Why the NPAs are supported in Southern Leyte

We went through another long weekend last week and as always, whenever we have a three-day respite, my big biker friends always go out of Cebu in search of that long and winding cement roads, which we have very few in Cebu, and last weekend, our game plan was to go to Tacloban, Leyte all the way to Guiuan, Samar. Unfortunately, here I was fully packed on my bike when a strong squall drenched Cebu City for 30 minutes. Perhaps, because my bike was all wet as I rode toward the pier, the engine quit on me. To cut a long story short, I went to the pier to say goodbye to my bike buddies, who would have all the fun, while I had to stay home.

Perhaps, God didn’t want me to ride with my buddies because the very next morning, my bike started as if nothing happened. Later in the afternoon, my good friend, Andrew Co, who flies a Piper Cherokee 180, asked me if I wanted to fly around on his plane on Sunday. When I asked him if Samar was too far, he said no and off we flew Sunday morning. My biker friends texted me that it was drizzling already in Samar when we took off.

Flying off Jetafe, Bohol, pilot Andrew and his instructor Ralph Apelado were convinced that the black clouds off Leyte were signs of potential trouble, hence, we veered off and instead went to Tagbilaran City. After lunch on Panglao Island, we flew back to Cebu City, enjoying a wonderful plane ride. Of course, my thoughts were with my big bike friends, which still left me wondering why God didn’t want me to ride with them.

Last Monday afternoon, the Cebu bikers arrived with a big story for me. On Sunday afternoon, the rain-drenched riders arrived from Tacloban City and stayed at the Sy Shore Resort in Sogod, Southern Leyte. While they were resting, the chief of police in the municipality of Sogod, Senior Inspector Manuel O. Blasé, arrived, in what I was told, in a drunken stupor and took fancy at the nice-looking Harley Davidson big bikes parked inside the resort. He then asked his security personnel, SPO3 Panfilo Tomon and SPO1 Sosimo Egido, to find out who the owners were and check their licenses and registration.

We’ve been riding for years and nothing of this sort ever happened to us. We found out that he took fancy with one of the big bikes and thought he could detain it in Sogod… maybe keep it for himself? But what do you do when it is the chief of police waiting for you in the resort lobby in a town faraway from home? Of course, you’d be scared shitless!

Good thing, some of the bikers stayed in the house of Dodong Faelnar and learned about the situation and they went to the resort. It was then that one of the bikers remembered that he had the cellphone number of Southern Leyte Gov. Rosette Lerias and called her right away. Gov. Lerias was a fellow golfer during our days at the Club Filipino in Cebu City. My friend found out that she was in Manila, but she immediately placed a call to Sogod Mayor Sheperd Lino Tan to handle the problem.

Mayor Tan went to the resort to apologize to the group… one of them is my good friend, John Domingo, US Consul assigned in Cebu. Imagine the mayor had to apologize for the drunken police chief who was nowhere to be found. Well, I learned yesterday that Gov. Lerias had him relieved. Now I know why God prevented me from riding with my friends because I would have confronted that police chief and given him a dressing down! Who knows what kind of trouble that would have gotten me!

I submit that I was a bit apprehensive that we were going for a ride in Leyte so soon after the bloody incident in Palo, Leyte. But this story tells you one of the reasons why the New People’s Army (NPA) is supported in the provinces and that’s because of ill-disciplined and abusive police officers and the worse kind are officers like Senior Inspector Manuel O. Blasé. We know that the Philippine National Police (PNP) HQ will transfer this fellow to another place as if that will solve the problem! They should put this fellow in the stockade for conduct unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman! By the way, big bikers are also tourists, whom Gov. Lerias wanted so much for her province! But with erring cops like that, no tourists would dare visit Leyte!

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Here’s an e-mailed reply to our article on nursing last Monday:

"Thank you for the article advocating for nurses. I am a registered nurse living in California for 14 years and earning $36/hour. If I decide to work overtime on weekends, I would have $100 cash outright, 1/2 x pay for the first four hours and double pay for the next four hours, with net take-home pay of more than $900+ for one weekend of work. I own a house, which is almost fully paid, and built my parents’ house in the Philippines and still helping nieces and nephew to go to school, which I would not have done if I stayed in the Philippines.

"Being a nurse here is very different; nurses’ here in the US are treated with respect, and physicians treat nurses as co-equals, unless you are working with some Filipino doctors who brought with them their culture of arrogance. In the Philippines, nurses are not respected and continued to be treated as housemaids of doctors; of course, that was years ago, I don’t know now whether there has been a change. I am currently working for the State of California as a health facility evaluator nurse, i.e. licensing of hospitals. Whenever I visit any hospital, it looks like I am in the Philippines because everywhere I go, hospitals are being manned by Filipino nurses.

"Six years more and I would have a lifetime retirement pay of $2,000+, which I would not get if I did not leave the country. Nurses here are driving a Mercedes or Lexus; however, I only own a second-hand Ford Explorer. What I observed among new nurses was their difficulty in communicating in English. Probably the Department of Education should do something about it, instead of stopping nurses from leaving the country. More power to nurses. Sincerely, Carina [email protected]"

Here’s a clear example of how successful nurses are in the US and it is time that we teach them proper English because that’s one of our major deficiencies. My high school buddy Tony Rizarri called me when he read the article and he only had one message for our government — improve our educational system… and assure us of better nursing schools!

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, at 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.