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May-June 2002

Made In Hong Kong

Over 120,000 Filipinos work in Hong Kong.  Before the British left in 1997 there were many European officials who needed nannies and household help and were willing to pay good wages and give good conditions.  That has changed now that Hong Kong has reverted to China.  Life has become harder but that message has not got back to the Philippines.  Sr.  Leticia Bartolome, ICM who has worked there for years sends a letter to a friend and tries to change her mind about coming to Hong Kong.

We would like to thank Sr. Leticia for accommodating our request to print her name despite her original request to withhold it.  We salute her for this brave article.

Dear Eva,

Peace to you and all your loved ones!  Thank you for writing and for the trust that you gave me in sharing your hopes and aspirations for the future.  But I am really very sorry to disappoint you, in the same way that I have disappointed so many others who have written me for help to find jobs for them here in Hong Kong.

Dad, It’s Ok To Cry

By Ma Teresita R. Santiago

Tes Santiago’s mother is an avid supporter of Misyon so Tes has come to love the magazine.  Because of the many inspiring stories Misyon has featured, Tes has been dreaming of becoming a missionary herself – and she is still praying about it.  Meantime, she wants to share her own story…

I Crossed The Bridge And I Got There…

By Sr Ma. Luisa Tomaro OND

Three years ago, Sr. Luisa arrived in the tropical jungles of Papua New Guinea. She is presently handling family life and catechetical ministry in the parish of Daru. One of their regular activities is ‘patrolling’ – they go from village to village preparing the people for Baptism, Confession, First Communion or Marriage. Here she tells how she has come to cross the bridge of ethnic differences.

To Search is to find

We do not have the answers to every question – but the very asking of the question is the beginning of the answer. So why don’t you send us your questions and let us together find the answers to our questions.

MONEY LENDERS

I know a member of a Catholic organization who runs a lending company which works like a 5-6. They are good leaders in our community but I understand that this is against the Church teachings.

The Bible forbids the lending of money with interest. But that was at a time when money had a stable value. Today the value of money changes so that if I lend you P10,000.00 today, next year when you give it back to me it will actually only be worth maybe P9,000.00 in terms of the goods it can buy or in terms of rice. So the Church does allow interest to be taken on a loan. That interest should not be excessive and it is to be judged by several factors. One important factor is the RISK involved. If there is no collateral then the lender runs the risk of losing everything and sometimes does. Hence he or she makes up for it by increasing the interest. Another factor is to ask what is the prevailing interest at that time and place. What is very wrong is to take advantage of people’s illness or otherwise to lend them money on a land title with an exorbitant interest rate and deliberately use that to get the land from them. This happened a lot in the Marcos years in the rural parts of the Philippines and was one of the factors that drove the revolution. Now to your friends we should be slow to judge and you would have to be quite sure that you really have the true details. People are inclined to give only their side of the story.

By Fr Joseph Panabang SVD

Which is Which

Trying to welcome a group of elders who came to see me in my hometown during my last vacation I pulled out a bottle which I though was the lambanog whisky given to me by my benefactors in Baguio. Everybody was commenting that the drink was perfect. It was their first time to taste such. The following day, as I was preparing for the Mass, I discovered the bottle I had offered was the Mass wine. It was the bottle nicely covered with red Japanese paper, similar to the cover of the lambanogbottle. What a costly mistake. And no, I did not use the lambanog for the Mass.

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