Going home: Fears, prayers and hope

WE are going home for good after more than a decade of working in Saudi Arabia. Like many overseas Filipino workers or OFWs who are in the same situation, we have worries and fears. How do we start life anew in a country which has become more of a place to visit than home? For the past 14 years, my family and I have adopted Jeddah as our second home where we have been living in the financial comfort we sorely lacked when we were in Manila. 

I came here in 1999. When I went on vacation the following year, I brought my wife Marilyn and our only child Maria Angeline with me to Jeddah. It was a promise I made to my wife that if I couldn’t bring them here a year after I left, I wouldn’t renew my contract with Saudi Gazette where I have been working as an editor. Living far away from the family was not an option. My wife and I understood the perils of families breaking up when separated for a long time.

I left at a time when we could hardly make ends meet. I was working then as an editor with the now-defunct newspaper Today in Makati, Metro Manila’s financial capital. My wife had resigned from her job as a nurse at the Perpetual Help Medical Center in Las Pinas to take care of our child. To compensate for her lost income, we set up a store in front of our house in Bacoor, Cavite, on the outskirts of Manila. Although the store was earning as much as her lost salary, our combined income couldn’t cope with the rising cost of living in Metro Manila.

I decided to leave when we started to miss paying the monthly amortization for our home which we acquired on a loan from the Social Security System (SSS) and when our telephone was cut off every now and then because we could not keep up with the monthly bills. I also remember those times when I had to rummage through the shoe racks of Shoe Mart in Bacoor for a new pair of shoes on a shoestring budget to replace the worn-out pair I was wearing. I often ended up buying secondhand shoes peddled on the sidewalks.

My wife Marilyn, daughter Maria Angeline and I at the bridge
of the Petronas Twin Tower in Kuala Lumpur during our
 3-day  side trip on our way to Manila from Jeddah last May.

Those haunting memories give me cold feet as we prepare to go home for good after our child finishes her high school here in Jeddah. She was our primary reason for working overseas. Like other parents who care for their children, we want to prepare a comfortable future for her. Our daughter, who was two months short of her first birthday when I first came to Jeddah, is now 16 and graduating from high school in March next year.

Many OFWs have ambivalent feelings when they think of finally going home. A friend, Eli Arciaga, who has been in Jeddah for the past 31 years, says he and his wife Lita had planned to go home several times but had always changed their minds. “I had planned to quit working here when I was 45, 50 and 55, but there are always reasons to keep coming back. One reason is financial,” says the 59-year-old chief analyst and programmer in a construction company here.

The Arciagas have acquired a fish pen and a rice-trading business which they have left to the care of trusted kin. They have also built their dream house in Cavite and have saved enough to make their retirement comfortable. But the financial ease they still enjoy in Jeddah and the fact that two of their three sons are now working here give them reasons to stay longer. Their two sons and their families are staying with them in one compound.

"But eventually, we will go home. My sister in Canada wants us to migrate there, saying that life is much better over there. But for me there is no other country that is better than the country of your birth,” says Eli. “Probably, we will go home within the next two years, but, again, it all depends. Our decisions are always dictated by circumstances.”

Eli and Lita Arciaga (far right) withe their two sons Randy
\and Michael, daughters-in-law Judith and Joy and their
 grandchildren at Steak House in Jeddah

 Virgilio \Mejia and wife Nene

Like the Arciagas, Virgilio Mejia and his wife Nene, who have been in Saudi Arabia for the past 32 years, have longed to go back home where they have a son or join another son in New Zealand but they always change their minds because their two daughters, Karen and Jane, have followed them here after their graduation from college. Jane got married a year ago and has to live separately but Karen still stays with the couple.

Unlike the Arciagas, we have not saved much, partly because we had to stop saving after Saudi Gazette fired me in 2005 and I was forced to take a clerical job in a construction company that paid a third less than my previous pay. When I got fired, we opted to stay rather than to go home. I looked for a new job, although it meant spending whatever amount I got from the Gazette as service award or severance pay. My wife was also forced to look for a job and got one that paid a little more than what we had to pay for a Filipina maid we hired to look after our child who was in grade school.

We started saving again when Saudi Gazette rehired me in 2007, at a higher salary than what I used to get before I was fired, and my wife moved to another hospital which gives her better pay. But in 2010, my mother-in-law suffered two successive strokes that left her comatose and eventually led to her death. Her confinement on a respirator in a private hospital for more than a month drained all our savings in the bank and even got us into debt which we paid in a year’s time.

Eli Arciaga and his wife Lita cradling
a grandchild.

Unlike the Araciagas and the Mejias, we have no compelling reasons to stay any longer after our child finishes high school next year. We have decided, though, to extend our stay for another year after her graduation to keep my wife from breaching her contract, which she renews every two years, and losing part of her end-of-service pay. Our daughter has also agreed to enroll in an online course until we go home. If God wills, the extension will be a saving grace to give us a little more time to save a little more.

The past always leaves bittersweet memories. Looking back, I have no regrets over my decision to work overseas. Having married late in my 40s to a woman 14 years my junior, I am now in the twilight years of my life while our daughter is still in her teens. If I had not left to work overseas, I don’t know how we could ever afford to send our daughter to college. Now, with our home in Cavite fully paid and with our little savings, we find hope with our plans on how to start all over again, including going into small food-franchising businesses.

We had once dreamed of migrating to New Zealand, but it did not work out. As a man of faith, I have come to believe that everything happens for a reason and I do not regret when things do not go my way. Instead, I pray for divine guidance; for God to continue keeping the chips falling where they should, and when there are gaps, to keep on bridging those gaps. Experience tells me that we do not write the scripts of our lives. We can only do so much.
 

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Note: I wrote this for the Saudi Gazette and am posting it here while I can't still write much on subjects much appropriate for this blog. My family and I have been very busy this past few days in preparation to move to a new house.