Antonina Binsol (Posthumous)

Antonina "Tonette" Avisado Binsol was one of the prime movers of STAC-J in its early years. She was Secretary of the organization from FY 1996 to 1998 and became PRESIDENT in FY 1998 to 1999.

Tonnete was one of the founders of Tulong Pinoy Movement, an organization of overseas Filipinos. She worked tirelessly to advance and raise public consciousness of the movement's goals.

Tonette spearheaded a project to establish an international school for children of the more than 400,000 Filipinos in Japan. Sixteen months ago, with the permission of St. Anselm's church parish priest, Fr. Leo Schaumer, TP presented a free program called KABAYAN ORIENTATION FOR MIGRANT CHILDREN IN TOKYO, as a weekend bicultural school project for all Japanese-Filipino children in Tokyo to:

a) To impart learning of English and Filipino as second languages of Japanese-Filipino children and b) To provide a learning experience of Filipino values and cultural heritage of the Philippines, for :

1) Children with Japanese and Filipino parents and 2) Children with Filipino parents who are working in Japan Tonette was indefatigable in helping with the passage of the absentee voting movement, working with Filipinos in Japan.

She also started a free WEEKLY COMPUTER CLASSES for Filipino migrant workers to help migrants educate themselves, start networking to give them the social security necessary to survive in a foreign country, and study Japanese to help workers communicate better with the Japanese community, which helps foster closer ties and smooth acceptance of foreigners. This gave them a place to study, exchange information, share ideas, learn to support each other and empower them to negotiate for their rights. In August the program expands to include business startup and Japanese courses, accounting/management, English (academic and corporate), cooking/baking, and advanced computer courses such as multimedia/video- streaming, hardware assembly, troubleshooting, programming in Visual Basic/C++/Perl, graphics design, web authoring, database management, etc.

She raised funds to send Zambales' Aeta children to school, started an adult Aeta literacy program, a mud crab farm in the Philippines, facilitated access to the Internet in various Philippine communities, promoted a cyber OFWMall to buy and sell goods, the formation of a more secure and speedy manner of sending remittances to RP, OFW-TV, and numerous local economic programs geared to alleviate poverty in the country. Tonette, a one of a kind cyber and real life NGO, passed away on July 10th, 2007.

Source :The STAC-J Execom and the STAC-J Website Team 2007

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