Tragic end to a decades’ long family dream
‘When Jastine’s mother got an email from a Tallaght IT lecturer praising her daughter, she was the proudest woman in Ireland ...’
THE wet season has arrived and as the rain lashes down and the sun dances between clouds, painting shapes across the lush, forested mountains surrounding Jastine Valdez’ hometown of Aritao in the northern Philippines, you could almost believe you were in Enniskerry.
But the truth is, when tragic Jastine Valdez was abducted by Mark Hennessy on a quiet Wicklow country road, before he violently murdered her, the 24-year-old couldn’t have been any further away from home.
It had been only four years since a then 20year-old Jastine — now laying in an open coffin in her grandmother Lola’s home in Aritao, where hundreds of family and friends are making the pilgrimage to see her before her funeral — arrived in Ireland to start her new life with her parents, Teresita and Danilo.
Yes, Jastine had visited Ireland before, and she was moving to be with her dearly beloved parents. But saying goodbye to the grandmother she called ‘Mammy’, and to close cousins and friends to move thousands of miles away to an alien country and culture must have been a brutal culture shock. Jastine found herself thrust into unknown surroundings, far out of her comfort zone.
But in those four short years, Jastine — who would have turned 25 at the end of this month — blossomed and thrived, and did her family and hometown proud. She started studying accountancy at Tallaght IT and found work as a carer and then in a coffee shop, only paring back her hours before Christmas to focus on her exams.
When Jastine’s mother Teresita got an email from a Tallaght IT lecturer praising her daughter, she was the proudest woman in Ireland. Jastine excelling in her studies in Ireland was the culmination of a decades’ long family dream, which Jastine hoped to crown by bringing her grandmother to live with them in Wicklow one day.
It was only visiting the Philippines to talk with Jastine’s family about their darling angel that my eyes were opened to just how far Danilo, Teresita and Jastine Valdez had come, and the years they’d sacrificed, all to give their only daughter a better life.
In many ways, the Philippines is very like Ireland — if we turned the clock back around 50 years — but with Hollywood movies, English newspapers, McDonalds and all the trappings of the modern American lifestyle thrown into the mix.
The Church still rules the roost in this deeply devout and conservative Catholic country, and women get a rough deal. The treatment of young women here smacks of Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s. But in other ways, such as the grinding poverty that’s forced on most of the 106.5 million hard-working Filipinos living here, we are worlds apart.
A wall of oppressive, sweltering, humid heat hits me the moment I leave the airport terminal in Manila, after an eight hour flight to Abu Dhabi and a nine hour flight onwards to the Philippine capital.
Unlike our four seasons in one day, the Philippines has just two — wet and dry — and now in June, the clatter of thunder and lightening and colossal downpours are well underway in the muggy 37 degree heat.
On my first morning in Manila, I pick up The Manila Times to see Ireland has made the front page — although the article is not relating to Jastine, due to be repatriated the next day.
‘Requiem for most of Ireland’, reads the headline, opening to a full-page, four-column, seething opinion piece decrying how Ireland has ‘thrown away their Catholicism’.
OPINION writer Franciscan S. Tatad writes, ‘I have never been more afraid for the Irish, for Catholics and non-Catholics alike, for the Roman Catholic Church, and for the whole human race.’
He goes on to rail against Irish voters, saying they: ‘wanted to show their contempt for the Catholic Church, which has made it so hard for women to enjoy the pleasures of casual sex without requiring them to accept the responsibilities of its consequences.’
Manila is a noisy, vast, sprawling metropolis of towering skyscrapers and highways knitted together with seemingly endless miles of neighbourhoods that seem slum-like, where millions of people are crammed together in ramshackle, hut-like homes and tiny shops, mainly fashioned out of discarded steel and corrugated iron.
In the chaotic streets, it is constant gridlock, and children and dogs dart between beeping tuktuks, taxicycles and jeepneys, — crowded, former US military vehicles, colourfully-painted and used by locals as taxi buses. Health and safety has yet to be invented here, with travellers often jumping on and off moving jeepneys or hanging off the back.
