Distressed OFWs in Kuwait get early Christmas gift
Credit to Author: Bernadette Tamayo| Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2019 16:43:42 +0000
OVER 300 distressed Filipino workers in Kuwait, including those in jail, received $100 or over P5,000 from President Rodrigo Duterte as Christmas gift.
The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said the President sent his “love and care” to Filipinos in Kuwait through the Office of the Undersecretary for Migrant Workers Affairs (Oumwa).
The gift-giving took place from November 26 to 28 at the Philippine Embassy’s halfway shelters and in Kuwaiti prisons such as at the Sulaibiya Central Jail.
The Christmas gift-giving program, the first such project by the embassy since 2016, was funded by the P1-billion Assistance to National Fund of the DFA for 2019.
Chargé d’Affaires and Consul General Mohd Noordin Lomondot and DFA Oumwa Executive Director Enrico Fos led the distribution of the cash gift and hygiene kits to each of the 265 wards at the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Resource Center and at the Kuwait Public Authority for Manpower shelter.
They also visited the Sulaibiya Central Jail to check on the condition of about 50 Filipinos there.
Lomondot expressed his gratitude to Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. and Undersecretary for Migrant Workers’ Affairs Sarah Lou Arriola “for making Kuwait the first stop in the DFA’s Christmas gift-giving program for distressed OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) in the Middle East.”
“The DFA, through the Philippine Embassy in Kuwait, initiated this gift-giving program as a way of sending the love of President Rodrigo Duterte to our less fortunate kababayan in Kuwait, and as a way of telling our distressed OFWs that their government has not
forgotten them,” Lomondot said.