SPECIAL FEATURE: The country’s best policewoman

CEBU, Philippines - For someone who had to catch fish at night and work in the farm at dawn just to finance her education, graduating from college means a steady and stable monthly income. To become one of the country’s best police officers is a welcome bonus.

This is the story of Inspector Margienett Terano Yosores of the Talisay City Police Station, who was recently picked as one of the Country’s Outstanding Police officers in Service (COPS) given by Metrobank Foundation, Inc., besting 153 nominees all over the country.

“Wa ko ga-expect nga mapili kay una wa ko gi-endorse sa province mao na’ng na-shock ko when it was announced that there were nominees from Cebu and I was one of them. It was truly a God-given gift, kay tanan qualified and with strong points,” she said.

Yosores, 46, heads Talisay City Police Station’s Operations, Police Community Relations, Women and Children Protection Desk (WCPD) and Family Juvenile Gender Sensitive, where she helps other agencies fight against human trafficking and other issues that concern women and children.

In an interview with The Freeman, she shared one case she could not forget was when she was able to track an infant who was kidnapped in Talisay City and brought to Leyte seven years ago. Yosores, a policewoman for 16 years, said she believes “hardwork” has paid her in so many ways.

Her  story

Yosores was raised in an “hacienda” in Tayasan town, Negros Oriental, but not as a daughter of an haciendero but of one of the peasants there.  She grew up eating rice, which they ground in stones mixed with sweet potato, and sometimes nothing at all.

At a young age, she already knew that her family was having tough times. To help the family send her siblings to school and to provide food on the table, she helped her father carry sugarcane bundles, earning P1 per bundle or P35 a week. This happens, however, only during summer, which is the harvest season for sugarcane.

To earn a few cash for the rest of the year, Yosores said she devised other money-making ventures. She would sell ice candy to her classmates and schoolmates and her “commission” from her sales would be used to buy food for the family. “Sukad ni-eskwela ko, wa gyud na kapalit akong mama og lapis o ballpen para nako kay ako mismo mangita og kwarta para di na sila mamroblema,” she said.

Yosores said she had also tried making charcoal by burning coconut shells she collected, and at night she would join her father catch fish. At one time, she almost drowned while following an escaping squid to a deeper part of the sea. Their catch would later on be sold at the “taboan” so that they could buy rice and other provisions for the waiting family, she said.

 â€œUnsa’y luoy anang mga tawo ron, luoy pa mi sa una,” she recalled.

When she was in high school, she started tilling farm soil earning as much as P3.50 per day. She said she still did it even when she was in college to sustain her education.

Yosores moved to Dumaguete City to enroll in college despite her father’s refusal to help her. The family did not have enough money for food, how much more to send a child to college. Her grandparents, too, agreed with her father’s decision, saying women should not go to college.

Yosores worked as a bagger at Kang’s General Supply in Dumaguete to support her daily needs and college education (she took up a Commerce course in Foundation University). On weekends, she would take the first bus to Tayasan (two hours from Dumaguete) to do tilling work, as, she said, the P500 for two days in the farm was a far cry compared to the P35 per day that she earns at Kang’s. Yosores said she even would do some fishing at night to earn extra.

Despite joggling several odd jobs to earn a living and even with her mother Edna’s earnings while working at a dress shop in Dumaguete, Yosores said she was still financially challenged, especially that a huge portion of her income had to go to tuition fees and other school expenses. She said it pained her every time it rained as it would mean she would have to pay for a ride in a tricycle. Yosores remembered how she pretended that her P29.95 pair of shoes was still okay for four years despite its being badly worn out.

Finally in 1989 she finished a college degree and immediately started working. And while being employed at a fastfood restaurant Yosores took a second course which was Accountancy, as she wanted to become a Certified Public Accountant-lawyer. But she failed in the pre-board exam.

When she heard that the PNP was recruiting new members, she immediately applied for it. She became a full-fledge policewoman in 1997. She said she would have wanted to become a soldier since she was a child, but when she told her father about it, he rejected it, saying soldiers don’t live long.

Yosores did not bother trying her luck again to become a CPA or a lawyer. She said she saw all the signs that she was meant to be a policewoman when she easily passed all the tests. From then on, she said her climb to the rungs of success might not be easy (she became a Police Inspector in 2009, 12 years after she joined the force), but she considered it a challenge, similar to her other failures.

Looking back, Yosores said she only wanted to get a college degree for her to get a better job. She said she was the first in their clan to have finished a college education, and later on her three other siblings—one is also a police officer, the other a supervisor at Shangri-la Mactan and the youngest a mechanical engineer—who she supported all throughout. Yosores said her childhood friends would tell her she was lucky she was smart, but she told them in return it was not about the brains, as she was no smarter than any of them, but hard work and faith from the very start.

“Akong mga barkada moingun nga hayahay ko nga bright. Di man ko bright, kugihan lang. Kugi ug ampo ra gyud,” she said, adding that even when she did not have time before to go to church since Sundays were always devoted to farm work, she never forgot to pray. — /QSB (FREEMAN)