At this time of year, Fatima Ramos would normally be preparing her boxes. Overseas Filipinos typically fill these boxes with gifts, clothes, food and household items to send to their loved ones back home in the Philippines for Christmas.

Ramos has previously sent the tax-exempt parcels to her family and Philippine charity organisations from Abu Dhabi, where she works as a domestic worker.

Now back in the Philippines, Ramos is seeking answers about the parcels she sent last year, some of which arrived severely damaged while others remain missing.

“I got one of my boxes, and it was completely soaked. The clothes were faded and mouldy. The items and the box were all crushed. It was heartbreaking. The food, such as the chocolates, had melted because it got wet,” Ramos told This Week in Asia.

Ric, an engineer in Saudi Arabia who asked to be identified only by his first name, has suffered a similar experience with a - a compound word in Tagalog meaning return to a country - box.

According to him, he sent a box from Jeddah in June, and a delivery company’s representative told him in July that the parcel was still awaiting shipment. When he followed up in September, his emails and calls went unanswered.

For many overseas Filipinos, boxes often represent weeks or months of careful selection of items paid for with their hard-earned savings, and an expression of their love from afar. Their tax-exempt status reflects the Philippine government’s recognition of the role overseas Filipinos play in supporting their families.

But thousands of these boxes have been left in limbo as the Christmas season approaches, with some abandoned in shipping containers at Philippine ports and others stranded in their countries of origin amid problems involving cargo forwarding companies.

The boxes sent by Ramos and Ric were handled by Makati Express Cargo, a forwarding company serving customers in the United States and the Middle East.

The Philippines’ Bureau of Customs (BOC) revoked the company’s licence in January and filed criminal complaints against it in May over nearly 40,000 boxes left unclaimed at ports, involving more than 30 million pesos (US$1.6 million) in unpaid duties.

Ramos sent eight boxes between January and March before returning to the Philippines for good because of a heart condition that she said had worsened following Iran’s attacks on the United Arab Emirates, including Abu Dhabi. She found out about the mounting complaints against the forwarding company only after she returned home.

“At first, I didn’t want to believe it. But then I started following up with my package online and through the company’s website in March. By April, I still couldn’t get an answer to verify whether my boxes had already arrived. They should have been in the Philippines by now,” she said. This Week in Asia has reached out to Makati Express Cargo for comment.

On Sunday, the BOC said it had discovered 29 abandoned shipping containers holding at least 10,000 of the boxes at various ports in the Philippines, some of which had arrived in May.

In June, the BOC had earlier filed complaints against five cargo forwarding companies over 3,176 abandoned boxes.

Some of the boxes had already been opened and rummaged through and “slaughtered”, Ramos claimed. This Week in Asia has also reached out to the BOC for comment.

Ramos, who has been gathering complaints from at least 300 overseas Filipinos in the Middle East over their unclaimed boxes, said she had spoken with officials from the BOC and the Department of Migrant Workers to help resolve the matter.

For migrant Filipinos, the unaccounted boxes were a sore point as they symbolise their love and sacrifice, according to analysts.

Over 2 million Filipinos work as overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), part of a larger global diaspora of between 10 million and 15 million.

“Some Filipino families who decided to migrate to other countries may consider sending boxes as a means of extending love and care to relatives in the Philippines. A balikbayan box could be viewed as a sustenance of relational closeness or to communicate thoughtfulness,” said Lenis Aislinn Separa, an intercultural communication researcher based in New Zealand.

“Each item they buy that fills a space in a box has a backstory of how they struggled in prioritising between what they need to survive living abroad and providing what they believe their family needs back home.”Hannah Nario-Lopez, an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman’s sociology department, said each box was a labour of love from migrant workers, who would curate items carefully over weeks or months.

“This simple, small, menial act converts the physical distance and the time spent abroad into tangible care, allowing the worker to remain present in the everyday life of their household,” she said.

The box also complements regular cash remittances from OFWs by offering items for household needs such as groceries, toiletries, school supplies, bags and shoes. For some, its loss could disrupt daily routines, such as health supplements for family members who were elderly or ill, Nario-Lopez said. As such, the loss of the box would become a source of trauma for a family, according to Nario-Lopez.

“The non-arrival of a box feels like a broken promise, leading to guilt for the sender, and disappointment or a feeling of abandonment for the family,” she said.

Ramos said that in one meeting with the Bureau of Customs, an OFW shared that she had sent a box containing medicines for a family member, who later died. The box was lost along the way.

“The medicine never made it. The commissioner [of the bureau] was moved, because he had not realised how severe the impact had been,” she said.

Nario-Lopez said every loss of a box would erode trust in Philippine institutions involved in its safe delivery, citing cases of looting at warehouses that stored such parcels.

“We have to remember that the box is actually a grant to Filipinos working overseas. It’s tax-free because they’re sustaining the country through their remittances. So because of this, it becomes a manifestation of distrust in our logistics and governance,” Nario-Lopez said.

She warned that OFWs also faced unscrupulous scammers looking to exploit them.

“OFWs searching for cheap shipping alternatives become valuable targets for predatory forwarders. It seems like it gives an opening to people with bad intentions,” she added.

Nario-Lopez urged Philippine authorities to tighten regulations and online tracking of box movements to protect OFWs and their families.

“We could pressure the state through social media, for example, to have a more systematic or universal database to actively track container ships, expose fraudulent consolidators and [praise] lobby officials or leaders who would genuinely advocate for OFWs,” she said.