Every OFW has a number they never forget. For some it’s a first paycheck, or the price of the plane ticket that took them away from home. For Anthony Borja Altabano, it’s twenty pesos — the exact amount he carried to school each day as a boy, enough for the ride if he walked part of the way, or enough to eat if he skipped the jeepney. He usually chose to walk, thirty minutes each direction, and told himself the walking was building something.
He was not wrong. At 43, the boy who rationed his coins is now a Nurse Specialist in Adult Cardiology at the King Abdulaziz Cardiac Center in Riyadh, part of the Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs at King Abdulaziz Medical City. Eleven years abroad have earned him a wall’s worth of recognition — Best Nurse for the Cardiac Department in 2023, a nomination for the Nurse Excellence Award for Cardiac Services the year before, and in 2025, the honor he speaks of with the most weight: Ang Ginintuang Ilaw: The Nightingale Award, given by the Filipino Nurses in Arabia to nurses who embody the profession’s highest ideals of service and leadership in the Middle East. But ask him what any of it means, and the answer always lands in the same place.
“I chose to work abroad because I wanted to change the story of my family,” he shares with TGFM. Everything that follows in his career is, in his telling, a footnote to that single sentence.
The ceiling he could not stop seeing
Anthony’s clinical life began the way many Filipino nursing careers do — with a licensure exam and a leap into the deep end. He sat the Philippine Nurse Licensure Examination on November 29 and 30, 2008, passed in February 2009, and landed at FEU-NRMF Medical Center in Quezon City. The assignment was the ICU/CCU, the ward where the sickest patients go and where a new nurse either learns fast or does not last. He learned fast.
Six years in critical care did what such years do: they hardened his judgment, steadied his hands, and gave him an identity he still carries. Unstable patients, high-risk cases, decisions measured in seconds — this became his native language. Yet the formative lesson from those years was not clinical at all.
“Excellence does not come from waiting for opportunities,” he recalls of that period. “It comes from seeking them.” When the hospital did not readily offer the certifications he needed — ACLS, BLS, the credentials that separate the competent from the exceptional — he paid for them himself. Seminars were scarce. Conventions rarer still. He pursued them anyway, funding his own development because he had decided, somewhere along the way, that his growth was his own responsibility.
The problem was that determination alone could not manufacture what the environment did not have. Slowly, then all at once, he understood that he had climbed as high as the building would let him. “I realized that my professional development had reached a ceiling,” he says. “I saw limited opportunities for advancement and specialization.” For a nurse who defined himself by forward motion, standing still was the one thing he could not tolerate.
That recognition became the hinge on which his whole life turned. In 2015, after nearly six years of building his foundation in Quezon City, he left the country. The move was not only ambition. It was a calculation rooted in that childhood ledger — a way to expand his expertise and, in the same stroke, to keep a promise he had made to himself long before he ever wore a nurse’s uniform.
A debt of gratitude, carried across an ocean
To understand why Anthony left, it helps to understand what he was leaving for — and who he was leaving it because of.
He does not romanticize his upbringing. The twenty pesos, the thirty-minute commute, the things his classmates had that he did not — these were the ordinary indignities of growing up without much, and they taught him “endurance, humility, and the value of every opportunity.” But they also planted something more durable than resentment. They planted a promise. “One day,” he told himself, “I will lift my family into a better life.”
There was, too, a debt to repay. He finished his own studies only because an aunt and uncle stepped in to help. That generosity became a template. “I carried with me the desire to pay that forward,” he says, and working overseas gave him the means to do exactly that — to send his next of kin to college, to spare them the hardships that had defined his own path to a diploma.
So when he boarded the plane in 2015, he did not think of it as a career move. He describes it instead as “an act of responsibility, gratitude, and hope.” The distinction matters to him. A career move is about the self. What he was doing was about everyone who had ever gone without so that he could go forward — his parents, his siblings, the relatives who had believed in him when belief was not free.
The Kingdom he arrived in did not exactly roll out a welcome. His first month in Saudi Arabia coincided with the height of the MERS-CoV outbreak. Before he could train, before he could so much as set foot in his unit, he was confined to his accommodation for a full month — isolated, uncertain, and afraid in a country he barely knew. It was, in retrospect, a fitting introduction. The overseas life he had chosen would test his patience before it ever rewarded his ambition.
But reward it did. At King Abdulaziz Cardiac Center, the former critical care nurse found the thing whose absence had driven him from home. “Everything I had long aspired to experience as a nurse finally became possible,” he says. The seminars, the advanced training, the culture that treated continuous learning as a baseline rather than a luxury — the very things he had once paid for out of pocket in Quezon City were now simply part of the job. The ceiling was gone. For the first time, he could see how far up the building went.
Leading, mentoring, and the proof that stays behind
Give a driven person the room to grow, and the growth rarely stays contained to their own résumé. Anthony’s certainly did not.
Over eleven years in Riyadh, he became not just a specialist but a fixture of his unit’s leadership. He works on its Key Performance Indicators, guarding the clinical outcomes and safety benchmarks that a cardiac center lives or dies by. He chaired the Falls Committee, tightening the protocols that keep vulnerable patients from harm, and now chairs the Documentation Committee, where he pushes for the accuracy and compliance that quality care quietly depends on. Twice he has been named Patient Safety Champion — an honor he ties to a conviction he states plainly: that safety “is the foundation of quality cardiac care.”
