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By: Erin LaCombe, President & CEO, CV Strategies

A casual conversation in a hallway grew into a partnership across the Pacific and carried a daughter full circle, home to the Philippines and the profession her mother had mastered.

It began the way the things that change a life often do, with a few words in a hallway. Tom Coleman, Rowland Water District’s General Manager, does not waste a word, even in passing. What he says carries weight. He stopped his Director of Finance with an opportunity: helping a water utility in the Philippines, at no cost to customers, sponsored by the highly esteemed Asian Development Bank. Neither may have understood then that those words would change everyone who took part, and Myra in ways she could not yet name.

Of anyone at Rowland Water, Myra Malner understood the bank’s stature. She had grown up in Makati, south of Manila, the eldest of five and the only daughter. She was “the apple of my family’s eye,” as she puts it. The bank was a name she had never expected to find beside her own. Now her employer in California was sending her home, representing her mother’s trade.

In Her Mother’s Shadow

Her mother was one of the reasons Myra loved numbers and the reason she went looking for a name of her own. Linda Evangelista was a formidable figure in accounting in the Philippines who wrote textbooks other accountants studied and sat on the panel for the national CPA examinations. When Myra took her own boards, her mother had to step aside that year. Myra passed. Everyone knew whose daughter she was.

By her twenties, she had her own career as an auditor at Ernst & Young and a compliance manager at an arm of Citibank, but her mother’s name reached every room first. At 29, she left for California, found water at a mutual company in 2011, and came to Rowland Water in 2020.

The Long Way Home

Norzagaray Water District sits in a rural town north of Manila. Myra and the Rowland Water delegation arrived ready and eager on ground she knew. The general manager, Aimer Cruz, and his staff took the team in immediately, and to Myra, they felt like old colleagues from the first day.

She had come prepared to be the bridge, switching from her careful English to the Tagalog of her childhood and back, setting the tempo of every meeting. The exchange ran both ways. At Rowland, 29 employees serve nearly 14,000 connections; at Norzagaray, 94 serve 24,000, with much of the work still done by hand. They showed the staff how the right tools and steadier finances could ease that load; in return, they came away humbled by how much Norzagaray did with what it had.

Off the clock, days filled with shared meals and faith. On Easter, she brought Tom to Mass, and afterward to the back of the church, where her mother had been laid to rest. Linda had died the year before the first trip, and the accounting profession was full of her. Alone in a hotel room, Myra imagined her mother learning that her daughter had come home on a project bearing the bank’s seal and wished she could have seen it. Her husband told her that her mother knew and was proud.

Her last trip, for the graduation, marked what Norzagaray had built. The exchange came back to California, where the Norzagaray team observed a Rowland Water board meeting and signed a memorandum of understanding. What had begun as an assignment had become, for both sides, a friendship.

Within Reach

Sending staff abroad can look like a heavy lift for a small agency. In practice, the bank covered the cost, and the gain came home. The people who went returned sharper and more committed to the customers they serve, having seen what reliable water means. This was a public agency giving back, and Rowland Water is one of California’s most “special” special districts. Myra believes other districts could do the same across the world.

Full Circle

The phrase Rowland Water lives by is “caring for our neighbors,” and in Norzagaray, Myra saw how far it could travel. Aimer said they should meet whenever she came home. So, last December, she asked to bring her son. He sent a driver, and 20-year-old Kyle, a student at Fullerton College, came north from Manila to meet the people his mother had worked beside. It was the lesson Linda had given Myra as a girl, taking her into neighborhoods that taught her what enough was. If that were her last day, she told her husband, she could say she had done what she set out to do.

Rowland Water District’s partnership with Norzagaray Water District was supported by the Asian Development Bank and Royal HaskoningDHV and was formalized in a memorandum of understanding in February 2025.