Arline’s Fight

Raising money for Arline after her brain surgery. Please take time to read her story below.

Arline was introduced to me by her mother, Virgie in the year 2000, when we started a small shop and needed some honest reliable staff. Virgie was my mother’s laundry woman and earned a living looking for work from house to house.

Although Arline only finished high school due to financial hardship, we decided to employ her based on her family’s honest reputation. What struck us the most was she was a happy young lady despite being poor all her life. Her father went missing while on a boat to Malaysia from the Philippines, looking for better job opportunities to support his family.

When we moved and had to close our shop, Arline was employed as a saleslady again by another business and was earning 3,500 pesos or about $90 AUD per month. We’ve remained good friends through the years and kept in touch, mostly through Facebook.

In January 2018, Arline suddenly felt dizzy and lost consciousness. She was released from the hospital as soon as she got better.

Eventually she started having painful ears and eyes. She thought she needed new eyeglasses, so she went to the eye doctor. However, the eyeglasses didn’t help and she started experiencing severe headaches too.

She was referred to a specialist where a brain tumour (meningioma) was discovered through a CT scan. The sad part was because she knew she could not afford any surgery or treatment, she went to a herbalist instead. However, her headaches got worse, and the doctors insisted that only surgery would help.

Her family did not have any means to raise the money, so her eldest sister Geleen Erfe had to borrow somebody else’s land title to pawn to the bank so she could raise at least half the funds needed for her surgery.

She received some help from the government as an indigent patient, but she still had to leave a debt of about 340,000.00 pesos (approximately 9,200 AUD) in the hospital plus she needed to raise more than 200,000.00 pesos (about 5,500 AUD) to be able to pay the bank to release the land title that their family borrowed.
(Please see photos of documents).

Arline survived the surgery, but now has permanent damage in her vision and her walk had been affected as well. Thus, she can’t go back to work yet.

I personally saw her in January and had given her a small amount of money when I found out about her surgery.

I could genuinely relate to her situation because I also had the same condition and was operated on in 2015. However, I was in a much better position with a private healthcare in Australia.

She told me that the person who loaned the land title is wanting his property back. Arline and her family are at their wit’s end where to find the money to pay the bank. Her recovery is not progressing well because she finds her situation very stressful, and to add to that, she has to look for money every time she needs to have a check-up. The government does give her some, but not enough to cover her personal debt.

The only way I know how to help her is through fundraising and actually plead her situation through the generosity of the public.

Please help Arline get better by supporting her financially.

Thank you so much.