An everyman for all seasons
Ruel Macalisang is a company driver for WSP, a structural engineering firm that’s now Canadian-owned.
Ruel drives WSP head Matthew Sampson around Manila, and one Monday afternoon, when he snuck into the toilet of a building in Legaspi Village, Makati while waiting for Mr. Sampson, he stepped back after relieving himself and discovered he had stepped on a wallet. Yup, that was my wallet. In what must have been a senior moment, I had returned the wallet to my back pocket... or thought I had, and it fell to the floor undetected.
On my part, I discovered that I didn’t have my wallet some 45 minutes after leaving said building and I retraced my steps to the restaurant where I had a late lunch and to the building toilet but I didn’t find the wallet. I then began the process of blocking my credit cards and ATM, rueing the cash as lost for good, and just hoping against hope that things like my driver’s license and senior citizen ID would somehow turn up.
To my surprise, I received a text one Thursday asking if I had lost a wallet — through a common friend, Klein Beate, a member of the staff of Raffy Tulfo’s teleradyo show. So, there I was just quietly thankful that I would, at the least, get the IDs back when Klein asked how much cash was in my wallet. When Klein mentioned an amount larger than what I said, I remembered that I had been reimbursed that Monday for some advances I had made during a previous event. So, apparently, not only was I getting my credit cards and IDs back, but the cash was still there in my wallet. I was invited to come to Mr. Tulfo’s show, get my wallet back and meet Ruel on air.
What I enjoyed were the moments I spent with Ruel before we went into the TV5 studios. He hails from Bulacan and had to make paalam to his boss to one, bring the wallet to Mr. Tulfo’s show the previous week, and two, to show up for this return. I asked him why he didn’t just hand over the wallet to the building admin/reception or security guard, and he said it was because this way, he could be assured that it was returned to me. During the show, when asked why he didn’t just keep the cash, he readily replied that it would have felt wrong to use money that wasn’t his, and it had been a lesson he had been teaching his sons. In fact, his youngest, Jacob, had a similar situation in school earlier in the year. Jacob had found a wallet and dutifully, returned it to the teacher right away.
Ruel is a father to Josiah, Jasper and Jacob. His three boys and his boss, Mr. Sampson, should be very proud of him. And in the case of WSP, should treasure the kind of employee they have. It’s easy to spout goodness and a sense of ethics and strong values when it’s all in theory but to put them in practice and resist the easy path of temptation is another thing. One could have even pocketed the cash, then return the wallet and say that was how one found it — but to seek its return, and ensure that it does so intact, makes Ruel my everyday hero.
As Ruel relayed to me, he has been working for 17 years now with WSP and it’s a job that has allowed him to put his two elder boys through college — an engineering course for the eldest. Well, I just want to say to Ruel that the most valuable education his boys have been getting is right there at home because he’s been the Professor of Value Formation and Doing the Right Thing. We can only hope there were more like Ruel in the upper strata of society, of government and in life.