Aloha and Mabuhay to our Fil-Hawaiian friends

It was Aloha week in Cebu because of the arrival of the 21st Annual Trade Mission led by the honorable Mayor Mufi Hannemann of Honolulu and the Filipino Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii (FCCH). They arrived in the Philippines last week and got briefings from the Asian Development Bank, visited a Gawad Kalinga village and met with their counterparts in business. In Cebu, they had a Business Trade Workshop with the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry Inc. (CCCII) and was given a briefing by Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña.

Later during a dinner at the Marriott Hotel with the CCCII, they signed a Sister Chamber Agreement with CCCII president Sammy Chioson and Ms. Rose Cruz Churma, who chaired the 21st Trade Mission of the FCCH, and Mrs. Rosemarie V. Mendoza, president of the FCCH. After Cebu, they’re off to Olongapo today and Sunday, Clark/Angeles City on Monday, and Baguio City on Wednesday before they take the Hawaiian Airlines flight back to the Hawaiian Islands.

I was alerted on the coming of the Hawaiian Trade Mission by Dr. Erlinda Kintanar Alburo of the Cebuano Studies Center because she asked me to interview Ms. Emme Tomimbang, a famous TV personality in Hawaii who has been in the Hawaiian media for more than 30 years. She is of Visayan parentage as her father, the late Tommy Tomimbang, hailed from the island of Siquijor. Emme has been known for her one-hour TV show “Emme’s Island Moments” and was able to interview the late President Ferdinand Marcos during his exile in Hawaii, and in 1989, she interviewed Imelda in New York for the NBC Network News.

In 2003, she was named “Hawaii Filipino Woman of the Year,” and was awarded by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) in 2006 the “Pamana Ng Pilipina Award” for her two-hour documentary on the Hawaii Filipino Centennial, “Mabuhay with Aloha – The Hawaii Filipino Experience 1906-2006.” This award-winning documentary is about the journey of Filipino sacadas who left our sugar plantations to work in Hawaii starting in 1902.

What I found very interesting about Emme is that she and her husband are neighbors of the late Mrs. Madelyn Dunham. If this name doesn’t ring a bell, she’s the maternal grandmother of US President Barack Obama, who raised him in Hawaii until he moved to the mainland USA. As neighbors they helped in the funeral preparations for Obama’s grandma last year.

After last Wednesday’s dinner, our good friend Marriott Hotel general manager Roy Abraham invited us for drinks in the bar (the Marriott Hotel has the best bar in Cebu City) with Emme and her production assistant Joanne Corpuz, and suddenly, the 6’7” tall Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann (a second-term mayor) joined our table. Indeed, we had a great time with Filipino friends from Hawaii!

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I got this complaint by Hanno Winder ([email protected]) on his problems with the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. (PDIC):

“Dear Mr. Avila, I always hope that you or your colleagues write something about the practice of the PDIC but nothing happened. In the meantime, the PDIC has created a new tactic that they do not have to pay the debitors. They send the letter with nearly the same text as you can find at their homepage (PDIC 16, Sept. 2009) to keep their debitors quiet and to stretch the time to pay the money to the debitors. I also want to inform you that I did not receive any answer from PDIC on my e-mail complaint, only the standard text.

“So I think nobody is reading what you write to them. But it is sure nobody answers. Today I called again the PDIC headquarters in Manila and asked about the status of my claims: ‘Sir, they are under processing.’ I ask you now: How long will they make this game? Can you help stop this? My opinion about Mr. Nograles is that he is not able to manage a company like PDIC. He is a politician or whatever, but no manager.

“You can see now that the employees are not able to handle two cases per day! This is the average now according to the calculation I sent you last time. I would like to know what happens when a bank like Banco de Oro, Metrobank or for example Landbank collapses. How long will the debitors wait for their money – 10 to 15 years because the banks are 10-15 times bigger than the banks of the Legacy Group? I want that all people have their complete money back, even if it is not insured because it is more than P250,000 per person, before Christmas. The PDIC has saved more than P365,000 now. The PDIC is not a company which has to make profit; it is a company which has to serve all the debitors in the Philippines. Best regards, Hanno Winder.”

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected] or [email protected]. Avila’s can be accessed through www.philstar.com.