REMEDIOS ALCANTARA DELA CRUZ

Nurse, OFW and Nanay who raised a family from Riyadh, one balikbayan box at a time

Remedios Dela Cruz packed her first balikbayan box in 1981, and by the time she packed her last she had sent home more than ninety. Born in Lubao, Pampanga, the daughter of a rice farmer and a seamstress, she earned a scholarship to the University of the Philippines College of Nursing in Manila and graduated in 1976. She spent five years as a staff nurse at the Philippine General Hospital, where the night shifts taught her to be gentle and quick in equal measure.

In 1981, with three small children and an unpaid hospital loan, she accepted a contract at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh. She meant to stay two years. She stayed eighteen, then spent four more in Dubai at Rashid Hospital, calling home every Sunday on prepaid phone cards, missing graduations, fiestas and her own mother's funeral. She never complained. Instead she sent ham and chocolates, school shoes, a sewing machine for her mother-in-law and a letter in every box. Her salary built the family house in Lubao and put all three children through school. Back in Manila in 2004, she taught clinical nursing at a Quezon City university and mentored young nurses preparing to work overseas, patiently explaining which contracts to avoid.

She sang 'Dahil Sa Iyo' at every party, cooked a kare-kare that made grown men go quiet, and led the Saturday rosary at her parish. Her husband, Eddie, a Cubao–Quiapo jeepney driver who raised the children while she was away, died in December 2019 after forty-three years of marriage; she carried on, a little more quietly. Remy died on 8 July 2022 after a long illness, aged sixty-eight, surrounded by her three children and eight grandchildren, one of whom is now a nurse.

“A nurse's love travels farther than any plane ticket.”