Ilonggo lad joins Boeing

By Herbert Vego

IT’S not everyday that a young Filipino gets an invitation to work for the prestigious Boeing, the world’s largest manufacturer of aircraft.

Such is the good fortune now befalling Leopoldo “Ajin” Moragas II, a 24-year bachelor from barangay Caitib, Miag-ao, Iloilo.

As I was saying in a previous column, Ajin had passed an exam and assessment test for new employees at the 40-hectare Boeing assembly plant in Everett, Washington, USA.

The good news today is that the company has asked him to start training with pay on February 13 this year. Wow, what a privilege!

Ajin is the only child of retired banker Leopoldo “Doods” Moragas and educator Haydee Gequinto of Miag-ao. The three now live in Seattle, Washington.

The Moragas surname certainly rings a bell.  Dad Doods had retired as senior assistant vice-president of the Philippine National Bank (PNB).

But here comes the son hitting the aerospace before he could finish a course in Aerospace Engineering which he had started to take in Seattle.

Having passed the exam and assessment test, however, Ajin could now finish the course with the help of the company he had aspired to work for, his father enthused in an online conversation with this writer.

The young Moragas will join a team of professionals assigned to assemble ten 737-MAX  jet planes.

Google says that Boeing beginners may earn at least US $23 per hour, which translates to around PHP 1,380 per hour.

I don’t know much about how he spent his high school and college lives.  But I can’t forget the child I met for the first time.

Leopoldo “Ajin” Moragas II was only a 6-year-old boy when I met with him and his parents at Marina Beach in Miag-ao. A boy that young was supposed to be in kindergarten school.  It amazed me to know that he was already in grade two.

The boy had entered kindergarten I at age 4. Since he could already read and write in English, he was immediately accelerated to kinder II in the second week. And at age 5, he was in grade one.

At the beach, we asked him to name the planets in the solar system. He enumerated the planets without pause: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto.

We asked him to name the bones in the human skeletal system. He did.

We asked him to solve an instant addition problem on paper:1,635,412 plus 582,346. Within a minute, he wrote the right answer – 2,217,758.

With his large magic slate and leadless pencil, Ajin drew what we had asked him to draw: map of the Philippines, map of the world, elephant, lion, snake, dog, rat and monkey, among others. He did them all in near-perfect scale and dimension purely from memory!

When was the first time that the boy showed intelligence?

“When he was seven,” Doods recalled, “I bought him a trial-and-error plastic ball with assorted geometric holes and matching plastic figures like rectangle, star, circle, oblong, triangle and square. He inserted the right figures in the right holes on the first try.”

I asked Ajin to recite Rizal’s Last Farewell. He did, forgetting not a single word, in 10 minutes.

Surely, the best is yet to come for this boy who has turned into a man.

-oOo-

BEWARE OF CONDO SCAMS  

WITH the Dinagyang Festival forthcoming in Iloilo City, many so-called sales agents of condominium units are busy “helping” tourists and transients find a place to stay.  Let this experience of a friend be a lesson to learn from.

A certain Cheska sales-talked him into occupying a unit at Avida Towers for two days at PHP 40,000 per day.  He agreed to pay PHP 80,000 for two days through the agent plus a “refundable security deposit” of PHP 20,000 for whatever bills (say, the Internet and phone calls) he might incur while occupying the unit.

True enough, my friend and his two companions occupied the unit for two days but got no refund of his “security deposit” from the agent despite repeated demands.

Sad to say, the real owner of the condo unit had not been identified.

You see, it is now a common practice for unit owners to lease them to tourists and transients through agents who are supposedly trustworthy.

Beware, folks!