Our man in Spain

We just got back from a l-o-o-n-g Spanish holiday, and though we enjoyed the tour immensely, it’s great to be home again, back to the grind.

The holiday spanned all of 15 days, starting off from Madrid where we picked up our BMW vehicles for the road trek from the capital all the way down to Barcelona, covering as much as we can of the Spanish peninsula within the two-week tour. It was one heck of a land tour, thanks to the comfortable (and very fast!) BMW automobiles that were provided for us, but more on that in the later issues in this column, starting next Saturday. What I’d like to share with our readers is our exclusive interview with the sitting Philippine Ambassador to Spain, His Excellency Carlos C. Salinas who sought us out when he learned through our column that our family was going on a tour of Spain.

It was really a great honor for us to have the Philippine Ambassador actually seek us out, even coming to our hotel to get together with us. Getting our contact numbers with the help of The Philippine Star office, Ambassador Salinas called us up at 10 a.m. the day after we arrived and at 2 p.m., we were having an amiable chat at the hotel. How dynamic and pro-active can our Philippine Embassy in Spain be?

Ambassador Salinas may be very familiar to our local businessmen, having helmed his family-owned shipping company. He also sat as Chair of the Marina Board during the time of President GMA, steering the Board to better times with his astute business sense and fair play. Four months ago, he joined the diplomatic corps as an appointee of President Noy Aquino to head our embassy in Spain.

Touching on his focused efforts to promote Philippine-Spanish friendship, he singled out religion and strong family ties as Spain’s legacy to us, among others. Three months ago, he shared, the embassy together with the Filipino community held a mass as our way of thanking them for the gift of religion. It was a concelebrated mass, with 15 priests joining in.  They had invited members of the missionary orders who came to the islands centuries ago to propagate the faith and lay the groundwork for Catholic education in the country to celebrate the mass — the Augustinians, Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans and Recoletos.

“Because they went there (Philippines), we are the only Catholic country in Asia”, said Ambassador Salinas. Too many of us now take this for granted, but the Filipino community in Spain looks back to this with gratefulness.

Only four months in service to the country, Amb. Salinas ticked off the many activities in the full slate of the Philippine embassy. Last month, Sen. Edgardo Angara was there to inaugurate the first Centro Rizal in Spain (the first in Europe actually) on June 12. The library has books, literature, films, etc. all about Dr. Jose Rizal, and the Centro is open to everybody who wishes to learn more about our national hero.

Also last month, on June 14 was the Spanish Friendship Day or as the Spanish call it, the Dia de Amistad Hispano Filipino which celebrates the friendship between the two countries. By virtue of Republic Act 9187 which Sen. Angara authored, this day is now officially marked as such, inspired by the Siege of Baler where 54 Spanish soldiers took refuge in a church in Baler in the dying days of the war. The soldiers holed up in the old church, not knowing that the war was finally over until a newspaper found its way to the church one fateful day. The Spanish commander read about his friend who was marrying a Filipina, and realizing that the war was over, finally left their sanctuary.

President Emilio Aguinaldo, seeing their bravery and loyalty, extolled them in a Presidential Decree and gave them safe passage back to Spain. Out of the 54 soldiers, only 33 made it to back to their motherland, the rest were casualties of war. Ambassador Salinas has actually met and touched base with the descendants of these 54 soldiers.

It was an easy afternoon chat, not a stiff, formal interview that we had with the Filipino diplomat. He also talked about the repatriation of our Filipino overseas workers from Libya this year. It was a Friday afternoon in March, he said, when he received a call from Repsol, the Spanish oil company, telling him of their repatriation efforts for all of their foreign workers in Libya. Among these were fifteen 15 Filipinos who were then drilling for oil in the Libyan deserts, all of them without documents because these were left in haste in the evacuation. The Spanish authorities, sympathetic and cooperative, granted them temporary entry even without travel documents.

At 2 a.m. the following day, the plane carrying the Filipinos arrived in Baras airport in Madrid, and with specific instructions from the Ambassador, the Philippine embassy staff was there in the airport, waiting for them and waving tiny Philippine flags to welcome them. Seeing the flags, our beleaguered countrymen found a safe haven. They were housed in the Embassy where the Filipino community demonstrated once again their bayanihan spirit, bringing mattresses, pillows and bed sheets as well as food and even toothbrushes for the 15 tired and hungry men. What touched the heart of Ambassador Salinas was the act of one Filipina whom he did not personally know and who did not know any of the overseas workers. She came to the embassy with two bags of chocolates, giving two bars each to the men. Asked why the gesture, she said that these men fled Libya with nothing, and she wanted them to have at least two bars of chocolates each to give to their children as pasalubong. “I think this story captures it all,” said the Ambassador.

By the way, Ambassador Salinas says that the World Youth Day next month, August, will be hosted by Spain and some 3,363 Filipino students will be joining the celebration. The Philippine Embassy in Spain has organized walking tours for our young Filipino delegates to walk the trail of Rizal. It would be very interesting to know where he lived while in Madrid, where he worked, wrote, ate, the Clubs he went to, etc. He urges the participants to get in touch with the Philippine Embassy in Madrid for more information on this.

And of course, for Filipinos who would like to visit Spain, the Philippine Embassy is willing to provide information you may need to make your visit to this great country more enjoyable.

Mabuhay!!! Be proud to be a Filipino. 

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