ON A side street of a biscuit factory in Caloocan City, Maria Luisa Tayco’s dreams comes wrapped in the odors of spoiled food, re-used cooking oil, murky wastewater, and sweat of a hundred laborers.

It is here where Tayco, recipient of the Singaporean community’s Golden Samaritan award, now works after 14 years as a domestic worker in Singapore and founding a Singapore-based OFW charity eight years ago.

It is here where Tayco, hailed by a television show last New Year’s Eve as one of the best people the Philippines, decided to sell her kidney.

“It’s for my son,” the 47-year-old Tayco said.

The woman who formed the charity group Pinokyos Welfare Inc. and who for years was at the forefront of migrant giving or OFW philanthropy now seems in desperate need of charity herself.

Her friends and former supporters can’t believe it.

“Logic alone cannot fathom why she remains helping others other than herself,” said one of her friends, to whom Tayco owes P5,000.

“It isn’t healthy to help others if you have your own urgent needs, Luisa,” another friend told her. Tayco owes her P2,500.

She also owes this reporter P5,000.

Tayco, who once shipped books and school supplies from Singapore to the Philippines worth P2 million, can’t pay her utang now. She owes people P27,000.

Still, she remains focused on continuing her Pinokyos work: she named the canteen she put up in front of the Rebisco biscuit factory after her group. A plastic piggy bank meant for Pinokyos gobbles coins more steadily than the Pinokyos Canteen’s cash box.

She does so even after the canteen’s power and water have been shut off because she couldn’t pay her bills.

Philanthropy

TAYCO formed Pinokyos in 1999 “to save Filipino children back home from lack of support so that they avoid lying and doing bad things.” She knew first-hand how children, deprived of their OFW parents, could easily be led astray.

In 2002, when the Rotary Club of Singapore awarded Tayco’s efforts in behalf of Pinokyos, the diminutive founder (who barely stands five feet), donated the entire cash prize of four million pesos to the organization.

Her largesse didn’t extend to her bookkeeping, which was spotty at best. The group has no properly documented records of the contributions it has sent to the Philippines from Singaporean and Filipino donors. All it knows is that the money has funded projects like mini-libraries in Surigao del Norte and Dana City, Cebu, allowed scholarships for poor but deserving children, and supported a center for lepers in Caloocan.

But Tayco’s advocacy work took its toll on her employer, who fired her last year. She was forced to return to the Philippines, given the rule against jobless foreign domestic workers and her mother’s illness.

Despite her absence, the migrant donor group of more than 50 Filipino workers in Singapore still elected Tayco as president. Mila Egalin, Pinokyos secretary, said in a phone interview that Tayco remains the only person donors trust.

“They still look for her and only want to talk to her,” Egalin added, even as Pinokyos struggle to carry on in spite of Tayco’s absence.

Humanity

Back in Manila, Tayco continued to work for the group she founded. She opened and operated the Pinokyos Canteen near the Rebisco biscuit factory on Gen. Luis Street in Caloocan, hoping to turn the factory’s 700 workers into her customers.

But things haven’t gone as swimmingly as expected. The workers apparently didn’t care there was a good cause behind Tayco’s canteen. From November to mid-March, the factory had fewer workers. Plus the business had to compete with five other canteens, two bakeries, three retail stores and a fruit stand.

There’s a signboard on the factory gate that Tayco points to. “When that says ‘All apprentice girls and boys, work!’ or ‘Wrapping, manual, work at 7 a.m.,’ it means we have to prepare meals for them,” she explains. “I know how many meals I will cook for them.”

However, another sign instructing workers to proceed to another Rebisco factory is equally portentous. It means there are less potential customers for Tayco and the other stores in the area.

If seemingly random signs were the only indicator of how Tayco’s business rises and falls, then it comes as no surprise that Pinokyos Canteen’s coffers began to bleed. Apparently, Tayco was a better fund-raiser than she was an entrepreneur.

Her personal woes didn’t help. Her son Richard, the eldest of five, began to complain of headaches and needed a brain scan.

Her husband, whose philandering she claims stopped when she began Pinokyos, left her for two weeks when the pressure to turn the business around intensified.

Then there was her unexpected peri-menopausal pregnancy.

She needed to raise money and her kidney seemed like a good trade-off. Except that her doctor refused to consider harvesting because she was expecting.

During this litany, Tayco’s husband sat staring at the factory gates and refused to speak. Later, when he thought his wife was out of earshot, Tayco’s husband said he went away because he couldn’t stand Luisa’s temperament.

Benedict, Luisa’s son, said her mother scolded her in front of customers inside the canteen. “She also threw the TV remote at me,” he added.

But where does this feistiness fit into this tangled tale of expansive philanthropy on one hand and personal misery on the other?

Giving

Tayco brings out a plastic sandwich bag. She uses her good hand, her right scalded from a pan of boiling coconut oil she tipped on herself. It was the same day Meralco cut off the canteen’s electricity.

The sandwich bag is stuffed with IOU notes on some 15 crumpled strips of yellow and white paper and torn cigarette cardboards.

A strip of paper says she owes a supplier some P6,000. Another says she owes two canteen workers their wages.

She claims her attempt to secure a loan for the canteen from the Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration has been frustrating at best.

She said OWWA referred her to the National Livelihood Support Fund, which runs a loan program for returning OFWs. An NLSF person gave Tayco a referral letter, and then Tayco went to a rural bank in Bulacan province.

“I was being passed around from an office to another since November,” Tayco said. She said she gave up after four months when her transportation money dried up.

But, according to one of her friends, “It has always been ‘cash out’ and never ‘cash in’.” Tayco owes her $50.

Tayco’s failures back home is ironic, given her success as an OFW philanthropist in Singapore. What galls is that her inability to pay her debts is starting to become the measure of her worth. Her charity work has become almost dream-like, noted at best by friends who still believe in her and her creditors who banked on her credible record.