By the time we come off the press, three of our kababay­ans would have been dead in China. SallyOrdinar­io-Villanueva, Ramon Credo and Elizabeth Batain were all injected the lethal drug to snuff their lives instead of the firing squad. All because of drug trafficking. And they will not be the last.

Two more will follow.
According to Philip­pine government sta­tistics, there are 630 Filipinos jailed in foreign countries for drug traf­ficking. Of these, 250 are in China and 72 of them are in death row.

Grim statistics indeed.
While we grieve with their families for every death diminishes us – ‘for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” we cannot help but ask the nag­ging question:
Why do so many Filipi­nos have to die in foreign lands?

We are familiar with oth­er statistics:
Flor Contemplacion, Jenifer Bidoya and others, nameless and faceless all paid for their lives.
Some 700 workers, mostly women, die each year following maltreat­ment by their employers. Forty foreign workers ar­rive home in coffins each week.

Yet 3,000 leave the coun­try each month to seek a living aboard, and sometimes, instead of living, they return home dead.
Ten percent of the population of 92 million are in almost every coun­try in the world and it is not going to stop.

The Philippines continues to en­courage the mi­gration because not only does it provide much needed currency but also prevents a so­cial volcano from erupt­ing.
For the receiving countries, it provides them with cheap, ex­pendable labour. Until some cataclys­mic thing happens to the country, we do not see any hope for the hapless Filipinos who end up paying for their lives abroad so that their own children will have a life in the Philippines.

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