Ode to the Filipinos.

The Filipinos are the best nurses in town. Humble, positive and hard-working – What more could you want? I Love them to bits! But then we go back a long way. Many years ago when out and about as a young man, fresh out of the nest, I stumbled upon their country. They helped me make sense of it all.

As young and innocent, I spent the summer holidays with my grandmother. She had a second home among fields and tractors. It was a fun and carefree life. I was a boy who read newspapers and I remember studying one article carefully. It was about Philippines and Imelda Marcos shoes. It was the first time I heard about the country.

Out there in the Swedish mid-west, I used to play with some local kids and a farmer’s girl from next door showed me her fanny behind a barn. The fanny was exciting, but so were the shoes. I tried to picture them, 3000 pairs in a long line. 

Later when I made it to the Philippines, the women, the Filipinas, were working hard, doing everything they could to make me feel good and be happy. They were kind and hospitable and called me ‘sir’. I protested when one said I looked like God, but then she brought me along to her room and showed me a poster above her bed with the face of Jesus with long hair and big sad eyes, all typical catholic kitsch. ‘Look’, she said, ‘like God’, and she smiled, showing off lines of white teeth.

I never saw her wear her expensive watch, the one she’d bought with the money given to her by a European man to provide for the education she never had. But she didn’t want any education. She’d never asked for one and then a man came along and offered her lots of cash and she didn’t quite know what to do. So she, silly girl, took the money and bought a watch instead. When the man came back the following season and found out, he walked away disappointed and hurt. He was the bigger fool of course. Giving money away, feeling good with himself and deciding for others what they need, as he makes himself captain of the ship and takes the responsibility upon his own white man’s burdened shoulders.

I’d come to her beach thinking I knew it all. It was time to shut up. Quiet, I ordered another San Miguel.

Living on a beach I never got used to all the attractive and young Filipinas that were together with white men, somehow never as attractive or young as them. Most locals didn’t seem to understand. ‘If they are both happy, what’s the problem?’ one girl responded. I tried to explain how economic and gender related inequality results in patriarchal structures, leading to female objectification and sexual exploitation. She listened politely for a while but got bored and turned to look out onto the beach instead. A bald fat man and a pretty young girl came walking barefoot smiling to each other in the setting sun. ‘See, they are happy!’, she decided. When I disagreed, she got angry and wondered who was I to decide who was really happy and not. Yeah, who indeed? I’d come to her beach thinking I knew it all. It was time to shut up. Quiet I ordered another San Miguel.

Years later, we’re both in the NHS, the Filipinos and I. More equal now. Working fifty hour weeks, serving doctors and patients in one of the biggest healthcare monsters around. The London NHS would collapse overnight, had the Filipinos decided to pack up and leave. They find their way in the NHS bureaucracy better than most. Ticking all the boxes while still applying common sense.

Local policy and hospital practice frequently differ and as an agency nurse I often jump around between hospitals. When new and in doubt I look out for the Filipinos and follow suit. That way I tend to be alright.

They are the hardest working people on the planet. No other country sends out so many of themselves to work abroad while supporting the ones left at home. Remittances by Filipinos working abroad make up for 10% of the country’s annual GDP.

And no other country loves Jesus and his mum like they do. Philippines, an Asian anomaly, like a piece of South America in between Taiwan and Indonesia. Nowhere is the pope more a rock star than when in Manila. They go all gaga. Crying, fainting and behaving all over the place.

And no other country loves Jesus and his mum like they do.

In the morning they attend mass. In the evening they bet on cockfights where roosters kill each other with razor-clad feet while the crowd screams itself hoarse, drinking cheap whisky and loose most of their money. The capital’s mean streets are, despite the prayers, absent from divine protection, more resembling Columbia and El Salvador than Vietnam or Hong Kong. Fresh blood, needles and shot bodies sprawled out in the gutter. In the same time family values are so strong that it’s pretty much impossible to divorce, not to mention having an abortion. Strangely, the age of consent is twelve. Twelve?! ‘Well, out in the provinces it gets dark early and there’s not much to do’, someone offered as explanation and then that smile again.

One Filipino I met in the NHS was an unusually good looking boy. More pretty than handsome he stood out among the nurses with his doe eyes, soft voice and gentle movements. Once he showed me a photo of an attractive girl on his phone. ‘How do you like her’, he asked innocently. ‘Oh, very nice indeed’ I said, admiring the young beautiful woman. Cruelly, he let me stand there looking for some time, before revealing, with a wicked grin, that the young lady posing on the phone was him – at night.

Another time I was allowed to tag along, as the only whitey, to a Filipino-only party. I drank bad beer (Red horse, vile and strong), ate worse food (pig’s face and bowels), sang terribly with my arm around one of the girls (once a boy) and felt right at home. 

