A Brave New "Working" World

I finally found a Filipino song I was looking for - Napakasakit Kuya Eddie, which came out in the early 80's.  It's a tragic song (untranslated into English as far as I know) about a remittence worker who has left his family behind in the Philippines and disappeared into the hot deserts of Arabia to find better work.

I know this much about the song: he's lonely, thinking of home, and his wife has taken up a new lover, and by the time he gets home, his kids are smoking marijuana, and everything has crashed and burned.  You can hear the plaintiveness in Raol Cortez's voice as he sings, even if you don't know the lyrics, and you can always pull up a version of it (there's a bunch of them) with a montage of photos of miserable people and hard lives.

Pain is universal, and multilingual.


I was looking for this song because I was reading a National Geographic article entitled "Far From Home" the other day (January 2014), which chronicled the tough lives of economic migrants, specifically focusing on the desert world of the United Arab Emirates, where only 13% are native citizens - the vast majority of people in the country are from elsewhere, Bangladesh, India, or the Phillipines, and are often in the most menial jobs  (construction work in 100+ degree heat, oil field work, etc.).

It amazes me what we've created in this world economically, our brave new "working" world, where "sticking together no matter what" is probably the least economically feasible option, as inflation rises and as the numbers of people outweigh the opportunities in one's own country, and as the demands for all our new toys increases.  Satellite TV's, after all, don't grow on trees.

Image courtesy of Opinionated Veracity

But what does that do to the whole notion of family and home?  Globalization is a nice concept, but it creates its own little box set of problems.  All the money sent home doesn't replace time spent together ... 

It also amazes me that the idea of remittence workers is so deeply embedded in Filipino culture, that it would go back two decades or more.

This pain has been going on a while ... 

When I was preparing my Fulbright application, which would have focused on expatriates, I ran into some interesting statistics.  Apparently, three percent of the world population is expatriate (not a huge number but enough to make it the fifth most populous country in the world).  I'm also, apparently, one of 6.32 million Americans living abroad.  That's about a half of a New York City.

Of course, I'm probably thinking about this because I'm just fresh from my latest visit to immigration, a morning-long affair in which I processed a two-month extension on my marriage visa and then waited to "check-in" (foreigners here have to do that little bureacractic two-step every 90 days, and I usually do it by mail, but I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone).  

There seemed to be mainly retirees there, waiting patiently to process their 90-day check-ins, but I spied a Filipino passport, the familiar burgundy of the U.K. passport for sure, and a wandering group of Burmese monks.  I enjoy these times I go into the wild free-for-all, the designated meeting areas of the globalized citizen, if for nothing else, the chance to hear the Tower of Babel of languages floating all around me.

Image courtesy of WBEZ

I could also lose myself in the ongoing drama of the World Cup, but there are shadows of the economic woes of the disadvantaged here too. People are now literally dying in Qatar, building the stadiums for the 2022 World Cup.  Economic migrants naturally.

And what of me, a displaced American living in Thailand, looking for better economic opportunities in South Korea, Oman, Japan, and other places?  

After uprooting myself from my birth place, will I have to uproot myself from my adopted country to move to a third culture?  To be twice removed from both of my homes would be very odd ... 

Perhaps even odd enough to write a song ....