Mon Pandaan’s father died when NPA rebels attacked their farm in Bicol, and his mother was too frail to support him and his three siblings. The children pored through the garbage in the public market for something to bring home. Somehow, Mon finished high school in 1987, and then he moved to Las Piñas to work as a canteen helper. Eating once a day, he slept in a jeepney with a friend, and one night they were assaulted by drug addicts; they killed his friend and took his money. Mon was in despair. But the day after this, he came across a newspaper article about a vocational school called Dualtech, where poor kids like him got the break of their lives. He located the office and applied for admission – plucking up the courage to make that phone call because, he would say later, he had nothing more to lose.
That was in 1988. Graduating after two years, he found a job as a technician with Raytheon Semiconductors, and proudly showed Henry his first ATM card. In October 2003, coming home from Sydney, Henry felt a tap on his back at the baggage area; it was Mon, who had also just flown in from Bangkok, where he was now a supervisor for Amkor-Anam, managing more than a dozen engineers, and married with two kids. He had bought his mother a house in Bicol, and sent his siblings to college.
Having worked overseas for some years, he told Henry, he had met people who had lost all hope and faith, in themselves and others. But he said that he was lucky not to have given up: "If you look for it, you’ll find it. If you believe it will happen, it will come true."
Manny Hatol, Jr. looks like Mike Tyson, whose kind of pugnacity would have helped him growing up in that earthbound hell called Smokey Mountain. He fought for the best vegetables and throwaway gadgets – typewriters, Gillette shavers, even TV sets. He graduated from high school in 1988 but had to keep poking through the garbage with the rest of the family. One day he found a discarded disk drive, and thought he could sell it in Raon. The person he tried to sell it to turned out to be a teacher at Dualtech. And so he applied to get in and was accepted, graduating in late 1993.
Soon after graduation, Man-ny was hired by a French company processing sea-weed for carageenan. He became a star technician, because he knew how to squeeze the most out of each piece of equipment. His promotions came fast, and his salary zoomed. Henry last saw him in late 2002 in his eight-acre estate just outside Boston, to accept an invitation that he had sent Henry earlier that year via the Dualtech website. By then, he was married to a pretty American girl named Laura, and they had a son.
How on earth did he get his estate? Stock options. During the dotcom boom in the late 1990s, he had developed a reputation as a topnotch technician, and was pirated by a US biotech firm to take care of plant maintenance. With his knowledge of bioengineering and biotechnology processes, he was able to co-hold a patent that reduced the time-to-market of certain products. The company CEO was so grateful that he gave Manny stock options and a cut in the royalties.
One weekend in October 2002, Manny picked Henry up from his Manhattan hotel in his BMW X5, saying, "Sir, I bought this to thank the Germans for the scholarship support they gave us at Dualtech. Without it, I would probably be still in SM going through the trash!" The US was great, he said, but there was nothing like home, and he planned to retire in the Philippines or set up a plant here to help others, the same way he was helped.
Like Manny, Jennylyn Sabado grew up in mounds of filth, in the garbage dumps of Payatas, Quezon City. Her family had moved there from Masbate, where her fisherman-father had died in 1993 when a typhoon sunk his banca. With six children to feed, her mother brought the whole brood to Payatas soon after. As the eldest child, Jennylyn felt the strongest pressure to find a well-paying job.
As it happened, she had the body and the looks to find work as a bargirl. Her family’s desperation brought her to the brink of going this route. But she had been an honor student in her barangay high school in Pulandutan, Masbate, and she resolved to give her brains another chance. She picked up a tabloid, where she was struck by the story of another girl like her who had been given a fresh start at a voc-tech school in San Juan. Jennylyn found the school, managed to secure admission and trained for two years in hotel and restaurant operations. As soon as she graduated, she got a job, brought her family out of Payatas, sent her siblings to school and got her mother a food stall in the neighborhood market at Cogeo.
