The News UpFront: (Commentary in lieu of TOP STORY) as of Thursday, 30 August 2007

~ They are coming from all over. The saboteurs working behind the official facade of government-funded community organizations. And now this threat coming from the prim-and-proper-looking-in-picture-only Edna Consing Concepcion and her infant baby called Fayl-lam-bed.

By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ

SAN DIEGO - Two phone rings broke my quiet afternoon last week (Thursday, 23 August)when an off-and-on acquaintance named Edna Consing Concepcion called, her voice seething with anger.

Her call, the kind that launches into a tirade before one could say a polite hello, wasn't something new for me. I've had worst. Usually, I will just let the caller ventilate until the curses become redundancies.

Over the years I have acquired some expertise dealing with those calls. My experience comes from many instances of having to confront adversaries of different persuasions, shapes and sizes and degrees of danger they project.

As an investigative journalist, my work is a natural magnet for those who feel aggrieved. While a story could be as objective as it is informational in the recitation of facts, there are others who see that same story as an affront on their persons.

Edna Consing Concepcion falls in that category.

She would complain but not answer questions. She would throw tantrums but would not clarify. She would call but not respond to emails. In other words, she simply doesn't want to be pinned down by written records as having said things, the best to deny everything.

I'm sure she would complain again why she's being written up. Such a highly-visible persona like her who is always seen surrounded by a herd . . . of politicians, of officials in high places, of people who made it big, except the pedestrian among us?, she should expect scrutiny from the public.

In the past two issues of the Philippine Village Voice, I believe Edna Consing Concepcion hardly found the time to smile. But in a recent full-page pictorial in the Asian Journal that must have cost an arm and a leg to publish, she was a picture of happiness, so full of verve and abundant glee that her eyes were reduced to a moving slit.

I must have spoiled her feeling of instant success in seeing her production venture overwhelmed and smashed into pieces by what I wrote later in my "Breaking News" about her newfound joy, the seven-month-old baby named fayl-lam-bed. She mothers it with girlhood chum Marilyn C. Mesina.

It's actually PhilAm BID, for chrissakes, the acronym for the Philippine American Business Improvement Districts, which hopes to breathe life to a lackluster Filipino community by, hold your breath, creating business zones out of nothing. Tall order? No, let her dream her American dream.

The length of time I waited, and still waiting, for an answer from Edna Consing Concepcion approximates the chronological and biological age of PhilAm BID. It's been that long and I will not tire waiting until she tear down her wall of indifference and shed some light about the organization.

PhilAm BID got $5,000 from Microsoft Corp.in a hocus-pocus-like turn of events in February. How such a giant, a corporate behemoth, would come down to San Diego only to join a newly-born infant named PhilAm BID (yes, seriously) is the big story waiting to be told.

And Edna Consing Concepcion would not share the story for fear, I surmise, that it would trigger a thousand and one more stories that would be unmanageable and unfavorable for her. But if there's nothing wrong with how she got Microsoft to part with $5,000, why is she evading the issue?

I hope Edna Consing Concepcion does not belong to that contemptible breed who have made silence a vow of a lifetime.

Those kinds inhabit COPAO, the Council of Philippine American Organizations, not the crooks and opportunists of Philippine American organizations (coPAo). Understandably so, because in COPAO, they would rather $27,000 just vanished in thin air than explain who pocketed it.

Silence is also a trait in Mabuhay Alliance where they would rather gladly talk about the social-climbing skills of the fat-salaried Faith Bautista whose travels would put Marco Polo to shame, than discuss issues about why attendees to its networking seminars, blah, blah, blah are always the same people.

Mabuhay Alliance is a big story waiting to happen. And I promise my readers that I will break that story regardless of whether Faith Bautista, Kim White and other officials would be pleased or not. A little more time and voila!

I should not really be that nosy. The truth, however, is I get nosier when I am faced with a blank wall. So I start from scratch and build a case like a dutiful police detective. The Filipino community has a right to know -- though I can't speak for all its members, I am one of them.

That right springs from the fact that organizations like PhilAm BID, COPAO, Mabuhay Alliance derive their support and strength from that very same community. They always make an excuse that these so-and-so projects are for the community, that these will benefit the community, etcetera, and then they raise funds.

Aren't we entitled to know then?

By the way, Edna Consing Concepcion's unexpected outburst during her phone call was to warn me. She says: "Don't write about me or PhilAm BID ever!"

As if that is not enough, she repeats: "I don't want the Philippine Village Voice to write anything about PhilAm BID! Never ever".

And before I could reply, she issues a threat: "Did you need a restraining order to do that?"