COLUMN ONE : Paychecks Full of Pain and Profit : Filipinos driven to find work abroad can support entire families. But the social price is high, and the Mideast crisis has cut many pipelines.

Down a dingy alley in a crowded slum, Nenita Castillo and her four children share a tiny wooden house with 12 other people. The sofa is torn, the beams are rickety and garbage piles up outside.

Her husband, a mechanic in a Kuwaiti oil town for the last five years, has a new girlfriend and a new car there, she complains. He hasn’t sent money home for five months.

“It is very difficult,” she says bitterly. “We have no money.”

Several miles away, Florecita Renato needs only cabinets to finish her dream house, a solid, two-story structure with an airy veranda. There’s a separate bedroom and bath for her mother, a new 20-inch color TV and a full-time housekeeper for her baby.

Her husband, also a mechanic for the same Kuwaiti company, wired his paychecks home each month for nearly six years.

“We built the house with Kuwaiti dinars through and through,” she says proudly. “That was the reason he went.”

The pain and the profit of millions of overseas workers and the families they leave behind is etched in sharp relief in the Philippines, one of a half dozen impoverished Asian nations from India to Indonesia whose workers are trapped in the Middle East conflict. The squalid refugee camps springing up in the Middle East have focused attention on such workers, who made up more than half Kuwait’s population. But back home, their plight only overshadows deeper problems of chronic unemployment and social upheaval.

Each day, more than 1,000 skilled and unskilled workers leave Manila to seek their fortunes abroad. Each year, the estimated 1.5 million Filipinos who nurse in the United States, clean homes in Hong Kong, pump oil in Saudi Arabia and sail ships around the world send an estimated $3 billion home. That makes them the nation’s most lucrative export.

“They go for greener pastures,” said Francisco Pasion, head of the oldest and largest trade union for overseas Philippine workers. “They go because there are no jobs here.”

Many fulfill their dreams, sending salaries back to buy a house, educate children, start a business. But others, especially women, find a nightmare of broken contracts, physical abuse and worse.

An estimated 80,000 Philippine women, for example, work as “entertainers” in Japan. Many are recruited by Japanese Yakuza gangsters and wind up as prostitutes in dingy Tokyo nightclubs, officials here say. In June alone, four were murdered, two committed suicide and one was stabbed. Twenty-nine others sought refuge for being pregnant.

Problems are similar, if less severe, in other countries, according to Rosabella Khan, head of a government assistance program for overseas workers.

“I try to discourage women leaving,” she said. “So many go as governesses, or tutors or secretaries, and they end up as prostitutes. They become so destitute, they have no choice.”

Khan points to filing cabinets filled with hundreds of reports of rape, beatings, nonpayment of salaries and abuse. Most are from the Middle East, home to about 700,000 Philippine workers and family members. The total is unknown since many stay illegally.

“One girl came home from Saudi (Arabia) last month in a hood and long dress,” Khan said. “I thought she was a Muslim. Then we found she’d been kicked and beaten and slapped by her employer. She was black and blue all over. We had to send her to three hospitals.”

That case may have been extreme, but nearly 800 cheated, stranded and destitute workers were repatriated in the first six months of this year. So many workers bring horror stories home that President Corazon Aquino temporarily banned the export of women as domestics in 1988. Today, an emergency aid booth at Manila airport and several crisis centers cater solely to returning migrant workers.

Many Philippine men complain they often are discriminated against overseas, given lower wages and worse housing than European counterparts. Ironically, they are partially victims of their own success.

Former President Ferdinand E. Marcos first exported workers to the Mideast in the mid-1970s to generate foreign exchange and ease unemployment at home. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and other countries soon shipped millions of workers as well. Cut-throat competition for jobs has nearly halved salaries since then.

Philippine engineers and doctors who used to earn $1,500 a month now draw $800, labor officials say. Carpenters and pipe fitters who had $500 paychecks now get $280. And unskilled laborers earn as little as $120, far less than before.

There are also higher fees. Manila-based recruiting agencies that once charged only the employer now often demand $1,000 from the worker as well. That’s five times the legal limit, and no guarantees are given.

“Workers are forced to sign two sets of blank contracts,” said labor leader Pasion. “One goes to the government, with the legal salary and fringe benefits. The other is for the job. . . . Then, when he arrives, he finds the contract was written in Arabic. So the terms and conditions are changed again.”

The social cost at home is also growing. While many couples survive years of separation, officials say at least one in three overseas families breaks up, further fracturing this staunch Roman Catholic society. Partially as a result, police say a majority of Manila’s drug addicts are children of overseas workers.

“We are a society of close-knit families,” said Eduardo Bellido, a labor researcher. “Once a father or mother is away, the children are adrift. The moral fiber is eroded.”

There is another cost. About 70,000 Philippine nurses work in the United States. Recruiters visit nursing schools and hospitals, offering scholarships and jobs to lure away the best and the brightest. While they are a boon for America, the drain they represent has left a severe shortage in Philippine hospitals.

Nor is it unusual to find teachers, therapists, medical technicians and other college-educated women working as domestics, sharing lunch and letters from home each Sunday with thousands of other Philippine women in Hong Kong’s Statue Square or Rome’s Central Terminal.

Marianito Roque, resources manager for the overseas workers welfare administration, argues that the brain drain is matched by a “brain gain.” He says the money the workers send home helps to educate family members. Whole villages in Cavite and Pangasinan provinces depend on remittances.

“If you go to the barrio, they’re dreaming of overseas work,” he added. “They see the wife of an overseas worker with a nice dress, a TV, a radio. And they have nothing. It induces more wives to encourage their husbands to go, too.”

Many regret it. Even before the Iraqi invasion, Christina Camposagrado, 30, hadn’t gotten money from her husband in Kuwait for six months. Thin and hollow-cheeked, she waited at an overseas workers’ aid center last week to apply for an emergency loan to feed her three children.

“I heard he has another girl there,” she said, starting to cry.

Home on vacation, Leopoldo B. Digno, 41, said he and his wife broke up during his recent five-year stint in Libya.

“To live away from your family is very hard,” he said sadly.

And many find it difficult to readjust to life back home, where salaries are far lower. Ricardo Pisco, 36, worked nine years as a waiter in Saudi Arabia and Libya to support his wife, her family and his seven brothers and sisters back home. That’s impossible in Manila, he says, so he’s applying for another overseas job.

“I have no choice,” he said with a shrug. “My money is finished.”

Such dramas of the diaspora are the daily stuff of Tagalog-language TV soap operas. And a long popular Manila radio call-in show, called “To Saudi With Love” until a recent name change to acknowledge other countries, lets the nation eavesdrop while husbands and wives pass news, quarrel and make up over long-distance lines.

“They discuss finances, how to handle a son who is a drug addict, how to handle kids who are dropouts from school,” said show host Rey Langit. “All their problems.”

One woman even phoned her husband in Saudi Arabia to announce on the air that their 3-year-old daughter, Cherry, had died.

“The father shouted a terrible curse at the top of his voice,” Langit recalled. “Then he cried and cried on the air. That was very strong.”

Not everyone likes it. Jose T. Almonte, a retired army general, said he was angry and ashamed when six nieces went abroad recently as domestics. He says the lure of the overseas job is distorting Philippine values.

“There is a feeling of shame on our part,” he said. “A feeling we’ve failed our children. We’ve squandered their future. So they must leave to better their lives. And that’s a tragedy.”