Afghan war comes to RP mountains
A week ago, only a handful of people in the sleepy mountain valley town of
Now, Afghanistan is all anyone talks about here after Zenia Aguilan, a native of this Mountain Province town, was killed in a suicide attack on a luxury hotel in Afghanistan and whose remains arrived home over the weekend.
Claro Cristobal, spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), said the body of the 31-year-old Aguilan arrived at around
Aguilan, who sought work overseas so she could help support her family, was killed last week in a Taliban suicide attack at the five-star
Clutching a portrait of her slain daughter, retired schoolteacher Herminia Aguilan struggles to speak, her eyes welling with tears. “They are bad people,” she told AFP of the Taliban extremists blamed for the attack on the
A ban on the deployment of Filipino workers to
The youngest of five, the vivacious and outspoken Zenia was a straight-A student who earned a degree in physical therapy and a ticket out of Sagada, a town where literacy is high but where poverty remains a major problem.
Zenia’s four siblings are also professionals working abroad – just a handful of the more than eight million Filipinos sending billions of dollars home every year from more than 120 countries.
The vast army of overseas workers – who sent home $13.1 billion in the first 11 months of 2007 alone, up 14.1 percent on a year earlier – have become the backbone of the Philippine economy, according to government data.
The Aguilans are typical of those who have joined the exodus to try and make a better life for themselves and their families.
When Zenia was just two months old, her father died, leaving Herminia to raise the family alone. On a public schoolteacher salary of about $100 a month (roughly P4,000), “life was hard,” she said.
“The children knew we were poor and they had to leave for economic reasons,” she said, adding that one of her children is a nurse working in the
While Aguilan said the money did help, it did not replace having the family together. Now, following Zenia’s death, her remaining children will be under one roof for the first time in years – to bury their sister.
Zenia first sought work in
From
“She came home on vacation last July and did not appear worried about being in
“She loved her work and she was enjoying her time in
Friends and relatives gathered at the family’s modest wood-paneled two-story home nestled in the middle of Sagada’s maze of pathways described Zenia as easygoing and generous. Pictures show a young, smiling, attractive woman.
“She was family-oriented and always thought about family first,” Aguilan said, her voice again trembling.
“I pity my child. Her life had been full of sacrifices and now she had to die that way in a foreign country, all by herself without family. She didn’t even see her father.”
Zenia had been planning on returning home, most likely for good, in February, and had promised her mother they would go on a long-delayed vacation.
Instead, the 62-year-old matriarch is sadly preparing to bury her daughter.
Word of Zenia’s death has spread quickly in Sagada, where practically everyone knows each other by first name and are either relatives by birth or marriage.
Conversation in coffee shops and markets centers on the Aguilan family’s tragedy.
Aguilan says despite the tragedy of Zenia’s death, she knows her other children will continue to work and live abroad, to ensure a better life for them all.
“They had a difficult life – they should experience what I did not experience in life,” she said. – Reinir Padua
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