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| Celia passed suddenly due to heart attack, after 17 years of working in HK (photo from Facebook) |
The family of the late Celia Cusipag Tolentino, 62 years old and a native of Solana, Cagayan, is asking for help in raising funds to cover the cost of her funeral and other related expenses.
Celia passed away suddenly on June 13 at the Caritas Hospital, a day after being rushed there unconscious due to a heart attack. Her family said they knew Celia had hypertension, but it did not seem to concern her much.
Two of her three adult children rushed to Hong Kong in
response to a call from Celia’s employer the day before, saying their mother
was in critical condition. However, she had already passed when they got to
Hong Kong.
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While here, they managed to get in touch with Social
Welfare Attache Rem Marcelino who told them that apart from the Php120,000
burial assistance from the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, they will get
an additional P100,000 from the Aksyon Fund of the Department of Migrant
Workers.
Her employer, on the other hand, will pay for the cost of repatriation, plus the air ticket of one of her children who came to Hong Kong.
However, it is still not clear whether the money
will be disbursed in time for the expected repatriation of Celia’s remains in two weeks’
time. Her children said she will be buried in Solana after a short funeral.
Her older daughter, Maceng, said their mother had been with her current employer only since January this year after her previous contract was pre terminated in December last year.
She deferred her exit from Hong Kong to last April,
when she managed to go home to Solana for two weeks.
Maceng said she and her siblings had asked their
mother to just go home for good, but she decided to go back to her Hong Kong
employer, as she wanted to save up for her retirement.
Celia had just started working in Hong Kong 17 years
ago when she was already 45 years old, when her husband died, leaving her to raise their four children by
herself.
In 2015, another tragedy occurred when her eldest son and Maceng's husband died in a traffic accident, leaving two young widows and six children betweem them, who Celia also tried to help support.
But her biggest expense, that of sending her twin youngest children to college, had just ended, with the two finishing courses in veterinary medicine and engineering only recently, and have now both started working.
Had she managed to hold on a bit longer, Celia could
have retired with ease and in peace, knowing that her years of hard work in
Hong Kong was about to bear fruit.
(The online OFW concern group, Social Justice for Migrant Workers, is helping raise funds for Celia’s family through one of its administrators, Divina Apostol, who also hails from Cagayan. Please check out their Facebook page for details. You may also contact Maceng directly through WhatsApp on +63 954 234 6434).
