The global financial crisis may have dealt a severe blow to Filipino migrant workers, thousands of whom lost their jobs and fell into debt. But public schoolteacher Melinda Mendoza does not see this impact at all — at least not within the four walls of her classroom.

On the contrary, Mendoza, 45, is bothered no end by her pupils’ ostentatious display of opulence in a poor rural setting, where luxury is atypical.

“They have huge allowances,” says the teacher of 21 years in the government-run Pulong Anahao Elementary School, located in the town of Mabini here in Batangas province, a two-hour drive south of Manila.

On top of that, the students own electronic gadgets like mobile phones that are no match to those of a public school teacher like Mendoza. She earns a measly few thousands of pesos a month, hardly enough to buy a high-end unit that is a status symbol in this South-east Asian country, at least 30 percent of whose 90 million people live in poverty.

Mendoza says about half of her students are children of migrant workers, a great majority of whom work in Italy as domestic helpers, caregivers, nannies or factory workers.

These children’s parents earn what they can never earn in the Philippines, which has become the world’s largest exporter of human labour after its workers began going overseas in droves in the seventies. Today, Filipino domestic workers in Italy earn 60,000 to 80,000 pesos (1,287 to 1,717 U.S. dollars), or a lot more, a month.

“There is dependence on remittances among families,” says Ricardo Casco, national officer for labour migration support of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Based on 2007 data from the World Bank, the Philippines ranks fourth globally in terms of remittances received, next to India, China and Mexico. In 2007, its remittances reached a whopping 14.45 billion dollars, up from only 103 million U.S. dollars in 1975.

Like many Filipino workers abroad, those in Italy were not spared by the crisis late last year that have since forced many offshore companies either to close shop or cut production, says Estrella Dizon-Añonuevo, executive director of Atikha Overseas Workers and Communities Initiatives.

A migrant worker’s monthly take of 1,500 euros (2,150 dollars) in Italy was reduced by half as a result of the crisis. Remittances to families in the Philippines in some instances dwindled by 15 to 20 percent at the height of the downturn, she says.

Yet, many Filipino workers scrimped and saved to ensure that they maintained the same level of financial support they had been giving to their families, says Añonuevo, whose NGO conducts financial literacy among migrant workers as part of its advocacy.

“There was belt-tightening among migrants,” she points out. Some were forced to live with fellow workers to save on rent and keep money that otherwise should have gone to their own basic needs.

But Añonuevo also says the hardships these migrant workers endured hardly ever figured in discussions between migrant parents and their children in the Philippines that are often held through today’s modern technologies, including the Internet.

It was not uncommon to hear of Filipinos holding down several part-time jobs at the same time in order to continue sending remittances home. “What is the purpose of spending the best years of your life anyway?” asks IOM’s Casco.

This is why schoolteacher Mendoza hardly sees signs of migrant parents’ economic problems affecting her students’ lifestyles. Every day, in fact, she sees how the class divide plays out in her classroom.

At lunch breaks, she says, one can see who the children of overseas Filipino workers are – or OFW, as they are commonly called in the Philippines – and who are not. They have packed lunches and snacks – and money to buy more food in the school canteen – while many of the latter subsist on so little or none at all.

“I usually tell my students to share their food with those of their classmates who have no food,” she says.

Mendoza worries that her students exemplify a materialistic bent born of a culture that has become dependent on remittances sent by their migrant- worker parents.

The village of Anahao, which has a population of less than a thousand, has benefitted quite a lot from the wave of migration for labour.

This was especially so in the nineties, when a village woman, unable to land a job even if she was a college graduate, packed her bags and left for Italy to work as a domestic helper. It did not take long before others followed in her footsteps, literally, inspired by her example and the fortunes that going overseas seemed to have brought her.

Soon, Anahao itself began to change. European-style mansions replaced wooden structures typical of a rural setting, earning it the moniker ‘Little Italy’. Farming was the main source of villagers’ income until the 90s, when families became entirely dependent on remittances and gave up ploughing.

Today, 15 percent of Mabini town’s residents works overseas. Seventy-two percent of them work in Italy, 10 percent in the Middle East while the rest is in the United States, Asia and elsewhere in the world.

Within and outside the village of Anahao and other parts of Mabini, one can hardly miss the telltale signs of a rural town that has tasted progress. Many more concrete houses are being built, expensive vehicles being driven around – among others to ferry children to school such as Mendoza’s – and private schools whose total enrollment far exceeds those of state-owned schools, because migrant parents equate them with better education.

“They even go to expensive hospitals,” says Esperanza Balita, a municipal employee who was once a migrant worker herself.

Realty property taxes, an indicator of land and home ownership, have nearly doubled over the last decade, from 17 million pesos in 1998 to 31 million pesos (365,000 to 665,378 dollars) in the first quarter of this year.