By 2001, she had become a supervisor at the Mandarin Oriental, Manila. Shortly after, she married the boyfriend she had met at the Mandarin, and moved to the posh Oriental in Bangkok – where, in December last year, Henry met Jennylyn and her husband.
Henry saved his last story for the summa cum laude of Dualtech – Arnel Posadas, holder of the highest grade point average (1.12, UP-style) in Dualtech’s history. "The next time you come across a kid cleaning a car," Henry muses, "treat him with respect because, 10 years from now, he might be your employer."
The eldest of three children, Arnel lost his parents when he was 10, and the children had to be farmed out to rela-tives. Arnel ended up with an uncle who sent him to high school and upon graduation in 1990, got him employed to wash cars in a Sta. Rosa subdivision for a couple of Japanese expats. Sent on an errand to buy some supplies in Alabang, Arnel chanced upon a poster of a scholarship program in a waiting shed; it had been put up there by a Dualtech student.
Arnel applied and was accepted, and he turned out, Henry recalls, to be "a brilliant technical-minded guy, but one who was short on long-term thinking experience. When I asked him what his goal in life was, he said that it was to finish the course and find a job. I told him that he would get that in two years. He said he had never thought about it, so I suggested why not put up a manufacturing company in the Philippines by 2002, a decade after he would have finished his course in 1992?"
Arnel thought about it and then asked Henry how to go about it. I’m going to let Henry tell the rest of this astounding story: "We made a plan, and the guy stuck to it like a leech. He got employed at Intel and within a few months devised a piece of testing equipment that saved millions of dollars for the company. Andy Grove, the Intel CEO, was so happy that he gave the kid a bonus and told him that if he wanted to study engineering, he would finance it.
"Arnel got a government scholarship through the TESDA to study engineering in Japan – at Kyoto University, I think – and he left for Japan in 1994. I remember lending him my old suit because he didn’t have any. In four years, by 1998, he finished a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering, got employed by his professor – who turned out to be a director of a Japanese high-tech firm – and by 1999 was crisscrossing the globe presenting research papers on his field, the ionization of air particles for semiconductor manufacturing. I next met him in Chiba, Japan in mid-1999, when he told me that he already had a couple of patents in his name, was receiving royalties, and had a flat at Roponggi, their central business district.
"What was the next step? I told him to get capital from his company so he could outsource some of the R&D in the Philippines, which he did. In early 2001, he brought with him US$1 million in investments to start a company, which now hires 300 engineers and technicians and is valued at $4 million, with factories and offices in Eastwood. One thing that struck me as funny was when he bought his CRV in 2001 using his credit card. I’ve never done that, but he was able to buy two CRVs with a single card in a span of one week. The kid, as I still call him, shuttles between Tokyo and Manila regularly, and he has grand dreams.
"In June 2002, as we were having dinner in Ueno in Tokyo, he told me: ‘Sir, I’ve accomplished our 10-year goal. What’s up in the next 10 years?’ He has accomplished all these through hard work and, as always, grabbing opportunities when they come up. He has had a lot of difficulties, though. His younger brother, whom he sent to school, was salvaged in Pasig when some policemen suspected him of being a drug pusher. This is why he and his sister are very close, since they have only each other. She works for him – she has a Masters degree in Psychology – doing HRD."
Another relative absconded with tens of millions of pesos. That’s part of life, Arnel shrugged. His new concern is how to be on top of his field, and how to make sure that his associates are happy and well paid. Almost half of his engineers and scientists are honors graduates of the top schools in the country. "One of them," Henry says, "is the son of a former neighbor, whose cars he used to wash three times a week. Now, they’re very good friends."
I haven’t met any of these remarkable people – including Henry Ligot, whom I must thank for these stories. But anyone who wants to get in touch with Dualtech can call their Canlubang office at (049)549-1701. They can also be reached by e-mail at info@dualtech.org.ph. Perhaps, by spreading this information, we can extend that long chain of help and self-help just a few links farther.