It’s all fun and games at the Foreign Workers Cooperative Launch

It’s all fun and games at the Foreign Workers Cooperative Launch

The Chicken Catchers of Abbotsford

Let me tell you a story. 

Last summer, a colleague in the non-profit group I was working for organized a Sportsfest, where caregivers, temporary foreign workers (TFWs) and supporters from the community were invited to compete in basketball, volleyball, and badminton. The event attracted a huge number of participants. Elimination games were played every weekend, and by the time the finals rolled in, everybody knew everybody else by first names, and permanent friendships had been forged.

A group of young men who were working in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia came down to Vancouver and competed under the name Javita Superstars. They were extremely fast and fit and they played good basketball. The boys became a hands down favourite among the girls and they got the biggest applause in every game. They lost on the points system but they won everyone’s hearts.

The Javita Superstars were TFWs. They were chicken catchers. The word ‘chicken catcher’ sounded funny at first, nothing serious, but something that inspires jokes, or even an idea for a sit-com.

As the media person for my organization, my job is to research and write about things that we do regularly. I interviewed the chicken catchers to find out more about them. This was the first time I have talked in-depth with a group of TFWs and heard about their stories. First I realized that there was nothing funny or easy about chicken catching.  These men work all night, going from barn to barn across the Fraser Valley, braving the cold and the rain, until they have caught and sent off at least 30,000 chickens to the processing factories. Then they go home to their dormitory to sleep all day. They wake up in the early evening and set out to do the same thing that night. In between breaks, some of them will get out their phones to connect with the outside world, by texting or by Facebook.

The amazing part is the quality of these chicken catchers’ education and their work experience from back home, the Middle East or Asia. One of them ran an internationally-funded NGO in a farming belt in the Philippines, helping farmers switch to ecologically sustainable agriculture; another one was an IT expert who established and maintained the computer networks in his workplace in Taiwan; one had a business degree and had supervised a meat processing factory in Japan, and swore he could pluck, cut and bone a chicken in seconds. My list goes on.

What this group has in common with every TFW who came to Canada is their desire to change their future, their willingness to work menial and low-skilled jobs in exchange for the chance to become landed immigrants here. They are equally ambitious, highly educated, and hardworking. Being ready to be chicken–catchers, and being good at this job, are good signs. They’re not afraid of hard work. These are the people who could make this country a great one, and even better, an economically powerful one.

My personal research on Filipino TFWs has indicated that almost everyone who came to Canada is over-qualified for the job they’re currently doing, like these chicken catchers.

Yet not everyone who come here to work get to stay. I compare getting a provincial nomination to apply for landing in Canada to winning a game of roulette. If you are a temporary foreign worker, the odds are rarely on your side. Firstly, the number of nominations are limited, and secondly, how does a worker get noticed, then nominated by the employer in the first place? There is no hard and fast rule to this one. Mostly, you go home after four years, your dreams and your qualifications notwithstanding.  I’ve met a few jobless TFWs who fought tooth and nail to stay in Canada after their contracts weren’t renewed, but who eventually gave up and went home defeated.

I rage regularly against the unfairness of the TFW process and I have never stopped looking for ways to make it work for the thousands of workers who leave for home disappointed and broken, year after year. Things have to change.

But how do you telegraph this fact to the federal government? How to make the decision makers understand that these workers aren’t just numbers, but individuals, with individual capabilities, qualifications and specialties that they can contribute towards making Canada a better place?

Gear up!

All set!

Get catching!
(Photos by Anne Lee)

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

Memories of My Third Big Brother

The road is long, with many a winding turn

That leads us to who knows where, who knows when
But I'm strong, strong enough to carry him
He ain't heavy, he's my brother… The Hollies

The evening before my third big brother Toto passed away, they said he declined dinner and went off to bed early. He never woke up again.  

Kuya Toto was 64. He never married, and for nearly half his life, he lived in the house I built for my mother back in our farming village, and I was supporting him. He couldn’t hold down a job, he didn’t socialize, and he existed in a world real only to him.  

