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For the love of God
The immigrants who help out other migrants
In the heart of old Nicosia two immigrants work around the clock to help other immigrants come to terms with Cyprus and hand out donations for the poor. THEO PANAYIDES meets them
Deep in old Nicosia, somewhere between the half-abandoned cobblers’ shops and the Sri Lankan Christian Fellowship, past the hand-written sign – “Dear Neighbours: Please Put The Rubbish on the Corner of the Street. Not Here!” – in English, Russian and Greek, is a nondescript office on the ground floor of a low building. The space is large but unmemorable: a low white table flanked by two worn sofas, a water cooler, an electric fan, a row of computer terminals against the far wall. Tables, chairs and bar stools are scattered untidily, giving off a mismatched vibe as though they were lifted from assorted other offices – which they probably were, since the place lives mostly on donations. On the glass window, above the row of potted plants (some now dried-up), a sign reads “Nicosia Mercy Centre”. Another sign notes the opening hours, then a poignant addendum: “We care about you, and we want to give you a helping hand”.
On the right as you come in is a small cupboard, which Marcelo Cayanan opens to reveal a pile of packages in plastic bags. There are books, VHS tapes and children’s toys stacked around the cupboard – but these packages are the main attraction, the main reason why the Centre opens twice a week, Wednesdays and Fridays. Marcelo hands one for me to inspect. Inside are various canned goods – kidney beans, mushrooms, other vegetables – a jar of apricot jam from Morphakis Ltd in Larnaca (one of the Centre’s main donors) and a box of spaghetti. Other packages have variations on the same ingredients. These are the foodstuffs handed out to about two dozen people – usually the same people every week, admits Marcelo – who wander the streets of Nicosia, usually homeless and invariably hungry.
‘Who are these people? What are their stories?’ I ask Marcelo and his wife Aida as we sit around the low white table sipping plastic cups of water. Two main categories, they reply: men from Eastern Europe – mostly Poland and Romania – who’ve come to the island as EU citizens but can’t (or won’t) find a job, and people from outside the EU, Africans or Pakistanis, many of whom are political refugees; “They have trouble in their countries, and have to leave,” says Marcelo. Some of them get help from social services, but it tends to be erratic and inadequate. Most of them (especially the Eastern Europeans) sleep in parks. “They just like to be there,” says Aida with a hint of impatience. “I don’t know,” says the more conciliatory Marcelo, “it seems the life in their countries must be difficult also.”
Aida’s more assertive, with a vivid turn of phrase. Marcelo is 56, bespectacled, with straight black hair, and is (or used to be) an accountant. He’s not responsible for founding the Mercy Centre. That honour goes mainly to Lakis Georgiou, another accountant, a Cypriot married to an Englishwoman who walked through the Old Town a couple of years ago and noticed “a lot of people who are homeless, who are poor and are just in the street, you know,” as Marcelo puts it. The Cayanans became involved soon after the Centre opened, having worked for years within the local Filipino community.
Both are Filipino, born in the same province: Pampanga Province, just north of Manila. Marcelo’s background is unexceptional – the son of a farmer and a part-time dressmaker, the eldest of 12 children (six boys, six girls). Aida, too, comes from a poor family, but carries a powerful memory of her mother being kind to the beggars who used to knock on their door, toting a shabby bag for charity: “You know, they come from house to house – and my mum always invited them to come in and gave them food, and then when they leave they have something in their bag as well”.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and Aida spent a few years in the 80s teaching English at a refugee camp, Phanat Nikhom, in Thailand which was then a haven for Vietnamese boat people and other refugees from Laos and Cambodia (she’d ask her students to draw their families, she recalls, and they’d draw a crowded boat – “then, in the second episode, the boat is empty and everybody is floating on the water”). Meanwhile, Marcelo had studied Accountancy – helped by a relatively rich uncle – and taken a job in Saudi Arabia. They were introduced by a relative, spent five years courting long-distance – sending each other lengthy messages on 90-minute audio cassettes, spiced with occasional (but expensive) phone calls – then finally decided to marry. Their elder daughter was born in Saudi, just before they moved to Cyprus in 1992; she’s now studying Special Education in the Philippines, having graduated from the American Academy. Their younger girl is still in school. Both girls have lived here all their lives, speak Greek fluently and think of Cyprus as “their country” – but of course, like their parents, they’re not Cypriot citizens.
