Violations
A small news bite in the local newspaper out of Manila, Philippines. Another Filipino has returned home from work abroad. Returned home from the Arab Emirates, in Bahrain. Where many impoverished Filipinos go to seek work as domestics, as hotel workers. In fact, as indentured servants. Expected to do precisely what, as and how they are instructed by their overseers, their employers.For whom the Filipinos represent a cheap source of labour, as in slave labour. These workers, needless to say, have no rights under the law as it is exercised in Bahrain. They are represented as nameless, faceless, characterless, behind-the-scenes functionaries. Dependent on the money they earn, mostly to send back home to equally-impoverished family members in the Philippines.
There is this about Filipinos; they are reverentially religious, they are hard-working, they are trusting. And their trust is abused continually as they are overworked, and no consideration to their well-being is ever advanced toward them. Their employers take advantage of them as the powerful manipulate those with no protection. Many are physically beaten, and many are sexually abused.
The article? Well, it mentioned that a newborn male baby was discovered in a washroom bin on a Gulf Air flight from Bahrain. "The baby is now under our care", an official of the Department of Social Welfare & Development in Manila declared. "We'll look for his mother. We're giving his mother a chance to come forward."
The baby was discovered by airline cleaners, with his umbilical cord attached, bloody and wrapped in tissue paper. Kindly people in the capital city of the country have offered to adopt the baby, but the government insists it wishes to discover the whereabouts of the baby's biological mother.
To chastise her, to find her guilty of child abandonment, causing injury to a child, disgracing the honour of Filipinos returning from workplace-purgatory humiliated and fearful; to pronounce guilt upon her? Better to simply place the baby with a willing foster family, and leave the poor woman to her very special nightmare memories.
Labels: Human Relations, Human Rights, Middle East
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, September 15, 2010
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