On good days, he did gardening around the property. The flowers and the vegetables he grew were the joy of the neighborhood, and everyone was welcome to pick whatever they fancied.

On bad days, he could be seen walking around the village, conversing with himself or with some of his invisible friends. In the grip of a full psychotic episode, he would walk away from the house and disappear for days, and nobody could find him. Eventually he would come home, dirty and hungry but wouldn’t say where he had been. Thankfully, he didn’t do such disappearing acts often.

Sometimes he would lock himself up in his bedroom, but stood guard near a small peephole he carved out of the wall, where he could observe the activities outside. He was convinced that someone or something was coming to get him. The only person he trusted was our mother, and later, our big sister.  

The one time he actually agreed - or more precisely, was physically forced - to go to the doctor, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. 

My brother refused to go to the doctor ever again and no one was able to make him. He never acknowledged his condition. He knew the stigma attached to mental illness. (Villagers talked about people like him behind their backs while exchanging conjectures as to which evil spirits (engkantos) could have possessed them. Word was that my brother may have inherited the same spirit that took possession of a neighbour, long dead, who used to haunt the banana groves brandishing his wooden sword and loudly challenging imaginary enemies to a duel.)  

My family and I knew otherwise. I’ve researched paranoid schizophrenia extensively and found that it was caused by chemical imbalance in the brain, and can be medicated, even if not cured. It can be hereditary, or be triggered by stress and other environmental factors.  

After my mother died, I requested my big sister and her husband to move into the house so they could keep him company. My sister, who’s now 74, made sure that he had everything he needed, and reported things back to me. Whenever I prayed about my brother, I always asked that he would at least stay physically healthy or go early and without pain, because I worried about him eventually having to live alone. God had now answered my prayers and I'm grateful, but it didn't make the loss any easier.  

Before schizophrenia claimed the best of him, Kuya Toto was smart, ambitious, and good looking. My other older siblings used to tease me that I was his junior female version, (ahem) but then again, only to point out my bad posture and quick temper, things that I had in common with the guy.

Kuya Toto was also a good teacher and a compassionate man. A self-taught first-rate electrician in his younger days, he helped many of his friends get jobs in Manila and trained them to be electricians, like himself. Those whom he trained became trade electricians, good enough to work even in the Middle East.  

One day about thirty years ago, my fourth big brother Fernando had a jeepney accident which landed him in the hospital for weeks. This event seemed to have triggered something in Kuya Toto’s brain and he was never the same again.  

Today I grieve for his wasted life and for his unrealized potentials. If not for schizophrenia, he could have achieved whatever he wanted.

But today I also rejoice at the memory of the times he spent with me when I was growing up. I was the youngest child in the family, and he was eight years older. I remember being three years old, playing by the side of the creek where he and Fernando were swimming. One of them dived and accidentally toppled me into the deep pool along with them. I nearly drowned. Kuya Toto grabbed me and put me back up onto the ledge and said, “I’m going to teach you how to swim.” He then showed me how to float, ‘like a dead person’; how to dive; and how to paddle with my arms and kick my legs properly.

He taught me that the water was my friend.  

Kuya Toto tried his best to turn me into a little warrior.  When I was four, he built me an arrow gun from pieces of bamboo and taught me how to shoot accurately. I was very accurate. The first time I let my arrow fly, I hit his leg. He trained me to drop mangoes off a high tree with my sling shot. He said ‘aim for the stem, not the fruit.’ I was happy to hit the fruit. When he was older and became interested in the martial arts, he instructed me on the rudiments of judo and karate. He showed me how to pull a balisong - a local fan knife - out of my pocket and have it unlocked and ready in 3.5 seconds.  ‘Watch me: One. Two. Three!’ He even constructed for me a sort of weapon he called a chaku, made of two wooden sticks attached to each other with a metal chain, and demonstrated how to swing the end stick as fast as they did in the movies, without strangling himself. He would draw a target mark on a green coconut and dare me to hit it with the tip of my chaku.  

He taught me focus and concentration.

He made me fearless. 

