A Group Study Exchange team from the Philippines recently visited the Westfield/Mayville Rotary Club with their team leader, Alfredo M. Campos, a charter member of the Rotary Club of Teresa since 1998, and students Pahm Balasabas, Anna "Dos" Karenina Roque, Francezca C. Kwe and Arcie Mallari.
Introduced by Dan Smith, New Generations chair, team members told about their visits to various communities plus their own employment back home.
Together, they treated the club members with homeland songs and performed a dance which told the story of rice planting and harvesting.
Article Photos
The Group Study Exchange 2012 Team from the Philippines recently visited the Westfield/Mayville Rotary Club. Seated from left, Anna “Dos” Karenina Roque and Francezca C. Kwe. Standing, from left, Arcie Mallari, Dan Smith, Rotary’s GSE co-chair; Pahm Balasabas and Alfredo M. Campos, team leader.
Campos, who has held various positions in his Rotary club, is chair for Service Projects-1 of the Teresa District.
Through him, the club was able to provide two major water projects through matching grants, one a potable water system and another a vegetable farm water system.
He is a graduate of University of Santo Tomas, Manila, and has been a civil engineer since 1985. His career was centered in sales and marketing for architectural and construction finishing products of multi-national companies until 2009. He is a free-lance project sales consultant working for three companies.
Pahm Balasabas is an energetic, well-motivated and hardworking woman who enjoys facing life's challenges and achieving personal goals.
Born and raised in Taguig, Pahm she is proud to have earned three college bachelor's degrees: nutrition and dietetics, nursing and public safety. She now belongs to the Tanglaw-Lahi Class of 1999 of the Philippine National Police Academy. Her skills, agility, alertness and decision-making have earned her awards and recognition that gave flesh to her remarkable performance as a female cop.
Currently, Pahm is in the field of training, as operations officer, at the Phillippine police training service in charge of addressing the competency and skills enhancement of police officers across her country.
Anna Karenina Roque, fondly called Dos, earned a bachelor's degree in communication and a major in advertising and public relations. She calls herself "A-Jill-of-All-Trades" having experience in various fields such as media, events, advertising, marketing specialties, in charge of product and trade marketing, notebooks, net books and tablets.
Starting her professional career as a primetime radio disc jockey of one of the top FM stations in Manila, Dos fulfilled her childhood dream of making TV commercials.
For her work as an advertising copywriter for Lowe Worldwide in Manila, she won an Adobo Ad of The Year Award, a Tambuli Award and a Gold Araw Award, all awards for creative advertising works in the Philippines.
Dos is into running, ultimate Frisbee, travelling, coffee, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and K-pop. She is a proud mama of a Maltese dog named Chitoboy.
Francezca C. Kwe earned a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's in English with a major in creative writing from the University of the Philippines, where she now teaches creative writing and literature.
She also works as a writer and editor for print and internet media and has published news and feature articles in various newspapers and magazines. She currently is the copy editor of a monthly lifestyle magazine.
As a creative writer, Francezca has received the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature and the Nick Joaquin Literary Award for her fiction.
She has published her short fiction in literary journals including Asia, Magaine of Asian Literature and fiction anthologies Philippine Speculative Fiction among others. She is writing her first novel.
Mallari is the founder and president of Silid Aralan, member of the International Planning Committee of the UNESCO Chair and Institute of Comparative Human Rights and a consultant of Monark Foundation Institute.
In the children and youth development field for 14 years, Mallari developed the learning framework of SAI called Silid Aralan Learning Technology, which has helped thousands of children since its inception in 2007.
Mallari is the first Filipino to get the Sauve Scholarship in Montreal City, Canada. In addition, his project, Iwastology, won in the 2011 Living Your Legacy Conference and chosen in the Dalai Lama Fellowship.
With experience and expertise in children and youth development, specifically in education, he was invited to deliver several trainings for more than a thousand public and private school teachers nationwide, government and even in private sectors.
As for reciprocity, Rotary District 7090, of which the Westfield/Mayville Rotary Club is a member, will send young business and professional men and women to the Philippines from Feb. 15 through March 15 next year, according to Dan Smith, co-chair, with a representative from Canada.
Interviews for those interested in being a member of the team will be held Saturday. Applications must be submitted as soon as possible by calling Smith at 269-9900.