Filipinos abroad seek news, rally aid after ‘Yolanda’

[islander]

Filipinos abroad seek news, rally aid after ‘Yolanda’

Associated Press
Saturday, November 16th, 2013


Filipino employees at an express company in Hong Kong pack boxes of donations from overseas workers at a shopping mall before they ship them to the survivors of Typhoon ‘Yolanda.’ AP

HONG KONGâ€"They gather in California churches, in Hong Kong shopping malls, at prayer vigils in Bahrain and on hastily launched Facebook pages. Filipino overseas workers, cut off from home after a super-typhoon killed thousands, are coming together to pray, swap information and launch aid drives.

Above all, many of the more than 10.5 million Filipinos abroad â€" some 10 percent of the country’s population â€" are desperately dialing phone numbers that don’t answer in the typhoon zone, where aid is still only slowly trickling in and communications have been largely blown away.

[islander]

“I call again, and I keep trying and trying and trying but no one answered,” said Princess Howard, a worker at a money transfer business in Hong Kong, of her attempts to reach her 62-year-old grandfather and nine other relatives in the Leyte region that was flattened when Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (Haiyan) hit one week ago.

Sending $21.4 billion back home last year alone, Filipino overseas workers are a major part of their country’s economy, with their remittances equaling nearly 10 percent of gross domestic product. Spread out over more than 200 countries, they work as nurses in Europe, sugar cane laborers in Malaysia, housemaids in Hong Kong and construction workers in the oil-rich Middle East.


Read more: http://globalnation.inquirer.net/91301/filipinos-abroad-seek-news-rally-aid-after-yolanda#ixzz2ksqeggMR