After he went off to study in the city, he only visited with us on holidays. He would bring treats like peanut butter and cookies whenever he came home, and would tell me and Kuya Fernando endless stories about city stuff, like the wired contraption where one dialed some numbers and be able to talk to someone far away. Other times he would serve us triangle-shaped scrambled eggs and other things like that.

He taught me that there was another world worth exploring outside the village.  

We didn’t hang out very much after we grew older. He got a construction job in Manila, and I did my own things. I went to college, dropped out after two years and got married. Many years later, I separated from my husband and came home to mother with my three little daughters. After failing to find a good job locally, I decided to work as a nanny in Singapore. It was around the same time that his schizophrenia reared itself, and he ended up coming home and living with our mother as well.

On medication during the early years of his disease, he could do some contractual electrician work around our area, while he helped my mother look after the girls. This time around, although he was still a good teacher, he also had become a stern disciplinarian. I heard that when the girls were little, he oversaw their daily activities like a drill sergeant. 

He taught my daughters self-discipline.

When I thought about my years of absence from my children’s lives, I’ve concluded that they turned out alright, partly because Kuya Toto was around to look out for them, in his own paranoid kind of way.  

I've decided not to go home for Kuya Toto’s funeral because I’m in the middle of launching a big project. I know he would understand. Besides, I’ve let my children take over. My two older daughters who live in the Philippines have gone home to the village to organize his burial services. They got him some really nice flowers and hosted a big festive memorial, one that included the fourth and ninth day celebrations. It’s a village tradition. My youngest daughter who lives in Washington, USA, paid for most of the expenses. These girls loved their Uncle Toto. He was around during most of their childhood.

Although none of us became electricians, a big part of my third big brother's legacy resides in the things he taught my daughters and me. 

Sending all your money home? Expensive. Saving some for yourself? Priceless.

I have simple needs, and I've never paid too much attention to money, unless I was thinking of spending it. Until today.

One of my part-time jobs is coordinating activities for foreign live-in caregivers (LICs) and temporary foreign workers (TFWs) for a non-profit organization. I help plan educational workshops, organize sports competitions, fundraising and other group events, all of these tailored to arm the workers with tools to adjust seamlessly to their new environment. These activities also help provide newcomers with a sense of belonging to a community, a sort of family away from their families.

Getting twenty or more foreign live-in caregivers in one room for two hours on a Saturday, however, is not an easy job.  These men and women are the hardest-working people I know, and most of them are out on weekends, working part time to make extra money to send home to their families. Money to educate their kids, pay their rents or mortgages, or support aging parents. Sometimes they get so caught up in making money because the need is too great, that two things get neglected: their health and their own financial future. Many of these workers have no savings nor insurance, the importance of which only gets noted when the ability to work and earn money fails.

I know because I've seen it happening and I've been part of the community that helped raise funds for a few unfortunate members of this group, those who might have suffered a severe or fatal illness, and those who passed away. With no money for expenses or repatriation of their remains, it becomes the community's job to help finance their hospitalization or repatriation.

In response to these circumstances, I organize workshops that encourage them to put away some earnings for such a rainy day, or buy insurance to fall back on in cases of illness or death. Morbid but practical.

My boss, the president of the non-profit group that I work for, is very passionate about getting LICs and TFWs to upgrade their skills and become financially independent. He believes that financial security is the number one reason why everybody comes to Canada. To help make things easier for some of these people, my group worked with a school to get our members discounted tuition fees, and with a bank to get them low-interest caregiver education loans. We invited representatives from both the school and the bank to give talks and answer everyone’s questions about how these deals work. The first batch of our students graduated last August. A new batch are in the process of enrolling.

The school director called me recently to say that out of twelve enrolees, six had pulled out. They told her they’d changed their minds. We needed twelve students to proceed with the weekend curriculum that the school had specially set up for them.

A few days ago, the bank officer in-charge of releasing caregiver loans took me aside and told me in a grim and urgent tone: “We need to have one of those financial literacy workshops really soon. We have to get the newcomers as early as we can, before they can develop some bad spending habits.”

