High-Paying U.S. Nanny Positions
Puncture Fabric of Family Life in Developing Nations

ROBERT FRANK / Wall Street Journal 18dec01

CAMILING, Philippines -- The night that she left to become a nanny in America, Rowena Bautista knelt in the empty church of her Philippine farming village and lit a candle.

"Please watch over my children," she prayed. "Bring us back together soon."

More than six years later, Ms. Bautista and her children are growing further apart. The college-educated 39-year-old spends her days caring for the baby daughter of Myra Clark, a working mother in Washington, D.C. She hasn't seen her own son and daughter in more than two years. The last time she went home for a visit, her eight-year-old son refused to touch her and asked, "Why did you come back?"

Ms. Bautista left the Philippines in order to support her children. Over a third of the residents of her village are unemployed. Most jobs in the Philippines pay less than $5 a day. She sends home $400 a month from her $750 monthly salary for her children's schooling, food and clothes.

Her salary also pays for a nanny in the Philippines, Anna de la Cruz, who cares for the two children. Ms. de la Cruz, in turn, has a teen-age son of her own, whom she leaves with her 80-year-old mother-in-law while she's caring for the Bautista children.

As the global economy draws more women of the industrialized West into the work force, it is also pulling mothers from poor countries to take care of children in wealthier ones. Last year, 40% of the 792,000 private-household workers in the U.S. were foreign-born, not counting the large number of illegal immigrants who provide child care.

These sweeping labor trends have given rise to what some sociologists call "mothering chains," groups of mothers like Ms. Clark, Ms. Bautista and Ms. de la Cruz who are linked across the world by their children.

The chains are especially common in the Philippines, one of the world's biggest sources of migrant workers. More than one in 10 Filipinos has a family member working abroad. While most of the country's migrant workers used to be men, today more than 70% are women, many of them mothers working overseas as nannies. Philippine women helped send home over $7 billion to the country last year, creating the country's second-biggest source of hard currency after electronics exports.

The struggles of migrant mothers are fast becoming part of the mainstream Filipino culture. Last year's best-selling movie was "Anak," or "Daughter," the story of a mother who returned from working as a maid in Hong Kong and found her family torn apart by her absence. At Sunday Mass in the predominately Catholic country, priests say a special prayer for parents overseas and the children left behind. Radio stations play a hit song called "Mamma," which ends with the lyrics:

London, Vancouver or Hong Kong Governess, housekeeper or nurse What is to happen to us children With mothers who travel so far.

On a recent morning in Washington, Ms. Bautista walked her employer's baby, Noa, to a park filled with other Philippine nannies. She met Rosa, a 36-year-old Filipina from the island of Iloilo who left her son back home 10 years ago and who now worries that he's skipping school and experimenting with drugs. Sheila, a 27-year-old Filipina, was raised by a nanny in Manila after her mother became a nanny in the U.S. She says she's proud that her mother's salary helped her get a college education. But today Sheila has joined her mother in Washington, also working as a nanny -- leaving her own three-year-old daughter behind. Both nannies declined to give their last names because of immigration concerns.

Even as mother chains spread new wealth to third-world countries in the form of remittances -- or money sent home -- they have also created new pressures. Studies show that children of migrant mothers tend to underperform in school and have more health problems than average children. Critics also charge that mother chains may foster a new kind of global inequity, where children in poor countries lose their mothers to higher-paying families in the developed world.

"Mothering becomes another export," says Rhacel Parrenas, an assistant professor of women's studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who first documented care chains in Italy three years ago. "The benefits are clear, but we haven't really considered the social costs."

For as long as she can remember, Rowena Bautista wanted to become a doctor and move to the U.S. She was raised here in Camiling, a small farming village about 200 miles from Manila, where her mother was a teacher and her father was a sound engineer. Ms. Bautista excelled in school and planned to enroll in medical school. "Rowena was always the independent one," says her younger sister, June. "She always had to do things for herself."

Yet by the time she graduated, Ms. Bautista's family was struggling to send all five children to college and couldn't afford medical school. She tried engineering college but dropped out after three years. Ms. Bautista then began a winding and difficult journey that eventually led her to the U.S.

