MAMITA
A hard up utility worker who was displaced at the height of Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan) and needed money to pay for a child’s tuition is being cited here as a model of honesty after returning a bag with P100,000 in cash.
Rosalito Mamita, 55, an employee of the city government, may be poor, but to officials and other people who have heard about his story, he is rich in virtue for not thinking twice about handing over the bag on March 9.
“It was a huge amount of money, all right, but it was not mine,” he said.
Yolanda damaged his house in Barangay 74 in Nula-Tula District more than a year ago.
“I am in dire need of money not only to help me repair our house but also for the tuition of my eldest daughter,” Mamita said.
He earns only P5,720 a month as a utility worker assigned to Balyuan Amphitheater, where he found the bag past 9 a.m. that day. He has been on his job for 21 years. His wife, Corazon, 51, gets P3,000 a month for babysitting.
No one else around
The couple need at least P4,000 for their daughter’s tuition. Another child is in second year high school.
Mamita said he was resting in the amphitheater when he noticed the bag in a row of plastic chairs. No one else was around.
“I did not even bother to check the content of the bag,” Mamita said. He immediately saw the need to report the bag to his boss “so it would be easy for its owner to claim.”
While he was on the way to his office to call it a day, he said a man approached him to ask if he saw a bag. He gave the bag immediately to the man who, in turn, handed it over to his crying wife.
The two, who have remained unidentified, quickly counted the money in P1,000 and P500 bills, and found nothing missing. “They profusely expressed their thanks to me for returning the bag to them,” Mamita said.
The man put P500 in Mamita’s pocket as a form of reward. “I refused to receive the money, but the man was insistent,” the employee said. Eventually, he accepted the P500, which he spent on snacks and two kilograms of rice for his family.
‘Honest, good man’
Kelton Mate, chief of the parks and plazas division of the City General Services, is proud of Mamita’s deed.
“He could have kept the bag considering that there was no one at that time to claim it,” Mate said. “The money was huge and so tempting. But he was really an honest and good man.”
The bag was not Mamita’s first find. Coworkers said he had found valuables before and always returned these to their owners.
On March 11, the city government honored Mamita for his honesty. Mayor Alfred Romualdez gave Mamita a certificate of appreciation and P5,000. Vice Mayor Jerry Yaokasin gave him P3,000.
Mamita is given permanent status starting March and will receive a salary of P11,000 a month.
Asked what he will do with the bigger pay, Mamita said he can now finally fix his house.