By YOLLY Z. SOTELO

WHO is benefiting from the strong peso? Surely not the Overseas Filipino Workers.

I find it funny, if not distressing, that OFWs who are credited with keeping the economy afloat, if not robust, with their regular remittances, hardly benefit from their assistance.

Case in point: My brother works abroad, sending dollars monthly to his family here. When he went to the US some years back, the dollar to peso exchange was 55 or 56, so a dollar can go a long way. My sister in law went back to college to study nursing, a profession that can earn more in the US than other professions. Then my three beautiful nieces are all in school, too.

Now, at 45 to 46 peso for every dollar, my sister in law has to stretch every dollar sent by my brother. I don’t know if he had increased the dollar he sends monthly, dollar does not fall from the tree even in the Land of the Free. Everyone has to make sacrifices.

Then there’s my niece, my cousin’s daughter, who is being sent to a nursing school by a relative. The relative sends $100 monthly for my niece’s school expenses – tuition, daily fare, and all. My cousin, who earns minimal wage here, could not send the daughter to school and is dependent on the help of the relative for the daughter’s schooling. The current low dollar exchange is also hurting her.

Projects supported by international funding agencies are affected, too. For instance, a project proposed is based on the dollar exchange at the time the project was approved. A $100,000 project means the proponent has P5.5 million when the dollar-peso exchange was P55. Now its only P4.5 million. If the project is a feeding program, how many children will not be reached? If its reforestation, how many denuded forest will not be planted?

What’s funny is that while the dollar to peso goes down, the cost of everything goes up, except for technological gadgets like cellular phones, the cost of which goes down when they are no longer the top of the line or the latest style. Still, they are not within the means of the ordinary folk who make tiyaga on hand-me-down phones.

But yes, there’s something I should be thankful for – the telecommunications company, specifically the Digitel to which I subscribe since it started operations years back. It has not increased its monthly bill, or if it did, by a very minimal amount. It is maybe because of the stiff competition it faces from the mobile phone companies, and maybe because it has to pay less now to its foreign loan because of the low exchange rate.

Now that the government has to pay much less to its foreign lenders, there is more money left (supposedly) for programs and projects to uplift lives of the people. We hope that this is the scenario that will happen. The scenario that we dread: Most of the money saved go to the pockets of the corrupt politicians.