Big Break

Venturing to Manila, Ms. Bautista was working in a travel agency when she got her big chance in 1987. A local job recruiter told her about an engineering job in Taiwan paying over $350 a month -- four times her salary in the Philippines. She signed up, borrowing $1,000 from her grandmother for the recruiter's fee.

A day before she was scheduled to leave, Ms. Bautista discovered that the recruiter was a fraud. The agent gave her a fake passport in someone else's name and a Taiwan tourist visa. Ms. Bautista, bent on repaying her grandmother, boarded the plane to Taiwan and took on a new identity.

For five years, she evaded the Taiwanese immigration authorities and worked odd jobs for under $150 a month. She cleaned houses, walked dogs and worked as a nanny. She found steady work on the night shift of an electronics plant, assembling television plugs.

One Sunday in 1990, while eating lunch with some friends, Ms. Bautista met a Ghanian construction worker named Kingsley, and they started dating. The next year, in a cold, makeshift clinic, she gave birth to a girl named Princela. A year later, on the same day as the U.S. presidential elections, she had a son, and proudly named him Clinton.

On Princela's first birthday, Kingsley was detained by immigration. He and Ms. Bautista and the two children were deported, and they returned to Camiling to live with Ms. Bautista's family. Jobs were scarce and after a few weeks of looking for work, Kingsley left for South Korea. Ms. Bautista soon followed, but she was detained at the South Korean airport and sent back to the Philippines.

Ms. Bautista grew despondent. "What good was I if I couldn't even support my own family?" she recalls. She baked cakes and sold them on the street but was barely making enough to buy a bowl of rice each day for the two kids. In late 1994, a cousin called with the answer to her problems: a job in America.

The work, as a nanny in Washington, paid $600 a month and included room and board. Ms. Bautista quickly accepted. Tucking Clinton and Princela into bed one night, she told them she was planning to leave. "I said, 'I'm doing this for you. For your future.' I think they were too young to understand."

As Ms. Bautista drove to the airport on the evening of her flight, Princela buried her head in her mother's lap and cried. Clinton sat alone in the back seat. As she kissed her daughter goodbye before boarding the plane, Princela looked up and asked "When are you coming back?"

"Soon," Ms. Bautista said. "Hopefully soon."

The Other Mother

Myra Clark is a rising star at the offices of Oglivy Public Relations Worldwide in Washington. The 32-year-old University of Texas graduate was recently named an account director and handles some of the company's biggest clients, from multinational companies to foreign governments. With her husband and her two-year-old daughter, Noa, Ms. Clark lives in a stately brick house in one of Washington's nicest neighborhoods.

Because her husband works for a foreign embassy, the Clarks were able to hire a legal nanny without paying the usual U.S. taxes or wage and benefit requirements. She first heard about Rowena Bautista from another diplomatic family who was moving, and she hired her immediately. With her first employers' diplomatic work visa, Ms. Bautista had little trouble entering the U.S.

"She is incredible," Ms. Clark says. "When I'm at work, I can focus completely on work because I know Noa is in the best care. I trust her completely." She adds, "Rowena's made an incredible sacrifice for her children and I know that. But I can't imagine making that sacrifice with my daughter ... . I don't think I could."

Ms. Bautista also feels fortunate, since she is legal, is treated well, and is being paid $750 a month. She spends her weekdays living with the family in a spacious basement bedroom. On the weekends, she sometimes works at a nightclub stocking bottles and stays at a small apartment she shares with another Filipino family. She keeps four photos on her dresser: Clinton, Princela, Noa and Yahni, a boy she cared for from a previous family who still calls and asks if she's coming back. The pictures of Clinton and Princela are from five years ago, "because new ones remind me how much I've missed."

Ms. Bautista, like many mothers in a mother chain, has grown close to her employer's child. She calls Noa "my baby" and rushes to her crib every morning at 7 a.m. to begin the day. They take walks in the park, visit the playground, go to reading hours at the library, and in the afternoon, curl up together for a nap. One of Noa's first words was "Ena," short for Rowena. Noa has started babbling in Tagalog, Ms. Bautista's first language, while Ms. Bautista, in honor of the family's Jewish tradition, has started singing children's songs to Noa in Hebrew.

