I have been back here for days and I have spent the past days trying to absorb our experiences and also catching up with daily activities here. Basically, we as I have mentioned before, the trip was a scouting trip meant to tell us if we absolutely don’t want to go back.
We have been taken cared of well by my relatives there and for that I would like to extend my gratitude towards them. I have been reading bad stories of Filipino relatives trying to extort the foreign spouses and it is indeed shameful and sad. However, we are fortunate to not have the same circumstances. We had a Dutch colleague who has a business in Vietnam who visited us and also visited an online female friend only to end up staying in a crowded house in their living room and paying for trips to various places and feeding the whole neighborhood.
During our trip, I have seen this attitude of “give me money because you are rich and I am poor” everywhere. It makes things uneasy for me and sometimes you feel that you have to get yourself in a lower profile not to be extorted. We were extorted by corrupt policemen for goodness sake! Anyways, this is not the only country we have experienced this and others are much even blunt and pushy so I can’t totally say my country is that bad. I just want to act naturally but sometimes you don’t know how to act because people might discriminate you if you don’t look rich enough (or foreign) to pay for things but at the same time you also don’t want to look too rich that people will rob or make you pay higher than what is normal. I hope you got the idea.
In some ways, I long for a society that is more egalitarian in ways but poverty prevents that from happening in less-developed countries such as the Philippines. This I realize I now just have to live with and approach in a humane or charitable way. Now I just have to think that the extorted money could have been paid for a sick child (I hope!). One of the positive ways I have seen as a good example from my family I visited is that instead of just handing out free money, they hired less fortunate folks and get them to school for free. Maybe I would do that and even help someone pay for tuition in exchange of doing some skilled work or work that would have them pick up skills for the future.
My feelings go from excited to disillusioned nowadays. I want to still consider even going to the US but look at what is happening now! It’s also sad to think I will be farther away from my family in Canada but that could be solved by regular trips yearly. MrC and I talked about my wishes and hopefully we can plan for it financially. He also has to see his family regularly of course.
In the meantime, I have started working for MrC’s company and we are trying to research how I could get paid legally without too much costs incurred by his company. Tomorrow, I will also file my application for retention of my Filipino citizenship. This is but the first step towards the preparation. I also made lists now of stuff we would put into storage, give away or dispose, and sell. We plan to stay for an additional 6 months in the Philippines and see if things are still positive from there. I just hope and pray for wisdom to guide us in our decisions for the next few days. Our target for coming back is December of this year.
1 response so far ↓
1 zylla // Sep 25, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Wow…you’re back. Time flies, indeed!
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