Center alarmed over abandoned OFW families

DAVAO CITY—A local migrants’ center has called the attention of authorities over what it called a big number of families abandoned by overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and whose plight has been largely overlooked by government and nongovernment welfare organizations.

The Mindanao Migrants Center for Empowering Actions Inc. (MMCEAI) has recorded 18 cases of abandoned families this year, but the number went up sharply within the last four weeks when the center began to take a serious look at the incidence, said Inorisap Sialana Elento, MMCEAI executive director,

Elento told the BusinessMIrror that the center was also alarmed when it saw a longer list of cases in the City Social Services Development Office, the local equivalent of the Department of Social Welfare and Development.

The Integrated Gender and Development Office (IGDO) as well as records of the office of former Councilor Angela Librado, also maintained their own list of women seeking legal and financial assistance.

She said that initlal discussions with the women abandoned by their husbands working abroad also showed that they knew more cases of abandonment among friends and acquaintances.

Elento said that the MMCEAI has already agreed with the city government’s IGDO here to conduct a forum with the other government agencies, including the DSWD, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration and the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency and Mayor Sara Duterte..

The forum scheduled for Monday next week would try to seek a focused attention on the concern of these families abandoned by their breadwinners.

“There is a case of a former OFW, whose husband is also an OFW, but who left them for another woman in the Middle East. The husband has  not communicated with his family for some time now and this woman is now only scavenging among the trash bins and garbage dumps along the highways to survive,” Elento said.

She said her initial talk with Gabriela Partylist Rep. Luz Ilagan generated a favorable response from the congresswoman. Elento said Ilagan has assured her that the solon would ask Congress to allow her to conduct a national inquiry “as an issue of being another a social cost of migration.”

Elento said the MMCEAI would also like to ask why it was easier in the Philippines to contract multiple marriages without one being annulled yet.

“From the number of cases we heard, it would show that philandering husbands were able to marry in another place while he has still a family here,” she said.

She said that the potentially big number of abandoned OFW families “should be looked at seriously by government and nongovernment welfare agencies as a major form of the social cost of the country’s dependence to foreign remittances because this issue has been grossly mislooked or taken for granted.”

She said that the MMCEAI research and the likely Congressional national inquiry would validate the group’s claim that there was “really a big incidence of this social cost that would explode right at our own faces as a nation.”

“This may also force our political leaders to address again the issue of migration of our workers,” she said. –Manuel T. Cayon / Reporter, Businessmirror