Filipinos Take 'Going Places' Literally

Ricky, as his family calls him, is the major breadwinner for relatives who share a cramped house in a Manila alley. The Sony television in the living room? Ricky bought it. The refrigerator, too. And the white telephone, on which he calls several times a month. The house itself was upgraded from a wood shanty to a modest concrete dwelling with his earnings.

All told, he helps support 14 people in this three-bedroom house -- his mother, father, brother, 10 nieces and nephews and a baby named Genesis. His aged father repairs broken figurines and other trinkets for resale, making $180 a month if he's lucky. Ricky, they said, sends them about $400 every other month.

"There are many people with talent, but they have never been given any chances here," said Reynaldo Aure, 43, Ricky's older brother. "So they go abroad."

Meeting a Demand

Though Filipinos have been departing for centuries, the major exodus in search of work began in the 1970s. Though it ebbed in the late 1980s, it has been growing again because of rising demand in societies that need skilled workers, analysts said. Filipinos are in some ways uniquely equipped to meet the need. Colonized first by the Spanish and then by the Americans, they are linguistically flexible. Filipino singers are such good imitators that they have a phrase for it: "plakang-plaka," or "sounds just like the recording."

They are culturally adaptable, and their caring manner is prized, especially in graying societies that need nurses, said Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr., director of the Institute of Philippine Culture at Ateneo de Manila University.

They perform more than 250 different jobs in about 170 countries, according to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, which assists and tracks Filipino overseas workers.

Galvez Tan rattles off details of a few he's met recently: a Filipino transportation service operator in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, a Filipino manager of a cigarette factory in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and karaoke-loving Filipino international aid workers in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

What will reverse the talent drain, Aguilar said, is a palpable improvement in the political situation, "by which the middle class will see that yes, politics is not too annoying, corruption is not such a major issue."

Lately, pundits have been citing those who choose to return. "I just feel that I would be happier, and be more useful, working back home," wrote law student Ibarra Gutierrez, finishing a degree in New York, in a recent column in the Philippine Inquirer.

One day, Jacinto said, when he has repaid his parents and brother for the years of sacrifice they endured to get him through medical school, he wants to return, too. But first, he said, there's a nursing job somewhere for him in the United States.

Cody reported from Beijing. Researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.