A Bacolod resident who was able to leave Kabul, Afghanistan, before its takeover by the Taliban this month is now in search of a job.
Rolie Omega Pendon, 43, of Barangay Mandalagan, who had worked in Kabul for nine years, said he hopes to find a job in Bacolod City so he does not have to work abroad anymore.
“I’m very happy to be with my family, but sad because I have no work,” he said.
Pendon, an administrative and human resource manager in the Kabul automotive industry, said he started working there in 2006 and was transferred to Uganda and Somalia before he was reassigned to Afghanistan.
He has a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology degree from the University of St. La Salle. He worked as a disc jockey for Love Radio while in his first year in nursing school in Bacolod, when the opportunity for him to work in Afghanistan came.
Pendon said that he worked for a United States-funded automotive project that maintained vehicles donated by the US government to the Afghan police and Army.
As soon as President Joe Biden announced in April that the US troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan, Pendon said they knew it would fall into the hands of the Taliban.
The US troops were the ones maintaining peace and order in Afghanistan, so without them definitely the Taliban would take over and we knew we would no longer have any security, he said.
They were demobilized batch by batch and he was able to leave Afghanistan by June 21 on a commercial flight to Dubai, and arrived in Bacolod on August 12, Pendon said.
Some of his Afghan co-workers were granted asylum in the United States, he said.
Pendon said he is afraid of what is going to happen to Afghanistan, there were well-educated Afghans working to develop their country.
The Taliban, a militant group that ran the country in the late 1990s, seized power in Afghanistan this month as U.S. troops withdrew from the country.
A U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had ousted the Taliban from power.*