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. OFW Journalism Consortium
