I AM privileged to attend CESB Thought Leaders Congress together with five other Division leaders from Davao Region and be able to listen to the inspiring stories of two world class Filipinos who did not stop until they were able to reap successes one after the other.
The first one who I have mentioned several weeks ago came from Indigenous People’s community who proved that resiliency is bouncing back from debacle and downtrodden state to an improved and well lived life.
The second one is a former maid who became a CEO and the founder of Asia CEO Awards, an annual event that recognizes top-performing Filipino business leaders across Asia, Mrs. Rebecca Bustamante-Mills.
Rebecca is the seventh of 11 siblings who grew up in poverty. At the age of 18 when her mother died, she left her hometown of Dasol, Pangasinan and work in a factory in Bataan to send her younger brothers and sisters through school because their father had no permanent work.
She tried all kinds of job from helper with different families, saleslady in the mayor’s store and sold ice buko, ice candy and even pandesal when she was a kid. Even when she was in high school, she worked to earn money for her schooling.
In 1986, she began working as a domestic helper in Singapore at the same time studying Accounting at the Open University of Singapore Institute of Management without the knowledge of her employers.
After several years of working in Singapore, Bustamante decided to work as a babysitter in Canada for almost four years while pursuing her graduate studies in Accounting and Marketing at Ryerson University in Ontario.
When she was already 27 and about to fulfill her promise to her mother to send her younger siblings to school, Bustamante seriously thought of entering into a serious relationship.
After a friend insisted to her to date a businessman Richard Mills who eventually became her husband, she went to the internet to see if the qualifications she set was met by Mills. Affirming so, she lied about her true background but eventually revealed when Mills asked her to introduce to his parents.
After finishing her master’s degree, Bustamante rose to the occasion in Canada when she worked as a marketing executive and also founded her own recruitment firm, High-Q Personnel until in December, 2000, she and her husband decided to stay in the country for good.
Bustamante landed a job for Mary Kay Cosmetics and then at the Canadian Embassy. In 2005, she and her husband decided to put up their own company they named Chalré, which now has operations in the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Canada, doing the screening for senior managerial and directorial positions for multinational companies. She did not rest on her laurels and continued to more to promote the Philippines.
She said that she always wanted to contribute to the Philippines because she said she came from nothing and was able to develop her future and promised to herself to give back to where I came from as she plan to attract more foreign investments to the Philippines. And the rest was history, from nothing she is now earning well and helping a lot of Filipinos especially the women.
This Corner hopes that more and more Filipinos will try their best to set aside negative thinking and instead focus on the best possible way they can move up to a higher level of helping themselves and others to make a name for themselves.