Meet our First Featured OFW
This is the first true-to-life story I am sharing here. I will be featuring some more of this kind as I gather more materials from around the world. People I will write about are not famous – only brave Filipinos who dared to make a life outside their country and emerge victorious and successful. This is the first one of them….
This is the story of a feisty Filipina, who has made something out of her life here in the UK. It is not something grand but at least, she is getting by and doing better than how she would have had if she stayed put in the Philippines. Not that I encourage leaving one’s own family and country for the sake of doing it. This is all about admiring this lady for her guts to dream big and follow that dream wherever it led her – against all odds, by the way.
Our story starts in a very poor province in the Philippines. Let us call her Tinay – a forty something Filipina living in the UK today with her lovely daughter and a loving, doting British partner. I met her through my husband, who met her in one of the hospitals he used to service as a Mobile Radiographer. Tinay would bring home-cooked Filipino food to work and share them with her colleagues, my husband included. That is how they became friends. Eventually, she would invite my husband whenever she hosts little BBQ parties in her garden.
She is naturally open, friendly and welcoming of her kababayan. In fact, I consider her my first friend here in England. I was just so taken by her enigmatic and feisty personality that I blogged about her right after that June night meeting in one of her BBQs.
Tinay’s life is so colored, exciting and full of twists that it is proving difficult for me to start doing it justice in writing. I will try anyway and beg for your forgiveness where I will fail.
It was in the 70’s, when she was just a Grade V elementary school pupil, that she was sent by her mother to borrow a sack of rice from one of her uncles (her mother’s brother), two villages away from their house. They had nothing more to cook for supper that day.
She walked on dirt roads with no slippers under the blazing sun for hours. When she got to her uncle’s house, she was not even offered a glass of water to drink. Worse, she went home empty-handed as the uncle refused to lend them even just half a sack of rice.
It was one of the saddest days of her life – she felt so sorry for herself and her family. To her young mind, that rejection was difficult to accept. When she arrived and told her mother of her unsuccessful errand, she saw her mother turn away to cry in silence. It must be painful to be turned down by one’s own brother at such a time of dire need. Tinay felt her mother’s pain and her heart bled just seeing her cry in silence.
Young as she was, she decided to do something about their life – to get out of poverty and give her family a better future. From where she was then, it was a tall order – still to graduate from Elementary School, with no hope of ever getting to university. But she believed.
Fast forward to the early 80’s, Tinay was studying Midwifery in Manila. Just to support her schooling, she stayed with her uncle (another brother of her mother’s), and helped in the house in exchange for her board and lodging. She recalls how her hands would bleed from washing clothes by hand, and how she balanced school work and being a maid in her uncle’s house. Her cousins treated her more like a maid than a relative. Tinay still remembers how one of her own cousins would not even look at her – like, she was not at all worthy of a glance.
One sunshiny part of her life was that, her Auntie – her mother’s sister, was kind enough to help Tinay’s older sister to join her in Jordan. At that time, her Auntie was working as a domestic helper in one of the royal households in Jordan. Her employer was the cousin of the ruling monarch at that time. The elder sister joined their Auntie as a domestic helper as well. The Auntie supported her schooling, while she stayed at her uncle’s house for board and lodging in exchange for her service.
Then, her kind Auntie discovered that she was treated more like a maid than a niece. She also learned that the uncle did not give the money she sent to Tinay the first semester of her first year (which he gave eventually when Tinay was about to leave his house). The Auntie decided to take her from that house and put her up in a boarding house.
She finished Midwifery with the support of her fairy godmother (her Auntie) and her sister. Right after graduation, not even able to practice her profession for lack of job openings in the Philippines, she left for Jordan to be a nanny in the same household where her Auntie worked.
After a few years of being a Nanny, this feisty, tiny waif got a job as a hospital assistant in that country – even assisting in open heart bypass surgeries! Not bad for a Midwifery graduate, I must say. All in all, she stayed in Jordan for 10 years.
To be continued…
Wonderful true to life story of a hardworking Filipina abroad. There are so many like her. God bless them all for all their sacrifices for their country and loved ones. Thanks for the post. God bless. BTW, I already linked you with my blog.
Glad to hear beautiful stories of our fellow women abroad.
Hi there, I found you through Chris’s blog, I am a Filipina too and based from Baguio City, Philippines.
How are you doing?:)
That was a terribly sad experience. That was her motivation to strive hard and attain her goal…I look forward to the rest of Tinay’s story..and by the way, magaling kang sumulat,,,,wala typo and grammatical error…
Keep posting.
Mel, thanks for dropping by and for that ever precious link. Until now, i haven’t figured out how to link others to this particular blog. i think i should consider buying my own domain for this one, now.
Yvie, thanks also for your time in dropping by. Nice to have you around here as well. My hubby is from Benguet/Baguio also, though he is not a native there. Hope to have you around more often.
Jena Isle, what can I say? you are always dropping by. thanks a lot, really. thanks for your appreciation. do follow Tinay’s story as it is interesting talaga.
[…] 30, 2008 by modernmariaclara You might want to read previous parts of the story first: Part I, Part II, Part […]
I grew up in Kuwait and I know first hand how Pinays are treated there. I really like the blog and hope that it reaches out to more people!
Hi to all the OFW’s who visit this blog, I’d like to invite you to join the new social network of the Overseas Filipino Workers at http://www.ofwfriends.com.
See you there!