Treating Foreigners Fairly

Cagayan de Oro City is a microcosm of the entire Philippine archipelago in terms of entry of foreigners for varied purposes.

As we walk just around the city, from the malls to markets, to piers and the airport, the beaches and the bars, even in downtown Divisoria, we see a lot of foreigners.

We see Caucasians, colored folks, Koreans, Japanese, Indians and all sorts of races and nationalities walking around, driving by or just enjoying the amiable and peaceful environment of Cagayan de Oro.

However, in the past years, I have personally noticed that more and more foreigners are getting frustrated and angry and disappointed at how our community as a whole has been treating some of them.

I, for example, had a German client before who married a girl from Camiguin and set her up in an apartment in Nazareth with all the appliances and food supply and financial support and the girl convinced my client to hire a house boy to which my client agreed. He went back to Germany to liquidate his assets and when he came back here he realized that his apartment was empty and all the appliances were sold out because the house boy after all was the high school sweetheart of the girl.

I also had a couple of American clients who brought all their savings from the States and invested everything here and they were later arrested and jailed because their Filipina wives eloped with their Filipino boyfriends while the foreigner husbands were out of the country.

I also had some Korean businessmen who invested in big time ventures like mining and trading and where duped to bankruptcy by their Filipino partners.

Some foreign retirees and pensioners who planned to spend the rest of their lives in Cagayan de Oro and built huge houses here, or invested in beach resorts, or ventured into restaurants or into every other seemingly profitable enterprise or business which later on were discovered by them to be just fraudulent schemes of their Filipino wives and the wives’ relatives to fleece the foreigners for their hard earned money.

There are also Japanese client of mine who invested money to buy ten jeepneys at a cost of half a million per jeepney or a total of five million pesos. Very soon he realized that the jeepneys costs only 350,000 pesos each and the jeepneys were registered in the name of his fiancée who ran away with one of the drivers and all his money were gone.

These are certainly very sad stories which paint a very bad picture and project a very bad reputation of Filipinos. This should be stopped if we are sincere in making Cagayan de Oro a foreigner-friendly and investment-attractive city.

Time and again I had been complaining of the thieves that abound in our city in the guise of taxi drivers who extort money from tourists who arrive in our airports and piers. These are shameless incidents which should be stopped.

The unfair treatment we extend to foreigners who are not only tourists but would-be investors or permanent residents and the fraud we perpetrate upon them would boomerang on us in the near future if we do not cooperate and educate each other to treat foreigners in our city in the best way and the fairest manner we could.

Reputations go a long way as much as first impressions are lasting.

We should always understand and realize that the treatment we accord to the foreigners who come to visit, invest or live in or city will spell the impression and the lasting reputation of our city as a foreigner-friendly city. Failing in these, we will all suffer from a bad reputation and the millions of dollars in future investments will cease to come.

Finally, as I have asserted before, we should even include in our elementary and high school curriculum the subjected of courtesy and respect and giving value to how we treat all visitors to our city whether they be Filipinos or foreigners.

That is called Filipino hospitality. We had so much of that in the decades past but Filipino hospitality had become an alien word and a strange tradition to the younger generations. If we fail in this, then we will have a future nation of rude, dishonest, inhospitable and greedy Filipinos.

Failing in all these, all the efforts at image-building, tourist promotions, national advertising and economic propaganda will all be brought to naught and will all go to waste because we have miserably fail in the basic and traditional tenet of Filipino hospitality.

Published by: Joe Pallugna on July 21st, 2008 | Filed under People, Cagayan de Oro

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