Category: Well, the Dubai residency was certainly a surprise. And in more ways than one! The pace was certainly not as hectic as London, and for the most part the group was able to go out and actually see the city, find time to know more about each other, and ourselves, appreciate some not so obvious things, and welcome if not tolerate some of the more confusing aspects of living an international life. I’ve mulled over a whole lot of new things from the course of that week, and as the whole experience has left me with a rather dense collection of inner musings, I am left with little choice than to split up my next few blog posts.
This is Part 2 of a series of 5
The phone call started off innocently enough. I called the hotel to follow up on the visa application documents that I’d just faxed. The kind, elderly voice at the other end of the line sounded eerily familiar. The dropped “th” sound, un-enunciated long vowels… I just had to hazard a guess:
“Ate, Pinoy ka ba?” (Literally: Pardon me, good miss, but would I be overstepping my socio-economic boundaries by assuming that you are indeed a fellow citizen of the Republic of the Philippines? Filipino is such a succinct language.)
The answer was a resounding yes. 15 minutes later, not only had I fixed my visa, but I’d also ran up my overseas phone charges, and been fed the name and age of a new Filipina-Chinese management trainee, Sophie, who finished from the same undergrad University that I did.
A quick look on Wikipedia showed me that there were between 250,000 and 450,000 Filipinos living in the UAE, taking up 5% of the population of the whole country.
I never really knew just how big a number 450,000 was until I got off the plane and did the check-in. There was a doorman there, Jonathan, I chatted him up. There was a girl, May, doing head counts for the first brunch. I chatted her up. The guy who cooked our omelets – José was it? Or Iñigo? I can’t really remember as I don’t really talk to people at 7:30 in the morning. But anyway, I ordered the same thing every day, so he already knew: “Bossing! Queso tsaka onion?”
There were so many Filipinos there I did 2 complete Dash Interviews in Tagalog.
Fast facts:
2008 Foreign Currency Remittance by UAE-based Filipinos – USD 520million
2008 Philippines per capita GDP – USD 3,515
2008 Philippines population – 90 million (450,000 workers = 0.5% of the population)
USD 520 million dibydiby (divided by, in Filipino) 450,000 workers = 1,000 USD approx
So you’ve basically got an extra 30% direct transfer for 0.5% of the population coming in every time Christmas hits. All going direct to C, private consumption.
Dutch Disease? Ha! How’s about a good dose of Spanish Sickness?
On the one hand I feel very proud to have so many Filipinos out, overseas, doing an honest day’s work and sending money back home. On the other hand, I’m also waxing over apoplectic just thinking about how sad the situation must be back home that Catholic, Asian tropical islanders have to fly out to the middle of the Persian Gulf to work in a Muslim (albeit nominally) country.
Why is it that the same people can be so productive outside the country, yet so indolent and hopeless when inside? I would hazard a guess and say that there’s something systemically wrong with the way the country is run. And, I’m sorry, but it is absolutely with no malice that I blame the Spanish for setting us up to be the only Latin American nation in Asia. Only Pakistan beats our bureaucracy on the corruption scale. We don’t save, we don’t invest, we don’t innovate. We sing, drink, dance and play the guitar.
And yeah, we export people.
Regardless, there has to be a way to harness the skills of these same people, right? But how? After the BRIC group, there’s the Next Eleven. How do we make sure that we get on the next wave of development?
I’m not all too sure about the process, but I certainly hope that this “cross continent” experience will help me learn enough to drive change back in the Republic.
Otherwise, I’m moving to Dubai.
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