With many new requirements from the Trump administration, it’s an uncertain time for immigrants, but Evelyn Abello, the new Philippine Honorary Consul for Alaska, hopes she can be of service.
Abello is known as Auntie Evelyn in the Filipino community in Anchorage, where she’s made her home for more than 40 years.
Earlier this month, she made a trip to San Francisco to the Philippine General Consulate to train for what is mostly a voluntary position. Now she is ready to serve the whole state of Alaska.“It’s kind of a challenging time to be in this position,” Abello said, “but I take things in stride and kind of like, deal with issues in the moment.”
Abello has worked as a teacher, counselor and as a longtime investigator for the Alaska Human Rights Commission. She says these experiences have been good preparation for this new role.
Abello says there will be times she’ll be called upon to help Filipinos in distress, but the job mostly involves a lot of clerical work, like helping people with travel documents such as lost passports.
Beyond this, Abello also hopes to raise the profile of Filipinos in Alaska, who are the state’s largest immigrant group. More than 35,000 live here and make up almost five percent of the state’s population.
“We are a diverse group. And so we have over 400 dialects in the Philippines,” said Abello, who believes it’s a mistake to think of Filipinos as a monolithic group. She says even though Tagalog is the national language for the Philippines, there are still language barriers for Alaska Filipinos, who sometimes resort to using broken English to communicate with each other.
Although Filipinos originally came to Alaska to work in fisheries and mining, Abello says they’ve moved into new fields such as government services, home health care and more recently into education, where teachers from the Philippines have been recruited to ease staffing shortages in rural schools.
There’s another aspect of the job Abello hopes to cultivate – trade and tourism between Alaska and the Philippines.
“One of the products that was kind of exciting to me was cacao,” Abello said. “We have a lot of that in the Philippines.”
Abello says Filipino chocolate is one of many trade and investment opportunities she’d like to promote. Abello will serve a three-year term as honorary consul. She replaces Rebecca Carillo of Juneau,
Starting on March 11, Abello will work out of Anchorage and will have regular office hours at 920 R Street. She will be available on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 5:00-8:30 p.m. and by appointment on Saturdays.
