An ‘education city’ in Clark

Joe Fernandez was chatting with friends at the students’ common area of the Clark Education City when we chanced upon him. At once, with little prodding, he told us his story.

He had been for many years an OFW based in Israel (“not as a caregiver but as a heavy machinery operator,” he clarified) but when his contract ran out, he was forced to come home. While here, he was surfing the Internet when he came upon an announcement from a recruiting agency for workers willing to work in Australian mines. Contacting the agency, he was interviewed and screened then sent to Clark Education City (CEC) where he was to undergo both English language and skills training before being deployed abroad by Barminco, the Australian mining firm that is currently sponsoring his training.

Asked how much he expects to earn, he tells us “I have a friend who has been working in the mines for some years and he tells me he earns the equivalent of P1 million a month!” If he does well in Australia, he says, he could initially earn some P500,000 monthly. Our jaws drop in astonishment, and we journalists rue that once again, we find ourselves in the wrong line of work.

A native of Vigan, Joe has been married for 15 years, “but if you put together all the time I have spent with my wife and children, it would be just five years,” he estimates, with a note of sadness. But, he says, even if his Australian working visa can be renewed for up to seven years with an option to bring over his family there, he has no plans of staying in Australia permanently. At 49, he says, he is getting on in years, and being diabetic, he doesn’t see himself working for much longer. “I plan to go home and finally join my family for good,” he says.

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Joe may be part of the decades-long diaspora that has seen millions of our country folk scattered to virtually all ends of the earth. The migration of Filipino workers and professionals around the world has been decried as a “brain drain,” but to people like Joe, who is a vocational school graduate, it has also afforded them a chance to rise above poverty and give their families a shot at a better life and future.

His stay at the CEC is part of his transition from his years of working in Israel to his eventual transfer to Australia.

Aside from enjoying free hands-on training from an international faculty, he also gets free board and lodging (“The air-con is so cold, I think they’re preparing us for Australian weather!” he comments) plus a monthly allowance of P10,000. In fact, the only reason he was still hanging around with his friends on a Friday afternoon, when many CEC students had already gone on weekend breaks, was that he was waiting to collect his allowance so he could go home to Vigan for the long weekend.

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Owned and managed by Site Group International, an Australian company that began training workers in hospitality courses (hotel, restaurant and institutional management, cookery) but has since expanded to health care and industrial courses, Clark Education City is located in Clark Freeport Zone, on the site of the former Centennial Expo.

The campus, which covers 300,000 square meters, was in bad repair at the start. “When the owners first saw the place two years ago,” says Angel Ordoño, now CEC VP for regulatory and corporate affairs, “the grass was as high as a grown man.” Site Group spent 11 million Australian dollars clearing the grounds, refurbishing the existing buildings (including the amphitheater) and building new structures. Before then, the Australians had gone to Vietnam and other countries in the region to scout for locales but found Clark to be the best site for their first campus outside Australia. “Among the factors we considered,” says CEC director Steve Ghost, “was the proximity to an international airport (the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport), the infrastructure in place, and the large English-speaking population.”

Currently, CEC hosts some 400 students, with some coming from countries like India, Bangladesh and Vietnam. During school breaks, adds Ordoño, young Koreans come for an intensive month-long English course, which explains the story books and textbooks in the library alongside cookbooks, linguistics texts, and industrial primers.

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Ordoño concedes that tuition at CEC can be pricey, which is why they also resorted to a “study-now-pay-later” plan. Still, tuition at CEC is about half what students would pay in Australia.

Some students, though, have already found employment in Australia, and recently the school hosted nine alumni working in hotels and restaurants in the country. CEC stresses, though, that they offer no guarantees of Australian employment.

They expect the number of students to increase dramatically, though, once the “sponsored students” scheme goes into full swing. “The Australian mining industry alone needs to fill a shortfall of some 60,000 workers,” remarks Ghost. Like Fernandez, potential students need to go through accredited recruitment agencies before they are screened by future employers who then pay for their short stay (of a few months) at CEC. Only upon successfully completing both the technical and English language requirements (students receive both a Tesda certificate and its equivalent in Australia) will students be sponsored for work in Australia.

Throughout the campus, walls are filled with murals depicting Australian scenes. Even the dining rooms and dorm halls bear the names of Australian cities and figures. “This is to make them comfortable with Australian culture and scenery,” explains Ordoño, although no one could guarantee if that includes the notorious Aussie accent as well.