Global warming fires up sex-for-flighters

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO 

by March Fianza

What have they been doing all these years? The sex for flight issue involving female OFWs abroad, foreign embassy officials and moneyed donor “clients” has warmed up like Mt. Mayon whose eruption was long-overdue. This has turned into a decade’s problem, heating up over the years, but workers in the Philippine Embassy, the labor agency and its attached offices wittingly or unwittingly hid the cases from the public. Maybe some labor and embassy officials in the Middle East do not release foul gases from their bodies that is why they forgot that things that smell very badly may still be concealed but since they are heated up, they stink and come out like the Sulphuric odor that steam out from a volcano’s crater. The public and media circles in Manila know about complaints in the past but these were not ventilated clearly as concerned officials successfully suppressed the information.

As much as possible they did not want the complaints and complainants to reach the lawmakers, until this time when partylist congressman Walden Bello caught the information. Almost 10 years ago, the NGO Gabriela along with an ally organization Migrante, had been reporting “sex-for-flight” cases but the agencies concerned, knowing of the complaints, chose to restrain them because any investigation would splatter back on their faces. The number of cases steadily increased with the number of OFWs that were recruited by private employment agencies that were in cahoots with labor officials. Incidentally, the problem arose at a time when people became aware of the natural and partly human induced “global warming” phenomenon. In my left mind, I seem to acknowledge that this has something to do with sex-for-flight cases, sex changes and gray gay issues. Middlemen brokers called bugaw, similar to the half man – half woman kind that approaches you when you are in a red light district along Roxas Boulevard, arranges the “areglo” between the OFW victim and the “customer.”

In other cases, employees intentionally allow their passports to expire with the cooperation of their employees. Cleo, my wife who worked as an OFW with Texas Instruments once upon a time can confirm this. The reason for this is that it is hard to re-enter after one has already returned home after finishing a work contract. So the OFW just lets the passport expire especially when he or she is immediately hired by another company. Now, when the time comes that they need their passport, embassy workers exploit the situation. Labor and foreign affairs office chiefs say that they also shed tears, crocodile tears that is, over besieged documented and undocumented OFWs who are thrown to the lions by embassy officials who should be assisting them. Sex-for-flight victims have unseen handlers even from the time they applied that is why they are there. Until now the unseen handlers fleece money from them without them knowing it. They are victims many times over but it is okay with them as long as they are employed and have some money sent home to their spouses and children.

********

According to what I have been reading, ice age is climate change, failed harvest and drought in farm lands in Peru, South and Central America. Climate change and global warming were normal earth occurrences until the human-induced kind followed during an unstoppable industrial revolution. I hope I have not been reading too much. Until lately, scientists and politicians from the “first world,” wherever that is, thought of global warming as an item that they can make money of. However, some serious natural scientists blamed climate changes, particularly the extreme cooling and warming of the earth depending on its distance from the sun that was similar to how our ancestors diagnosed the weather in their time. 

The other factors are the earth’s axis tilt which is constant and the ever-changing shape of the earth’s orbit from nearly perfect circle to elliptical on certain times. Naturally, when the earth treads an circle orbit everytime, it gets the same amount of sunshine everyday. And when it is an ellipse orbit, the earth is colder at a point when it is farthest from the sun and warmer where it is nearer. That could be the reason why ancient tribes in the Americas and Europe honored the Sun as their god. Their god indeed controlled life on earth. The skills of ancient tribesmen in the Americas, particularly the Incas, in terms of soldiery, farming, architecture and civil works were extraordinary but they could have been nothing if not for the changing weather from bad to good and vice versa brought on by an ever changing climate. I have also read that extended periods of warm weather centuries ago were the culprits why mountainous areas were naturally cleared, like the head of a person that becomes bald when exposed to heat and radiation. The weather stayed dry and warm but melting ice supplied water constantly. 

Like our Ifugao ancestors, the Incas in Peru built terraces on mountainsides and raised camote, potatoes and corn. They also constructed a water system to irrigate their lands. With what the Incas of Peru experienced thousands of years ago, they were not stupefied. They did not panic when global warming was on them. Instead, they rode along it just like any day and did what natural things they could do to survive. The changing climate, global warming and the ice age were part of their lives. –ozram.666@gmail.com