Phil-Ams

When the last US ships sailed out of Subic Bay in 1992, the US Navy was not just leaving behind its biggest base anywhere in the world.

Some of the children live rough
American servicemen returning to their old lives in the US also abandoned thousands of Filipina girlfriends and children, often to lives of terrible poverty.
Now the black, Hispanic and Caucasian-looking boys and girls they left behind have grown up.
Few of the so-called Phil-Ams in Olongapo have much hope of a future. In the Philippines it is hard for them to fit in because of their foreign blood. Many never recovered from the devastating childhood blow of being abandoned by their fathers.

After a decade or more of wondering, hundreds of Phil-Am teenagers who can summon up the courage to use address-finding search engines have been able to locate their fathers, sometimes within a few minutes of sitting down at a computer terminal.
The results of such quests have rarely been happy.

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