Apparently, he had declined the application of five of the caregivers we sent him for educational loans. The applicants whose names he kept confidential, already have incurred too much debt, even before they've become landed immigrants. Now I know why they cancelled their enrolment.

O the perils and pitfalls of easy credit. The intense attraction of acquiring material things. The joys of shopping for what my boss calls ‘anik-aniks’ (shiny, expensive, but ultimately useless items). And the guilt that comes from denying your relatives back home what they ask for, when you yourself live in a country of plenty. Those are the hurdles one has to get over, to achieve financial security in a new country.

First and foremost, my banker wants to address the danger of credit cards and bad borrowing habits, because he understands how easy it is to get mired in debt if one isn't careful.

“Letting them hear how credit cards really work will make them think twice before acquiring one,” says my banker friend. I totally agree with him. I’m already planning that financial literacy workshop as we speak.

My own advice: put away a small portion of your money regularly, in a place where you can’t easily touch it. Also, avoid credit cards like the plague. Take it from me. I once had two credit cards, so I know what I’m talking about. 

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, September 2013)

The Holy Week: Sunny with a chance of Easter Eggs

The Lenten season is upon us, and Christians all over the world are celebrating the life of Christ; how He lived and died to save humanity from the eternal fires of hell. How the Easter Bunny and the Easter eggs got into this picture is beyond me, but I won’t question the wisdom of western traditions.

Rather I’ll take you back to the days of my childhood in rural Philippines, when my parents and others of their generation celebrated the Holy Week just as differently, and perhaps as weirdly, as hunting for coloured eggs on Easter Sunday morning. Not for my village folks, though, was the unbridled physical display of piety seen in other Philippine towns: no self-flagellation, no wearing the crown of thorns, and most of all, no nailing of anybody to a wooden cross.

My village's Holy Week officially started on Palm Sunday, when people carrying intricately woven palm fronds go to church to commemorate Christ’s entry into Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.

The real action began on Holy Thursday. One of the well-off families in the village would host a reading of The Passion of Christ, and invite all the usual suspects, regular passion readers who did this sort of thing every year. My father was one of them. These readers would sing, not read, every stanza in the Book, using a well-established tune. One reader after another, man after woman, stanza by stanza, until they reached the very last line. Then back again at the beginning. This went on until the morning, or perhaps even up to 3:00 in the afternoon of Good Friday. When a group of singers took a break, another group would pick up the tune. A huge dinner of meat stew and rice, along with an endless amount of brewed ginger tea would be served. A regular infusion of ginger tea kept the singers going. Neighbours and relatives dropped in regularly to listen and partake of the food.

In those days, life at my village came to a standstill at the stroke of 3:00 p.m. on Good Friday. No more singing, no bathing, and no physical work. No going to church. Just praying at home, sometimes with lighted candles. Jesus was dead and we were showing respect.

Activities get re-started early in the morning of Sabado de Gloria --- the Saturday of Ascension. Jesus had gone up to heaven to join the Father, and we were free to do as we wished. Mother would sweep the yard early. Being a tiny kid, I got picked up by my ears by various adults, then hoisted up to the heavens a few times first thing in the morning. I was told this would help me grow taller. I’ve often thought about reminding my big brothers that not only did they fail to make me taller, I could also have lost an ear and it would have been their fault.

After breakfast, my mother would cook sticky rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves, which were then eaten with sweet coconut syrup. Those cakes made the Holy Week worth waiting for.

Easter Sunday was the day of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ: The more pious villagers would hire a jeepney to go to church in the city to celebrate Jesus’ return to life. A lavish, church-organized ceremony took place at 4:00 in the morning every Easter Sunday in our city. The event featured two processions starting out from two different parts of the town. One was headed by the statue of the Virgin Mary on a float, her face covered in a dark veil. The other was headed by the statue of Jesus Christ in another float. The two processions met at a thoroughfare, under a structure where an angel lay in wait to snatch away the Virgin Mary’s veil to signify the joy coming back to her life. The two processions then merged and headed back to church where a mass would be held to celebrate the Resurrection.

My mother never went to church on those occasions, and I loved the extra time I got to snuggle with her. By Monday, the passion books were all put away and everything was back to normal.

