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GTA Filipinos in the News
High
cost of looking after others' kids (
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/559855
Vicky Policarpio left her son when he was 20 months old to come
to
Judy
Gonzalez minded twins in
When Maria
Castro finally reunited with her three children, 11 years after she left them
to work as a nanny first in
Amid a few
tears and a great deal of resilience, the three university-educated former
nannies describe the heartbreak of years spent with just a fragile telephone
link to their families – and the unexpected, searing pain of reunion with
teenaged strangers often angry and wounded by those long years apart.
"I
asked my little girl on the phone what she remembered of her mommy and she
said, 'Nothing,'" says Gonzalez, 41. "It was hard financially to go
home but I did it once a year, just to get a smile back on her face."
She called
twice a week. "We love them, but the only way we can show it is by
phone."
Her
children arrived last April at her home in
Policarpio's son hid in his room when he first arrived in west-end
"I
hated that hood," says Policarpio, 45. "I
had my sisters here, so I could do my crying behind his back." When
finally they argued it out, the teenager said he, too, would get up during the
night and cry for his old home.
"What
we realize now is that these kids we are sacrificing for are being
victimized," Policarpio says. "The first
stage of reunification is very hard."
Castro's
children were in their twenties when they finally reunited with their mother and
father in
Filipino
teenagers, many of them raised by relatives and
transplanted in their most volatile years, have one of the highest school
dropout rates in
There are
20,000 live-in caregivers in
"The
choice we have is to die with a hungry stomach or get out," Gonzalez says.
The average
separation is eight years.
"We
are the lucky ones," Policarpio says. The three
women are working now in accounting or business administration and counsel
Filipina nannies shattered by their loneliness or their estranged families
through the newly created Caregiver Connection.
"Some
of them are working three jobs," she says. "Even when their own children come, there is no time to bond. It's
clear that some children aren't getting the guidance they need. We hear
heartbreaking stories."
Gonzalez
and Policarpio praise their former employers,
families who encouraged them to go back to school, who didn't make them work
around-the-clock and provided work for relatives when they moved on.
Even so,
they criticize
Women
aren't allowed to change employers or go to school, she says. If they lose
their jobs, they lose their status and their paycheque deductions.
"Lots
and lots of caregivers can't get out of the house. They have degrees back home,
but they can't upgrade their skills."
Gonzalez
says the nanny experience is "totally opposite to what we dream will
happen. I hated myself. I used to ask myself, 'Why am I deprived of watching my
girl grow up? Why am I looking after someone else's children?' But I had to
deal with it."
It's a guilt and an anger they share. "It's why we develop
an attachment to the children we look after," Castro says. "Whenever
I would hold any child, I would think I was holding my own child. I looked
after them as if they were my own because my own were so far away."
Martha
Campo, a long-time advocate of caregivers' rights who runs a weekly support
group for nannies, says children "are left to fend for themselves"
when they get here.
"They
get into drug use, gangs. They're bullied at school for their English. They
assert themselves and answer back. They're not the kids their mothers thought
they would be."
Their
mothers are different, too: independent breadwinners who long ago abandoned
their traditional submissive roles.
Castro, 49,
advocates an immigration policy that lets nannies "come as immigrants and
choose their own employers and bring their families. Eliminate the live-in
clause and let women choose for themselves."
"We
need to let this community know these women can be good citizens of
"When
we look back, the pain is no longer there."
Policarpio's son is now 17. "I've said to him, 'Michael, when you have your own
family, let me go back home then. I will take my rest.'"
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