Yet for all the committee titles and safety awards, the achievement he names with the most feeling has no plaque attached to it. It is the students.
“One of the roles I value most is mentorship,” he says. Over the years he has guided many nursing students, a good number of them Saudi nationals, through their training in his unit. Some of them came back. Licensed now, they chose his department specifically — because of the training, the motivation, the support they remembered receiving from him. For a man who is also a Licensed Professional Teacher in the Philippines, there may be no sweeter validation than that. “It affirms that my influence extends beyond bedside care,” he says, “and into shaping the future workforce of cardiac nursing.”
He is quick to credit the ground beneath his feet. A supportive nurse manager, a clinical resource educator who never stops nudging the staff toward further study — this is the kind of leadership, he says, that turns learning and improvement from expectations into a culture worth belonging to. In that environment, the professional he once wished he could become finally had the space to emerge, as “a clinician, leader, mentor, and lifelong learner.”
The credentials kept pace with the roles. He holds a Master in Management, major in Educational Management, from Philippine Christian University, and is now working toward a Master of Arts in Nursing at the University of Perpetual Help, Dalta System — one more rung on a ladder he intends to keep climbing.
The nights that were not on any brochure
The brochure version of overseas success — the house, the savings, the paid vacations twice a year with round-trip tickets home — is real, and Anthony has earned every line of it. He can now provide for his family with a security he never knew growing up. He has insurance, a house and lot, a child raised in comfort, and a life he once could only imagine “during the days when I walked to school with just 20 pesos in my pocket.” The distance he has traveled is not lost on him for a moment.
But the life abroad exacted a price the brochure never mentions, and its steepest bill came due at the peak of COVID-19.
His wife was 39 weeks pregnant when they both tested positive for the virus. What should have been one of the most supported moments of their lives became one of the most isolated. For 14 days they could not leave their home. Flights from the Philippines were suspended, so no family could come. There were no relatives, no outside help — only the two of them, waiting.
Then their son arrived by cesarean section, delivered while his wife was still infected. And here the cruelty of the timing turned almost surgical: Anthony had already completed his own isolation period and tested negative, which meant he could not stay in her room. A husband, a father, a nurse trained for precisely such moments — and he was kept on the wrong side of a door while his wife and newborn son were on the other. “We endured everything alone,” he says. “No relatives, no outside support, only each other.”
He does not frame it as a tragedy. He frames it as a forge. “That experience strengthened our marriage, deepened our faith, and taught us the true meaning of partnership and courage.” It is worth noting where that marriage began: not in the Philippines, but in the Kingdom itself. He met his wife in Saudi Arabia, far from either of their homes, and there they built the foundation of a family. Their first child was born on that same foreign soil. The country that gave him his career also, unexpectedly, gave him the people he built it for.
The workplace tested him differently, in the low-grade, grinding way that shared spaces always do. Conflicts in the unit were, as he puts it, inevitable. His response was a discipline of restraint. He stayed silent, respectful, professional — declining to argue, taking his side only to his manager through the proper channels. “Dignity is shown not in confrontation but in composure,” he says, and he treated that belief as a working policy rather than a slogan. It earned him respect. It also, one suspects, cost him something to maintain.
Through all of it — the MERS confinement, the COVID isolation, the friction of a foreign workplace — the anchor held. His family back home was his source of strength even from thousands of miles away, their encouragement keeping him grounded. A few trusted friends in the Kingdom stood by him and reminded him that even in a foreign land, he was not alone. “These experiences did not break me,” he says. “They shaped me.”
The map still being drawn
For a man who has already gathered more than most, Anthony talks about the future as though he is only getting started — because, in his mind, he is.
The immediate goal is academic: finish the Master of Arts in Nursing, then, given the chance, pursue a PhD. He does not treat this as vanity. “Advancing my education is not only a personal milestone,” he says. “It is a commitment to deepen my expertise and elevate the quality of care I can provide.” The teacher in him, meanwhile, keeps pulling him toward home. He envisions returning to the Philippines one day as a Clinical Instructor, passing on what critical care and adult cardiology have taught him to nurses who have not yet stood at a difficult bedside. Teaching, he says, has always been close to his heart, and guiding the next generation is “one of the most meaningful ways I can give back to the profession that transformed my life.”
At the same time, he remains open to opportunities abroad — particularly in countries where his family might settle for the long term. Wherever the path leads, the compass point does not change. It is fixed, as it has been since he was a boy with coins to count, on what will let his family thrive.
He has advice for the Filipinos following him onto that path, and it carries the authority of someone who has lived every word. Life overseas is not easy, he warns. You will learn everything independently — how to survive, how to adjust, how to stay strong when you feel alone. There will be days that feel empty, days you question the whole decision. His remedy is deceptively simple. “In those moments, always return to your purpose.”
It is the same question he asked himself on every hard night in the Kingdom: Why did I choose to work abroad? The answer, for him, never failed to supply the strength to continue. Hold on to your faith, he says. Pray. Believe that sacrifices are never wasted and that every challenge is quietly shaping you into someone stronger and wiser than before.
Somewhere in Riyadh tonight, a nurse who once walked half an hour to school on twenty pesos is checking on a high-risk cardiac patient, or mentoring a student who will one day return to his unit, or coming home to the family he crossed an ocean to build. The ledger he has kept since childhood is, by any honest accounting, well into the black. The debts have been paid forward. The promise has been kept. And still he keeps writing — because for Anthony, the story he set out to change is not finished being better.
