Future military officers find home, family in Baguio

TRAINING GROUND Many of the country’s military leaders are trained at the Philippine Military Academy but their moral core is partly molded by foster families in Baguio City who volunteer to “adopt” and guide cadets to help them cope with homesickness, being away from their own families during four years of training. —Neil Clark Ongchangco

FORT DEL PILAR, BAGUIO CITY, Philippines — Not many people understood the apprehensions felt by cadets of the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) the moment they were cut off from their families when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020.

Quarantined at the country’s premier military training school in Baguio City for more than a year, the cadets thrived on routine—doing physical exercises and attending classroom lessons. Graduates of this year’s PMA “Bagong Sinag” Class, who were plebes (fourth class cadets aged between 18 and 21) at the time, said all of them learned to quell their anxieties by bonding, finding camaraderie in their mutual isolation.

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But some of the credit for their mental well-being should go to their Baguio “foster parents,” who frequently chatted with the cadets online, and who fed them home-cooked meals once restrictions were lifted in 2021 and they were allowed to visit.

These foster parents are volunteers of the 45-year-old PMA Host Parents program. Whenever the cadets get weekend breaks, the “host parents” take them in. As part of the family, the cadets often go to the movies or dine outdoors with their foster parents and adoptive siblings, and even join them outside the city when they are given vacations that may last up to two days.

The PMA Host Parents program began in 1979 as a foster care project of Baguio residents to offer comfort to cadets who may be traumatized by their four-year long separation from their families, according to Mayor Benjamin Magalong.

A retired police general and member of PMA “Sandigan” Class of 1982, Magalong said he and his classmates were the first cadets to be given “foster parents” after that period’s superintendent, Brig. Gen. Angel Kanapi, approved the program.

WAITING Cadets of PMA Class of 2027 troop to Baguio Convention Center to meet their host parents for the first time on June 22. —Joel Arthur Tibaldo

Care packages

Host parents became crucial when some of the cadets fell sick in 2020, said Helen Tibaldo, who has been a foster parent for 20 years.

Tibaldo, the Cordillera regional director of the Philippine Information Agency, said some of her wards were infected and were housed by the city government at COVID isolation rooms at Teachers’ Camp “where we dropped off their food.”

“We finally met the cadets face to face again in 2021 and 2022 when the quarantine restrictions were lifted,” she said. PMA officially ended its quarantine and again allowed entry to tourists in March 2022.

On June 22, during this year’s Host Parents Day at Baguio Convention Center, Tibaldo reunited with 110 host parents who met their new wards belonging to PMA Class 2027 for the first time.

Class 2027 is composed of yearlings (third class cadets), who are attending their second year of academic and military training.

“In 20 years of cadet parenting, we are foster parents of practically a military company of officers in the Army, Navy and Air Force, plus cadets who ended up with the Philippine National Police, the Philippine Coast Guard and the Merchant Marines. Our first wards of Class 2006 are now lieutenant colonels,” said Tibaldo’s husband, artist and journalist Joel Arthur.

The cadets, whose numbers may vary depending on the class size for a particular year, are distributed evenly among the volunteer families on hand, Tibaldo said.

Around nine cadets of Class 2027 were farmed out to volunteers who already gathered their two designated “foster cadets” because their original host families failed to make it to the June 22 program.

Amparo Rimas, a widow, has taken care of the cadets for 40 years. She was given a hug by one of her first “adopted sons,” retired Coast Guard Commodore Danilo Ubaldo, a member of PMA “Maharlika” Class of 1984, during the event.

Ubaldo described his “Mama Ampi” as “caring, very loving and who was always concerned about our well-being.”

He said she used to feed not just him, but also his squad mates and platoon mates who occasionally visited the Rimas home.

QUALITY TIME Many PMA host parents have taken care of cadets for decades. Some of them met their latest foster children last week along with over a hundred Baguio couples. —photos by Joel Arthur Tibaldo, Carlito Dar and Vincent Cabreza

Building relationships

PMA cadets in the past used to be dominated by Metro Manila residents, said Lt. Gen. Rowen Tolentino, the PMA superintendent, when he addressed the parents. But lately, PMA has been training a more diverse group of cadets who grew up in Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon), Cordillera, Cagayan Valley and the Ilocos regions in Luzon and several province in the Visayas and Mindanao, he said.

According to Tolentino, the program exposes cadets to the civilian perspective of life as balance to military principles and rigid disciplinary rules and regulations they submit to in order to become leaders. The experience teaches cadets to build relationships with civilian communities once they graduate and are commissioned as junior military officers, he said.

The cadets also imbibe the altruism of “a welcoming community,” so host parents have actually helped shape the morality of the country’s future leaders, Tolentino said.

Tibaldo said the Host Parents recently conducted an inventory of their skills and professions, intending to build an army of classroom coaches. “If someone is good with math, that parent can help tutor her ‘adoptive’ sons and daughters who are having difficulties in class,” she said.

At the end of the program, the Class 2027 cadets left with their “foster parents” to see their new adoptive homes.

All of them carried their gray classroom satchels, leading Magalong to joke: “They’re carrying those bags because that is where they will keep the boodle (meals and other treats). You cadets really thought we didn’t know that.”

Many PMA host parents have taken care of cadets for decades. Some of them met their latest foster children last week along with over a hundred Baguio couples.