Seems a little harsh, I protest – but Marcelo only shrugs placidly. Neither girl was born in Cyprus, he points out (Aida went to the Philippines when she was seven months pregnant with her second child, and had the baby there), and besides they haven’t lived in Cyprus “all” their lives: there were also the three years in the early 00s when the family moved to Tennessee, so Marcelo and Aida could study for their Masters. Really? What did they study? And why Tennessee? It was a theological seminary, he explains: he himself did a Master of Divinity, his wife specialised in Counselling.
This is unexpected, though not really surprising. I’d thought of Marcelo as an accountant – though he says his childhood dream was to be an engineer – but in fact he stopped practising in the late 90s. He’s actually a pastor of sorts, a missionary for an evangelical outfit called the Church of God, based in Cleveland, Tennessee (Lakis Georgiou, the man behind the Mercy Centre, belongs to a similar church called the Church of God of Prophecy). The Centre is something of a sideline; the Cayanans’ main work comes every Sunday when they preside over their flock at the Church of God, also in Old Nicosia (though there are branches throughout Cyprus) – singing hymns, studying the Bible and offering advice to some 140 souls, almost all of them Filipino housemaids.
That’s another story in itself, a story of a whole complex sub-culture, women who are often lonely, often overworked, worrying about families back in the Philippines (most of the congregation is made up of married women). Their kids may be in trouble. Their husbands back home may be “not living right,” says Marcelo discreetly, “doing other-side things, you know”. They work anywhere between eight and 16 hours, six days a week, and their Sunday church is “a kind of release,” he explains. “So they pour out whatever is in their hearts,” adds Aida.
Are there tales of abuse? “Oh yes!” they exclaim. “Too many!” Some employers are just unreasonable; one woman had to work as a construction worker instead of a housemaid, mixing cement and so forth, “and her hands are like crocodile hands” says Aida vividly. There are also reports of sexual abuse. Mostly, however, the Church acts as a cross between support group and social club, with Marcelo and Aida – 20-year veterans of Cyprus and Cypriots – helping the women “understand their employers”. Many things are disconcerting for the new housemaid, “especially shouting. Shouting is the worst enemy of the Filipino, because in the Philippines if you shout at somebody then you’re really mad and you want to strangle that person – but Cypriots, it’s normal for them to shout, and to them it means nothing. After they shout, it’s finished. So we try to make them understand that Cypriots are like that, and you just have to understand them. You’re a stranger in their house, [so] you adjust.”
For the Cayanans, it’s a full-time job. “Some girls call us in the middle of the night, or in early morning or during the midday,” asking for advice. Just last week, recalls Marcelo, he received a frantic call from a housemaid who’d forgotten that her pink slip (Immigration document) was in the pocket of one of her dresses, and had thrown the dress in the washing machine. “What shall I do?” asked the poor girl, faced with the mangled document; “Shall I tell my employer? But my employer will shout at me!” I can’t help smiling – not at the girl’s plight, but her girlish fear of being scolded. “We act as their parents in the church,” agrees Marcelo, “so every small problem they have to call us”. It’s like having 140 extra daughters.
What drives people to become good Samaritans, handing out advice to frightened housemaids and food packages to jobless Poles? “Our heart is to help the poor,” says Marcelo, earnestly if not too grammatically. What about the other side, though – the argument that giving people food only encourages them not to find a job? He shakes his head. The twice-weekly packages at the Mercy Centre aren’t enough to live on, he insists. Besides, every package comes with an interview, where the men are asked about their lives – and mostly claim to be looking for work, but in vain. You can see them every day at Ochi roundabout, says Marcelo, packs of scruffy loiterers hoping hopelessly for day-work. Don’t I know there’s a recession?
Maybe so; in any case, I’m not really interested in the pros and cons of charity. I’m more interested in Marcelo and Aida Cayanan, born in Third World poverty, helping those neglected in what is, after all, quite a rich country, and devoting their lives to the lives of others. Some will say they do it for the money, and the church in Tennessee has indeed been paying them a salary (enough to live on, though not much more) for the past 12 years. Others may suspect they do it as immigrants helping other immigrants, and they do get momentarily wistful when talking about the Philippines (“We miss that place,” says Aida; “Plenty of trees around, and it’s so –” “Green,” says Marcelo, completing her sentence). Marcelo himself has a more spiritual take, however, never once raising his voice in the near-empty office with the mismatched chairs, and dried-up potted plants by the window and tins of beans and mushrooms in the closed cupboard.
“If you love God,” he laughs, “you have to love people too.”