"I give Noa what I can't give to my children," she says. "She makes me feel like a mother."

Yet surrogate motherhood only goes so far. On a recent morning while feeding breakfast to Noa, Ms. Bautista received troubling news from home. Her father told her on the phone that Clinton had a high fever and had lost his appetite. Princela, who's allergic to a wide range of foods, had broken out in hives. Ms. Bautista asked to talk to the two of them, but they said they're too tired.

A few minutes later, Ms. Clark called and asked if Ms. Bautista could take Noa to the doctor for a possible sprained foot. Staring out the kitchen window, Ms. Bautista's eyes shined with tears. "I should be with my children when they're sick," she said. "That's what a mother does."

Discipline Problems

In a third-grade classroom of the Camiling Elementary School, teacher Josefina Cabatic glanced at her latest discipline problem: Clinton Bautista. The high-energy nine-year-old has trouble paying attention in class and often distracts other students with his toys. "His mother sends them," Ms. Cabatic said. "Clinton is always very proud of the things his mother sends from America." This morning, while the other students worked on math books, Clinton passed around a comic book.

Down the hall, in the fourth grade, Clinton's sister Princela has different problems. With the African features of their father, Clinton and Princela are often called "Aetas," local slang for the dark-skinned indigenous people of the Philippines. The teasing has turned Princela into a shy student. She refuses to read aloud with the other students and sometimes eats lunch alone with her teacher.

With their mother gone, and their father abroad and largely removed from the family's life, Clinton and Princela are growing up fast in their struggling town. Camiling is no longer the peaceful farming community it was when Ms. Bautista was growing up. Decades of economic decline under corrupt leaders in the Philippines have brought drugs, crime and homelessness. Most days, the streets are lined with jobless, shirtless men loitering in doorways. Cows and dogs amble along the roadside. Rows of cardboard shacks are sprouting up along the river bank for the growing ranks of homeless.

Someday, Ms. Bautista hopes to get her green card and bring Clinton and Princela to the U.S. For now, they're crowded together with 12 other family members, including eight kids, in the same four-bedroom house where Ms. Bautista was raised. Several of their cousins who live in the house also have mothers in the U.S. Their grandmother has become their mother figure.

Princela has also grown attached to their nanny, Anna de la Cruz, who arrives at 8 a.m. every morning and helps cook, clean and care for the children. When she's not visiting her friend's mother in the market, Princela sometimes takes walks with Ms. de la Cruz or helps her with the laundry.

Big families like the Bautistas are common in the Philippines, leading many to argue that relatives can easily fill the role of parents when mothers go overseas.

'The Lucky Ones'

"We have lots of grandmas, aunts or uncles who are there to take care of the kids," says Ricardo Casco, deputy director of the Philippines Overseas Employment Administration, which handles overseas workers. "If you ask most Filipinos, they'd say migrant families are the lucky ones. They have so many material benefits."

The $400 a month that Ms. Bautista sends home is more than the salary of Camiling's main doctor and is undoubtedly helping the children. Aside from their school, clothes and food, the money helps pay for luxuries like a washing machine and refrigerator. She hopes to pay for an addition for the house next year, so Clinton and Princela can have their own room.

Yet studies show that families pay a price for migrant work, and that relatives don't always make the best parents. A survey of over 700 young children by the Scalabrini Migration Center in Manila in 1996 found that children with mothers working overseas performed worse in school, were more likely to be sick and were more likely to show signs of anger, confusion and apathy than children with mothers living in the country. The problems are compounded by Philippine culture, which discourages men from raising children.

During Ms. Bautista's last visit in 1999, she spanked Clinton for throwing a tantrum. He screamed back: "Why did you come back? Just to hit me?" Discipline has become a problem: Ms. Bautista often asks them to go to church and study harder, but they refuse. She also worries about their growing materialism: During a recent phone call, Clinton said little except to ask his mother for a computer and a scooter.

She's tried telling her mother to be stricter with the children, but her mother says "it's harder if they're not your own children. I could be strict with Rowena, but not my grandchildren." What's more, Ms. Bautista's mother works from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. as a teacher.

