Nursing school in the Philippines in the early 1990s produced graduates faster than the country could hire them. Diplomas outnumbered job openings, and thousands of trained nurses faced a choice: abandon the profession they had studied for, or leave the country to practice it. Margeline Maryam Hechanova chose the plane.
Twenty-nine years later, she is still abroad — but the woman teaching CPR in a Jeddah classroom today is also a certified scuba instructor, a fashion designer, and a dressmaker whose student collection walked a runway just days ago. Her career hasn’t been a straight line. It’s been a series of doors, each one opened while the last was still swinging shut.
From bedside to blackboard
She arrived in Jeddah as a registered nurse under the Ministry of Health, working the wards for nearly a decade before the work of caring for patients gave way to the work of shaping the people who would. She spent two years as a clinical instructor at Saudi German Hospital, then thirteen more at Alriyadah College for Health Sciences.
The reason she left the Philippines in the first place was simple arithmetic. “In 1990 so many graduate of Nurse but less job opportunity,” she shares with TGFM. Rather than pivot into a field outside her training, she took her profession overseas. “My choice is to work abroad than to pursue my career in another line which is out of my studies and profession.”
Eventually, even clinical teaching gave way. Today she works as a flexible Basic Life Support instructor certified by both the Saudi Heart Association and the American Heart Association, based at Saudi German Hospital. The flexibility is the point. It leaves room for everything else she’s become.
The habit of the open door
What separates her story from the standard OFW arc isn’t the leaving — it’s what she did once she’d landed. She describes herself plainly: “I am a type of person that like to seek opportunities or maybe options in many ways.”
The evidence stacks up. She took up scuba diving and enjoyed it so thoroughly that she became an instructor with the National Association of Underwater Instructors, then taught Filipinos to dive — some of whom used their certificates to find work or upgrade their licenses. Later she found another door in dressmaking, studying fashion design under instructor Jace Ramos Domingo. That thread led somewhere unexpected: on July 29, 2026, she took part in his fashion show under the student collection. “So far the show was a success,” she says.
The BLS instructor role and the design work aren’t in competition. One funds and frames the other. “I have a passion in teaching and designs,” she explains. “The benefit of my job is I have lots of time in my dressmaking, planning and creating fashion designs.”
What the years abroad rewrite
Three decades in another country change a person, and she doesn’t pretend otherwise. To her, working abroad means building a life among strangers who slowly become something else. “We are creating a community and family,” she says. “Sometimes we are not who we are when we are in our Home country. Lots of changes happen in our lives and this changes makes us strong.”
Not all the adjustments were easy. Married to a partner of another nationality, she names family — not work — as the harder terrain. Getting through it, she says, took patience above all.
That hard-won perspective shapes the advice she offers fellow Filipinos abroad, and it isn’t sentimental. It’s about discipline. “Wherever we are, even how big our salary, Management is very important,” she says. “Working abroad has no security of tenure. We must be wise in everything. Always build your option in life.”
She is already building hers. She can’t tend patients and teach forever, and she knows it, so the plan is a ready-to-wear shop stocked with accessories, plus lessons in simple design — teaching, still, just with fabric instead of a defibrillator. “Only changes doesn’t changes,” she says, in her own turned phrase.
Her closing counsel carries the weight of someone who has watched the life abroad remake people in both directions. Choose your company carefully, she warns, and leave the wrong rooms without burning them down: “If you cannot beat them, do not join them, leave them peacefully and with marks of goodness.”
