Photos et lettres des Philippines, de France et d'ailleurs

It is now two weeks since I received the bad news. In fact I had sent a text to Luisa's cell phone and I received a reply an hour later.
I thought she was the one texting but it was her sister, Magnolia, who told me that her sibling passed away on 27 July 2008. She asked me who I was and thanked me for what little I had done to her.
I had seen Luisa only 3 times and in truth we were not yet friends, I simply chose to narrate her story to illustrate if necessary, what is the fate of millions of people worldwide who were not lucky enough to find the proper passport in their cradle.
To preserve her anonymity while she was still alive, I had chosen the pseudonym Luisa whereas she was called Minerva. Enge was in fact his real name. I also took the opportunity to ask her sister a few details about her past. I had always been surprised that regarding her illness she never asked financial assistance from her former husband, above all she was also the mother of his son Eric. I was also amazed that she had even returned to the Philippines without her child.
I had no possibility to verify the story that will follow so it should be read as such. However, I have taken the liberty to restore some order in the texts that her sister sent.

Everything began like a dream, the dream of many Filipinas to marry someday a good foreigner to live a better and supposedly more comfortable life in a Western country.
His name was Jorge and he took her along after the marriage to Munich, Germany where later she gave birth to a son, Eric.
I do not know at what point things started getting wrong in the couple but at the time the divorce was initiated, Jorge was living with 2 other Filipinas.
Once the divorce pronounced, she went to live with his son in the Philippines where he was supposed to have his education, probably in Saint Paul College like his mother.

(Statue to commemorate the landing in Dumaguete in 1904 of the Sisters of Saint Paul de Chartres, 4 French, 1 American, 1 Portugese, 1 Chinese)

Then Eric caught chickenpox and was hospitalized. She asked Jorge for financial help to pay the hospital. He agreed reluctantly as he did not believe in the illness of his son and thought she wanted only to steal the money.

Nevertheless he persuaded her to go back in Germany with their cured son to spend some vacation there since the start of the new Philippine school year was only in June (I guessed they were in April or May).
While Magnolia's sister drove them to the airport, she had a kind of premonition and begged Minerva not to return to Germany and not to ever leave Eric alone with the father who could steal him from her. Minerva retorted that her ex-husband would never do such a thing.
In Munich, according to their agreement, he had rented an apartment for the duration of their stay. One day Jorge visited them and pretending to take his son for a ride, never took him back home.

Minerva got panicky and crying, went knocking on the door all the other apartments for help. Only a couple of elderly Germans took pity but they didn't know what to do about her predicament.
When Eric was taken she had just a little money left and often had to be contented with a loaf of stale bread as a meal.
According to the sister, this brutal husband not only took the child but also asked an allowance for his board and lodging because he was unemployed at the moment. It was probably a way to scare her so he wouldn't be prosecuted.

In addition his new girlfriend of the moment often sent messages to Minerva insulting her and saying, among other things, that she was an unworthy mother.
So to let her son live in peace, Minerva lost in a foreign country without resources and assistance, not even from the sister of her ex-husband with whom she got along  well, decided to return alone to the Philippines.
Thereafter she suffered terrible ordeals each time she visited her son in Germany and she had left a letter behind her to testify.
According to Magnolia, the husband Jorge is the most brutal and animal like person she has never met and she wants to send him a photo of Minerva in her coffin to make him feel guilty.
Indeed he never believed his wife had cancer and later a breast ablation because he said this could be only a lie to extort him money because "who ever heard of a woman staying only three days in hospital after such surgery?" What he did not know is that she could not stay longer for financial reasons.
She asked him thereafter, as a favor, to send her a picture of Eric and to talk to him but he refused this small favor saying she was a whore selling her body whereas she was dying.
On the day of her death she called out her son's name and asked her family to record that.
Her sister printed the letter that Minerva was in the process of writing to Eric, but unfortunately not yet completed.  She asked her to submit it at his majority in order that he should know one day the truth about his mother.
Magnolia wants this story one day read in Germany and particularly in Munich for them there to learn the evil and the injustices which were done to her poor sister, but that does not depend on me.
Here is the end of a sad story in a short life. All is it true? I cannot say but I believe it.