategic direction emanates from the group of
concerned Hong Kong residents, who raise the money, but spend the
time and meet the communities they serve here on their free
weekends. The rationale is that photographs of areas of poverty and
underdevelopment are not clear or real enough to those who have
never been there. The true face of need is only visible through
personal acquaintance. None of these visits or the work related to
them by the International Care Ministries has been extensively
publicized. They are conducted quietly with International Care
Ministries officials coming over, some with their children, to bring
help and hope to poverty-stricken communities in this country.
Officially, they foster education, encouragement and a better diet.
They treat 50 cases of tuberculosis a month, as well as cases of
malnutrition, scabies. They have l50 students in school and take on
some very dire cases of poverty and illness that with the necessary
assistance can recover and hope again. Their work with students is
meant to keep them in school by providing them one meal daily,
uniforms, school supplies and medical care. Many of us have not seen
the mountain barangays and slum areas where the International Care
Ministries does its work. But many Hong Kong residents have.
By this time with their larger scope of work,
the International Care Ministries could use some help from Filipinos
through other non-governmental agencies or through monetary
assistance for their projects. Executive Director Paquito Yaneza
heads the Manila office while Daphne Osena Kuok is the liaison
between Hong Kong and the Philippines. They are just two of the
growing numbers of Filipino volunteers who are seeing to it that the
International Care Ministries continues and expands its delivery of
hope to those who otherwise would be hard put to have it.
miongpin@yahoo.com
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