By Terry Friel
MARIA de Castro feeds a contented six-month-old Xi Pao in the rooftop pool garden of a swank high-rise condo in central Phnom Penh with all the love and devotion you’d expect from any doting mother.
But she is not the little girl’s mother.
Maria is the nanny. A Filipina, who — like many other Pinoys around the world — has left her own children and grandchildren to look after other people’s babies.
She is one of millions of workers — from nannies to seafarers to maids, factory and construction workers, farm laborers to nurses — from the Philippines and other poorer countries who make the choice to leave their families for years to give them a better life.
The Philippines Statistics Authority estimates there were more than two million Filipinos working abroad as of late 2024.
That is only the official number. Many more are working illegally overseas, often overstaying their visas for years, risking jail, fines and deportation. Flying under the radar of local and Philippine authorities.
But they play a vital role in the Philippine economy — Overseas Foreign Workers (OFWs) contribute roughly 8 percent of the country’s GDP.
And their remittances help keep the peso stable and strong, and bolster foreign reserves — sending money home means buying pesos and keeping demand for the currency steady.
In Cambodia, there is high demand for Filipino nannies among the relatively wealthy ethnic Chinese community, says Sok Lang, who owns and runs NannyN, one of several placement agencies in the Cambodian capital.
“They speak English and are very, very hard workers,” he says of what he calls “teaching nannies” because one of the reasons they are in such demand is their skill in teaching their charges English and other subjects.
“They can earn more than twice what a Khmer nanny can earn.
“Most of our clients are in the very top income bracket in Cambodia. To be able to pay a nanny up to $1,000 , you need to be earning a lot of money yourself — $20,000 .
“If they want education and good English to help teach their children, they will choose a Filipino.”
In three decades abroad, Maria has worked in six countries, doing everything from working in canneries to hospital kitchens, as a private caregiver for accident victims from rich families in the Middle East, to a school teacher, tutor and a nanny.
“If I stayed home, I could never make money like this,” she says.
A Philippine government-certified caregiver, she has been a nanny since going to China in 2017.
“I do this for my kids,” says Maria, a 52-year-old grandmother who was jailed for months in a small cell holding 10 women in China last year after trekking overland from Vietnam using a people-smuggler to get back to her old job in Shanghai.
She had surrendered in Shanghai as an overstayer in 2022 to rejoin her kids. She tried to go back to her old job to help them again last May.
“As long as I am alive, I do everything for my kids,” she says.
“It’s hard. But if you see your kids suffer financially, that’s harder.”
Every time she leaves the Philippines, Maria treks to the Baclaran church in Manila to sit quietly, think and “talk.”
“I am not a practicing Catholic,” she says, “but after my mom’s death, I went to Manila, and I heard about the Baclaran church.
“I don’t attend Mass; I just go there to refresh my mind, and I feel better when I go there.
“I feel lucky when I go to that church. When I enter the gates of the church, I can feel — even if the weather is so hot — when I go there, when I go inside, starting from the gate, I feel really like fresh air. It’s different.”
Officially known as the National Shrine of Our Mother of Perpetual Redemption, Baclaran s the biggest Mother of Perpetual Redemption shrine in the world.
Unusually, she did not go to Baclaran before last year’s ill-fated China trip.
“I was supposed to go there before I went to China last time, but my friend had no patience — so we did not go,” she recalls.
“I felt very bad that I did not go there. And that was the trip that I got caught on.”
After the China trauma, Maria was headed for a job in Jeddah that would have paid $500 a month working 24/7 as a live-in.
But a friend found her a job in Cambodia that pays twice that. She earns up to $1,000 a month, gets to relax at home each night, and has one day off a week.
This time, she made sure to go to Baclaran before she flew out.
And in Cambodia she has no visa issues — her employer pays for her business visa.
“I like Cambodia — the people are friendly,” she says. “I have not really been outside Phnom Penh. I am too busy looking after the baby.
“My visa, job — here is no more stress.
“Being paid in US dollars is great.”
An ethnic Chinese businesswoman in Phnom Penh says she and her friends prefer to pay extra for Filipino nannies.
“They speak English, which we want our kids to learn, and they are very, very hardworking,” she says, asking not to be named.
“They also are very flexible. My baby, my husband and I all got sick at the same time a few weeks ago.
“Our nanny stayed with us 24/7 for a week until we all got better.”
The hardest thing for OFWs like Maria is being away from family.
And for many years, contact was painfully difficult, slow and unreliable. Letters could take months to arrive — if they arrived at all.
Phone calls were prohibitively expensive.
But technology has changed all that, bringing families as close as a swipe on a smartphone now.
“It’s not like before,” says Maria, who video-calls her daughter on Facebook almost daily.
“Now, it’s very easy to communicate with people like your family because of Facebook, WeChat, WhatsApp.
“It is hard, but this helps a lot.
“I will do this until my kids are OK — maybe another five years.
“I want to build a better life for my kids and my grandkids and have some money to retire and still be able to help them.” – UCA News