Meantime, the outflow of migrant workers continues from a country that already has some 10 percent of its population working overseas in 190 countries. In 2008, at least 1.3 million Filipinos left for overseas work. Local communities worry about the continued social cost of migration, regardless of how hard times are putting great pressure on migrant parents overseas.

Village chief Raymundo Magsino, in an interview with IPS, says a number of youth in his community have dropped out of school, not for lack of resources as is often the case in many poverty-stricken areas of the country, and certainly not because of the economic crunch, but for sheer lack of interest.

Many young people here know they will be going to Italy anyway to join their parents, who, in less than a year of working there, provided they already have a working visa, are entitled to petition and have their children join them before they turn 18, explains Magsino. There, they can pursue their education or take on jobs common among Filipino migrants.

The attraction of leaving the Philippines is so strong that offers of free livelihood training –- so that they are productive while waiting to join their parents –- hardly had any takers, the former police chief rues. Yet these young people while away their time playing ‘tong-its’ –- a popular numbers game in the Philippines – or chatting on their computers or in some Internet shop.

Mabini mayor Nilo Villanueva has far bigger concerns — and they are not about the impact of the financial crisis. “The usual close relationship between parents and children” is gone, he says in a report accompanying the results of a study conducted by his office on migration in his town.

This has been manifested in an increasing number of out-of-school youth, reported cases of rape, annulment of marriage, and a host of other social concerns that, directly or directly, may be attributed to labour migration.

Mendoza, the elementary schoolteacher, shares Villanueva’s concern. One of her pupils, whose parents work in Italy, have stopped coming to school, and she knows that this has nothing to do with the financial crisis.

(*This feature was produced by IPS Asia-Pacific under a series on the impact of the global economic crisis on children and young people, in partnership with UNICEF East Asia and the Pacific.)

‘Gender’ may not exist in all of Asia’s lexicons, but the concept is not necessarily alien to the region.

“We don’t quite have the local term, but it doesn’t mean we don’t have concepts of gender,” Filipino anthropologist Michael Tan told the Mekong Media Forum, a four-day conference (Dec. 9-12) of media professionals from across the region and a mix of other participants in this city in northern Thailand.

Talk about the standards or “social constructs” by which people label certain segments of society — for instance, gay men, lesbians, metrosexuals (an emerging breed of men who defy society’s stereotypes), single or unwed mothers — and Asians societies have a notion, however hazy, of ‘gender’.

But precisely because gender has no exact translation in many of the Asian languages, the term has come to be associated with “women’s issues,” says Tan, or in some cases “lesbians or gay men”.

“Not a bad thing,” he says, acknowledging the important role of activism in a society that tolerates diversity and basic human rights.

Yet in many parts of the region, the concept of gender is essentially still tied to and cannot disentangle itself — or at least not yet — from many of the raging issues confronting women in their societies — rooted in traditional beliefs and driven in many instances by a patriarchal mindset, which in general put women at a great disadvantage compared to men.

Media’s coverage of women compared to men reflects such tendencies. Among others, their voices are not being heard enough, says the panel of speakers at one of the forum’s sessions, called ‘Thinking, Reporting Gender’ in the Mekong media. (The session was one of two gender-focused discussions at the forum organised under the ‘Communicating for Change: Voice, Visibility and Impact for Gender Equality’ programme of IPS Asia- Pacific.)

In Thailand, a 2005 study of print or broadcast material showed that less than half of the stories covered were about women, according to Rachanee Vongsumitr, a communication professor at Burapha University in Chonburi province.

“Why are women little covered?” she asks. The same study showed women hardly served as media sources of information, while men were generally acknowledged as “experts” in some specialised fields.

In China, women’s visibility in the media appears to have been helped in part by a national state policy recognising gender rights.

Lu Pin, executive director of the Media Monitor for Women Network in China, who also writes a newspaper column, says certain topics that used to be taboo are now finding print—and even making headlines. In her presentation, she showed the audience a picture of a lesbian couple, which was unheard of in the past, she says. The issue of homosexuality, evidently, is finding public space, thanks in part to the media.

Cai Yiping, executive director of Isis International, a Philippine-based international non-governmental women’s rights organisation, says for all of China’s image in the international community as a repressive society, such a policy exists.

It is in the Constitution, she says, and one of the fundamental state policies even though they are not well known or accepted as much as the other policies such as those on environment or land use, she says.

Such a policy has not necessarily translated into better media coverage of women, although Cai concedes that the media, in general, be it mainstream or alternative, are “pushing the boundary.”

Yet, but both Cai and Lu acknowledged that a great deal of reporting in China about women’s issues is still inadequate, quantity- and quality-wise. As such one still hears and reads media reports that, by their very portrayal of women or how certain stories are framed, still tend to blame female victims of violence for their plight. Yet, they say, there are still very few reports, say, about women in business or others making significant headway in otherwise male-dominated fields.

As important as women’s issues are, Tan stresses that gender issues necessarily include the whole gamut of emerging “roles, categories or statuses” of individuals in society.

