AUSTRALIA
The Australian
CAROLINE OVERINGTON
From:The Australian
August 04, 2012
IT is tempting to start this story with: A truck driver, a police officer and a Catholic priest walk into a bar … because that is what happened.
It was 11pm on a sweaty night in Manila. The bar was called Shinju No Mori – “Forest of the Pearls”. The truck driver was Steve Christie of Cranebrook in Sydney’s west; the police officer was the barrel-chested Ray King of the Liverpool Local Area Command; the priest was the trendily dressed and shaved-of-head Father Kevin Lee of the Padre Pio Catholic Church in Sydney’s Glenmore Park.
The three men had been on a pilgrimage in the Philippines with seven others from their church. They’d visited an orphanage, snorkelled around the islands, and were generally having a good time. The bar was directly below the hotel where they were staying. There were women out the front known as “guest relations officers” – poor girls from the villages who lend a bit of glamour to the joint and encourage Westerners to drink and use the karaoke machine.
So the three men sat down and a couple of bar girls approached, including a 25-year-old mother of two who told the group that her name was Dimple; in fact, it was Josefina. Like the others, this slightly built woman was from a poor village – her own mother had died when she was just 16 and her job before moving to Manila was selling plastic buckets in the streets.
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