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OFWs, Outside Cordi

Arcelie Laoagan: Link Roundup

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Our first post on this tragedy is here. Meanwhile, here’s a roundup of news reports on the murder of Arcelie Laoagan.

Edmonton Sun, 20 January: Friends of a missing Filipina woman working two jobs in Calgary to support her family in her homeland suspect she’s the victim found dead behind a southeast Calgary church.

Arcelie Laoagan, 40, was reported missing by her roommate when she didn’t return home after leaving work at West Canadian at 10 p.m. Thursday.

The blood-soaked body of a woman matching Laoagan’s description was found at 6 a.m. Friday behind the Grace Baptist Church.
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OFWs, Outside Cordi

Arcelie Laoagan, 2008

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This is really bad news. We tend to think that Canada is one of the safest countries in the world but this incident, on top of the earlier murder of Jocelyn Dulnuan, isn’t very reassuring. Here’s a report from the Inquirer on the murder of Arcelie Laoagan, a kailiyan who migrated to Calgary.

Another Cordilleran murdered in Canada — report
By Vincent Cabreza

Another Cordilleran has been reported murdered in Canada. Canadian newspapers reported this week that the “blood soaked body” of Arcelie Laoagan, 40, had been found by subway train workers on Friday behind a church in Calgary, Alberta.

Anthony Basil, Cordillera case officer of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, said Laoagan, a native of Sagada, Mt. Province, was the second migrant worker to fall victim to a crime in Canada in recent months.

Ifugao-born immigrant Jocelyn Dulnuan, 27, was murdered in a plush neighborhood of Mississauga City last October 1. Police have arrested two Latin American immigrants for the murder.

“We now have to address two fatalities from Sagada. We just received home [the body of Sagada native Zennia Aguilan, who was killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan],” Basil said. The OWWA is awaiting feedback from the country’s foreign office in Canada.

Laoagan was reported missing on January 17 when she failed to return home. According to an online report of the Calgary Herald, she called friends when she was apparently attacked.
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Peace

Men of Arms

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Thanks to the The Jester and Layad for the heads up on this touching article about the lives of military men.

First published in the Youngblood section of the Inquirer, this article was written by 1 Lt. Manuel Kalang-ad Jr, a kailiyan who graduated from the Philippine Military Academy last 2004. Lt. Kalang-ad is now serving as a company commander with the Philippine Army. It’s not often that we read an article written by a military man so let’s consider this a treat.

Men of Arms
by Manuel Kalang-ad Jr.

When I was a child, my grandfather cautioned me not to eat the head whenever we had chicken for dinner. He said that if you ate chicken’s head, during war or battle, your head would keep popping up, no matter how much you try to hide it, and it would become an easy target for the enemy. I didn’t pay much attention to this superstition of my grandpa. After all, for all the truth it might hold, I didn’t plan on becoming a soldier, whose job is to go to war.

I went through elementary and high school having much the same safe and idealistic dreams as any youngster my age. At first, I wanted to be an architect, then a lawyer. The two professions had one thing in common: You get to live the normal life of a civilian and don’t have to concern yourself with things like going out in the dead of the night because it is your duty to do so.

Never did it enter my mind to consider a career in the military. I had this image that the life of a soldier was a hard one, not much different from a farmer’s who must endure the rain, the heat of the sun, and the cold of night out in the field. I went through my formative years dreaming of someday becoming a big shot with lots of money and power.
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Baguio

What is Your Vision for Baguio?

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The Baguio Centennial Commission a.k.a Centecomm (sounds like a menacing Soviet agency during the cold war haha) is asking you to share your vision for the city in the next 20 years. Our ideas will be taken seriously daw by the Centecomm folks so let’s go ahead and envision something.

Mine is not so much a vision for Baguio but I hope that officials will pedestrianize the city. Instead of constructing projects designed to solve the problems of the rich (i.e., where to find a parking lot) let’s build pedestrian lanes that will encourage people to walk and make walking enjoyable.

Really a pedestrianized Baguio will be a much better city. You know, a city with cleaner air, lesser traffic, and healthier people too.

Oops, by the way, isn’t the Baguio Centennial logo above kind of cool? Congratulations to whoever designed it.
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National Affairs

In the News: Dana Batnag

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Remember Dana Batnag? We first blogged about her here and here. In our first post about her, we mentioned that Dana, then only 13 years old, won an international song writing contest sponsored by the UNICEF. You’re wondering about the song she wrote? It’s that very popular song, I Am But a Small Voice, which you sang every time you celebrated United Nations Day.

Anyways, Dana now works as a foreign correspondent with Jiji Press, a Japanese news agency. She’s in the news today because she is suspected of helping alleged coup plotter Capt. Nicanor Faeldon escape during the Manila Penn incident. Dana, whose dad comes from Besao, Mt. Province, denied the accusation and has received the support of her fellow journalists.

Here’s a news report from GMA News on this latest effort of the administration to scare members of the media:

So the RPN video footage in this report is supposed to be the evidence that points to our kailiyan as the suspected journalist who aided an alleged coup plotter? It looks to me like they are just talking. She is a reporter for Christ’s sake. She can interview any news source which Captain Faeldon definitely is. Besides if she is going to commit the crime of aiding an alleged coup plotter, would she do it in a room full of people and cameras?

I also don’t get the story that Faeldon was able to escape because he had a press identification card which Dana supposedly gave him? Really? You have probably the most wanted man in the country for the past five years and he was able to escape because of some silly identification card? So were police authorities too busy looking at ID cards such that they forgot to look at the faces of people they are inspecting? How dumb is that? No wonder Captain Faeldon has been eluding authorities for years. If an ID card is all it takes to escape from hundreds of police and military men who are purposely looking for you, I wonder what a simple wig will do?
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