Nilo Narciso, a Filipino special education teacher at Talent Development, saw Apao the Friday before her death, when he helped her empty her desk at the school. He called her a cab and carried her boxes to the curb. As they waited for the taxi, he said, she promised him that despite her previous suicide attempt, she would never actually go through with killing herself. "I will make this life a better one," she told him.
Apao had made the same promise to numerous relatives and friends on both sides of the globe, and many had trouble believing that her death was really a suicide.
"I could not expect she would easily give up on her kids," said a cousin of Apao's husband, Michelle Albor-Basabe, who teaches third-grade at Patapsco Elementary and who handled her affairs after her death. "Sometimes you give up on your dreams, but not on your kids."
FOR THE RECORD - A photo caption accompanying an article in Sunday's editions about the suicides of two Filipino teachers misidentified the source of the photo. All photos of Irenea Apao were taken by Manny Lopez.
The Sun regrets the error.
Circle of support
Part of what makes Bolado and Apao's deaths puzzling to their colleagues is that a strong support network exists for the city's Filipino teachers, literally from the moment they arrive at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.
Congregants at area Filipino churches rush to bring the teachers everything from food to furniture.
Two school system administrators, Curtis and Duque, check up on them constantly and intervene whenever there's a job-related problem. They are so involved in the teachers' lives that they've earned the nicknames "Mom" and "Dad."
Most of the teachers live together, renting adjacent apartments in four buildings around the city. They carpool together. They pray together. They've developed their own governance structure with elected leaders, including an overall coordinator, coordinators for each group arriving from the Philippines, even coordinators on every floor at the Symphony Center apartment building.
As school systems around the country increasingly turn to the Philippines and elsewhere abroad to find teachers, Baltimore has become a model for the support it provides. Its foreign teacher retention rate is higher than that in many other cities.
Yet the suicides were here.
Ligaya Avenida, a recruiter who has been sending Filipino teachers to American schools for nearly a decade and referred about half the teachers now in Baltimore, said Bolado's was the first suicide she'd seen.
Officials at Amity Institute, which sponsors visas for international teachers, said Bolado was the first participant to die in their 45 years in business.
