SAN ISIDRO, PHILIPPINES/KUNIRAN, INDONESIA: When Mrs. Gina Fabiano first considered leaving her wooden house in the Philippine municipality of Rodriguez to work as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia, 7,000 kilometers away, her children begged her not to go.

They had never been apart before, let alone separated by such a great distance for such a long period of time. They didn’t know how to live without her, they said.

But at the time, the now 43-year-old mother of five, who ultimately worked in the Middle East for three years between 2016 and 2019, felt she had no other choice.

Her family’s farmland has become increasingly unproductive since the government decided to open a garbage dump nearby in 2002.

Together with other families whose farmland was also destroyed, Mrs. Fabiano and her husband worked as garbage collectors, searching through the tons of garbage that had been in the Metro Manila area, about an hour away, looking for metals, plastics and other recyclable materials that they can sell to recycling plants.

The family’s income was never stable. Mrs. Fabiano and her husband earned only 1,000 to 2,000 pesos (US$17.10 to US$34.20) a month. The wages were barely enough to put food on the table and pay their children’s school fees..

Then her mother died in 2016 and Mrs Fabiano, as the second eldest of 14 siblings, had to take on the role of matriarch for her brothers and sisters, some of whom were still in school at the time.

“We didn’t have money to take my mother to the hospital when she got sick. I thought at the time that if I had worked abroad earlier, maybe my mother wouldn’t have died,” Ms. Fabiano told CNA, stroking the cross on her neck with her thumb.

When I was given the opportunity to work as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia this year and earn $400 a month, She seized the opportunity.

According to the Philippines’ Department of Migrant Workers, Ms. Fabiano was one of 2.1 million Filipinos who left their country to seek work abroad in 2016. That number dropped during the pandemic before rising to a new record of 2.3 million in 2023.

The majority of them came from remote rural areas and impoverished urban neighborhoods such as Rodriguez’s There are few job opportunities in the San Isidro district, especially for people like Mrs. Fabiano, who only has a secondary school diploma.

By working abroad, these Filipinos were able to earn at least double the country’s minimum wage of $10 per day., but it comes with some high costs.

For mothers like Mdm Fabiano, working abroad meant that they could no longer see their children grow up, could no longer celebrate special occasions such as birthdays and Christmas, and could no longer experience important moments such as the first day of school or graduation.

For those left behind, it meant the loss of a loved one, a guardian, a mentor and a shoulder to cry on.

“The hardest thing was not being able to take care of my only daughter,” Ms. Fabiano said of her youngest child, who was still in kindergarten when she left.

“All I could do was call her and ask, ‘What are you doing now? Have you eaten? Are you going to school?’ That was all. But with the girl I was caring for in Saudi Arabia, I was able to tie her hair up, feed her properly and put her to bed.”

“I could take care of them, but I couldn’t even take care of my own children.”