He cites, for example, ‘house husbands’, who assume the domestic roles traditionally ascribed to women. “Because women now work overseas … men are taking over domestic work,” he explains.

Does anyone (in the media) write about them? he asks. Dr Tan adds it is important for the media to recognise such roles or gender-related categories, including those involving gays and lesbians, “because they reflect the things that are going on in society.”

Getting people to talk about these emerging categories also challenges society to question its deeply entrenched stereotypes about men and women.

For activists like ISIS’s Cai, that does not even require using the word ‘gender’ or coining its exact translation in Asian languages.

On the contrary, the media are able to help society address pressing gender- related issues. After all, says Cai, all gender issues are interrelated; you solve one gender problem, such as discrimination against women, and you contribute to solving others.

* http://www.ips.org/TV/mekongmediaforum09/

Countries in the Mekong region have indeed opened their borders and former foes become friends, but several of them are still ruled by authoritarian governments that put limits on media and other freedoms.

Aung Zaw, exiled Burmese editor of ‘The Irrawaddy’ magazine, stressed this contrast during in his opening remarks at Wednesday’s opening of the Mekong Media Forum in this northern Thai city, where he has lived and fought for Burma’s freedom since fleeing the repressive state 21 years ago as a student activist.

In this kind of environment — where openness has filtered through all economies in the region but not necessarily into their political environments — the founder and editor of the magazine focusing on Burmese and South- east Asian issues said journalists need to raise fundamental questions to authorities lest they remain buried and allow the region’s repressive regimes to remain in power unchallenged.

This while scores of people continue to languish in oppressive environments — such as Burma where there are 2,000 political prisoners — that denies them of fundamental freedoms as well as economic opportunities in an otherwise resource-rich region.

“The role of journalists is not about nurturing media organisations; it is about having the courage to tell the truth,” and being committed to the pursuit democracy in an environment dominated by repressive regimes,” said Aung Zaw.

The Mekong region consists of China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Burma and Thailand through which flows the Mekong River, one of South-east Asia’s most important river systems.

The Forum brings together more than 200 participants — composed of about a hundred journalists and at least a hundred other media professionals and analysts, development experts and civil society members — for four days of discussion around critical issues confronting the media within the region.

“If you look at the Mekong countries, these used to be hostile to each other, but borders have opened up and people travel a lot” while trade has been increasing, he said, highlighting some of the major changes that have swept across the region through the years. Yet, these countries are still ruled by authoritarian states.

Although it has become a region with some of East Asia’s healthiest growth rates, the region faces a host of complex issues, including cross-border disputes and migration, poverty, environmental degradation, human trafficking and HIV/AIDS.

Experts say such social ills have been brought about in part by increased economic and socio-cultural integration. “Intensified illegal activities such as smuggling, drug trafficking, prostitution, and gambling are concentrated along the economic corridors, threatening border communities,” states a report by the Asian Development Bank.

Aung Zaw said journalists have a “watchdog,” not a “lapdog,” role to perform. “We should be raising questions to our authorities” to make them “accountable and transparent.”

He challenged the Mekong journalists at the Forum to collectively rally around the cause of press freedom and democracy, citing the issues that bind them together — issues bordering on repression, specifically of the press — and notwithstanding the diversity within Mekong societies.

“Are we united enough to defend ourselves? Are we united enough to defend our brother and sister journalists who are locked in prison (notably those in Burma), to protect our press freedom?” These, too, are the very important questions to ask in this forum, Aung Zaw added.

“When we talk about Mekong region, there’s a link (among the countries),” he said. Burma, for example, continues to be in power because countries such as Cambodia, Laos, China, Vietnam and Thailand “continue to support this pariah regime. They are very good at defending each other’s interests.”

Because the military junta continues to hold sway in Burma, at least two million Burmese have fled to neighbouring Thailand to work as migrant workers, many of whom labour under deplorable working conditions and extremely low wages. Among the biggest casualties of the repression in Burma are journalists. “You can see how the Burmese government continues to crack down on journalists,” he said.

Aung Zaw said that the media, for instance, should be looking into why some international donors to Mekong countries appear to be much more keen on providing support for big infrastructure projects in the region, and not for initiatives that push democratic space.

Journalists can dig deeper into Japan’s recent pledge of 5.5 billion U.S. dollars in aid to the Mekong countries, he suggested. “What is behind it? What is (its underlying) agenda?” asked the Burmese journalist, who launched the ‘Irrawaddy’ magazine in Thailand in 1993.

He said that often, proponents of development projects “don’t talk about building a democracy, press freedom, and how to develop seasoned journalists”. Yet the development process relies very much on how the media follow, report and monitor the most important issues for the countries they report on.

“Our participation (as journalists) is very vital in the face of such development projects,” he added.

*http://www.ips.org/TV/mekongmediaforum09/