I’m told the Victory Liner will take me from Manila to Baguio — where Jastine and her grandmother lived for two years so she could study financial management in college there — in six hours. Baguio is also the main city in Nueva Vizcaya, the northern province where Aritao is located. I arrive at the bus station, which straddles a poor slum, to be told the journey could take up to nine hours. Buses leave hourly and the Baguio bus is almost full, packed with families squeezed into tiny seats, with poor vendors hopping on and off, pedalling buns and scoops of nuts from tin buckets. Baguio, in the mountains, is a popular holiday getaway, and families happily endure the hellishly hot heat and long journey to swap the muggy Manila heat for some fresh mountain air. I decide to find a private driver to take me on my onward journey.
Six hours, and multiple dices with death on dangerous roads later, we arrive in Baguio, a leafy, mountainous city, a good 15 degrees cooler than in Manila, but also rife with poverty.
By chance, I bump into an old college friend of Jastine’s called Clarice. They studied finance together and now Clarice is working as a receptionist at my hotel. Like most Filipinos, she speaks her own language, Tagalog, with friends, but is proficient in English — Filipinos are schooled in English, although the standard is much lower in villages such as Aritao.
Clarice, like every Filipino I meet, is incredibly friendly and polite and servile to the point that it is almost uncomfortable. Every sentence is sandwiched with ‘Ma’am’ and people here seem insulted if you don’t let them serve you. They politely refer to their elders as Ma’am too, although it seems to be mainly used with foreigners.
The Father Ted character Mrs Doyle could have hailed from here, such is their enthusiasm to look after you. And, just like Mrs Doyle, women here are expected to serve.
A book I pick up about Filipino customs and etiquette defines a wife’s role as: ‘one who looks after the best interests of her husband, who gives him emotional support, perhaps material support and who manages the household and the children efficiently. There are no restrictions on women working, as long as they don’t neglect these duties.’
The book also explains how the ‘dalega’ or young woman is expected to appear shy, especially around men and should never flaunt her sexuality — ‘otherwise she will be labelled a flirt and considered sexually loose.’
Beauty contests are hugely popular here and are a coveted addition to any CV — huge posters at Jastine’s former private Catholic school, St Teresita’s Academy, encourages girls to take part.
Being so poor, the Philippines is also a dangerous country, where murders are commonplace and many taxis and jeepney drivers carry guns in their glove compartments.
That Jastine was murdered in Ireland — where her parents chose to build their home because they considered it so safe — shocks everyone I meet, including Clarice.
She tells me: ‘We usually hear about Canada or the States and people getting papers there. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Ireland and I imagine there are a lot of snowflakes there and it’s pretty.’ Her eyes widen as she adds: ‘It’s so far — she was so brave to go.’
‘I can’t believe it. She was very good friends of friends of mine. I saw it on my Facebook feed about the murder and we were all so shocked. Jastine had such a sweet look and was always smiling and a little bit shy, but she laughed a lot with her friends.
‘They would go together for swimming or for milkshakes or go hanging out together in coffee shops.
AGROUP aged in their early 20s were finishing their shift in the hotel bar. They hadn’t heard of Jastine’s death. ‘None of us have any friends or heard of anyone going to Ireland,’ they tell me in broken English.
‘Some young people here would get jobs in small company offices here, or in offices, or be a driver, but a lot go abroad to Hong Kong and Shanghai and Japan or Canada.
‘It can be so much killing here and a lot of drugs — every day someone is getting killed. It’s so dangerous.’
Yet, despite being largely devout church-goers, the Philippines is also ranked as one of the most gayfriendly nations in Asia, with polls showing 73% of Filipinos believe homosexuality should be accepted. It was the Irish referendum on same-sex marriage that ignited a push to make it the first Asian country to legalise same-sex unions, but the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines lambasted the idea, with priests threatening fire and brimstone from the pulpits.
Right now, a historic bill on the subject is being looked at by parliament, however the country’s controversial and hardline president Rodrigo Duterte — who makes Trump’s Twitter outbursts seem like the utterings of a saint — doesn’t inspire much hope of its being passed.
In 2016 he referred to the country’s US Ambassador as a ‘gay ambassador, the son of a whore…’ — just one of a series of jaw-dropping quotes that have shocked many.
Numerous people I speak to say that, here, Jastine wouldn’t have been killed by a violent killer high on cocaine and alcohol, as someone like Mark Hennessy would have been killed long ago, thanks to Duterte’s infamous ‘War on Drugs’. Under the president’s regime, police are urged to ‘shoot to kill’ suspected drug dealers, with international human rights groups up in arms about the many thousands of extrajudicial killings and a surge in vigilante killings and ‘disappearances’ since Duterte took office in June 2016.
