Everyone who wants to go to Finland, raise your hands
Plans underway to bring tens of thousands of Filipinos to work in Finland
By Sami Sillanpää
The family of Circe Brillantes were happy in their wooden house, until termites ate so much of the structure that it was no longer safe to live in. They could not afford a new one: houses cannot be built on the income of a family of rice farmers.
Thank God, as this Catholic family says, that Circe has a nursing degree, and was able to get work in Saudi Arabia.
Circe went to the Middle East, worked hard in a hospital, and sent money to her parents. The walls of a new house in their home village near the city of Iloilo began to rise up.
Later Circe went to Kuwait for two years. With the money she earned there, the new house became a home. Now the family of six has a solid house built of stone, which the termites cannot hurt.
"This house still is a bit incomplete", Circe says on the porch of her home, which is pleasantly shaded from the tropical sun by a coconut palm. The polite, 34-year-old woman speaks beautiful English. Her father, a farmer, manages better in the local Ilongo language. Mother Erlinda brings in bananas picked from their own tree.
The walls of the home are still concrete grey, and the kitchen floor lacks tiles. The money that Circe earned in the Arab countries is not enough for that - especially since their aunt's illness got worse. But now the family again has hope of getting the home back into shape. Circe has a job waiting for her, where she can earn ten times as much as she could as a nurse in Iloilo.
Her visa application was approved this week. In a couple of months Circe begins work as a practical nurse in Finland.
"Do you have bananas in Finland?" Circe asks. "Oh, imported."
That is how the world economy works. Food, raw materials, and people have to be brought in from far away.
People in Iloilo laugh a great deal. The Filipinos have a reputation as a nation of warmhearted people, who are plagued by corruption, poverty, and crime.
On the outskirts of Iloilo, sheds have been cobbled together out of sheet metal and cardboard. In the centre of this city of half a million people, there are a couple of department stores and a number of pawn shops.
Along Iznart Street there is a bright, orange office building, which is guarded, in the local fashion, by two men carrying shotguns.
The office on the sixth floor offers a way to get to Finland.
The tables in the ample office of Filscandia Manpower Recruitment Services are decorated with Finnish flags. Filscandia operates together with the Finnish Opteam.
The business of Opteam is to arrange employment abroad. It has brought hundreds of metal workers from Poland and Slovakia to Finland. The welders and lathe operators that it recruited are building Finland's sixth nuclear reactor in Olkiluoto.
"Finland's own labour resources are not sufficient to fill all of the open jobs. Statistics show this. In many fields there is already an acute shortage of labour", says Mika Eskola, deputy CEO of Opteam.
This is a business for Opteam, but Eskola likes to say that he is "saving Finland", in the ten years to come, more than 700,000 Finns are retiring. According to Eskola, the promotion of "work-based immigration" is the only way to keep the country working.
Recruitment of labour from Iloilo began about three months ago. Now the aim is to bring about 100 practical nurses to work with Esperi Care, which offers elderly care services.
Opteam is also recruiting cleaners, welders, and restaurant workers. "The goal is to build a significant network in the Philippines, which Finnish businesses can benefit from. By 2015 the aim is to bring tens of thousands of educated people to Finland." It is quite a task. No such migrations have been seen in recent Finnish history.
Fortune seeking has always motivated people. Finns have emigrated to America to work in forests, and to Sweden to build Volvos. Now people are moving to China to manage factories.
The Philippines was was established on the basis of migration, and it is still living from it. The country got its name according to Spain's Prince Phillip. About 500 years of Spanish rule were followed by 50 years as a colony of the Untied States.
During independence, which began in 1946, there was no end to instability, both economic, and political. This week a group of soldiers in Manila tried to stage a coup - yet again. Consequently, many Filipinos have a dream of getting out.
There are Filipinos working as household servants in Hong Kong, as construction workers in Chicago, as mercenaries in Iraq. A large proportion of the world's seamen are from the Philippines.
All in all, a dizzying nine million of the less than 90 million people who live in the Philippines work abroad. Some go for a year, others permanently.
There is a special abbreviation for migrant workers: OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker", and the sector is administered by two government offices.
"The money sent home by people working abroad is very important for the country's economy", says James Mendiola, who runs an office in Iloilo that helps would-be migrant workers.
A row of clocks on the wall of the office shows the time in various time zones, from Tokyo, to Riyadh, and to Sao Paulo. There are Filipinos all over the world. Last year 15 billion dollars worth of immigrants' pay money flowed into the Philippines, which is about five times more than the amount deriving from foreign investments made in the country.
