OFW Journals (OFW Stories on the News) and Some OFW Employment, Career & Business Tips

The poor giver
Charity group founder’s woes hobble OFW philanthropy
By JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO

CALOOCAN CITY—ON A side street of a biscuit factory here the smell of spoiled food, re-used cooking oil, murky wastewater, and sweat of a hundred laborers mixes with the fluttering haze of Maria Luisa Tayco’s dreams of migrant giving.

It is here where Tayco, recipient of the Singaporean community’s Golden Samaritan award, faces up to the reality of life after 14 years of working near Raffles’ Center and seven years of charity work on Bayanihan Centre in Pasir Panjang Road.

It is here where Tayco, who was hailed by a television show on New Year’s Eve as one of the best people the Philippines has, decided to sell her kidney.

“It’s for my son,” the 47-year-old Tayco said.

These four words echo the notion that migrant giving —hailed by advocates as OFW philanthropy— is as easy as securing a fulfilling job in a developing country like the Philippines.

The fate of Tayco, founder of the Singapore-based charity group Pinokyos Welfare Inc., would reveal that the belief that temporary migrant workers can give back to the country (aside from their remittances) looks good in paper.

Her friends and former supporters could only scratch their heads in disbelief.

“Logic alone cannot fathom why she remains helping others other than herself,” said one of her friends. She owes him P5,000.

“It isn’t healthy to help others if you have your own urgent needs, Luisa,” another friend told her. Tayco owes her P2,500.

She owes this reporter P5,000.

Tayco, who once shipped books and school supplies from Singapore to the Philippines worth P2 million, couldn’t pay those loans now amounting to P27,000 (roughly US$500).

Still, she remains focused on continuing her Pinokyos work: the food business she put up fronting the Rebisco Biscuit Corp.’s factory here was named after her group.

Likewise, a plastic piggy bank gobbles coins steadily than the Pinokyos Canteen’s cash box.

“This is for Pinokyos,” Tayco said, her hand softly landing on the coin bank’s back, temporarily forgetting that for failing to pay water and power supplies to the canteen were cut off.

Philanthropy
TAYCO’S preference for charity work began eight years ago during her sixth year as a domestic worker in Singapore.

She said she formed Pinokyos in 1999 “to save Filipino children back home from lack of support so that they avoid lying and doing bad things”.

She said this approach is such because many mothers like her are working abroad and cannot directly take care of their children.

The group got acclaim when Tayco won the Good Samaritan award from the Rotary Club of Singapore in 2002. The PhP4-million cash prize that went with the award she donated entirely to Pinokyos.

The group has no properly documented records of how much donations from Singaporean and Filipino donors it has sent to the Philippines. Its projects include the setting up of mini-libraries in rural areas, scholarships for poor but deserving children, and support to a center for lepers in this city.

Mila Egalin told the OFW Journalism Consortium® that since her predecessor formed the group, Pinokyos was also able to send donations to the southern Philippine provinces of Iloilo, Camarines Norte, Surigao del Sur, and Cebu.

“We just shipped boxes of books to set up mini-libraries in Surigao del Norte and Dana City, Cebu,” Egalin, Pinokyos secretary, told the OFWJC via an overseas phone call last March 25.

Giving more time to Pinokyos work, however, was frowned upon by Tayco’s employer. She fired Tayco last year.

A rule against jobless foreign domestic workers and her mother’s illness forced Tayco to return to the Philippines.

Despite her absence, the migrant donor group of more than 50 Filipino workers in Singapore still elected Tayco as president.

Egalin said this was so since Tayco remains the only person donors of Pinokyos —mostly Singaporeans— trust.

“They still look for her and only want to talk to her,” Egalin added.

It is also only Tayco who can thus far command attention to Pinokyos members, she said.

But her physical absence has left Pinokyos, the sister group of the Filipino Association in Singapore, with no choice but to “take the cudgels and continue the work she had started,” Egalin said.

Humanity
UNDAUNTED, Tayco poured her energy on establishing and operating the Pinokyos Canteen along a commercial lane trying to capture the market of 700 workers of the biscuit factory on Rebisco Road in Gen. Luis Street here.

But the market, as always, had its own rules: customer preference goes through a cycle, competition is high, and lenders are unforgiving.

The market, apparently, didn’t care if Pinokyos Canteen’s revenues were also going to charity work for less-fortunate Filipino children.

The factory had fewer workers beginning November to mid-March. Pinokyos Canteen competed for these workers’ purse against five other canteens, two bakeries, three retail stores, and a fruit stand.

Tayco pointed to the signboard at the factory’s gate.

“When that says ‘All apprentice girls and boys, work!’ or ‘Wrapping, manual, work at 7 a.m.,’ it means we have to prepare meals for them. I know how many meals I will cook for them,” Tayco said.

Another sign meant workers would have to go to another Rebisco factory outside the city and cuts the number of potential customers for these stores.

With its manager accustomed to seeking out donors than steering a business, Pinokyos Canteen’s coffers began to bleed.

Then her son Richard –the eldest of five– complained of headaches and needed money for a brain scan.

Then her husband, whose philandering she claims stopped when she began Pinokyos, left her for two weeks at a time when the pressure to turn the business around intensified.

Her husband refused to speak and just sat on of the canteen’s wooden bench, staring at the factory gates.

Tayco said he must be wondering about her pregnancy, which was the reason the doctor she’s selling her kidney to rejected the organ purchase.
Later, when he thought Tayco was out of earshot, her husband said he went away because he can’t stand Luisa’s temperament.

Her son Benedict said her mother scolded her in front of customers inside the canteen.

She also threw the TV remote at me, he added.

That that feistiness remained with the diminutive Tayco (she just stands a little above five feet) is no surprise with the odds stacked against her.

Giving
WITH her good hand (she tipped a pan of boiling coconut oil on her right hand the day power was cut off from the canteen), Tayco brings out a plastic sandwich bag.

It is stuffed with IOU notes on some 15 crumpled strips of yellow and white paper and torn cigarette cardboards.

One paper says she owes a supplier some P6,000. Another says she owes two canteen workers their wages.

The faded ink on some of the papers now measure how much Tayco gave back to her country as founder of Pinokyos and as a woman migrant worker.

Scrawled numbers there taken in sum also bare that sans government and family support, OFW philanthropy remains a theory— Tayco is living proof.

She claims her attempt to secure a loan for the canteen from the Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration has been at best frustrating.
“I have been begging OWWA to assist me since I lost my job in Singapore,” Tayco said.

She said OWWA referred her to the National Livelihood Support Fund, which runs a loan program for returning OFWs. An NLSF person gave Tayco a referral letter, and then Tayco went to a rural bank in Bulacan province.

“I was being passed around from an office to another since November,” Tayco said. She said she gave up after four months when her budget for transportation dried up.

A friend of hers says, however, that Tayco’s need for money never seems to run out.

“It has always been ‘cash out’ and never ‘cash in’,” the friend whom Tayco owes US$50 added.

Tayco’s failure to rise above a floundering business, a pregnancy after menopause, and a husband who she said fooled around while she was scrubbing toilet bowls in Singapore, would bare that OFW philanthropy is anathema if the giver ends up at the receiving end.

Her inability to pay her debts would eventually be used to measure her worth; her charity work for Filipino children at best noted by friends still believing in her and by creditors who banked on that credible record.

But it wouldn’t be Tayco alone who risk making that dream of sustaining Pinokyos’s work a fluttering haze forever mixing with the smell of spoiled food, re-used cooking oil, murky wastewater, and sweat of a hundred laborers on a side street of a biscuit factory here. end