Some OFWs ‘fear more poverty than Hamas’

By Alex P. Vidal

“War does not determine who is right – only who is left.” – Bertrand Russell

THE Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) Region 6 doesn’t have records, as of this writing, of Ilonggo Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) and their families who have contacted their office to coordinate and ask help for possible repatriation of OFWs amid the worsening firefight and bombing spree in Israel and the Hamas-controlled territories in Palestine.

The Iloilo Provincial Government has also put up hotlines and emergency contacts in the reactivated Operation Bulig Ilonggo Migrant Desk.

We have hundreds of OFWs in both countries working as nannies, caregivers, nurses, drivers, and construction workers, among other jobs.

If the bloodbath will escalate now that Israel has started the massive ground attack with their 300,000 soldiers entering Gaza to run after the Hamas terrorists and recover the hostages, Filipino OFWs might start to think of deserting the war-torn territories if their employers in Israel and Palestine will evacuate.

Most Filipinos caught in war abroad in the past, especially during the Gulf War in the early 90s, were hesitant to come home as there were no better economic alternatives in the Philippines.

Many of them opted to cross the borders and risk their lives and limbs rather than fly home and face unemployment uncertainties.

For many OFWs, it’s better to risk being caught in the middle of violence than to run roughshod over the booby traps of poverty in the Philippines.

The opportunity to land in good-paying jobs abroad and help families back home is suddenly lost and wasted when abrupt conflicts and violence like the Israel-Hamas gun battle occur.

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A very impressive poem written by Wilfred Owen, the greatest writer of war poetry in the English language, can be read in the Aspects of Western Civilization (Volume II) Problems and Sources of History (fourth edition) Chapter 6 on The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era, compiled by Perry M. Rogers.

Owen wrote out of his intense personal experience as a soldier and wrote with unrivaled power of the physical, moral and psychological trauma of the First World War. All of his great war poems on which his reputation rests were written in a mere 15 months.

From the age of 19, Owen wanted to become a poet and immersed himself in poetry, being especially impressed by Keats and Shelley.

He was working in France, close to the Pyrenees, as a private tutor when the First World War broke out. At this time he was remote from the war and felt completely disconnected from it too.

Even when he visited the local hospital with a doctor friend and examined, at close quarters, the nature of the wounds of soldiers who were arriving from the Western Front, the war still appeared to him as someone else’s story, according to The War Poetry website.

Eventually he began to feel guilty of his inactivity as he read copies of The Daily Mail which his mother sent him from England. He returned to England, and volunteered to fight on October 21, 1915.

He trained in England for over a year and enjoyed the impression he made on people as he walked about in public wearing his soldier’s uniform. Owen was sent to France on the last day of 1916, and within days was enduring the horrors of the front line.

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MORE BIZARRE SEXUAL EDUCATION FACTS AND INFORMATION:

—A 1998 Details magazine poll showed that 14 percent of women fantasized about Brad Pitt during sex.

—Only four percent of women find “mama’s boys” attractive. (NPN)

—SOME 89 PERCENT ARGUE ABOUT MONEY ALL THE TIME?: 11 percent of couples only have sex because it is easier than arguing about money.(Readers Digest)

—Micropenis is a rare disorder where the afflicted suffers from an unusually small penis, roughly .75 to one inch long…AND THAT’S ERECT!

—Dendrophilia – sexual attraction to trees. S

—WARNING: WHEN SOMEONE WE DON’T KNOW COMES NEARER, RUN: A frotteur is a person who becomes sexually excited by rubbing against strangers.

—THOSE WHO ADMIRE AND IDOLIZE HITLER, PLS DON’T READ THIS: It has been said that Adolf Hitler was a coprophiliac, which means he had a fetish for women’s feces. He also had a thing for being urinated on by women.

—Forty three percent of people in the US own a vibrator. (Cosmopolitan).

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two daily newspapers in Iloilo.—Ed)