#765 Shadow Families- Mia Alvar
A group of Filipino woman have a social club together while living with their husbands in Bahrain. This is where the jobs are, and they live a good high-society life. The untold reality of being separated from your home and culture is the split that can occur as travel back and forth puts strain on families.
“As children of the Philippines, we hardly knew a family that didn’t have its second, secret “shadow” family. Husbands left the provinces for Manila, wives left the Philippines for the Middle East, and all that parting from loved ones to provide for them got lonely.”
When a young, brash, aloof woman joins their clique things get interesting. She wears the latest expensive clothes without a husband and will only speak broken English eschewing her native Tagalog. Of course, this causes the rest of the group to gossip and resent this new girl. The rift becomes permanent when she appears one day pregnant and announces that the father is one of their husbands.
That doesn’t fly in an Arab world, so she was removed from sight. The woman are relieved but eventual come to wonder how much hypocrisy they were guilty of back then.
Notable Passage: “We lived like villagers at the foot of a volcano, hoping never to offend the gods who governed our harvest and our wealth.”
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