When Filipino women leave their families to find work abroad, they view migration as a necessary sacrifice to obtain the two things that will secure a future for their children: a home and an education.
But for the some 96,000 women who left the Philippines in 2010 to work as domestic workers, this simple aspiration comes at a cost that cannot be translated into monetary terms.
Join us on Thursday, November 13, for a Talks @ Pulitzer conversation with Persephone Miel Fellow Ana Santos who takes us into the lives of the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) -- and their families -- through her Pulitzer Center-supported reporting project, "Who Takes Care of Nanny's Children?" Launched in October 2010 in a collaboration between the Pulitzer Center and Internews, the Persephone Miel fellowship supports an international journalist to report on a systemic global issue in his or her home country.
Please reserve your seat today: [email protected]—specify in subject line: "November 13 Talks @ Pulitzer."
Thursday, November 13
5:30-7:00 pm
Pulitzer Center
1779 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Suite 615
Washington, DC 20036
Closest Metro: Dupont Circle
Santos, the 2014 Persephone Miel Fellow, is a print and online journalist whose work has been published in IRIN News, Rappler, Marie Claire (Philippines), among others. She has reported on HIV/AIDS, gender issues, sexual violence and reproductive health rights in Indonesia, Thailand, Jordan, Israel, Papua New Guinea and her home country, the Philippines. Living in one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, Ana has also begun writing about disaster preparedness and response and the many ways it is interconnected with reproductive health and population.
Most recently, Santos was published in The Washington Post as part of her joint reporting with Pulitzer Center Senior Editor Tom Hundley on the Philippines as the country with the world's last ban on divorce.
Her remarks are part of a special series of Talks @ Pulitzer on issues affecting women and children. The series kicked off in April 2014 with two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Larry C. Price and his work on child labor in the gold mining industry.
Other events in the series have featured the work of Pulitzer Center journalists such as Allison Shelley and Ameto Akpe, respectively, on reproductive health in Nigeria and on the effect of U.S. development projects on women's health in the country too, Mellissa Fung on the education of girls in Afghanistan, and Amy Toensing and Jessica Benko on widows in India who are both unwanted and unprotected.