Would it be the want, the dream of lovely little stucco houses, televisions and washing machines and lilac bushes along a white picket fence? Or would it be something more elemental? Like the memory of a father with whom one was just joking and having supper one moment and then whose body is later riddled with bullets as his wife and his children watch?

An imperfect father, who was a farmer, who tried his best nonetheless to care for his six children but in a moment of folly, stole a carabao to pay for the birth of a bastard son by a mistress, not knowing the price was his life.

And as if that wasn’t enough, what about the memory of a brother who killed one of his father’s killers, joined the rebel movement, and was never seen again? Or the memory of another brother who poisoned and killed himself with pesticide among the pigs that he took care of? Because he was crippled with polio and because he dared love a woman.

And because one day, he took a cake to her birthday party and his woman’s folks threw the cake at him and taunted him, “Pilay (cripple)!”

And when she was old enough to understand, why wouldn’t Rosalinda, 32, overseas Filipino worker, trade this life for another?

Why wouldn’t she put as much distance as she could between this world and another? Why wouldn’t she hope for a world where nobody gets killed for stealing a carabao and nobody kills himself and dies among pigs for a broken heart? Why wouldn’t she refuse to live her life the exact same way?

There are a thousand and one reasons why seven million Filipinos have left the country for another land only to become victims of human trafficking.

According to a US Agency for International Development (USAID) report, the root causes of trafficking include poverty, lack of economic difficulties, lack of education, the growing disparity between rich and poor, the enormous profitability of exploiting women, and rampant corruption in government.

Let’s be more specific.

A World Bank survey shows that half of Filipino families are eating less and eating cheaper food. About 7 percent had dropped out of school. About 17 percent experienced reduced incomes; approximately 70 percent have a family member who has lost a job.

Let’s be even more specific.

Growing up in the farm, Rosalinda remembers eating only rice and salt or rice and bagoong (shrimp paste) with her siblings. She dropped out in Grade 5. Her brothers and sisters never went beyond Grade 6. Her family subsisted on an income of only P1,500 a month. With her qualifications or lack of it, she could only find a job as a domestic helper.

Then, there are the intangible remnants of her life, her father, her brothers, and the memories that don’t go away.

Rosalinda’s reasons, to those of us who don’t understand why she would one day find herself inside a container van bound for Italy, are not just bound with money, a Western citizenship, a better life.

It’s about escape.

A Ghost Town

Barrio Wawa in Tanauan, Batangas sits besides scenic Taal Lake, one of the resettlement areas along the coast that absorbed survivors from the nearby villages devastated by the 1965 eruption of Taal Volcano, the world’s smallest volcano.

Today, what used to be a teeming, busy, calamansi-producing, agricultural barangay has become a virtual ghost town as if a mighty river, or another devastating eruption had swept over it.

Barangay captain Francisco Siman, 72, says that the village’s population has dwindled to 2,000 to 3,000 people from 5,000 in the ’80s.

“They’ve all gone to Italy,” he relates, adding that there is not single household in Wawa that does not have a close relative working in Italy.

According to data gathered by the United Nations (UN) from the Philippine consulate in Milan, 57.4 percent of illegal migrants they surveyed came from Southern Luzon in the areas of Batangas and Laguna. The data was explained by large settlements of Filipinos living near the Milan area who have been sponsored by their relatives who came to Italy ahead of them.

In possibly one of the greatest migrations in the world, Filipinos have plowed their way to more than 150 countries in the world, and Italy is one of their favorite destinations, along with Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia, says the 2007 US State Department Report on human trafficking.

The International Labor Organization estimates the population of migrant workers to be 120 million. The Philippines, along with Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka are the leading suppliers of these workers.

Of the seven million Filipinos working abroad, three million are undocumented and suspected to be victims of human smugglers and traffickers. They are finding their way to places like Italy, notorious as a top destination in the world for trafficked men, women, and children for sexual exploitation and forced labor.

And the voyage going there is not, by any means, a magic carpet ride but a harrowing, sometimes, deadly one.

Human Cargo

What are the lengths Filipinos would go to get to Italy and what are the lows human traffickers are capable of to get them there?

How does it feel to sit jampacked with more than 20 people in a dark container van, packed as cargo, inside a train running at the speed of 40 miles an hour, as hunger and the fear of discovery gnaw at your gut?

To Rosalinda, along with 19 other women who sat hot and hungry for eight hours inside the container van in a train bound for Italy, it did not feel like the last leg of their journey or a jump-off point for a great new adventure, but a long slow march toward death.

“We were hidden inside a cargo van and locked up. We were told to keep quiet. We couldn’t eat or go to the comfort room. Whenever anyone knocked, we were not supposed to answer,” relates Rosalinda of their ordeal.

The journey began in Wawa, fueled by scores of heedless and reckless women who have also made the trip to Italy, undaunted by an equal number of women who were arrested at border countries in Europe, repatriated, and never making it to Italy.

Talks in Wawa have it that it is even harder now to make it to Italy, with the cost of the journey even more prohibitive. That for every woman successfully smuggled within Italy’s borders, there is also one who never arrived. But the stories of these misadventures and failed dreams are only whispered about.

They are drowned out by the latest gossip of which person from Italy is building her dream house. To the people of Wawa, these concrete pastel-colored, Mediterranean houses of stone and granite, which glaringly stand out in the agricultural backwardness of Wawa, are tangible proof of the possibility of the impossible.

“People have grown weary of planting. Everyone is just waiting to leave for Italy,” says Francisco Siman, who remembers when calamansi was harvested by the ton in Wawa and the fields were actually tilled. And when all that activity had not been replaced by waiting.

Rosalinda was recruited by the wife of a cousin who was well known in Wawa for successfully bringing recruits to Italy in the year 1988. She says she paid P50,000 initially to the woman, with the balance of P150,000 payable and deductible from her salary when she got to Italy.

From Wawa, her journey continued to the Manila International Airport where an agent gave her a packet of documents that included a plane ticket to Bangkok. She says she was met at the airport in Bangkok by another agent who then brought her to a hotel, along with five other recruits. In Bangkok, where Filipinos are allowed to stay for 30 days without a visa, they waited for additional documents that would take them to Europe.

After about a week, they were given their plane tickets to Switzerland where, she says, a Swiss agent escorted them through immigration. From the Swiss airport, they were brought to a safe house along with 10 or more women and were instructed to wait. After three days, they boarded a train for Germany. This time, according to Rosalinda, they were smuggled by train personnel inside a locked cargo van so they could go through German and Italian border controls unnoticed.

When they passed through the borders of a small town that, Rosalinda says, she did not know, the van was unlocked and the women were released. And they each boarded buses to their separate destinations in Italy and to another life.

Others were not so lucky.

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