HONG KONG – Fleeing for safety, overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) who escaped from Tripoli and other parts of strife-torn Libya either lost or left with their respective employers their Philippine passports.
Fortunately for them, Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto del Rosario was with them in Tunisia and issued them travel documents as their exit pass from Libya.
Rosita Garfin, principal of the school for the Philippine community in Tripoli, was profuse in expressing gratitude for the efforts of the secretary and Philippine
ambassador to Libya Alejandrino Vicente, who supervised the processing of their travel documents out of Libya.
Del Rosario flew to Tunisia immediately after he was sworn into office last week by President Aquino as acting Foreign Affairs secretary and concurrent presidential adviser on foreign relations.
Saying she is probably the oldest OFW working in the Middle East, the 70-year-old Garfin expressed her appreciation for the assistance given them by Del Rosario. She noted that the secretary personally directed the evacuation being undertaken by Philippine embassy officials in Libya to bring OFWs to safer locations like Tunisia and Dubai.
Patrick Patani, a civil engineer also working in Tripoli, told The STAR that they feared for their lives while traveling by land for more than four hours to Tunisia and then to Dubai. From Dubai, Patani said they were taken to an aircraft chartered by the Philippine government that brought them to Hong Kong, from where they were to take their flight to Manila.
Garfin and Patani were among the first batch of 180 OFWs who were processed out of Tunisia by Philippine embassy officials under the supervision of the Foreign secretary.
Garfin relayed her experience of fleeing from the civil strife in Libya to Sen. Loren Legarda, chair of the Senate foreign relations committee who was here on a stopover en route to Vietnam to attend the United Nations International Strategic Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) conference where she is the “regional champion” for Asia-Pacific.
Legarda took the opportunity to talk with OFWs in transit at the Hong Kong airport before flying back to Manila. As chair of the foreign relations committee, Legarda sought out information and the experiences of the OFWs on how the Philippine embassies in the Middle East are handling the situation, especially in attending to the needs of those stranded by the civil strife in Libya and Egypt.
“I would like to hear from you the sense of urgency, the sense of anticipation by our Philippine embassy officials in those foreign posts in attending to the needs primarily of our OFWs,” Legarda told them.
Garfin and Patani told the senator that they have already identified to Philippine embassy officials other areas in Libya where there are large concentrations of OFWs waiting to be rescued.
“I’m glad to hear that your needs were very well attended to by our embassy officials,” Legarda told them.
Patani was specially concerned for the safety of other OFWs left behind in Tripoli and other parts of Libya because of the presence of many armed men who take away mobile phones, laptops and even food. He said even their transport van that was supposed to take them out was seized.
Fortunately, he said, his employer was kind enough to provide another vehicle that took them to safer ground.
Their problem, he said, was they cannot identify who are friendly and who are not because whether they are for or against the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, they forcibly take away private properties at gunpoint.
Obviously elated they would soon be coming back to the Philippines, the OFWs eagerly posed for photo with Legarda.
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