Dexter Soriano, a lanky young man living in the Philippines, was celebrating his 23rd birthday on April 22 when he crashed riding his motorcycle. Grainy cell phone photos from the aftermath show his purpled, bruised face in an ER, his neck encircled in a brace.
He died later that same day.
But Soriano’s mother, Evelyn Malaiba, was more than 5,500 miles away from Dexter, in a hilly suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, when she got the news.
Malaiba has lived in Lebanon for the past 15 years as a migrant domestic worker, among the tens of thousands of mostly women who enter the country from Ethiopia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and elsewhere through an oftentimes abusive kafala work sponsorship system.
Many of them are the breadwinners for their families.
Malaiba’s family, too, depended on the wages she sent back home to them in Batangas City, the Philippines. She traveled back home whenever she could to visit her family, albeit living the vast majority of her time in Lebanon.
But then in October, a deadly cross-border air war broke out in south Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel — tied to Israel’s bloody bombardment of Gaza. The Philippines quickly listed Lebanon as under “Crisis Alert Level 3,” meaning that it urged its nationals to leave.
Some Filipinas did leave, or were already back home visiting loved ones in the Philippines when war broke out in Lebanon.
Others, still in Lebanon, are hesitant to flee.
A One-Way Trip?
That’s because, thanks to the newly enforced Alert Level 3, they soon found that they couldn’t return to Lebanon to work should they go back to the Philippines. Some were even removed from their flights out of Manila or barred from boarding their planes, according to Myriam Prado, a Filipina citizen and co-founder of the Alliance of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon.
One woman, 70-year-old Sang Nunag, has been working in Lebanon with the same employer for the past 44 years and speaks English peppered with bits of Lebanese slang. She said that she, too, was barred from boarding her flight back to Beirut from the Philippines after a visit home that was meant to end in October.
But Nunag was determined to get back to Lebanon. It would be a long journey back to what she feels is her second home.
And for Malaiba, her 23-year-old son’s sudden death trapped her between two impossible choices: stay thousands of miles from her family during a time of heartbreak, or fly back to Batangas — at the risk of losing the livelihood her family depends on.
A “Second Home”
About two million Filipinos work overseas, by the Philippine Statistics Authority’s latest count. The majority are women, sending home remittances that help keep the country’s economy afloat
More than 33,000 Filipino citizens were living in Lebanon as of January 2020, according to the Philippines’ Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). It is unclear exactly how many of them are domestic workers, who live in and clean the homes of their Lebanese employers.
There are hundreds of thousands of other Filipinas and Filipinos working in other countries across the Middle East and North Africa, the vast majority in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
A few hundred are — or were — also in Palestine: The Philippines also raised an Alert Level 3 in October for the Gaza Strip, where some 70 Filipino citizens requested help with repatriation at the time, according to the state-run Philippine News Agency.
The Philippines DFA Undersecretary Eduardo de Vega told Filipino outlet The Daily Tribune last week that workers like Evelyn Malaiba could soon be granted an exemption from the Alert Level 3 measure, allowing them to return to Lebanon should they visit home.
His comments came after several dozen Filipina workers and some Lebanese employers protested last Sunday outside the Filipino embassy in Beirut demanding the measure be lifted. Prado, who helped organize the protest, explained that she and others are still awaiting an official response about the Level 3 restriction from Philippines authorities.
It is not yet clear whether Malaiba or others might be granted the exemption. She said by phone Monday that the DFA has yet to contact or inform her about such a measure.
The Philippines embassy did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
“Lebanon is My Home”
There are also the emotional ties that keep Filipina workers in Lebanon, despite some experiences of abuse at the hands of employers.
Imelda Castro first came to Lebanon as a domestic worker in 1997, when she was in her thirties. Now 64, she has five grown children back home in Iloilo City, the Philippines. She largely raised them from afar, she said, as she worked for decades in Jounieh, a seaside city north of Beirut.
Lebanon is my home, but I also miss my children.
– Imelda Castro
Castro has also become a grandmother in that time. “I’m a teta!” she giggled, using the Lebanese slang term for “grandma.”
“Lebanon is my home,” she added, “but I also miss my children.”
She has decided to stay in Lebanon despite the growing war in the south, in order to pay for her family’s expenses back in Iloilo. “I’m not rich, I come from a poor family.”
There are signs the cross-border war could expand, posing a bigger threat outside of southern Lebanon. Recent days have seen Israel strike just outside Sidon, a coastal city just 27 miles south of Beirut. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that the “intense phase of the war with Hamas [in Gaza] is about to end,” with Israeli forces looking to “shift some of the power north” along the border with Lebanon.
And a widely criticized, un-bylined Telegraph article on Sunday cited unnamed “whistleblowers” at Beirut’s airport as stating that the facility was a nexus for incoming Iranian arms, sparking fears that Israel could consider striking the airport should the conflict escalate. Lebanon’s government has refuted the claims.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army said in a statement last week that “operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon were approved and validated.”
“We Need to Work”
Nunag, who has lived and worked in Lebanon since 1980, remains unfazed. She lived with her employers in a western Beirut neighborhood through Israel’s 1982 siege of the city, and survived some of the worst fighting of the decade. Some days she whiled away underground, in the apartment building’s bomb shelter.
“I experienced all the war that happened here in Lebanon,” Nunag said. “Right now, in Beirut, there’s nothing.”
So when she was stopped from boarding a plane back to Beirut from the Philippines in October due to the Level 3 alert, she simply decided on another route back to Lebanon. “I went to Australia to my brother, and then from there I entered Lebanon again,” Nunag says.
“All of us, we need to work,” the 70-year-old reasoned. “If we can’t come back [to Lebanon], what about our families that we are supporting there [in the Philippines]? What will happen to them?”
Meanwhile, Malaiba remains heartbroken by her son’s death. “I can’t hug or kiss him,” she said.
Still, she also settled on the decision that her income in Lebanon was simply too important to risk leaving behind, should the Level 3 alert prevent her from coming back to Beirut from visiting her grieving family in the Philippines. Her daughter will graduate high school soon and needs tuition money for college.
And after all, she said, even if she is granted an exemption to visit the Philippines, it’s “too late” to fly those thousands of miles to Batangas City — her son Dexter has already died in the motorcycle accident, lost forever. He was buried just four days after his birthday.
“I know my son is in heaven now,” Malaiba said.
** All photos by João Sousa. Sousa is a photojournalist based in Lebanon and focused on social issues.
