MANILA, 31 October 2007 — Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), regarded as modern-day heroes, may be propping up and saving the country’s economy but many of them could not even provide for their family’s daily needs.

The Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration has reported that a growing number of OFWs refuse to send money back home. These OFWs mostly work in the Middle East.

Gloria Taule of OWWA Workers’ Assistance Unit (WAU) disclosed that many OFW families represented by the wives complain of husbands’ not sending their remittances.

“We have recorded an increasing number of families of OFWs who have been seeking assistance to get their regular financial support from their relatives abroad,” Taule revealed.

Taule noted that requests for financial support comprised the majority of complaints filed with WAU. More than half of the more or less 1,000 complaints OWWA is getting monthly involves OFW families seeking financial support.

“Majority of those who are not sending their remittances are male OFWs and the usual reason is that they are having extra-marital affairs,” Taule explained.

OWWA’s disclosure confirms an NGO findings that OFWs who abandoned their families back in the Philippines are having illicit affairs.

Kanlungan Executive Director Rosemarie Trajano told Arab News that 50 percent of the 42 clients who reported abandonment of familial duties are OFW families whose breadwinners no longer send their remittances. Most complains of financial non-support of OFWs can be traced to having illicit affairs or the married OFWs getting married again abroad to have another family, she disclosed

Trajano described that OFW families as suffering from extreme hardship during this period. Children of OFWs stopped going to school because they have no more money and have no more food to eat. “They have been abandoned totally, no remittances and no communication whatsoever, Trajano said.

Kanlungan found out that based on reports the OFW families make to formally seek redress, there is an ongoing trend of miscommunication between husband and wife that usually results to infidelity.

Cycle starts from good relations and open communication lines during the early days of absence of OFWs, then slowly reducing the number of received letters, text messages and phone calls. Amount of money sent is directly proportional to the number of letters to the OFW families. The more letters, the more remittances sent. For some, it is the intermittent on-and-off sending of remittances. For others, it is abrupt non-support to the dismay of surprised families.