Philippines: Radio Program, A Lifeline
for Migrant Workers
From Inter Press Service
News Agency (IPS) Asia-Pacific
Philippines (IPS) - ''How can I find out if the contract I am signing
to work as a nurse in Britain is valid or not?" asked a caller,
who was preparing to leave the Philippines and join its 7 million
nationals who work overseas.
Another migrant worker said, "Is it a sin if my girlfriend gets
an abortion? She will be deported if her employer finds out she's
pregnant. We don't know what to do."
These are the range of questions that the radio programme "Babaeng
Migrante, May Kakampi Ka" (Women Migrant, You have an Ally),
gets every Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 12 noon.
The program, aired throughout the Philippines via the AM station DWIZ,
has become a lifeline of sorts for Filipino migrant workers and their
families, who are swamped with queries as well as worries about their
future and status in the very uncertain world of overseas employment.
"We have been acting like their counselors and therapists,"
says Fe Nicodemus, co-anchor of the program and chair of the group
Kakammpi, which works with migrant workers and their families.
"Others just call to vent their feelings, their frustrations
in life,'' Necodemus adds of the migrants, who work as nurses, construction
workers, teachers, domestic workers, and seafarers.
Activists like her tapped into the power of radio by accident. In
1997, she had gone on radio and television hoping to seek justice
for a Filipino maid in Jordan who came home dead, with suspicious
bruises and wounds in her body.
In one radio program, Nicodemus was so swamped with calls and pleas
for help by Filipino overseas workers and their families that the
station asked her to stay, even if it could not pay her for her time
and work.
That show became a regular segment and for three years earned many
advertisements for the station that had invited her to host it. But
she says she was disappointed that not a drop of the program's earnings
went to efforts to help migrant workers, 800,000 of whom leave the
Philippines every year and make it the largest organized exporter
of human labor.
Often, Nicodemus' male anchors seemed impervious to the migrant workers'
plight. "They would laugh and make jokes about them or call them
stupid when they were off the air," she recalls.
In 2001, Kakammpi managed to get a grant from the Ford Foundation
to run its own radio program.
"We decided to focus on women and reproductive health because
73 percent of our 7 to 8 million overseas workers are women, who are
more vulnerable to abuses especially in some Muslim countries where
the status of women is low," says Nicodemus.
But she says the one-hour show has other segments, ranging from news
relating to migration, dramas about issues confronting women workers,
phoned-in stories and anecdotes from listeners, updates on legal cases
involving overseas workers and the reading of letters sent in by listeners.
Nicodemus hopes the program reaches more Filipinos, given the fact
that radio remains the most popular medium in this country of 80 million
people.
The workers' concerns are many, but the more common ones involve problems
with fake work contracts, withheld salaries as well as emotional problems
resulting from situations such as infidelity. In this mainly Roman
Catholic country, Nicodemus adds, the show gets a lot of questions
that begin with, "Is it a sin..."
Government officials, other activists and analysts, as well as workers
and their families are also heard in the program. In one broadcast,
for instance, an official from the Philippine Nurses Association stressed
the need to have a pre-employment seminar for nurses so they will
learn how to scrutinize contracts and have more bargaining power.
In another, the teenage daughter of a migrant worker discussed the
generational gap she feels with her absentee father.
The program also provides a help-line where listeners get either legal
or medical help or in some cases, psychological assistance. "For
instance, when they ask about abortion, we refer them to medical experts
because we obviously are not equipped to give advice on this,"
Nicodemus explains.
For those workers who suffer pangs of homesickness, the sound of the
host's familiar voice can sometimes be therapeutic. ''My voice sounds
like an empty can but they say that they're happy to hear me especially
when I laugh,'' Nicodemus quips. ''Filipinos love to laugh, you see.''
It helps a lot, too, that she speaks very fluent Pilipino, the national
tongue. She also knows whereof she speaks, because her husband was
an overseas worker for 15 years.
The program "Women Migrant, You have an Ally," which
won second place in the recent AIDS Media Award, has created such
a buzz that some producers asked about the possibility of making movies
about the lives of migrant workers it has featured.
For now, however, Nicodemus says Kakammpi's goal is to see the program's
slot expanded by at least half an hour to 1.5 hours.
__________________________________
This article is reported by Marites Sison for IPS-Philippines. Republished
with permission from Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS) Asia-Pacific.
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