A Major rant
Last Monday, Daz and I chance upon a really interesting documentary on BBC One. The program deals with the different lives of the immigrants living in the UK. Being an immigrant myself, I was interested to see what other cultures experience when they move in the UK so we started recording the episodes. Just this Monday, they featured the lives of two Filipina women living in the UK supporting their families back home. Their stories are not the typical stories you hear about Filipinos leaving their country for greener pastures. In these stories, you will hear quite the opposite.
- Susie left the Philippines and came to the UK to be a cleaner to support her family back home. She lives in a basement of a Georgian house where she pays about Php5,000/week for her rent. The room was dark and it's just bigger than Harry Potter's room under the stairs. She sends all her earnings back home to send her 4 children to school. When she was interviewed, you can see the longingness in her eyes on wanting to see her family and giving them a better life. She probably didn't expect this kind of life when she left the Philippines. Back home, she had a living room, a proper toilet, a kitchen (a proper and maybe a "dirty" one as well), and a decent bedroom with actual windows on them but not in the UK.
- Joanna left the country and has been living in the UK for the last 20 years. After all those years, you would expect her to have a comfortable life and a decent living but not in this story. Joanna has been supporting her 12 brothers and sisters all those time and she's not earning much as a domestic help. She helped her brother with his battle for diabetes though he died after his dialysis but his other brothers and sisters continue to ask money from her for tuition for their children and Joanna couldn't say no to them so she kept sending until she realised that she's so buried into debt that it will take her a lifetime to pay it off. She only took about £5,000 loan that never got paid and it accumulated into almost £45,000!!! She had no choice but to file for bankruptcy in the courts so she won't be hounded by the lendors. This is a major step for someone in the UK, declaring yourself bankrupt entails a lot of things- you can't get a mortgage for a house, you are limited to what bank account you can open, credit rating which is almost your license here, and so on and so forth.
These stories aren't novel to the Filipinos that live here. People go to such extremes just to please their families back in the Philippines and feed their wants and needs to the point of burying themselves in debt. I remember a personal story where a mother asks for some money to buy something in the Philippines and when the daughter said she doesn't have that much, the mother suggested to get a loan from the bank! She only wanted to get a Php200,000 sofa! Getting that loan maybe easy but repaying that back will end you up paying twice for what you initially borrowed.
After watching that programme, I felt a lump in my throat and I can sense an anger stirring inside me. I wish that programme will be showed in the Philippines so that families left there understands the real deal of Filipinos leaving their families behind to get them a better life at the expense of their own. I wish they realise that just because you are working abroad they can just demand things from you and expect you to come up with the money in a snap.
I personally believe that if you can't help then don't offer any or be honest to those asking for help. I've got brothers and sisters myself who email me asking for stuff. I give in to some of them if I think they are reasonable and I can afford it but I wouldn't commit to something I can't afford to doing or something that I don't think I have to do. You can't just expect people to help you all the time when you are in trouble or they will never learn to stand up on their own two feet.
I'm sorry for the rant but I just thought I'd let that out of my system.
p.s. I've tried to find a site that I can link but I couldn't find it anywhere and you can only view it if you are in the UK.