ABOUT 29 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) from Cebu arrived in the country after getting repatriated from strife-torn Libya, an official from the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (Owwa) in Cebu City has revealed.
The first batch of 27 arrived July 21 while two others came in Aug. 3 or the day when Malacanang issued an appeal to relatives of OFWs to help them convince their kin to heed the government’s evacuation alert.
Eda Enclonar of the Owwa office in Central Visayas, said the first batch have arrived in Cebu while the two are still in Manila.
Most of the Cebuano OFWs worked as laborers and welders in Libya.
Encionar said there are 717 OFWs from Cebu in Libya.
“We can’t really tell which part of Libya these workers came from because we only have general information as of the moment,” she told Cebu Daily News.
More than 2,000 OFWs have signed up for repatriation this week, as the government made preparations to evacuate them by sea or land from the North African nation before flying them home via Malta and Tunisia.
Among those who will be returning home is the Filipino nurse who was abducted and raped by Libyan youths, according to Assistant Secretary Charles Jose, the spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA).
Jose told reporters the government operation to remove Filipinos from Libya, to take place from Aug. 8 to Aug. 11, was going to be very expensive, running into millions of dollars.
The government will be spending $1.8 million (or 1.4 million euros) alone just to ferry the Filipinos from the Libyan port cities of Benghazi and Misarata, according to Jose.
Chartering PAL
It will be chartering two 400-capacity Philippine Airlines planes, forking out $1,400 per passenger, he said.
Jose said 436 Filipinos have signed up for repatriation in Benghazi and surrounding areas and 602 from Misarata and surrounding areas, or a total of 1,036 Filipinos.
This group will be evacuated by a ship that will stop in the two port cities before sailing to Malta where they will be flown home by the two chartered aircraft.
In Tripoli, 599 have signed up for repatriation. This group will be evacuated by land because Libya’s border with Tunisia has reopened./with inquirer
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