The house that Saud built

摘要

"IT'S hard to find a job here," says Sheryl Lozano, a chubby mother of two. Her husband, a scaffolder, is working on a building site in Saudi Arabia and sending money home. He is part of a mass exodus of Philippine workers. Their remittances pay the food bills, school fees and for new clothes. Ms Lozano's one-room shack, a tin roof on breeze blocks, is literally the house that Saud built. Roughly one Filipino in ten works overseas, an unusually high rate. Their combined remittances hit a record $18.7 billion in 2010, up by 8% on 2009. But the Arab spring has thrown sand in the works. Some 10,000 Filipinos had to be evacuated from Libya when war broke out. Though remittances have not fallen much yet, an uprising in an oil-rich Gulf kingdom would be serious. Saudi Arabia employs over 1.3m Filipinos, second only to America. Although the Philippine economy is less reliant on Middle Eastern wages than are South Asian countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh (see Banyan), the region is still a vital source of jobs: almost half of Filipinos who got jobs abroad last year went to the Gulf.