Opteam chose Iloilo as its home base, because its contact person, Gideon Regaldo, a doctor who worked for a long time in Finland, knew the Buaron family, which now runs the recruitment company in Iloilo.
Of the approximately ten employees in the company, none have ever been to Finland. But members of the Buaron family have been immigrants. Raul, the brother of the director of the company, worked for years on a pleasure boat in Monaco, owned by Finnish Formula 1 legend Keke Rosberg.
"His son Nico is now driving Formula 1. It was a nice family. We often took the boat to Corsica and Sardinia", Raul recalls.
The morning in Iloilo is pleasantly warm. A group of students on the lawn of the university are playing softball. A sign on the door of the main building makes a polite request: Please leave your guns in the cloakroom.
The nursing school which operates as part of the Central Philippines University is one of Iloilo's more than ten educational institutions in health care in the city. Nursing is the most popular field in the university.
It has been noticed in the Philippines, that people in rich countries no longer care for each other. There is a shortage of nurses giving care to the sick, the elderly, and the disabled in the ageing industrialised countries from Australia to Germany.
Therefore, Iloilo churns out nurses for the whole world. Where the students end up depends on "the world market situation", as deputy dean Carolyn Yoro expresses the matter.
"It used to be that students wanted to become nurses, so they could help people. Now the students want to be nurses so they can go abroad", Yoro says.
It takes four years to learn nursing. The language of instruction is English, which is one of the official languages of the Philippines, and a language of instruction from elementary school.
The education includes practice at a hospital operating in connection with the university. The nurses help in the birth of babies, assist in surgery, and deal with emergencies in intensive care. The final exam meets the standards of the United States.
"Our equipment may not be as fancy as in rich countries, but in professional skills, our graduates are competitive globally", Yoro says.
A small fan on the ceiling of the classroom tries to cut through the sweltering heat. About 40 students sit at their desks - women and men wearing the white uniforms of nurses. "Which of you want to go abroad to work?"
All hands go up.
"Who wants to stay in the Philippines?"
Nobody.
"This is our tragedy", says teacher Maria Fe Habardass. "What will happen to us when all of our trained professionals leave the country?"
The World Health Organisation shares the concern. It says that 15,000 nurses leave the Philippines each year. At the same time, there is a shortage of competent nurses at clinics in the country - especially in poor rural areas. The Ministry of Health of the Philippines estimates that 85 per cent of the nurses trained in the country have gone abroad.
But what else is there to do, when there is no money?
Allen Famatid, 28, opens the buttons on his white coat, and walks out of the West Visayas University Hospital at the end of a work day.
The hospital is the most prestigious in the area, but even as a specialist nurse in the treatment of liver disease, Allen earns only 10,000 pesos - about EUR 160, a month. It is more than what millions of Filipinos get from doing odd jobs, but it still is not much.
Allen first studied management at university, but noticed that the degree would not get him work abroad, so he trained as a nurse.
"I hope that I can get a job abroad, so that I might build a better future for my family."
The cheerful and energetic man has a wife and two young sons, but he is willing to leave his work and his family in Iloilo for a year or two, if someone in Finland were to want him.
Allen has been told that in Finland he could earn EUR 1,800 a month.
Allen left an application with Opteam a couple of moths ago. He did not get into the first group to leave for Finland, but he still has hope.
Esperi Care has chosen the first seven applicants recommended by Opteam. All of them have at least a nurse's education and experience at work. Many have been at work abroad before.
In Finland, the nurses first spend half a year in an apprenticeship programme. At that time they are supposed to learn the Finnish language. Then they take a test to be qualified as practical nurses.
Esperi has promised a two year contract and pay according to scales set by the labour agreement.
Circe Brillantes, the woman from the termite house, is practising elementary Finnish on a computer.
She is trying hard, but the sound of "hyvää yötä" ("good night") are difficult to produce. There are plans to send teachers of Finnish to Iloilo, but the first group of nurses are going to Finland with no advance knowledge of the language.
"I have heard that Finns are friendly and warm people. You can learn the language through interaction with people. That is how I learned Arabic", Circe says.
People do not know very much about Finland. There has been talk about the cold weather, as well as Nokia and Kimi Räikkönen. But none of these is something that would entice a person to move to the other side of the world.
