HANOI, VIETNAM–TRUE to the name of their band, four Filipinos are carving Melia Hanoi hotel into a watering hole for fellow OFWs craving a taste of home. They call themselves the D’Sensations and are here on their second month of gigging across Asia.

“Hanging out here helps us get over loneliness at being away from our families in the Philippines,” says Cresliejoy Abiang. She says she’s a technician for a textile firm here and is a regular at the hotel’s Latino Bar where the D’Sensations play.

That evening she and a group of Filipino co-workers tapped their feet to Gloria Estefan’s Conga. belted out by the D’Sensations. This is really where we hang out, Abiang added, as customers took to the floor, swaying to lead singer Liza’s injunction to “feel the fire of desire.”

“Simple unwinding here helps us, especially when we feel that we worked too hard this week,” Abiang said.

Her officemate Gina had her two children with her. They had vacationed with her for a month and were going home to Bataan the next day. “I keep in touch with them. I send them money,” Gina said.

Kids are the motive for OFWs like Gina and Abiang to work hard – so hard that the 200 OFWs here can’t meet as a community, complains Philippine Ambassador Laura del Rosario, referring to holidays like Philippine Independence Day, which the embassy celebrated here on June 8. “They say they’d rather rest,” she said.

Rest they need. After the third of six sets, a total 48 songs for the night, D’Sensation members, who come from Bataan and Davao, can hardly wait to grab the nearest drink.

Still, everybody is easy to entertain here, says Liza. Hanoi is after all considered Vietnam’s cultural center, besides being its capital. 1,751 kilometers northwest of Manila, the city is also a university hub – perfect for Filipinos here, mostly high-level professionals and executives in leading international and Vietnamese companies, restaurants, hotels, food industries and special infrastructure projects.

Hard working ethos

Saluting a group of six Filipinos who bought him a bottle of beer, lead guitarist Jun says that they’ve been moving to the Vietnamese ethos of hard work since they began doing gigs here. They had to prove that Filipinos are equally hard working. Every night the band begins the first set at 8:30 p.m., performing all the way to half-past midnight for their last set.

At least five of their regular customers are Filipinos, says Jun. “That’s why we sometimes play Filipino songs or Latino music with Filipino melodies,” he explains. That evening, customers leapt to their feet as they launched into “Manila Girl” by Put3ska.

The Thai-owned Latino Bar has been tagged a watering hole for Filipinos. Its Filipino manager, Jay Abiang, is Cresliejoy’s brother. “Hanoi is visibly progressing, so Filipinos work harder here,” he also remarks.

Rising remittances from an estimated 1,300 Filipinos OFWs in Vietnam, counting those in Ho Chi Minh City, indicate that hard work. From January to October 2007, over US$0.667 million sent home improved on the $0.471-million figure in the same ten-month period in 2006.

Philippine Overseas Employment Administration data also indicate that deployment of newly-hired and re-hired OFWs to Vietnam reached a record of 1,348 workers in 2006. Among them were some 14 overseas performing artists (OPAs), making communist Vietnam the ninth leading destination country of OPAs that year. Some of them are performing in Vietnamese and foreign restaurants in downtown Hanoi, says Jun.

Some Filipinos have also married Vietnamese nationals and set up businesses here, while a few are unskilled workers and minors. The Commission on Filipinos Overseas reports that two Filipinos have become permanent residents.

A rare occasion that Hanoi’s Filipino community became visible was the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in November 2006, when President Macapagal-Arroyo was at the Melia Hanoi for a side event.

“Let's try emulating that discipline Vietnam displayed,” Arroyo told the Filipino delegation led by members of Pinoys sa Hanoi.

Today that discipline is mirrored by Jay’s fingers dancing on the frets of his electric guitar. OPAs like him and his band members make labor migration a sensational success for the Philippines.

-- OFW Journalism Consortium

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