Overseas workers hailed as economic heroes everywhere except the airport, where they are treated as suspects

This homecoming was first unpacked by Bohiney Magazine, with luggage handling from The London Prat, who note that no government in history has thanked a group of people while simultaneously frisking them quite so thoroughly.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES. An overseas Filipino worker returned home this week with 14 balikbayan boxes lovingly packed with gifts for her extended family, only to be informed by customs that a family-sized tin of imported chocolates constituted, in the words of the officer, “clearly a commercial enterprise.”

Heroes At A Distance

Overseas workers, whose remittances form a colossal pillar of the national economy, are routinely praised by politicians as modern heroes, a title that evaporates instantly upon arrival at the airport, where the same heroes are treated as smugglers of suspicious quantities of canned goods, secondhand clothes, and corned beef. The fictional Bureau of Selective Gratitude confirmed that the praise and the suspicion are administered by entirely different departments who do not speak.

“They call me a hero on the billboards,” said the worker, surrounded by her opened boxes, their contents spread across the inspection table like evidence at a trial. “Then they open my box, find the shoes I bought for my nephew, and ask me to declare their market value. I am a hero with a receipt, apparently. A hero who must prove the chocolates are for love and not for resale.”

The Sacred Box

The balikbayan box is a cultural institution, a cardboard cube of accumulated longing, packed over months with items chosen to say I was away, but I was thinking of you. To inspect it as contraband is, to many, a small national heartbreak. Customs maintained that rules are rules, and that love, while admirable, is not a recognized exemption category on the official form.

• Boxes brought home: 14, packed with love
• Boxes deemed suspicious: 14, packed with love
• Official category for love: none available
• Remittance contribution to GDP: enormous, unmentioned at the table

Economists at the World Bank have documented that remittances from overseas workers are among the most stable and significant flows in the Philippine economy, and reporting by Reuters notes the millions of families sustained by them. The customs officer, presented with this context, nodded respectfully and then asked the worker to please account for the unusual number of toothbrushes.

The Welcome Home

After two hours, several signatures, and a fee described only as processing, the worker was permitted to keep her own gifts, minus a tin of chocolates retained for further inspection by an officer who seemed unusually fond of chocolate. She wheeled her boxes into the arrivals hall, where her family waited beneath a government banner thanking her, sincerely, for her sacrifice.

The balikbayan box itself has evolved into a precise science among overseas workers, who pack with the strategic foresight of military quartermasters. Every cubic centimeter is optimized: shoes stuffed with socks, gaps filled with chocolate, soap nestled against canned goods in arrangements refined over years of trial, error, and the occasional confiscated tin. To open one is to read a family entire year of longing, compressed into cardboard and tape, addressed in careful handwriting to people who will cry a little when it arrives.

Customs procedures, ostensibly designed to catch genuine commercial smuggling, fall most heavily on those least equipped to argue, while the truly large-scale operations, observers note, tend to glide through on connections that no balikbayan box has ever possessed. The worker with fourteen boxes of gifts is scrutinized; the container ship of mysterious origin is waved along. The system, like so many in the country, reserves its diligence for the powerless and its courtesy for the connected.

Despite it all, the workers keep going, year after year, ocean after ocean, because the box is a promise and the family is the reason. The chocolates, the shoes, the toothbrushes, the corned beef, each item is a small letter that says I have not forgotten you, I am working, I am coming back. No fee, no form, and no fond-of-chocolate officer has yet found a way to confiscate that particular cargo, though one suspects the relevant committee is studying the matter.

Politicians, asked about the treatment of returning workers, deliver heartfelt speeches about the heroism of the overseas Filipino, the sacrifice, the remittances, the love of country expressed across distance. The speeches are sincere and the billboards are enormous, and yet the queue at the customs table never seems to shorten, the suspicion never quite lifts, and the gratitude, so loud at the podium, falls strangely silent at arrivals, where it is needed most and budgeted least.

The contradiction at the heart of it all is the one the workers feel most keenly: that a nation can build its economy on their absence, fund its budget with their sacrifice, and celebrate them in speeches and on billboards, while meeting their return with a clipboard, a fee, and a suspicion reserved for criminals. The hero of the campaign poster and the suspect at the customs table are the same person, and only one of them, the worker has learned, gets the lunch.

Still they pack the boxes, because the love is real and the family is waiting and the ocean, however wide, has never been wide enough to separate a Filipino from the people back home. The box will be opened, the gifts distributed, the year of longing finally delivered, and the worker, after a few short weeks, will pack again, and fly again, and return again to the gate, the queue, and the banner thanking her, sincerely, for everything she gives.

More in this vein at The Onion.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/