After my parents and their contemporaries have all passed away, passion singing went out of fashion in my village. Now all I have are childhood the memories. Back here in Vancouver, the Easter eggs are calling my name.

(previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, March 15, 2013 issue)

Languages by the pound

Back in the olden days, on the very first Sunday of my first nannying job in Singapore, my lady employer wondered whether I wanted to go to church with them.

“Do you want to follow us to church?” she asked.

“Can’t I just ride with you guys? I asked back.

“That’s what I mean,” she told me.

My first lesson on Singaporean English: when you ‘follow’ someone in Singapore, you are actually going together to the same destination; you aren’t walking or travelling in another vehicle closely behind them. Singaporeans, like other English-speaking peoples, have created their own version of English, called Singlish, a language that also incorporated words from Malay, Tamil and various Chinese dialects. I soon learned to listen and speak the same way to get my point across.

When I first arrived in Canada, I wasn’t too surprised to find that the same linguistic challenges applied. Nothing ever grows and mutates faster than a language, a many-headed entity that changes form and shifts shape to accommodate the changing times. It brings to my mind the vision of an avalanche rushing down a mountainside, picking up and swallowing all sorts of debris along its way, landing at the bottom much bigger and less purer than when it started going down the slope. The only difference is that a language just keeps on going.

I can speak for English and Tagalog, the two languages I know best. Growth in technology and globalization has brought so many new words and expressions into the lexicon that they would probably drive language purists, if such people still exist, out of their minds. Heck, it could drive a Taglish-speaking Filipino crazy, when he still has to figure out about 7 other major languages already being spoken in the country, on top of the techno-speak being developed by call-centre workers and the gay-speak, the dialect of the Manila gay and show business communities. And when he goes out of the country, he then has to contend with how other English speakers so mangled the language that it makes him feel as if he’s talking to a Martian.

(Don’t even get me started on how words are pronounced. For instance, why would the word ‘swam’ be spoken like ‘swam’ but ‘swamp’ be ‘swomp’ and swan ‘swon’? Aaaaaargh!)

Nothing gives English-as-second-language (ESL) speakers more trouble than the slang being spawned and spoken by various specific groups. ESL people learn English from books, and generally speak that way, but you’ll find out right away when what you’re saying translates very differently to an ESL speaker.

For instance, a friend who’s a nurse by profession once asked an elderly Canadian male patient on which side would he like to be laid? She didn’t report what his response was, but I could imagine celebratory bells clanging inside the old man’s head: “Service with benefits, baby!”

Or the nurse’s German husband who once requested her to check a pimple on his ‘foreskin’, when he actually meant on his ‘forehead’. To him, those words were similar. I heard that the nurse corrected him immediately, although on further thought, maybe he did have another pimple somewhere else and really wanted his wife to have a look at that one.

Or take the case of my daughter who lives in the US, who overheard her colleagues talking about dogs being sold by the Pound. A curious person by nature, she had to know: “How much per pound?” Judging by the scandalized expression on their faces, my daughter realized she must have asked the wrong question. On the other hand, dogs do sell per pound in underground markets in the Philippines, or so I heard.

Keeping any language pure is a losing battle, because language is alive. Language evolves. It adapts to its surroundings to survive. I sincerely wish all purists who want to fight this trend the best of luck.

A friend of mine has stronger words for such people. He says there will always be some narrow-minded idiots who will want to keep their language ‘clean’ and not allow foreign words to infiltrate it.

“Wanting to keep a language clean”, he tells me, “is another form of discrimination.”

“Like Hitler said in his book, urban mice should only mate with urban mice, and rural mice should only mate with rural mice. Well, Adolf, ” my friend adds, “I've got news for you: Mice don't care whom they mate with, as long as it's another mice!”

(previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, January 15, 2012 issue)

What exactly, are the roots of racism?

“Are all the Filipinos poor?” The man sitting beside me in the bus turned to me and asked.

