About Memorial to Inconvenient Heroes
The Philippines is a hard place to live. Sure, your parents, your husband, your children are there but so are the merciless indignities of poverty.
So leaving is easier than you thought it would be even though you move to a place where you are viewed as a collection of skills more than a person. You spend your last peso on extortionate immigration fees and dutifully pay your NHS care fee even though you will work for the NHS. You let their eyes peer into your qualifications, your finances, your past indiscretions. And you find yourself, in the worst hospital, in the worst neighbourhood, with the worst administration in the coldest corner of England — bound, contractually, for years, to this set of circumstances. You knew you would happen. But still.
Yet you don’t turn away. You work. And you work. You take the overtime and the double and triple shifts. There’s not much else to do. You don’t have friends, you don’t have family. The dances you have brought with you from the Cordillera have no partner in these islands.
You take the money and send it home. You live cheaply and do without.
January brings news of a new form of influenza, one that can slip easily from person to person. You hear of people dying. You study it and know it’s real and it’s dangerous, but you don’t stop working. You work even more. Others fall ill, others die, but you are more careful. Still., you feel the firmness of an NHS hand on your back every time you walk into the breach. But you know you will pull through this and live.
And then it’s over. A few weeks in hospital, the same hospital you’ve worked in, with its poor administration and underfunded resources and inadequate PPE; who knows who gave it to you, or how you caught it? All you know is, you were fine and then you were sick, then you were on a respirator.
What happened afterward doesn’t really matter. Not to you anyway. Not to the hospital either. They just popped in another nurse, another kababayan, with the same skillset, to fill the place you left. They will keep calm and carry on.
The future king might have said some very nice things about your people in a prepared minute-long statement on facebook, but let’s face it, you are already forgotten. (On the plus side, you no longer need to protest over the outrage of the 1% pay rise). At home, they will pray for nine days and nine nights over the cremated remains the Ministry of Health and Social Care sent in the mail. Your children, your parents, your titas, your titos, your friends— they will speak their remembrances and cry into their zoom cameras and for each year after, they will light candles and say masses on the anniversary of your death.
But England? We barely knew you were here. You were here conditionally, as a skillset. You had no right to public services. This emotion, this humanity, this dying, this shipping, this handling— that’s not the skillset we hired. We’ve come to accept this, but it’s not something we necessarily want in this United Kingdom. And what does it matter? There are thousands more like you, thousands queued up to take your place and the place of everyone who might, in the future, find themselves similarly absent.
If you had lived, you would have made the money you needed— maybe you would have returned to home and family, maybe you would have stayed. But we both would have benefitted. That was the deal. Those were the terms. As it stands, your dying has made you inconvenient. So sorry. So, so sorry about that.
But we must move on now.
@alias_ibarra