The Gift

Saudi Arabia turns 95 today. Not that anyone will really stop to count. But Manila notices. The Kingdom sends 25 tons of dates every year. Twenty-five tons.

The Kingdom’s gift arrives, every year, like clockwork: 25 tons of dates. You think, OK, fruit. But it’s more a gesture than mere fruit.

At ceremonial turnovers early each year, Philippine officials from the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos and the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Office of the Middle East and African Affairs stand witness to this act of goodwill.

Saudi Arabia grows a lot of dates. Thirty-one million palm trees, 1.5 million tons a year. Gift of Dates they call it. Over 19,000 tons go to 14 million people in 105 countries. SR136 million. Since 2002, 90,000 tons shipped.

And it matters. It’s generosity writ large. But also strategy, diplomacy, soft power.

Saudi Arabia remains the mother lode for Filipino labor, the numbers rising even as the stories repeat.

Deployments jumped 33 percent this year: 60,461 sent to feed the Kingdom’s cranes and hospitals and bringing the total close to half a million, about a fifth of all overseas Filipino workers worldwide.

The government tries to keep pace: caravans in Jeddah handing out legal advice and financial counseling like bottled water, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration shuttling home 49 workers from Jeddah and Al Khobar last month.

Vision 2030 makes jobs. The remittances keep coming: $3.13 billion in March alone, a 2.6-percent uptick.

The Kingdom’s ambitions are bigger than labor. Vision 2030. Neom. The Red Sea. Tourism. Business. Innovation. Expo 2030. FIFA World Cup 2034 bid. Plans that dazzle. Mega-projects. Mega-bills. Mega-PR.

But also, maybe, real change and diversification and jobs for young Saudis. Investment. Growth. The State wants more than oil. It wants relevance and respect.

History matters. Diplomatic ties with the Philippines, 1969. Fifty-five years.

Saudi Arabia marking 95 years is also a chance to show Manila and the world that friendship endures.

Every year it’s dates by the tons. Pallets stacked and handed over with polite applause. Then there are the other gifts, the ones you can’t quite wrap in cellophane.

Two sisters, Ann and May, fused at the chest, flown out in 2004, separated by Saudi doctors, given the chance at separate birthdays.

Two more, Akiyza and Aisha Yusuf, last year, the same gamble, the same mercy.

Fifteen initiatives from 2016 to 2023 between the two countries: Agreements, memoranda, huge fat deals.

From 2015 to 2023, 2,674 projects in 99 countries. $6.5 billion. Behind each number, human labor and Filipinos making it happen: Filipino bent over beds, hauling rebar, raising kids via video call. Families stretched across seas, patched together by money wired home.

What binds the Kingdom and the Republic is that uneven, unsteady walk of two nations learning how to lean on each other, but still moving forward.