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LOOKING FOR LOVE

Geraldine Lahaylahay and her cousin Leah Luyao were forced to quit school for financial reasons and now work as cooks in a streetside stall.   CEBU, The Philippines -- Maridel Bacurnay may soon be winging her way to a new life in Toronto.

The 26-year-old cashier has been corresponding by e-mail with a 32-year-old Toronto accountant since last fall.

The man, whose identity Bacurnay would not reveal, is one of six prospective husbands from Canada, Britain and the United States that she has met over the Internet. While unsure of which suitor to pick for a trip to the altar and a ticket to the West, Bacurnay has narrowed her choice down to the Canadian, an English farmer and an income tax adviser from Boston.

I met Bacurnay through the Internet while researching what the Philippine government and Philippine media call “mail-order brides.” I forked over $40US to retrieve Bacurnay’s address and 20 others from a Web site devoted to putting young women from Cebu in touch with lonely men from cooler climes.

Women pay nothing to sign up with the many different international electronic matchmaking services targeting the Philippines. What they get in return for supplying their addresses are letters from hundreds of Western men. Some of these men, encouraged by what they have read and the photographs they have received, pay $3,900 and more to fly with organized tours to this island in the heart of the Philippine archipelago to meet face to face with 15 or 20 would-be brides.

INTRODUCTIONS “I keep my tours small. I do quality introductions,” boasted David Ryan of Asian Sun Tours, as he chain-smoked in a hotel lobby moments before his own marriage to a Filipina 20 years his junior.

Outraged by what is regarded as a modern-day trade in human flesh, the Philippine government made it illegal nine years ago to mention anything about Filipina women as ideal brides or sex partners in newspaper advertisements and pamphlets. Upon conviction, the penalty is imprisonment for up to six years.

The murder of seven Filipinas who married “pen pals” from Texas, Oregon and Australia, the use of photographs of Filipinas seeking to meet men through a German erotic magazine and the revelation that the wife of Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols was a “mail-order bride,” has only fuelled the debate.

Philippine Vice-President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has declared war on what she described as the “e-mail sex trade.” But she has admitted that it has proven very difficult to lay charges against companies based overseas which use the Internet.

  Like many Americans, Ryan first came to the Philippines with the U.S. Navy. The New Jersey-based travel company he founded is among several cited contemptuously by the Philippine media as a mail-order business.

Ryan skirts the law by describing prospective brides as pen pals. But his own brochure mentions immigration and marriage repeatedly and the 46-year-old entrepreneur claimed that between 300 and 400 of the meetings he has arranged here for foreigners have led to marriages. “I know our government doesn’t like this. But I don’t care,” said Bacurnay, who spoke with me in her office at the United Coconut Planters Life Assurance Corporation. “We have our freedom and we choose for ourselves. There is nothing that can be done to stop us from giving our names to pen pal companies. I don’t think of this as a dirty business. That’s a bad image to have. We’re not being forced. This is what we want.”

Across town, in a small, mosquito-infested apartment that is home to 15 cousins and lodgers, 21-year-old Noemi Montes, was of the same opinion. “We’re scared about doing this. Maybe we will go to prison just for talking about it,” the 21-year-old accounting student said. “But how can the government control who we marry?”

In an advertisement on the Internet, which prompted 90 responses, Montes described herself as “patient, loving, understanding, romantic and definitely very affectionate.” She said she hoped to have children and was seeking a man older than 35 years of age from the U.S., Canada, Australia or Europe. Her only specific request was that “he should know how to treat me well. That is all I ask.”

This bio and the accompanying photograph of the slim, long-haired student were enough to get her on an airplane to Australia where she met a divorced man almost exactly twice her age. To prove that she had made the trip, she volunteered photographs of herself in front of the Sydney Opera House and at a backyard barbecue.

ROMANTIC

Noemi Montes, with her cousins, advertised herself as “patient, loving, understanding, romantic and very affectionate.” “He’s not a bad guy, but I won’t marry him because I found out that he knows many other women,” Montes said. “While I was staying with him another Filipina rang him. So, it’s his fault we didn’t marry, not mine.”

Montes, who has nine brothers and sisters at home on the island of Negros Occidental, said that as well as e-mail correspondence she had received bags of letters since giving her address out three years ago. Like Maridel Bacurnay, she, now has a short list with a couple of names on it. But she was angry about many of the letters she received. “I don’t want any more pen pals. It’s too much trouble,” Montes said as several young cousins played noisily around her. “I can see in their faces that some of those who wrote to me are bad men. They are lechers. They would ask me about sex.”

David Ryan of Asian Sun Tours has sent the addresses of the 800 Filipinas in his data base to “thousands and thousands of men” in Canada and the U.S. Sorting the good men from the bad wasn’t always easy, he admitted. “You get a lot of low life in this, especially from newspaper ads. Some of them think it’s a piece of furniture they’re ordering,” the lanky, jet-black-haired American said. “Guys on the Internet are generally better educated, but not all of them. One guy who sent me an e-mail asked for nude photos.” “A lot of the operators in this business are real sleaze. There aren’t too many decent ones.”

Among Ryan’s many rivals are Japanese, Korean and German tour agencies. What Ryan had to say about them was mostly unprintable.

Ryan claimed to be a cut above his foreign and American competitors; however, some of the material in his own brochure seemed to contradict this. “The Filipina woman is a truly traditional woman and that is hard to find in the world today and almost impossible to find in the U.S.,” the brochure said.