I looked at his face to check if he was joking. The man, also an Asian, was serious. He actually wanted to know. Although I found his question ignorant and offensive, I didn’t say so. Instead, I asked him back: “Are all citizens from your country poor?”

He didn’t think so. I held my tongue after that. I got off on the next stop still upset about the man’s question. That interaction happened twenty years ago. I’ve thought about the incident every now and then; thought about various snide ways of answering him. I always come back to the conclusion that perhaps I should have told him that not all Filipinos are poor, instead of feeling insulted and defensive.

I could have told him that the very rich and the very poor Filipinos usually stay back home. That the rich ones didn’t need to leave the country to find a better life, while the very poor aren’t educated enough and didn’t have the wherewithal to pay their way out. That the Filipinos he meets in Canada are what I would call the adventurous, the middle, the educated class. These include the nannies.

I’ve experienced other expressions of racism since then, some of which were ironically well-meaning. A long time ago, a friend told me that her car broke down in the middle of the Lions Gate Bridge. Said bridge only has three lanes, the middle of which changes direction every twenty minutes or so. It’s one of the two bridges that connect our town to the mainland. Traffic on this bridge notoriously reaches bottle-neck proportions during rush hours. My friend’s car was caught in one of these bottlenecks. Fortunately she was able to steer her car out of the bridge into a safe shoulder.

“Otherwise, I could have been lynched!” relieved, she recounted her experience to me. Then to make sure I understood her, she inquired, “By the way, do you know what ‘lynched’ means?”

Bad question. I was young and rather proud of my fluency in English. I remember giving her three synonyms for ‘lynched’ in one breath. After that, she never assumed I would misunderstand her ever again. We remain close friends.

I’d been in conversations where a Caucasian would speak to me very, very, slowly, word by word, so that I’d get his point. Whenever this happened, I rudely interrupt the speaker by finishing their sentence for them. That usually shuts them up.

I’ve actually lost my temper and shouted at people for being racist to me, at least twice. I’ve now regretted having done so. Forgive me. At the time, though, I found it very satisfying to watch the objects of my anger being rendered speechless with shock. I’m sure they’ve never seen a little brown person explode in their presence before .

Through the years, I’ve grown more tolerant of people’s false assumptions regarding Filipinos, or of other races, for that matter. I myself have been guilty of subscribing to ethnic stereotypes and although I don’t say them aloud, I definitely think them. I have a collection of racist jokes culled from my travels, which I enjoy reading and sharing with others. After all, as my friend says, there’s a little racist in everyone of us.

Which leads me to wonder --- what exactly, is the root of racism?

Firstly, I think it’s borne of ignorance. Not knowing much about a particular ethnic group, aside from what we’ve read in the papers and heard from our friends, we often draw our own skewed conclusions from such limited stores of information. We listen to stereotypes. We believe in blanket classifications of different races. Those guys are bad drivers; this group treat their women like furniture; those people are mostly involved in drug-dealing and other criminal activities. In reality, bad drivers, sexist men, drug dealers, and criminals can be found in every racial grouping.

Secondly, it’s the economy. Take the Philippines, for instance. Due to lack of economic opportunities at home, Filipinos leave the country in droves to seek their fortune elsewhere. Women work as nurses, hotel staff and domestics abroad. In Canada, the Live-in Caregiver Program has brought in thousands of our women to work as domestics and caregivers. A Canadian man admitted once that whenever he saw a gaggle of Filipino women in the bus on weekends, he used to assume they were nannies on a day-off.

And finally, it’s a by-product of colonization. The bitter irony in this type of racism is that a sense of superiority stays with certain members of the colonized long after the colonizers have left. I’ve felt it. I’ve fought against it in my own country. There’s another name for it: colonial mentality. It comes from being born in a place where one is expected to take pride in having some conqueror’s blood running in one’s veins, of being considered prettier than the indigenous because one has a fairer skin or a more western nose. Sad but true.

These days, I’ve stopped reacting violently to whiffs of racism. I try to live by example. Pessimists say there’s no cure for racism, but I’m thinking if I could help open one person’s mind every now and then, that’s good enough for me.

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, Oct 15, 2010 issue)