Alone in her room in Washington on a recent night, Rowena arranged a pile of dried flowers she has collected to make a wreath for her children. "Sometimes I think that all the things I send them ... it's just to fill the space," she said. "What good is it if my children have problems later? What if I don't know them anymore?"

Anna de la Cruz once had the same choice as Rowena Bautista, but she took a different path. A slight, soft-spoken 44-year-old with little education, Ms. de la Cruz was struggling to raise her family in the early 1990s when she got an offer to become a nanny in Kuwait. The job paid over $300 a month, more than 10 times the amount her husband was earning as a rice sorter. She accepted, and after packing her bags and saying goodbye to her family, she started heading out the door.

"I saw my four-year-old son crying," she recalls. "I couldn't leave."

Ms. de la Cruz called the recruiting agent and canceled. When the recruiter threatened to send agents to force her to go, she says, "I had a friend call them and say I had a heart attack and died."

Later, a friend told her about the job with the Bautistas, and she accepted. For the first few months, Ms. de la Cruz, who lives in the rice paddies about a half-hour from town, stayed at the Bautistas' and returned home only for occasional weekends or holidays. But she missed her family. In mid-1994 she quit, saying she would prefer to stay home with her own family.

The Bautistas persuaded her to return, and now she commutes every morning by pedicab from her bamboo hut to the Bautistas' house in Camiling. She leaves at 5 p.m. every day and gets weekends off. The wage of $50 a month is lower than the Kuwait job, yet she can spend evenings and mornings with her youngest son, Johnny.

"Anna's been a big help to the family," says Ms. Bautista, who gave Ms. de la Cruz a raise when she returned home to visit two years ago.

Ms. Bautista sees herself and Ms. de la Cruz as being in the same boat -- nannies struggling to support their own children. "We both clean toilets and change diapers for a living," says Ms. Bautista. "The only difference is, I get paid more."

A lot more. On a recent evening, Ms. de la Cruz returned home from the Bautistas with her family's dinner -- a baggie of rice and two small, day-old fish. Johnny, 14, waited with Ms. de la Cruz's 80-year-old mother-in-law, who takes care of the boy when Ms. de la Cruz is working. Their hut has no electricity or running water, and they sleep on straw mats on the floor.

With her salary, Ms. de la Cruz can barely support her family. Her husband is often unemployed and rarely helps out. Her brother-in-law suffers from mental illness, and her mother-in-law has high blood pressure, though they can't afford treatment. Ms. de la Cruz says she hopes to hang on to her job with the Bautistas until her youngest son is old enough to start work.

"I have my job and my kids," Ms. de la Cruz said, stirring a pot of rice over an open fire. "I'm lucky."

Goodbye to Noa

At the St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Rockville, Md., the Rev. John Macfarlane stepped to the podium and began Sunday mass. Ms. Bautista slid into a pew at the back of the church, tired after working until 4 a.m. at the bar. This morning, she had another worry: Ms. Clark and her family are moving overseas.

With the family planning to leave within months, Ms. Bautista has little time to find another employer -- and another work visa. She has a few offers, but the change in schedule means she probably won't be able to return to Camiling to see her children for Christmas. What's more, she'll have to say goodbye to Noa. "It's like leaving my own children again," she says.

Kneeling at her pew, Ms. Bautista said a prayer for Clinton and Princela, and prayed for Noa, "wherever she may travel."

In October, Noa and her family moved to Israel. After trying unsuccessfully to find another family to work for, Ms. Bautista took a job doing clerical work at a Washington bar and restaurant, where her employer is sponsoring her for an eventual green card. She keeps a photo of Noa on the her dresser and talks to her on the phone every few weeks.

In the Philippines, Clinton and Princela are still struggling in school. Because of immigration restrictions which require her to remain in the U.S. while she is applying for a green card, Ms. Bautista won't be able to return home to see her family for Christmas -- the second year she hasn't been home. She sent the kids a box of presents but during a recent phone call after her 10th birthday, Princela was largely silent and said: "We're getting used to birthdays and Christmas without you."