Janelsy, or Jen to many of her friends, has been in Thailand for many years. During her first couple of years in Thailand, like most teachers, one of the ways by which she earned plenty of extra income was to tutor kids. However, instead of teaching them English, she taught her students to play the piano. She charges 800 baht per hour. That’s a far cry from the 1 peso per minute that she used to be paid for back in the Philippines when she taught piano at a young age of 17.

Now with two kids of her own, aged 6 and 5, Jen, along with her husband Jet, can’t content herself with work, part time jobs or small businesses, that won’t contribute much to the whole family’s long term goal of migrating to Canada. Her reason? She’s got a whole group of relatives waiting for them to go there so they can all be together.

Thailand, according to Jen, is a good place to start off that long and challenging process of getting prepared to migrate to another country such as Canada, the US, the UK, or any other country in Europe. Perhaps it’s because from here, one can easily travel to other parts of Asia, or further. Then when the time comes for you to apply for a visa to where you want to migrate, it will show that you have travelled, and have come back to your place of origin. In short, you are not typical of someone who will go to a country, then stay and find work there, with no plans of coming back to Philippines.

While here in Thailand, Jen also does two other things to better her chances of upgrading herself at work, and to explore other ventures that offer opportunities to earn extra income. She signed up for a distance learning course in teaching, and is nearly finished with it. She also works with a team of doctors to promote a product that literally makes one look younger in just thirty minutes!

How does Jen balance out her workday to fit in all of these, you might ask. Well, it wasn’t always that easy. And it required her and Jet to sacrifice being together with their kids in order to focus their energies on preparing for their one way trip to Canada. When their two boys were with them here in Bangkok, it wasn’t as satisfying as they hoped it would be.

Yes, physically they were one family, and the kids had the privilege of studying in an international school. But they found themselves too exhausted to take care of them when they get home at night. Jen says it hurt not to have enough time nor energy to cook them decent meals. And so, to allow Jen and her husband the freedom of time and space to grab opportunities that come their way, they made the painful decision of bringing the kids home to Jen’s parents in La Union.

When asked what were her other challenges here in Thailand, apart from having her kids over, Jen says,

“Challenges are the people I meet, because in this challenging world, we have to position ourselves to everyone we meet. We have to deal with different kinds of people accordingly, so adjustments have to be made.”

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