“How I wish he were here, dear God.”

It is obviously easier for children to bare their hearts in a letter to God than to speak of the loneliness and longing for a parent who is not around.  Painfully frank, the letters reveal the children’s anxieties in matters that may seem petty to others but are so real to them.

“Is it very hot where he’s working?”  “Does Mama get any rest?” “Is it safe where she is – how does she keep warm?”

The sentiments reflect the children’s concern for their missing parents, but also their longing to have their fathers and mothers guide them through the daily grind of school and the milestones of growing up.  Not surprisingly, these are things they do not or cannot talk about to teachers or guidance counsellors – or even possibly and especially, their surrogate parents.

Getting fifth graders to put down their thoughts in a message to God, on having a parent abroad was one of the experiential activities conducted by St. Scholastica’s Academy of Marikina (SSAM), after the school realized that a majority of their grade school students had parents who were Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs).

SSAM first wanted to understand the situation to be able to address the reality, says Marites Baul, Guidance Life Mentor with the Student Development Center.

“Benedictine schools always have programs for special groups of students and for their special needs,” she explains. “Here we saw a special need among pupils with a parent or parents working abroad.  So initially we ran a survey to confirm who among our fourth graders were in this group and how they were coping.”

The survey, conducted last year, found that fourth-graders with absentee parents had low self-esteem and feelings of loneliness about the “incompleteness” of their families, what with their fathers away. And more so if it were the mothers who were abroad, the survey revealed.

Janet Bayan, mother of sixth-grader Jenna and wife to a communications and electronics engineer in Saudi Arabia, recalls when the school had asked incoming students about their parents’ occupation. “The largest number turned out to be OFWs, which was most pronounced in one section of Grade 4 and that includes my child.”

Adds Baul of the survey results: “We also found inconsistencies in discipline. Some (children of OFWs) did not follow set family rules but were not punished the usual way by their mothers. And sometimes they had only the maid as company until their mothers are back from work.”

Based on the survey results, the school produced a program for the Grade 5 children of OFWs titled “Bridging Our Lives from a Distance.”

The letter writing, says Baul, was part of the program’s module and was meant to draw out the children and give a concrete visualization of the situation of parents working abroad. The letters highlighted the children’s feelings of being “very, very lonely,” she notes.

In the letters too, the pupils revealed feelings they could not easily articulate.   They wrote about worrying about their parents, even if in actual sharing sessions, they would paint a brighter picture, as in:  “My dad’s an OFW and he’s doing fine and we are happy.”

Baul attributes this seeming dissonance to the respondents’ young age and their relative inadequacy for verbalization when compared to, say, high school students. “What was touching was the (pupils’) gratitude that somebody loved them enough to sacrifice being away from them.  Some called this ‘the necessary pain.’”

The “Bridging Our Lives from a Distance’ program also included meetings with parents left behind by their OFW spouses.

Says Bayan, 41, whose daughter was only 4 when her Dad left in 2003:  “Some things my daughter could not tell me I learned from these parent-teacher conferences.”

A news reporter and program anchor with the Philippine Broadcasting Service (PBS), Bayan had to make time not just for her daughter at St. Scholastica but also for her younger son, Jarod, in another school.

A single parent for the past eight years, Bayan has developed a routine around household chores to exorcise her frustration and loneliness: “Do the laundry, clean the room – do something constructive.”

But this is hardly enough.  Last year, the program organized four experiential activities and at its culminating rites last February, offered affirmation, support,   roses and letters to Bayan and other participants.

It is a continuing program, assures Baul. “For continuity we will build on the same group but (focus) on their other needs. We will push through this year as the group enters Grade 6, and hope to continue until the pupils finish high school.”

For the children of OFWs in the school, the program provides a complementary support to the prayers and hopes that they nurse about seeing their families whole again. Women’s Feature Service