Delivering Happiness

By Rolo B. Cena
Arabian Diaries
Dumaguete Star Informer
19 July 2009

Before plunging into the weekend bowling game last Friday (by the way, Thursdays and Fridays are weekends in Saudi Arabia), my colleague and teammate asked me to drop by the busiest Remittance Center in the city of Al-Khobar for the usual, you know, “padala”.

Since I had no business inside, I waited for him outside the Center. Biting sun thumped my skin and the extreme humidity whacked everybody in cue, including me of course. It is summer once again in the Kingdom and the temperature is playing like you are swimming in the lake of fire.

My eyes were glued at the poster mounted on the glass wall of the Center that says: “Delivering Happiness”. The teaser invited my smile and seized the extreme temperature I was feeling while waiting for my colleague. Suddenly, my mind worked and started to scribble. Finally, I realized it was working.

Anyway, sending money to our loved ones became an activity none of us misses; and we cannot afford to miss. Irrespective of positions and locations, remitting is by far the most popular event in the lives of overseas Filipino workers (OFW) not just in the Kingdom but all over the globe. It is an event incomparable to the Olympics. Believe me!

Trying to combat the heat, I tossed a candid joke at some Filipinos who have just finished their remittances: “Nagbayad ka na ba ng utang mo sa asawa mo?” (Did you pay your debt to your wife already?)

All of us burst into laughter. We elaborated my joke and detailed some areas that further hurled us amidst the heat. What a day to reckon with after a year of staying in the most conservative of all Islamic Kingdoms.

Yes, it was just a joke but technically, it seems that we are indebted for life to our spouses. We had the prevailing contract and the social obligation, too. Seriously, I can’t believe I can crack that joke at the crowd; seriously still, I can’t imagine if I fail.

After all, the teaser that confiscated my thought earlier is obviously true. After husbands remit, spouses send SMS, email or call to inform they receive the money. Ergo, the entire family is happy. It was happiness delivered by technology indeed.

Happiness delivered!

Lately, my playmate in lawn tennis, upon seeing that I was “on line”, sent me a private message asking if he can borrow money. I interrogated because at his young age and singular cause in life, why in this world he would attempt to borrow money from a married man. His response was this: “sir, until today, we still don’t receive our salary. My mother is asking for some amount for her meds. And I have nothing to eat starting tomorrow.”

Juxtaposed with some other stories, his was no different from the minority of our numbers here whom I should dub “unfortunate”. Yes, his story is one of those that inspired me to write (you can read his and his colleagues’ story in my next column entitled “The Al-Tassel Story).

I was deeply moved and disturbed that I tried to scuffle against the stinginess I was hoarding inside my heart that day: I committed to send a little amount, nope, not for the meds of his mother but for his food. However, the money was not a gift but a payment for a service. This man happens to know massage and has been doing this as his part time job just to survive in this Kingdom.

I always recall one of my favorite management scientists Dr. Stephen Covey who advocated this famous dictum: teach man how to fish; do not give him a fish. This is what I taught him just recently.

Delivering happiness: I always feel happy if I see that my help gets through the senses of the one asking for help. It is graciously relieving and fulfilling; very rewarding.

Delivering happiness: this famous dictum of the busiest Remittance Center in the City failed, in some respect, to this young man whose dreams in life are as young as the sunrays touching the early morning sand dunes of the Easter Province where we are staying.

Can a man ever say he is happy if he is deprived?

I was never happy when I was deprived to defend myself for an accusation maliciously founded and plotted against my professional life. I was never happy when I was deprived to explain why one thing fails. This man was never happy since he arrived at the Kingdom because of total and complete deprivation.

When President Marcos failed, the entire Filipino community knew he was not happy. When President Erap Estrada failed, most of his supporters knew he was regrettably unhappy. When the petite lady of the Imperial Manila is failing the eighty-five million Filipinos, we knew she is never happy and will never be.

Not all Overseas Workers are delivering happiness to their homesteads. Some are; some are not. And not all remittances are true picture of happiness; there is more to it than the teaser we read.

As what I have written in my poem entitled “The Memorabilia” published in 1986, “Not all stones glitter; not even all those who wander succeed.”

Happiness after all is relative. It’s all in the minds!