Aileen
From the Philippines to Bairnsdale
*Aileen and her family have since moved to Pakenham, southeast of Melbourne
In Australia, I’ve learnt how to be a superwoman.
I am a mum of three. A wife. A worker at Patties Foods in Bairnsdale, in Victoria’s southeast.
Where I’m from in the Philippines, if you worked, you paid someone to do your cleaning. You could come home from work and live. Here, Australians do it all by themselves.
I wake up in the morning, prepare lunch for the kids, clean the house, get the kids to school, go to work and then everyone’s home and you’re preparing dinner, getting homework done and then the next day you do it all again.
So that’s what I’ve realised – you need to be a superwoman here, and drink lots of vitamins.
Our family arrived in Australia on 3 December 2016. My husband wanted to work in a different country, to give us a much better life and a better future for our kids. He arrived earlier, got a job as a mechanic in Bairnsdale, and he decided to bring us all here.
We’re from Manila, the capital of the Philippines. It’s very crowded there, not like here. The houses are wall to wall – your wall is my wall, so you can hear your neighbour.
I love it here. Every time I look at the news about the Philippines, I don’t want to go back. The only reason I’m looking forward to going back there is my family, because I miss them. They are a thousand miles away from me, so I look forward to seeing them. But do I want to go back there to that life? No. Life is easier here, comfortable. In the Philippines, it’s hard.
It’s taken a lot of adjusting, I can tell you that. First, there’s the slang. When you say, “I reckon”, I say, “I think”. I learnt to speak English the American way, so there is a lot of Aussie slang I don’t know. Then there’s the gardening. I grew up in the city – I don’t know anything about watering the plants, pruning the plants. One day we got a letter in the mail, explaining we needed to prune and water our garden. That was another adjustment. The supermarket is very different here, and I always keep right when other people are keeping left. When I’m walking I have to tell myself, “keep left, keep left”.
Before we came here, I was worried about experiencing racism. You cannot deny we have a different race, so you can never guarantee we won’t experience racism. But when we got here, I realised the people are so nice – they’ve welcomed us with open arms. I never thought it would be that good.
I want our kids to be successful here. They are going to school and making friends. My daughter was even helping with English classes at her school for families who don’t speak English as their first language. I am worried about what will happen when they turn 18 – will they stay with us, their parents? Of course their dreams, whatever their plans, I will support them.
We are Filipinos at heart, and there are some things I don’t want my kids to forget. It’s very important to me that they never let go of the Filipino language. We are pure Roman Catholics; we attend church locally. We still eat our traditional Filipino food.
But for me, this is the home for us now. Bairnsdale is a very nice place to live. We love the place.