Ask any of the nurses at Iloilo, and all would primarily like to go to the United States. Australia and Canada are also popular. The Middle East is fairly easy to get to, but many horror stories are told about unpaid wages, and even sexual abuse.
A new boom location for Filipinos is the English-speaking, predominantly Catholic Ireland.
Ireland also has a history of mass emigration, but the new prosperity there has turned the tide in the opposite direction. Now Ireland, which has a smaller population than Finland, already has 10,000 foreign nurses - half of them from the Philippines. One Swedish company has set up a recruitment office in Dublin to attract Filipino nurses to Sweden. There is competition for skilled Filipinos.
Who wouldn't want to hire Maureen Parra, a cheerful woman of 32 from Iloilo, who is sharp and funny and speaks five languages, from Cebuano to Spanish. She has two degrees, as a physical therapist and as a nurse.
Maureen has applications to the United States, Australia, and Finland.
"There are many who apply to the Untied States and Australia. Sometimes it takes more than a year to get a reply. Finland is a new country, and one might get there more quickly", Maureen says.
There are recruitment offices in Iloilo to several countries. There are some dishonest ones among them. Even many of the honest firms charge a few months' wages in fees.
Opteam does not charge the applicants any fees. The company says that it is a matter of principle. Opteam earns its money by billing its Finnish customers - that is, the companies where those who are recruited go to work.
"I hope that Finland will become a new opportunity for us, a new place where the people of Iloilo can go to work", says Deputy Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog.
Thousands of nurses graduate at our schools every year. We have many people available."
Iloilo trains as many nurses in a year as all of Finland does.
The Opteam office has not yet advertised Finland very much. The word has nevertheless spread in the hospitals and schools. Well over 100 applications have come - some from other cities. One evening, on Iloilo's short bar street a local young man, going by the name of Red, says "I have thought about applying to go to Finland as a cleaner.
If the visions that Opteam and its partners have for the Philippines are implemented, there will be a completely new kind of migration to Finland - or then not. The office run by Filipinos has its hands full of work. Applicants need to be interviewed, and certificates need to be verified. Someone is always trying to cheat.
The small Finnish Embassy in Manila could not handle the thousands of visa applications with its present staff.
The big question is, what Finland wants. Many politicians speak in favour of work-based immigration, while others are strongly against it. Labour unions have their own worries. In the whole of the EU there is a need for new labour, but at the same time, it is said that quotas are needed for the use of immigrant labour.
They are big issues that Circe Brillantes has not had time to think about. Her everyday life goes into helping her sick aunt. Sitting on the sofa of the unfinished home, the aunt looks frail. Her kidney ailment requires dialysis treatment in a hospital every week.
Treating the aunt is so expensive for the family, that Circe's pay, even in Iloilo's best hospital, would not be enough to cover it. She also has a debt of honour to pay. Without her aunt's financial support, Circe would not have been able to study to be a nurse. Nearly 200,000 pesos, or the wages of many years, went into the training.
"Now it is my turn to pay it back. I hope that I can get to Finland so that I can pay for my aunt's treatment in a hospital.
There are still medical examinations, permit issues, and orientation, but then, Circe should be ready to travel.
In the Finnish winter she will have to learn to use a woolen cap and learn to dodge ice falling from the eaves of roofs.
But it was not any easier in Saudi Arabia, Circe recalls. There were problems if one was seen without a scarf, or with the hair undone.
Circe could face at least a two year separation from her husband. Arturo is a seaman. It is expensive to call from the ship's satellite phone, so usually he is in contact only when he gets into port, within range of a mobile phone base station.
"The last time I got a text message last week. He was somewhere in the Middle East, going to Africa, I suppose."
Arturo has docked in Finnish harbours as well.
Opteam has promised to help those going to Finland in getting their families to join them, but it is not easy. Arturo would also need a job and a residence permit.
In their wedding picture, he looks happy and handsome. Circe keeps the picture on her night stand. The wedding was nearly two years ago, and the two have not seen much of each other since then. Even the wedding presents - a rice cooker, a thermos bottle, and the rest, are still in their boxes, piled up in a corner of Circe's room.
The two have not yet found a place where they could settle together and set up a family. Such a place might be found in Tikkurila, for instance.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 20.1.2008
SAMI SILLANPÄÄ / Helsingin Sanomat
sami.sillanpaa@hs.fi
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| 22.1.2008 - THIS WEEK |
 Everyone who wants to go to Finland, raise your hands |
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