Skilled workers desert Philippines

Michael Duque is a nurse in the accident and emergency department at a London hospital. Six years ago he left his home in the Philippines to seek his fortune abroad.

Michael Duque left his home and family to work abroad

As a nurse in Britain he earns about £24,000 (US $47,000) a year; doing a similar job in one of the top hospitals in Manila, the Philippines capital, he would be earning just £1,800 ($3,500).
He is one of some eight million Filipinos living and working overseas.

The money they send back in "remittances" – about $15bn in 2006 – is vital to the Philippines economy.

But there’s a substantial cost involved as well, for Philippine society and for the individuals involved.
The personal cost lies in long-distance family separation, something familiar to generations of Filipinos.

It makes her crazy and stressed; she gets jealous

Every month Michael sends up to £600 home to his family: wife Glenda, daughter Ella, aged 7, and son CG, aged 4. They live well on it, in a house in Manila’s suburbs.

Glenda, who trained as a nurse herself, is now a full-time mother. And Michael, like many exiled Filipinos, is paying not only to support his family but to educate the next generation of overseas workers: Ella goes to a local private school.

But Michael has worked abroad ever since his daughter was born, originally in the Gulf and for the past four years in the UK.

He keeps in touch by phone and e-mail and via the videophone on the computer and he gets home perhaps once a year to see the children.

But he misses his kids growing up and he misses being a father to them, he said.
His absence puts a strain on his relationship with his wife as well: "It makes her crazy and stressed; she gets jealous," he said.

Familiar story
The children miss their father too. "Sometimes they say: ‘I want my Dad,’" Glenda told me when I interviewed her in the front room of their house, as Ella conscientiously did her homework on the sofa beside her. "Especially her, because she is the favourite of her father."

Glenda looks after children as husband Michael works abroad
Ella is a solemn child: in the two hours we were in the family’s home I didn’t see her smile once and she scarcely said a word.

I didn’t see her younger brother at all: he threw a tantrum and stayed upstairs, screaming and slamming doors as soon as we arrived. Click this link to read the original complete blog
http://tropicalpenpals.com/blog/?p=2708