The Filipino Hostage Caught In The Middle In The Middle East; Plus, My Cousin Stephen’s Birthday
by Emil Guillermo
Post-Thanksgiving week’s Black Friday was more like “Asian Friday” with a little something extra to be thankful for if you were following the world news from the Middle East.
One expected to see the 13 Israeli women and children swapped out for 39 Palestinians in the first major exchange of hostages over the weekend.
But the breathless reporting was also forced to be comprehensive, honoring the big surprise. Among the first released last Friday included “10 Thais and one Filipino.”
Who amongst us expected to hear that phrase?
They weren’t Asian American, but Asian Nationals. Still, any AAPI who had been keeping arms distance from the news of the day was instantly drawn into the story like never before. The global crisis had an Asian face with Asians caught in the middle.
Vetoon Phoome, 33, was in the group released Friday that included nine Thai men and one Thai woman. Like most of them, Phoome had been one of the 30,000 Thai nationals working on Israeli farms.
Upon his release, Phoome, who worked on a potato and pomegranate farm near Gaza, told his sister Rungarun Wichangern on a video call not to worry, and that he had not been tortured, according to a report in the Guardian.
By Sunday, four additional Thai hostages were released leaving 16 still being, according to the Thai government. Officials said since Oct. 7, 39 Thai nationals had been killed, the largest number of foreign people killed or missing because of the war.
The one Filipino
And then there was the lone Filipino, Gelienor “Jimmy” Pacheco.
The 33-year-old was not an agricultural worker but lived and worked as a caregiver to 80-year-old Amitai Ben Zvi in the Kibbutz Nir Oz, the original strike point of Hamas on Oct. 7.
On that day, Pacheco called his friends to tell them he was being kidnapped and that Zvi, whom he had cared for the last four years had been killed, according to the Times of Israel.
It was the last time Pacheco was heard from until last weekend, 49 days after his ordeal began.
From pictures with Philippine Embassy officials, you can tell who was held hostage. Pacheco is the one who looks like he missed a meal or two. Reports among hostages of not having enough food were common.“I’m only alive because of the Lord,” Pacheco was quoted by the Philippine Embassy. “Even on the day they abducted me, I was really thinking about my family. While I was in Gaza, I just wanted to live for my family.”
And isn’t that the case in the Philippine Diaspora, where one is always thinking about the survival of one’s family.
For Pacheco, it’s his wife Clarice Joy, and three children. Because there was no suitable work in the Philippines, one was forced to go thousands of miles away—15 hours by air—to work as a caretaker in Israel.
It is the only way to be your own family’s financial caretaker.
And that’s the price of diaspora.It’s a grim Filipino reality. You can support your family in the Philippines, only if you live so far away and hardly see them.
It’s the unnatural natural way of family life in the Philippines and apparently in Thailand too. These were service workers desperately seeking ways to serve in order to provide for their own families.
The released Thai hostages were expected to be united with them in Thailand. But for Pacheco it was unclear.
To Israel, Pacheco is seen as a kind of hero. Cheered when he was released from an Israeli hospital, Pacheco was promised lifetime social security benefits and stipends from the Israeli government, a gesture similar to that given to Israelis who are victims of terrorist attacks.
The Philippine government reportedly said it would provide financial assistance should Pacheco return home.
But Philippine Foreign Undersecretary Eduardo De Vega said it was up to Pacheco whether to stay in Israel or come home.
“He already is based there, he has a job,” De Vega said. “If his wife wants to visit him there, she won’t need a visa. We can pay for it if she wants to go on a compassionate visit.”
I thought it was an odd answer. Strange, really. After being held hostage somewhere in Gaza, it wasn’t clear, wouldn’t you want to go home to the Philippines immediately to the relative comfort of home?
Could you afford to? Maybe that’s not an automatic answer when in your native land diaspora is a way of life.
That’s always been the case. My father was in the first group to come en masse to America in the 1920s. He was a colonized American national born in the Philippines. Once he left, he never went back to the Philippines to live.
For my dad, the balance of life has always tipped America’s way, even with the racism and discrimination he faced.
Indeed, where is home for those in the Filipino diaspora? It is the irony for Asians caught in the middle in Gaza, to be out of place, far from home, in a war that is above all about a fight about home.
Stephen Guillermo
The Guillermo family immigration story began when my father came to the U.S. from the Philippines as a colonized American in 1928.
After the immigration law changed in 1965, my father’s nephew arrived and petitioned for his brothers and sisters. Decades of visa backlogs and snafus later, the next big wave of the Guillermo family finally arrived in the U.S. in the 1990s.
Stephen was one of them. Born in the Philippines and raised in San Francisco he was a Guillermo 1.5’r. But he died American-style, gunned down in 2014 when he entered the wrong apartment in his building.
November 27th would have been his 36th birthday.
EMIL GUILLERMO is a journalist and commentator. See his micro-talk show on YouTube.com/@emilamok1.
