Our migrant past may be behind us, but we should never forget it is still a way of life for families like Jastine’s
THE Irish Daily Mail’s weekend interview with the heartbroken family of Jastine Valdez, the young Filipina woman brutally slain after her abduction in Co. Wicklow last month was poignant on so many levels.
Not only did writer Michelle Fleming capture superbly the quiet dignity of a family whose simple rustic life, marked by hardship and close community ties, has been ripped apart by tragedy, she also shone a light on the immense personal sacrifices made by Filipino migrant workers like Jastine’s parents, who leave their beloved homeland in droves to provide a better life for their loved ones from abroad.
The details of the Valdezes’ story may be specific to them, but the lives of the thousands of Filipinos who have made Ireland their adopted home follow a similar trajectory. Indeed, so too do the roughly ten million Filipinos working today in every part of the world.
In this country, about one-third of the Filipino population, almost five thousand people, work as nurses and are registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland. And while the lack of regulations in the home care sector make it impossible to tell how many Filipinos are scattered across the country, looking after the old, the sick or the disabled, we know that there are literally thousands of women meeting the demand for careworkers and cheap domestic labour, created by our ageing population and rising numbers of women working outside the home.
Perhaps predictably, Jastine’s mother Teresita worked as a housekeeper when she arrived here. She first left her home village of Aritao in the northern Philippines in the late 1990s, the period that saw the first wave of Filipina women join their menfolk abroad. While husband Danilo moved alone to Saudi Arabia to work in landscaping, Teresita travelled alone to Manila where she worked for a fabric producer for two years.
They saved every penny and by 2001 they had enough to travel to Ireland and set up home. Danilo took a landscaping job and Teresita started working as a housekeeper.
Following the pattern of most Filipino couples who leave their offspring at home to be raised by their grandparents and extended family while they support them financially from afar, Teresita and Danilo left their daughter with her granny when they emigrated to Ireland.
Their separation from their seven-yearold child must have been terrible, and the homesickness almost intolerable. Each year, the couple patiently counted down the days and weeks to Christmas when they would all be together again. There must have been times when they were close to despair.
How many more years, they must have wondered, would it be until Jastine is old enough to join us in Ireland? How often were they tempted to up sticks and go home with their savings, rather than put their lives on hold forever?
Little did they know then of how the cruellest blow of all still awaited them; that way down the line fate would decree that just three years after the family were reunited, their darling daughter would be destroyed in such a savage and freak killing.
Michelle Fleming’s interview with Jastine’s aunt, Florida Calusa Lim, conducted in their humble home, as the swelling ranks of neighbours wept for the young women whose remains lay in an open casket before them, gives us a unique insight into a community that, for all its familiarity, is alien to us in so many ways.
Altruism
Florida explains the fierce altruism and ambition that drove Jastine’s parents, like so many Filipinos, to say farewell to everything they hold dear. ‘It is always so heartbreaking to say goodbye to family – I’ve been through that too,’ she says. ‘But you’re not thinking about yourself, you’re thinking about your family back home, you want to give them better [sic]. So we put that in our heart, and hold it there with love and we do it and pray for it.
‘They knew that Ireland was safe and that they’d have a better life there. They had no friends or family there, but they had a community of Filipinos and they slowly built a family and a life there.
‘Yes, they were so brave – yes, there was a lot of homesickness but they did it for Jastine. You do it for family so they will live comfortably.’
Filipinos have been putting down roots in this country since the late 1990s, but while they, of necessity, have been forced to get used to our native Irish ways, the reverse is not always the case. We may know, for instance, that many of the women who lavish love and attention on Irish children in the course of their work as nannies or au pairs, have children of their own, living on the other side of the world.
We also know that the carers who tend to our elderly, either in the privacy of their own homes or in nursing homes, also probably have ageing parents at home, to whom the only support they can offer is financial.
We may suspect that the Filipino nurses and care workers who now form part of the fabric of our health service must have similar experiences of separation and lonely frustration.
But unless we are personal friends with a Filipino, or have travelled to their country, we probably have never thought too deeply about the gnawing ache they endure from missing their children, or the wrench of being cut off from their nearest and dearest.
Or of how a lonely existence with the focus solely on work and phone calls home must chip away at even the hardest resolve. Or how they must have to call on every ounce of fortitude to cope with the haunting guilt, overwhelming homesickness and the financial burden of being, perhaps, the only family breadwinner.
It must be unbearably difficult for instance to console a crying child or wipe the snot off their faces when you know it is your own child who is owed your special care and attention, rather than the child of strangers.
Dancing attendance on patients you have just met, when one’s own flesh and blood is bedridden and infirm on the other side of the world, must also seem unnatural.
Granted, the strong Christian faith of the Filipino people must help sustain them, along with their firm conviction that remittances from abroad, rather than hands-on help, or a rich family life is the best way to secure the future for their families.
Of course it’s not that long ago that we endured the same lash of self-denial and pain of separation for the sake of prosperity.
Throughout the centuries, the lack of opportunities in our undeveloped, agrarian society forced generations of Irish people abroad, while the economic stagnancy of various recessions also prompted waves of mass emigration.
The shocking death of Jastine Valdez shows us again that, while the grim migrant existence is now part of our history, it is still a part of life for whole swathes of humanity – many of whom live and work amongst us.