This coming March 26, would have been Macrine's 90th birthday. This posting I am dedicating to her.
Filipinos are everywhere. For me, that truth is not just a headline about migration
statistics. it is written in my own journey from the Philippines to the United States,
and in the life of my late wife, Macrine, whose nursing career became both a
personal calling and part of a global Filipino story.
Growing Up Filipino, Becoming Part of the Diaspora
I was born in the Philippines, in a culture where family, education, and hard work
were the pillars that held everything together. From an early age, I saw relatives
and neighbors leave for distant countries, some to the U.S., others to the Middle East,
Canada, or Europe, chasing opportunities that were scarce back home. Each goodbye
at the airport felt like a small fracture in the community, but we all understood
the reason: they were leaving to lift their families out of hardship, to pay for tuition,
to build a simple house, to support parents growing old.
Eventually, I joined that stream of Filipinos who packed their lives into suitcases
and started over in a foreign land. Like so many others, I carried with me not just
documents and clothes, but memories: the smell of home-cooked food, the sound
of Tagalog jokes, the comfort of knowing that wherever we go, we bring a piece
of the Philippines with us. In the United States, I learned what it meant to be an
immigrant—to work harder than most, to navigate subtle and not-so-subtle racism,
and to constantly prove that I belonged in spaces that were not designed for
people who looked or sounded like me.
Yet even in those struggles, I was never alone. Filipinos were in the hospitals,
in the Navy, in home health, in restaurants, in IT, quietly forming a backbone
of labor and care. We were “everywhere,” but often invisible.
Macrine’s Late-Blooming Journey into Nursing
My late wife, Macrine Nieva Jambalos Katague, did not start her career the way
typical nursing success stories are told. For years, her vocation was motherhood.
She devoted herself to raising our four children, putting their needs before her
own ambitions. Many would have said she had already fulfilled her life’s mission.
But at the age of 40-an age when some people start thinking about slowing down
Macrine made a bold decision: she pursued nursing in the United States. While juggling
family responsibilities, she went back to school, embraced long study hours, and
persisted through exams and clinical rotations. She refused to accept the idea
that dreams have an expiration date.
Her first nursing job was in hospital nursing, where she learned the rhythm of shifts,
the fast pace of acute care, and the emotional toll of seeing suffering and loss close-up.
In those hospital corridors, she joined a quiet army of Filipino nurses who kept
American health care running, often without recognition, but always with deep
compassion.
From Hospital Floors to Home Health and Leadership
As her career evolved, Macrine transitioned to home health as a visiting nurse.
This phase of her journey reflected something profoundly Filipino: the instinct to
care not just for a diagnosis, but for the whole person and the family around them.
She entered patients’ homes, sat at their kitchen tables, reassured anxious spouses,
listened to worried children, and helped navigate the maze of medications and
follow-up visits.
Home health nursing is intimate work. It requires clinical expertise, but also cultural
sensitivity, patience, and the ability to meet people where they are-in small
apartments, suburban homes, or senior communities. Macrine brought all of that
with her. She was not just a nurse with a bag of supplies; she was a calm presence
walking into someone’s hardest days.
Her final professional chapter took her away from bedside and home visits and
placed her behind a desk, as head of Quality Assurance for a home health organization
in Maryland. There, she used her experience to improve systems, documentation,
and standards of care. It was a different kind of nursing, less visible to patients,
but crucial to the safety and quality of the services they received. In that role,
she embodied another truth about the Filipino diaspora: we are not only
hands-on workers; we are also leaders, administrators, and decision-makers
shaping institutions from the inside.
One Family, Reflecting Millions of Filipino Stories
When I read that there are millions of people of Filipino ancestry in the United States,
and millions more scattered around the world, I don’t just see numbers. I see faces
that look like mine and like Macrine’s-faces of people who took risks, endured
separations, worked night shifts, and swallowed homesickness to build better
lives for their families.
Our family’s story-an immigrant husband from the Philippines, a wife who became
a nurse at 40 after raising four children, a career that moved from hospital floors to
home visits to quality leadership, is just one thread in a vast tapestry. But it mirrors
the broader Filipino diaspora in many ways:
Leaving home out of both necessity and hope.
Reinventing careers in midlife, proving that age is not a barrier to new beginnings.
Serving in health care and caregiving roles that keep systems functioning and families
intact.
Climbing from entry-level positions to roles of responsibility and leadership.
Filipinos in New Zealand are now sending members of Parliament to represent them.
Filipinos in the U.S. are professors, tech professionals, judges, local officials, and
community organizers. Around the world, you will find Filipino caregivers in European
homes, engineers in the Middle East, seafarers on international ships, and nurses l
ike Macrine in hospitals and home health agencies.
Our family’s American journey sits inside that global story. The remittances sent back
home, the degrees earned late in life, the overtime shifts, the multi-generational homes,
the blending of Filipino and local cultures—these are the details that transform
abstract migration statistics into living, breathing lives.
A Personal Reflection on Legacy
When I think about the phrase “Filipinos are everywhere,” I no longer hear it as a cliché.
I hear it as a quiet tribute to people like my wife: a woman who started nursing in midlife,
walked into countless homes as a visiting nurse, and ended her career protecting
quality of care for patients she would never meet face-to-face.
Her legacy lives on in the patients she helped, in the colleagues she mentored,
in the systems she improved, and in our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren
who now carry both her Filipino roots and her American story. Our path, from the
Philippines to the U.S., from young parents to seasoned professionals, from anonymity
to quiet influence is one small reflection of a much larger narrative.
The global Filipino diaspora is not just about where Filipinos have gone, it is about
what they have given. In my family, that gift took the form of a nurse named Macrine,
who turned love, sacrifice, and hard work into a lifetime of service. And in telling her
story, I see more clearly how one family’s journey can stand for millions of others,
scattered across the world yet forever connected to the same islands we still call home.
A Water Color AI Copy of the Photo Above:
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