Earlier as I was preparing my usual morning regimen of hot coffee with a lot of creamer and sugar, I overheard my aunt on my paternal side and her husband having a light conversation together with their 2-months old baby, Precious Jirah. I heard tito was playing childishly with his daughter, prompting the little baby to converse with him, or hoping to just make some baby sounds. Jirah seem to ignore whatever is going on around her innocent world. This scene of a happy family enjoying the early morning hours went on for few more minutes.
And this all happened in front of a laptop computer... over this internet communication tool called Skype.
My aunt's husband, Totie, is an OFW in the Middle East. After they were married last year, tito went on to work for their future abroad. Typical Filipino reality, if I may say. I personally know many people who are under this reality--this is all too familiar. And yet for me, it is still too confounding and a little too disturbing. It all the more becomes discomforting and absurd when you think of the reason about why people leave families and relatives behind to work abroad. Do they really want to go abroad and leave sons and daughters in the first place? Or are they just forced to, because of necessity, because of the need to, because of the inability of this government to provide decent work that will provide decent salary and not just to subsist? Okay, it's just my rants. But no apologies.
Looking at my aunt's family...looking at their young daughter--I think about her future and how money from abroad will help build it. And I take consolation in that. Maybe, that would suffice. Maybe for people who leave behind families, they take comfort in that thought. And they went on to defy distance because of love.
Me? Haaayy, man I hate distance.
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