HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — From his Tumon hotel room, while on a 14-day mandatory quarantine, he could see just how beautiful and warm the island is.
He would have been in snowy Amman, Jordan, in February, he thought to himself, were it not for his new foreign service assignment in the midst of the pandemic.
Meet the new Philippine consul, Ferdinand “Ferdie” Flores, of the Philippine Consulate General in Hagåtña.
“It’s a pleasant surprise,” he said of Guam’s vibe, where everybody knows everybody and there’s a melting pot of cultures. “It’s a little bit of everything.”
Flores started his career at the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs in 2008. Two years later, he was stationed in Tel Aviv, Israel, for a four-year stint.
Flores was later sent to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. About 680,000 Filipinos live and work in UAE.
“That’s where you get the consular break-in,” he said.
He was transferred to Amman, Jordan in 2019 for two years, and arrived on Guam in February for a four-year assignment.
“For me, the pandemic is a test of our operational continuity plans,” he said. “In our case, we never stopped operations. In Jordan, we were working nonstop. We were working at home, to follow prevailing restrictions there.”
Coming from the Middle East and moving to Guam brings a lot of differences that go beyond physical and political geography as far as consular services are concerned.
“Where I came from, most of the Filipinos were working as household staff workers. They were in live-in situations so we don’t see them most of the time,” he said. “But with this community in Guam, it’s a community of professional Filipinos so the tempo and depth of engagements would be different.”
The Philippine consulate has jurisdiction over Philippine interests on Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Republic of Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia.
Whatever challenges come his way, Flores is fully prepared, given his varied background that goes beyond foreign service.
He has a bachelor of science degree in biology from the University of the Philippines in Los Baños, Laguna, south of Manila. Coming from a family of educators, Flores taught high school chemistry and physics for three years after college.
Flores always wanted to pursue a career in Philippine government, and that goal took him to work for the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice and the Office of the President.
For years, he was staff officer for media issues with the Philippines’ Anti-Terrorism Task Force, before it became the Anti-Terrorism Council.
He knew back then that eventually he would go into foreign service.
“I think I was preparing for the foreign service work by going through all these offices. My boss then was heavily working on the first anti-terrorism law. So from 2002 until 2008, I was working for him, and it kind of snowballed into foreign service work later on,” he said.
In his younger years, he said, he asked himself, “What job or career will entail a lot of talking, which I probably enjoyed when I was younger? Then I said, ‘I’d like to see the world and meet other Filipinos.’ So foreign service it is.”
Ferdinand “Ferdie” Flores, of the Philippine Consulate General in Hagåtña.
Photo by Dontana Keraskes/The Guam Daily Post
