IPS feature They had a baby girl just a month ago, but Mark and Hanna (not their real names) are hardly the portrait of ecstatic first-time parents. A mere three weeks after their daughter Nicole was born, they had to send her home to the Philippines, where their parents would look after the tiny infant.

Up to now, Hanna's eyes well up with tears whenever she is asked about her child. Mark, meanwhile, tries to answer queries about Nicole stoically, but his sadness is palpable.

''It was a hard but inevitable choice,'' he says of their decision to send her far away from them so shortly after her birth. But, he explains, that was the only way that both of them could continue to work in South Korea, and save enough for what they dream would be a more comfortable life back home.

Mark and Hanna, both Filipinos, are but two of the estimated 200,000 illegal foreign workers — majority of them Asians — in this country.

Hoping for greater financial opportunities that have been denied them in their homelands, many workers put up with the social and emotional price they have to pay to stay on in the country.

Difficult, dangerous, dirty

Family separation, as in Mark and Hanna's case, is but one such price. They, and other foreign migrant workers, are finding out that the higher wages here can also mean more physical and other hardships that could take a toll even on the most hardy.

To start with, the jobs they have are called '3-D' — difficult, dangerous and dirty, shunned by most locals and available to ''trainees'' under a system that South Korea set up in 1994 to officially keep the labour market closed to foreigners but allow cheap labour to come in.

These jobs include work in mould-making and leather factories, as well as in dye companies.

The foreign workers also often come from close-knit families from which they have to be away for months or even years at a time. And many aremothers who have to endure not seeing their children grow up, even as they toil to send the youngsters to the best schools their fund remittances can buy.

To top it off, they often have to do so away from their husbands, some of whom break their marital vows and have relationships with other women.

Indeed, for all her heartache over having her infant daughter wrenched away from her so soon, Hannah takes comfort in the fact that at least Mark is with her, and can help ease her longing for her daughter, as well as her homesickness.

Mark has also proven to be a good listener whenever she has problems at work — which is almost inevitable for someone like her in South Korea.

Violence at work

A survey done by a non-government organisation (NGO) in Daegu, some 300km south of Seoul last October, for instance, indicates that one out of three of the 196 foreign women respondents had experienced verbal or physical violence at work.

Hanna herself says that it was because a manager had hit her on the back that she decided to give up her legal status as an ''industrial trainee'' at a factory and seek work elsewhere. She says that she had been ''embarrassed'' by the whack, and had asked the manager not to do it again. Hannah adds that she told him nicely that she simply ''could not endure such a thing''.

But he soon hit her back again, infuriating Hannah. She says she asked help from the agent who had arranged for her to work at the factory, but nothing happened. So, Hannah says, she left the factory — and turned illegal.

Some labour experts concede that part of the problem is that often, many foreign workers arrive in South Korea knowing little about their host country and the ways and language of its people. This, they say, may lead to instances in which innocent, if rough, gestures made by the South Korean bosses are misinterpreted.

For example, Park Eun-Hee of the Galilea House in Ansan, near Seoul, recounts how one Filipino woman was so upset after her Korean supervisor, who happened to have a limited English vocabulary, berated her loudly in mostly Korean.

In an attempt to make himself understood, he accompanied his shouting with wild gestures, including one that he used apparently to mean for herto ''push a pipe into a hole of the machine'' so it could be cleaned.

But Park says the supervisor's actions looked so obscene to the Filipino worker that the latter cried all the way to Galilea House, which offers counselling and other forms of assistance to Filipino workers.

Better than before

Still, labour groups do not discount the occurrence of real instances of abuse of illegal foreign workers.

From February 2000 to September 2001 alone, some 809 employers of foreign workers were at the receiving end of charges that ranged from delayed payment and denial of industrial disaster insurance, to sexual harassment.

This is despite the fact that many foreign workers, because of their illegal status, fail to come forward even after they are victimised by their employers.

Cases of sexual harassment are often spoken of quietly in factories. If they are hard for Korean workers to bring up, they are even harder for foreigners to raise — especially trainees allowed to work in the country for only three years — and out of the question for illegals.

Even in Korean work places, what often happens is ''a woman worker who speaks out against sexual harassment would find herself already fired even before she goes to court,'' says Chung Young-Sook, a labour union official.

Roman Catholic priest Eugene Ata Decoy, who founded Galilea House in 1994, says though that the situation has actually improved for foreign workers. Decoy, who has been in South Korea for 11 years, says that when he first came to the country, the conditions were much harsher for foreign workers — even for the legal ones.

''If they were hurt, they were deported without being paid or cured,'' he recalls. ''Even if they were unpaid, they had no way of being paid....some of them even killed themselves.''

Today, he says, at least the legal foreign workers can count on medical insurance. As for the illegals, there are now NGOs to which they can run for assistance.

Not worth it

For Filipino workers in Ansan, Galilea House is the one place that provides them a home away from home. Aside from mass every Sunday, Galilea offers activities through which they can help each other cope with life in a foreign country.

Park also observes, ''Filipinos are born good natured and can endure a hard situation and take it positively.''

Mark's years of overseas work, however, prompt him to give his fellow Filipinos this advice: Stay in the country if you already have work there. ''You may make some extra bucks here,'' he says, ''but it isn't worth the loneliness of being away from home, as well as the troubles you might suffer here as a foreign worker.''