Filipinas were described as “extremely sensuous, but the man’s looks and age, from our experience, do not seem to be very important to them ... They actually seem to like doing housework -- no kidding! These women are family oriented, not to mention how ingrained it is in her because of her culture, to please her husband.”

As for fears that the bride-to-be might fail American medical checks, Ryan advised clients, “Remember, gentlemen, these are fine, decent women and the majority of them are virgins.”

None of this seemed to faze Michelle Dimol, a 28-year-old accountant who helps co-ordinate Asian Sun Tours’ arrangements in Cebu and who is, herself, on the lookout for a foreign husband.

MONEY FOR FAMILIES “I’m young, free and single and I want a white man because they are so guapo (handsome),” Dimol said. “Many girls have pen pals. It’s a good way to meet. Whether with mail or e-mail, it is our only way to communicate. We don’t have the money to travel and meet men.”

Dimol and other Filipinas receiving e-mails from would-be paramours agreed that the main reason that women from the Philippines wanted to marry foreigners was to get money to help their families. “They can call us mail-order brides if they want, but it’s a really good idea because it is practical,” said Geraldine Lahaylahay, 19, who has read the dozens of e-mails that her 19-year-old cousin, Leah Luyao, gets. “Our priority is to improve our financial situation and this is the best way to do it,” Lahaylahay added.

Lahaylahay and Luyao were forced to quit school because they could not pay annual tuition fees of about $600 a year. They now make their living cooking food at a streetside stall owned by their aunt, Colata Gonzalez. They live with her and five female cousins in a rickety two-room wooden house in a teeming slum a couple of hundred metres from the provincial jail. “I’m all for it if they marry a foreigner,” said Gonzalez, who is 42. “Lots of our neighbours have married foreigners. I’d do it myself if I thought there was any chance a foreigner would still find me attractive. “If they succeed, they will be missed. But they can come back and visit and when they do they can bring presents for the family.”

Asked if they thought Canadian women would ever marry a Filipino man through the Internet, Gonzalez and her nieces laughed for the longest time. “It’s all economic. There is always a crisis here. It never ends,” Luyao said. “Even if some of the men who write are bad, our lives can’t be worse than they are here, so I’m not afraid.”

Despite her own circumstances, which were movingly illustrated by her tumble-down residence in a particularly rough part of town, Montes said she was not rejecting Filipino men because they were poor. “I just don’t want a Filipino and that’s that,” she said. “They just don’t suit my taste. I feel my future is overseas. I want to be in another country.”

  Ryan said it would be wrong to blame Filipinas for trying to improve their lot through marriage. “Let’s be honest, anyone with a choice will marry someone richer rather than someone poorer,” he said. “These girls are trying to marry Americans and Canadians because they want a better life. They get great educations here and then can’t get a job so they end up working for almost nothing as nannies in Hong Kong.”

Ryan was certain that he knew why his clients wanted to marry Filipinas. “Do you like Canadian women?” he asked. “I mean, let’s face it, they have an attitude problem” without elaborating. “Most of the girls I introduce are friends of friends or cousins of friends of friends. The majority are of average or a little above average looks. But some are stunning, drop-dead gorgeous. “The guys? Well, not a lot of them look like Mr. America. Not everything is in their favour, either. One hundred guys may be writing one girl so she can choose the cream of the crop. The girls take the best they can get and a lot of the guys end up with Dear John letters or nothing at all.”

While in Cebu for his marriage and honeymoon, Ryan was also helping two men from the U.S. meet Filipinas. But all was not going well.

Earl from Lexington, Massachusetts, a geeky-looking farmer in his early 30s, was so upset by the chaos and poverty he saw on the way from Manila to Cebu that he refused to meet any of the women who wanted to meet him. Repelled and homesick, his visit to the Philippines lasted 48 hours.

The first “date” of Previn, an Indian-born computer type in his 30s who moved to the U.S. in his teens, was also a disaster. He was so socially inept that he ordered dinner for himself but did not know enough to do so for the pretty 20-year-old woman he had invited, so she went without anything to eat.

On his second date, which ended unhappily after a few minutes, Previn was so paralyzed with fear that he was virtually unable to speak.

Ryan was embarrassed, annoyed and greatly amused by the bizarre antics of Earl and Previn. He insisted that he had never before had such misfits for clients.

Maridel Bacurnay was obviously hoping for more. “I’ve made a folder for each one and keep their letters and photos in it,” she said. “I haven’t chosen yet. I’m still fixing my mind. I’m not so choosy. I just want someone older than me.”

FINALIST FROM TORONTO

As for the Torontonian who is one of her finalists, she said she kept his photo in a place of honour in her bedroom. “He’s taller than me and has a nice body because he works out once or twice a week. He’s like a big playful kid,” she gushed of a man she has only spoken to once briefly on the telephone. “He was upset because he had a girlfriend before in Canada and it didn’t work out. He said he had heard that Filipinas were of good character, so he tried this.”

Maridel knew little about Canada, other than that it had had a severe blizzard in January and has a stronger economy than the Philippines. “Nothing about Canada bothers me because Filipinos call it the gateway to the U.S. Once you’re there it is easier to get into the States,” she said. “I know about the murders, but I feel that if it is your time to die, you die. From what I can read from their letters, the intentions of my suitors are good. “My plan is to marry a foreigner so that I can take care of my family. My mother really, really wants me to go abroad. She wants me to marry so that I can help my brothers and sisters and so that she can join me there. Her big idea is that we will one day go to Disneyland together and meet Mickey Mouse.”