The Filipinos often marvel quietly at modern western oddities. Like when a criminal manages to successfully sue the police for being unnecessarily hurt when caught. Or when staff are off duty for over five months for depression, on full pay, returning just before the money on NHS’s generous sick pay policy is reduced to half.

Dogs are well liked in both England and Philippines but maybe not always for the same reason. A nurse from Yorkshire had just lost her dog, 90 miles away, and was distraught like only an English dog owner can be. So NHS gave her leave. Compassionate leave/emergency leave/some sort of leave. It wasn’t annual leave. In the Filipino camp, the occasion caused raised eyebrows and, for some, amusement. To get leave, outside your annual leave, on full pay, for a dead dog! Some shook their heads in disbelief, quietly mumbling “only in England.” The experience didn’t do much for their already limited understanding of the necessity in slapping a 40% tax on their hard-earned overtime pay. I quite saw their point. Poor doggie, though.

One of them told me about his dad’s parenting style. ‘He was a bit strict, my dad’, the nurse said. And then went on describing belts, whips, sticks and of failed attempts of hiding pieces of carton in the pants, trying to protect himself. He was beaten and smacked until his skin bruised and broke and he didn’t cry anymore. All in order to make him good. 

And good they are. Too good of course. More submissive than most, they are favourites as maids in the Middle East. One Filipina I met had been working in Saudi Arabian A&E’s and had to witness, and look after, her sisters coming in with fractured ribs, severed genitals and bleeding from body orifices due to prolonged rape sessions sustained in domestic captivity.

And good they are. Too good of course.

Philippines got increasingly fed up with the abuse of its women in the Gulf. When the chopped up parts of a Filipina was found in a Kuwaiti household’s freezer, the government had enough. ‘You don’t seem to like Filipinos’, president Doterte concluded, implementing a total ban on its citizens from working in the country’s domestic sector. After lots of diplomatic activity and reassurances by the oil rich host the ban was later lifted.

More talented than the English in how to ‘just get on with it’ and ‘mustn’t grumble’ and better equipped practically from their training, while working harder than most – It’s not strange that the NHS visits them as often as the affection starved white men do, filling up visa quotas with new eager recruits. 

A Filipino nurse student spends her training doing everything including taking bloods, inserting cannulas, catheters and nasogastric tubes. When school’s out she gets down to work. A newly qualified British nurse can’t, or isn’t allowed to, it seems, do very many practical tasks at all, thereby further increasing the pressure on doctors and reducing the efficiency of the NHS.

They might be the best of workers, but no one openly says so. It’s not allowed. And they themselves certainly wouldn’t. Almost physically incapable of boasting, they keep their heads down. Some of them used to be doctors back home. If only the arrogant English/Indian/Pakistani consultant surgeon knew! Not that they would ever tell him. ‘Never mind, David!’ they say and offer me more noodles.

Because they can’t eat on their own. On the lunch break they grab their friends and put all the containers with rice, noodles and pork, lots of pork, around on the table and they eat and are merry, chatting in Tagalog, occasionally pissing some miserable git off just because they’ve got more friends than he does. The miserable git wants them to be as miserable as he is and proceeds to write anonymous complaining letters about that they’re too happy, talking too much in the staff room, with too many people of their own. And the trust, usually more afraid than brave, writes a memo saying that no one is to talk their own language on hospital premises while on duty, whether on break or not, be it inside or outside the staff room. I read the memo and lost it.

‘What? You’re not allowed to talk whatever language you want – on your break?

‘What? You’re not allowed to talk whatever language you want – on your break? That’s it. Let’s show them, let’s go and wreck their offices! Fascists!’ I was fuming: 

The cheek of it! The managerial team, only ever seeing the inside of office walls, and meeting rooms, forever walking around with Costa lattes, why do they worry their pretty heads? Spineless pretenders, all of them anyway. The kind that change voice depending on who they are talking to. Were they to work on the floor in the theatre, helping doctors dig out faeces packed bums and bowels, be down on all fours, embracing a child spinning around on the floor, crazed from a drug-induced delirium, saying ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ to surgeons whose manners come off as the gloves come on, all while paying for their nephew’s education –They would poo in their pants! They wouldn’t do it. They couldn’t do it. They would cry, faint, shake and sob and be generally useless. And then… Go off on leave for stress. They can shove their memos!

Yes, I did get rather angry.

The Filipinos themselves didn’t seem too upset. ‘Never mind, David, it will blow over! Relax. Here, have some more fried rice.’

The Filipinos themselves didn’t seem too upset. ‘Never mind, David, it will blow over! Relax. Here, have some more fried rice.’ Right they were – again. They are still talking and laughing on their food fuelled breaks, the miserable gits continues being miserable and the ridiculous memo is forgotten about.

As their beloved book has it in the Ecclesiastes: “Nothing is new under the sun.”