Doctor to honor friend slain in church bombing

NORTH COTABATO, Philippines – A Filipino doctor based in the United States promised to sponsor an outreach mission here as a tribute to his friend, who was killed in a recent church bombing in Pikit town.

Anacleto Belleza Millendez, a native of Pikit, was a friend of Felomina Nacario-Ferolin, a government nurse, who was one of two persons killed when a grenade exploded in a chapel of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines last Oct. 8.

Three other persons – Geremias Dandan and his engineer-son, Gerome, and Virgie Manulid – were wounded in the incident.

In a statement yesterday, Millendez, who in 2005 founded the Beautiful Heart Foundation, said he is planning to conduct a medical mission in Pikit and in Maguindanao’s nearby Pagalungan town, where Ferolin worked as a government nurse.

Ferolin was known in Pikit and in Pagalungan as a dedicated civil servant who declined reassignment to other towns, owing to her attachment to the local Muslim communities.

“She was a good and hardworking nurse. Her death was a big loss for us. The bombing of the UCCP church in Pikit was condemnable. It was absolutely satanic,” said ophthalmologist Kadil Sinolinding, Jr., former Pagalungan municipal health officer and now regional health secretary of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Millendez said he also wants to put up an extension office for his foundation in Pikit, which provides humanitarian services to the poor.

Millendez and his parents transferred to Quezon City during the height of the Mindanao Moro rebellion in 1974, which devastated farming villages in Pikit and in the surrounding North Cotabato towns.

He graduated as doctor of medicine from the Manila Central University and migrated to the US, where he works as a full-time physician. 

“I was devastated when I learned that she (Ferolin) was one of the fatalities in the UCCP church bombing,” he said.

Millendez said he would send medicine and other medical supplies for Pikit residents.