Duterte remains committed to his style of martial law, as is clear in another outrageous quote: ‘Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now there are three million drug addicts — I’d be happy to slaughter them’. The group of hotel workers I met tell me they love Duterte, adding: ‘The president will be very furious about Jastine and would make sure she gets justice. He’s great and a fighter and would kill this guy and all drug dealers in Ireland.’
To get to Aritao from Baguio, Jastine would have had to get a lift, take a seven-hour bus journey or jump aboard a packed transit van and endure a perilous, shortcut route through the mountains.
The roads are terrifying and incredibly dangerous, with huge articulated trucks transporting rice, corn, onions and pigs, hurtling from the provinces to Manila, vying with tuk tuks and taxicycles. Often people travel on open roofs, flying up and down narrow mountain roads and along busy highways. Now, coming into the wet season, it’s particularly dangerous, with slippery surfaces and mudslides common.
At St Teresita’s, I find the school’s Spiritual Director, Renee Calega sitting in a wheelchair with his legs knitted together with steel pins. His car was involved in a pile-up a few weeks ago on the highway. The parish priest, Fr Silver, who was driving as Renee slept in the passenger seat, was killed. It’s just one of many horror stories I hear about road deaths.
Crowds hang around the Hiace vans from Baguio to Aritao and there’s a five-hour waiting list, so I hire a driver with a black A-Teamstyle van. It’s a hair-raising journey through the mountains, around hairpin bends, at break-neck speed, with little by way of cliff barriers. Four hours later, we reach the stiflingly hot Aritao.
Just like Ireland, there is mass emigration from the Philippines, and small towns such as Aritao — where Jastine grew up with her grandmother while her parents worked in Ireland — are almost devoid of young people once they hit work or college age.
THERE are no job prospects for an intelligent girl like Jastine here. Her grandmother got by farming rice fields behind her home and locals here eke out a modest living driving jeepneys or motorcycle taxis for around 500 Philippine pesos a day (less than €9), cooking at makeshift BBQ street stalls, or running food and bric-a-brac stores and tending kiosks.
If they’re lucky enough to go to college, Jastine’s friends might get a job teaching at St Teresita’s Academy. But salaries are abysmal, with teachers and nurses earning between 15,000-20,000 pesos a week (€250-€320). I’m told salaries for Filipino doctors are so bad many re-train to become nurses so they can work abroad in hospitals where nursing qualifications are recognised, as qualifications in medicine are not.
It was only thanks to money sent back by Danilo and Teresita that Jastine could afford to attend the private, fee-paying St Teresita’s and later study financial management. None of the teachers I meet at St Teresita’s remember Jastine and the school co-ordinator tells me how low salaries have pushed many staff to leave after a year or two to work in larger cities.
Filipino people in towns like Aritao don’t have much, but they have each other and it’s clear family and community means everything.
The Main Street — with smoke blowing from street BBQs selling chickens and fish — is manic with locals traveling to visit family or friends in taxicyles and tuktuks, or clustering in small groups outside the handful of stores and eateries.
It’s not unusual to see a family of five, and a dog, traveling with bags of food packed onto a battered sidecar of a rusty motorbike.
When Jastine was a young girl, she used to go to Melvins Store after school to stay with Gina Juan Ambros, while her granny Lola ran errands. As well as sweets and drinks, Gina sells everything from phones to headphones, hair bobbins and toys. ‘She used to sit up here on the stool and play like she was the shopkeeper.’
Gina pulls out her phone and scrolls through the many messages she got from her ‘Jaz’ on Facebook. Jastine wishes her ‘Happy Mum’s Day Tita!’ In another she writes, ‘Tita I miss you so much’, and ‘Tell my friends I love them’, with many more asking Gina to send her love to her family.
On animal-lover Jastine’s Facebook page, she posted adorable puppy and dolphin videos, heartwarming stories about acts of kindness and photos of her playing in a snowy Wicklow wonderland.
Gina smiles sadly, ‘She was so sweet. Really such a good, kind girl. It isn’t fair God would take some girl like her so sweet. She liked playing in all of the snow — none of us saw the snow. She was gone far away, but always we would hear about her.’ Gina looks at Jastine’s Facebook page and shakes her head: ‘How could this bad man do this? I never thought she would not be safe. Sweet, sweet Jaz… ah, we will miss her.’
Sweet Jastine Valdez, finally home, where she will be missed forever.