BENCHWARMER

Benguet lily-white at "Darkman"
Ramon Dacawi

Some might have scrimped on or skipped their refreshments at Hongkong’s Central where they meet on their Sundays off. Most are domestics, ordinary people drawn to the former British colony to help work out a better life for their families back home. Their space is around what they call “The Blackman”, a dark statue of Thomas Jackson who helped build the Hongkong Shanghai Banking Corp.

To them, the figure serves more as a marker on where to meet and to find them rather than inspiration for the simple, commoneconomic dream that drew them to Hongkong. They discuss news from home, mostly through the Baguio Midland Courier which arrives on Monday or Tuesday and distributed the next Sunday.

That’s how these overseas workers from the Cordillera learned about the plight of Filbert Almoza, a 24-year old ailing father who wants to be there when his 11-month old baby girl turns a year old. Until June last year, Almoza had a steady job as driver for a company concreting the Baguio-Nueva Vizcaya Rd. that traverses Camisong, a village in Itogon where his family lives with his parents.

That month he threw up blood. Doctors diagnosed kidney failure and advised regular dialysis for him to survive. Recently, his wife Lorena admitted they no longer could sustain the twice-a-week, blood-cleansing dialysis sessions pegged at P3,000 per round. Last week, Lorena said Filbert has been skipping some of his Tuesday and Friday appointments at the dialysis room of the Baguio General and Medical Center.

The Cordillera workers in Hongkong figured they could help, so Filbert could see his daughter Kathleen try to blow her first candle on Sept. 5. Gerald Antonio, Josephine Pascua and Lilibeth Dagas, officers of the Benguet Federation-Hongkong, one of several associations of overseas workers from the Cordillera, signed a letter-appeal they passed around.

The response yielded some 1,300 HKD (P7,445.49) in hard-earned money, probably including amounts intended for their Sunday coffee at Central. With dispatch, they sent it through BPI Remittance Centre (HK), under the account of Lorena. Relieved, she said the support gave her precious time to tap other Samaritans to maintain the treatment schedule. “Naanus da unay (They’re so kind),” Lorena said last week. She asked that the effort be published “as my family’s way of thanking them”.

The move recalls a similar effort in 1998 of pupils of the Suyoc Elementary School in Mankayan, Benguet. From their stipends, the kids raised some P200 they turned over to their teachers to help pay for the freedom of Avelino Apidos, an Igorot worker then languishing in jail in Saudi Arabia. Apidos was imprisoned after the truck he was driving developed mechanical trouble, ran over and killed a man.

Tried, he was sentenced to death by beheading, but was given the chance to live and be released provided he could pay “blood money” amounting to 75,000 riyals or about P750,000 then. Last word was that Apidos had been repatriated and now plies the Baguio-Tublay passenger jeepney route. He lives near the Sabkil area, along the same road to Almoza’s own home. The Hongkong workers’ support to Almoza was not their first.

Two years back, one of them, a woman and mother of two from La Trinidad, Benguet, sent cash support through three bank transmittals. It helped Tofi Estepa, now a six-year old boy, recover from brain tumor forwhich he underwent surgery three times. “I know how Tofi’s parents feel as I’m also a mother,” the donor said then. “Don’t mention my name; I just want to help,” she stressed in an overseas call she made to know she could contact the Estepa couple.

For years now, Cordillera workers in Hongkong have been celebrating their own version of Cordillera Day - with a difference. For one, they mark it on the Sunday closest to April 21, not July 15 as we do here. For another, they give a humanitarian dimension to their celebration to the beat of gongs at Central Park. The substance lies in their annual search for “Ms. Cordillera-Hongkong”, a popularity contest that raises funds for a community project here in the region.

The project is selected from several proposals presented and defended by members before a panel. Once the panel decides which project to undertake, a member going on vacation monitors its implementation in the chosen village. The Hongkong OFWs are not alone. Collectively or on their own, expatriates scattered in developed countries have been sending amounts for other patients here.

Among them is Freddie de Guzman, an architect in Canada who has already reached out to about 10 patients since April last year. He began by bankrolling the six chemotherapy sessions of a 49-year old widow and mother of nine. The patient, who lives in Sablan, Benguet, is now on remission from breast cancer.

Also unaffected by donor fatigue, an Ibaloi woman raising her daughter in Kentucky, also began last year a personal mission for the sick, including Almoza. Last week, she sent $230, in gratitude to celebrate her surviving cancer and in memory of an older sister who succumbed to the big C in June last year.

De Guzman recently transmitted P7,000 for Almoza’s dialysis. All he prays for, he said, is good health for his family so it can continue helping. Last month, Olive Agsaoay, a nurse in London, sent P2,000 which she asked her son Kelvin to deliver for a kidney patient. The Cordillera is also not wanting of locally based Samaritans. They include a Baguio family who now and then writes checks for other patients. Another, who also requested anonymity, just coursed P7,000 through bank vice president Rolly de Guzman of RCBC.

His or her previous donation of P6,000 was broken down as follows: P3,000 for the dialysis of kidney patient Jane Crispino, P2,000 for diabetic patient Juliet Agustin and P1,000 for Joshua Nacionales, a three-month old boy suffering from hemangioma.(e-mail:rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments).