I Love Philippines Too!

Filipino Famous Comedian: Edwin San Juan

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 10:30:00 +0000

Pilipino fride, punny comedian! Hahaha! He's fun and he's younger in this video! More vidoes of Edwin San Juan can be accessed in youtube. If you're a Filipino, or someone who knows the Filipino culture, weaknesses and some unique stuff, you will surely enjoy his comedy! The f's and the p's, we indeed interchange most of the time... that's just pucking punny, isn't it??? :=)

Have fun andMabuhay!

Scholarship Grant for Filipino Students in University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB)

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 20:11:00 +0000

I had the great honor and luck to have stumbled into this lady's blog and she advised me in my previous post about reading that, in memory of her father, ascholarship grant in thePhilippines is offered! Isn't that a good news for Filipino students? For fellow Filipinos, please help disiminate this information to your friends and families who might be qualified. I copied the information about qualification to the site where the info is. Feel free to visit the site yourself, here. If you can please repost this in facebook and other social meadia.

Who is eligible for this scholarship?
The Shouichi Yoshida Memorial Scholarship (SYMS) shall be granted to students of any nationality, coming from economically handicapped families and gifted intellectually. The field of specialization shall be agriculture and the fellowship shall be restricted to the first university degree to be operated only in institutes in the Philippines.

Scholarship Grant

Full scholarship offers a stipend of P2,000 per month for 10 months per school year for students from the University of the Philippines at Los Baños plus tuition, matriculation and miscellaneous school fees; P1,800 per month for 10 months per school year for students from other agricultural universities in the Philippines plus tuition, matriculation and miscellaneous school fees.

Scholarship Requirement

Qualifications

• Scholastically promising
• Economically needy
• Field of specialization: agriculture
• Proficient in English
• Should pass the UPCAT and NSAT exams
• Of good moral character

Basis of selection and relative weight of each

• Financial/economic condition
• Secondary/high school grades
• English proficiency
• UPCAT and NSAT exams

Financial condition

Local applicants

Family income of P900 and below 40 points
Family income of P901- P1100 30 points
Family income of P1101-P1300 20 points
Family income of P1301-P1500 10 points
Family income of P1501 and above 0 points

Foreign applicants

The financial condition needs to be certified by a government agency/institute in applicant’s country. This institute will likewise determine the standard of living in this particular country specifically the area where the applicant comes from. Information on the occupations and salaries of parents, brothers and sisters of the applicant will also be determined.

Grades
High school honor graduate or belonging to the upper 5% of the graduating class.

The educational standard of the applicant’s country shall be considered. Through the country’s education agency/institution, the UPCAT exam shall be given to the applicant.

Supporting papers needed

• Application form previously filled up and signed
• Photocopy of secondary school grades or transcript of records
• Certification from the school’s principal that the applicant belongs to the upper 5% of the graduating class if not an honor student or is an honor student.
• Results of UPCAT and NSAT exams
• Results of English proficiency exam
• Certification of financial status from the state or photocopy of income returns of preceding year
• One page typewritten essay on the topic: Why do you want to study agriculture and what benefits do you expect from it for yourself and your country?

Requirements for Maintaining the Scholarship

• The grantee shall get a weighted average of at least 2.5 from at least 15 academic units per semester with no grades below 2.75 in both academic and non-academic subjects.
• The grantee shall submit his grades to the scholarship committee at the end of each semester, within one week after the final examination period, for evaluation.
• The grantee shall consult the designated adviser and the committee regarding plans for dropping a subject. The committee reserves the right to approve or disapprove dropping of subjects. The grantee will not be allowed to retain less than 15 academic units during a semester, except during the grantee’s last semester in college.
• The grantee shall not transfer to another school or college, nor change course, without consultation with and approval of the scholarship committee.
• The grant will be enjoyed for a period of 5 years or until the grantee graduates, whichever is shorter.
• The grantee shall automatically lose his scholarship, should he fail to meet the grade and number of credit requirement.

After graduation, the grantee is requested to keep the committee informed of his intellectual pursuits and progress once every 2-3 years.

Please contact: Romeo Visperas (r.visperas@cgiar.org) should you wish to apply.

Filipino Readers are More Powerful Citizens and Knowledge is a True Power

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 08:25:00 +0000

Filipinos who read daily are more powerful. Is that true? I cannot argue otherwise. The late Ernie Baron would always say, "Knowledge is Power" and that is not only a slogan or a motto but a reality! When we read, we exercise our brain. When we read often, we will ne exposed to different opinions and we will be able to weigh down these varying arguments and it will enable our brains to formulate and weigh down these information that would eventually allow us to decide wisely on a certain scenario. According to a source, reading "is the mastery of basic cognitive processes to the point where they are automatic so that attention is freed for the analysis of meaning."

Why am I emphasizing this importance in reading? I was browsing for Philippine news when I saw the headline about reading and indeed, it is hightime that FIlipinos try to get more educated. And reading is oneof the best tools to achieve that! Why Filipinos should read? and Read? AND READ even MORE? Knowledge is Power, yes, I repeat, Knowledge is a very strong power in every sense!

1. Reading makes the reader become a better person. If we read, we widen our perspective. We get influenced lesser. Reading exercisesour brain to comprehend something. If we read what is happening, we absorb this information in our brain and it becomespart of us, as if we ourselves experienced what we read. It awakens our imagination and it makes us a person capable of understanding something we ourselves have not experienced in reality yet.

2. Reading allows us to be impartial. Wiser individuals don't decide withour evidence. A wiser individual weighs evidences 1 vs evidence 2. But an even wiser individual would go beyond evidence one and two to even understand what's going on. This person would dig further and see the root of the presented, available and dug evidence to arrive to the best conclusion. And this person usually has the better life of the three!

3. Reading will lead you to your dreams! In Philippines, the horizon of Filipinos can be really very limited. The country itself is like a prison of each own. Crossing another country is not a simple thing to do. Without reading, it's difficult to imagine what's outthere! Through reading, our imagination work. We are exposed to a different world. It gives us the possibility to see beyond what our eyes are laid to. You may say, why not TV? TV is very easy, we see faster, we lose the image faster. It does not exercise our imagination because it's all there: spoken, shown, no more space to dream. With reading, we discover new things, new experience, and from the limited things we knew, reading made us realize there is something more and we are entering a new ray of direction for our lives.

4. It goes without saying: Reading makes us more informed, more intelligent. And once we are itellignet enough, we will realize that the more we know, the more we don't know. And we are at the zeal of having more knowledge...and it never stops... By this time however, we are better citizens who know better, we would like to improve, and improve and improve and learn and learn further. And who are these people? These people are usually those who constitute the elite of their group, the better informed, the more financially stable. And it actually started by just reading... and reading more!

Simple as it seem, it is not simple to develope. The èarent should devise ways for their children for them to love reading. They should devise ways to make the children love reading. And how? Story books, illustrated children books, work on the child's imagination...not only TV, not only toys! It's not the child alone, the parents themselves have a big part to play. Read and your children will see that reading islovely if you yourself do it!

Reading's an undervalued treasure!

I Pray to the Almighty Powers for the Success and Peace of the Philippine 2010 Presidential Elections

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sun, 09 May 2010 07:51:00 +0000

As a Filipino,

I ask the favor of the Almighty One
To allow us to have successful and peaceful day
On this day, when the public servants are to be chosen
And this day begins on the 10th of May 2010.

Voter or non-voter, I pray for rthis day
To be respected and to be chherished
This is the day for every Flipino voter's voice
Let respect of each others' choice and opinion reign.
This I pray, Our Almighty Being!

As a voter,

Guidance,light and strength

Oh My Dear Almighty

Is what I ask of Thee.

Please guide me,

Please give me light

Please let me have strength

For a righteous choice

Let this act of voting

Be fruitful

And maybe someday

Will lead my dear nation

To a better condition.

Please guide and let this big day

To proceed in a successful and peaceful way.

As a candidate,

Allow me Our Almighty One

To Accept the fate of this big day

I volunteered to be one of the servants of this nation

But if my fellow Filipinos choose someone else before me

Give me strength to accept this reality.

I always have wanted to serve my fellow men;

It is a gigantic honor from my side

This sense of honor can be sometimes misleading

And can change my views and approaches at times.

My Dear Almighty please help and guide me.

False Bomb Alarm in Amsterdam During the Independence Day Event/in Memory of World War Two Victims in Netherlands; the Queen Escaped, 30 Wounded

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Wed, 05 May 2010 08:10:00 +0000

My God! I live here in Netherlands! Yes, where Amsterdam is and I could have been in this event. This is rediculous and at the same time sad and really a thing to think of or to think about. What happened? I actually read this happening from, as usual, La Repubblica, the Italian newspaper (online). There is a video there as well of what happened. Today, I am at home as it is holiday here in Netherlands (whose capital city is Amsterdam, while administrative capital is the Hague, where I worked). Today, the 5th of May is Independence Day, and yesterday, the 4th of May is the Day for remembering the dead of world war two.

The panick is really something. This means that most people are so conscious of the unsafe environment around! If you want to see the video, see it here... It was during the speech of the "burgermeester" (mayor) after the two-minute silence for the world war two victims/deads that someone screamed so loud and long and then screaming that there was someone screamed "Bomb! Bomb!"and then the panick begins. That was it... and also the Dutch Queen Beatrix, who's present during the event,had to leave her post as well. It was stated that there were 30 people wounded caused by this panick.

One of the victims after the heavy panick...

The queen being lead away from the vicinity...
What can we conclude from this? The world is getting rotten,allow me to say it. Yes, we don't have freedom anymore. Anywhere is unsafe. That is why people are anxious and conscious that there might be bombing during this event because I think, the following reasons count:

The recent Time Square attempted bombing (you can click this and read the story)
Some group(s) in Netherlands are so obvious against somereligion and/or race
The Queen's Day Disaster in 2009
The general anxiety of public when it comes to safety (after of what we see in the news daily)

Whether we like it or not, this world is heavily sinking... Now who can still enjoy public events and feasts like this? Now who can live in total anxiety? We will be all prisoners in our own houses if this is the case. Sad to think of but this is reality.

Vote for a Better Philippines, Invest for the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Mon, 03 May 2010 21:15:00 +0000

Vote for a Better Philippines, One Vote Can Change the Future, Invest on the Future: Fellow Filipinos, let your voice and sentiments be heard: never miss to vote and vote wisely! Ang inang bayan ay hindi natin minana mula sa ating mga ninuno kundi utang natin sa ating mga anak! Ingatan, respetuhin at alagaan natin siya, huwag nating abusuhin at huwag nating lapastanganin.

Why Should I vote? It is only a single count after all! Who’s to vote? Maybe I vote for my cousin?

1. No, it is NOT a single count but millions. Our public servants (supposed to be) are in position courtesy of a single vote- YOUR single vote, my single vote, my mom's single vote, your mom's single vote and soon! Yes, a single vote from a lot of Filipinos. Do not think in minuscule but paint the bigger picture. Your vote will never be wasted. Practice your right. Not all have it, you know.

Voting time for Filipinos is near. Six (6) more days and the big day is there. I am sure most of you, my beloved fellow Filipinos, have your own candidates in mind already. I know in some cases it is not very simple to exercise your voting rights as I heard before that there were cases of threats and intimidation to force voters in choosing a certain candidate. Thus, for those who can do the voting freely, without problems but an hour or two to spare, it’s a wonderful thing to do.

2. My candidate is not number one in the surveys, why should I vote? My dear brother or sister, the survey is only statistical. They pull out a few thousands of people out of millions. Your candidate deserved your vote. Let the whole nation know that YOU voted your candidate, that you prefer his/her style of government

3. “TV says… radio says… I read in newspaper that… “Don’t think that way. If you are very sure of your candidate, go for it! Don’t forget that media entities get paid for advertising or for making propaganda moves against or pro a certain candidate. I don’t think media entities can be 100% trusted of what they tell you.

4. He is from my province, I vote him! That is why Philippines is being left behind because we have this sympathy votes. We vote by feelings and in the end, we take all the pain. If you are sure that a person governs not go good, even if that candidate is from your area, vote for the correct one!

5. I will vote for A as he is nice and he is handsome or for B because she is sexy, young and beautiful and she shook my hand during the candidate. My dear voter, this is not the way to have our nation should have its fate. Smiling is not enough, facial value is nothing. What we need for our country is someone strong and with a good platform of government and who surely can manage to follow that platform he/she’s presenting.

6. “Politician A promised this to me… politician B, said he’d give me…” My dear brother and sister, if you think like this, do not complain about corruption. You’ve just been corrupted in broad daylight and you don’t know it! Never trust politicians who do personal promises. They will only waste your taxes later on. Can you imagine how others like you he/she promised to? And you know what? What he or she would spend to fulfill that promise is the money of the public! What a shame!

I think I have said enough. I just hope you are guided with your choice and not clouded with doubts or biases. God bless the Philippines. Hopefully a good leader can be chosen this time.
But you know what? Still to make our lives better depends mainly (99%) upon us, and does NOT depend upon any promising corrupting politician. Vote wisely. Your children need it. Philippines need it. Vote for your children and for the Philippines!

Bombing Attempt at Times Square in New York; Indeed No Place is Safe!

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sun, 02 May 2010 13:31:00 +0000

Can you imagine if the New York Times Square is blasted to pieces? Just I read from La Repubblica, the Italian newspaper(online), I was appalled by the news. I suddenly opened the New York Times new website. Here's what I read from there: “A crude car bomb of propane, gasoline and fireworks was discovered in a smoking Nissan Pathfinder in the heart of Times Square on Saturday evening, prompting the evacuation of thousands of tourists and theatergoers on a warm and busy night. Although the device had apparently started to detonate, there was no explosion, and early on Sunday the authorities were still seeking a suspect and motive.”

Can you imagine if Americans woke up on a Sunday morning with all the Times Square blasted and lots of fellow Americans dead and wounded? And of course, the same fate for tourists within the vicinity? SInce the attempt failed, the mayor himself, Michael R. Bloomberg felt that they are "very lucky". I have to agree with that. Indeed lucky and blessed! This would have been another disaster just like September 11 attack (9/11) if it had succeeded. The mayor further noted that, "We avoided what could have been a very deadly event." That's a good thing, mayor. No one got hurt and a lot of lives were preserved. I am sure there are fellow Fiipinos (or even relatives) there as well, and I am very thankful that it is safe now and nothing really as serious as bombing happened... (sigh....)

Although there was a disturbance to the natural way of living in the vicinity, such as having several theaters and stores, and the South Tower of the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel, being evacuated, doing everything for the safety of the people always justifies the means of what the authorities have done. Congratulations for the success, on having prevented the blasting of such bomb.

“It appeared it was in the process of detonating, but it malfunctioned", Mr. Browne said as reported in NYTimes. And you know what? Sometimes there are very strong natural forces that do not allow bad deeds to succeed. But still, the sad reality is, there is no safe on earth. We can just die. Can you imagine strolling hand-in-hand with your sweetheart after exiting the theater at Times Square and a bomb will just blow both your body parts off in pieces in a matter of few minutes and before you know it, you're both facing Saint Peter? That's really a scary thought, not to add the fact that your body parts may not be completely found anymore...

Philippine May 2010 Elections Voters Activities and My Big SWS Survey Article Dissatisfaction

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:38:00 +0000

Today, I stumbled over a blog with an article about the results of February 2010 pre-election survey for the Philippine presidentiables (2010 candidate for Philippine president). It was mentioned that the basic information was from the results of the survey conducted by the social weather station (sws) in the Philippines. Since I cannot vote as I live here in Europe (though I could have registered but I was not aware then), I am indifferent to the results of that survey. I have to see the program of each candidate todecide which one to vote. However, I have to admit that I became curious of sws so I went entering the website. There were a lot to learn there, especially that this sws is an authority when it comes to survey in the Philippines. I still have to see the ideas of the COMELEC (commission on Elections) though.

One of the surveys that caught my interest is the “Planned Activities of Registered Voters”. Quoting sws:

The special SWS Pre-Election Survey conducted from February 24-28, 2010 found that registered voters have varied planned activities for the May 2010 elections: 26% plan to watch the counting of votes, 23% attend political rallies of candidates and 20% serve in organizations that will help in having an orderly and clean election.

Other planned activities for the May 2010 elections are: be a watcher for a political candidate (15%), put up posters for politicians (11%), actively campaign for a political candidate (9%), and be a member of the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) (3%).

In three pre-election surveys of 2007, to watch vote-counting and to attend political rallies were also the top planned activities for the May 2007 national elections.”

I left the Philippines when I was 22 and that was 3 years ago. I was not that mature enough to understand a lot of things about politics and I was not also exposed to the outside world and external politics… unlike now.

Looking at the results of that survey about planned activities, it seems that the voters are quite apathetic. I mean, it was not mentioned (or I have not read) that the choice in the poll/survey is mutually exclusive (if you choose one option you cannot choose another) but the percentages of participation is quite low. I mean, I can also misunderstand this survey but if only 26% of the voters wish to watch the counting of votes, does it mean that the rest are not curious enough what have become of their respective votes? Anyway, again, the sws article did not elaborate on a lot of things. The way the article is presented is very broad and confusing.

Readers like me, who are not into the world of surveys, will surely be confused. Sws put on a lot of numbers or percentages and graphical presentations and their variables but it did not explain what those variables mean. In this modern world, if you tell “watch the counting of votes”, it can also mean, (1) watch literally on voting centers, (2) watch the counting on television, (3) watch the counting through live streaming online and a lot of other ways. So which one is the meaning of that variable “watch the counting of votes”?

Information that is clear is not information at all. As I mentioned, sws is supposed to be an authority onpolls but it doesn’t seem to be in this very particular case I am presenting. If an information (it is merely a raw data in fact) is very broad and vague, it is easier for the presentor of that information (sws in this case) to confuse the public and/or manipulate them if the presentor wishes.

Please, sws personnel, make your articles/publications a bit clearer. We would like to understand things and not to be more confused. I appreciate reading in your “Survey background” how you did the survey and what is your sample size (so small for the whole population) but please, I am still asking the same thing: please elaborate/simplify/detail your variables to the reading public. Thank you.

Fellow Filipinos Gaining Respect and Giving Honor to the Philippines: Seafarers!

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:11:00 +0000

If you have seen this post here, I can say that this post now is quite relevant. You may have notice that most of the articles in this blog are kind of negative but that does not mean that my intentions are negative. I would like my fello Filipinos to wake up in their deep slumber. Only through acceptance of our shortcomings we will be able to irradicate that shortcoming(s), right? It's just like cancer, how can you cure it if you don't even acknowledge its existence?

Living here in Europe for almost three years, I have meet some people around. From these people, I learn a lot of stuff,and I also learn from fellow Filipinos or half-Filipinos I meet in various places. I hear their ideas,opinions and experiences and from their, I compare what is it in the Philippinesan/or I hear their opinions about Philippines or Filipinos.

Last December, I was able to speak with a newly-wed couple friends who just had their honeymoon in a cruise. Theirexperiences was that there are a lot of Filipinos on board the cruise ship. Although this couple are both Italians, they became awareof stuff considering they have a Filipino friend: I! After their cruise, they can only appreciate theFilipino service thay received:

Following are their comments that made my heart really skip with excitement andmade me proud to be one Filipino:

1. Why are you Filipinos so educated? No screaming, no nervousness towards customers/clients, etc?

2. You are all respectful and soft-spoken;

3. The cruise ship'sFilipino crews never missed a "Buon giorno"(good morning) and "Grazie" (thanks) whenever the situation is correct;

4. The service they give is very good.

Whenever I hear things like these, it makes me happy. I am very contented. This means a big honor to the country/nation and to the Filipino nation. Lovely reaction/feedback, right?

I need not raise my hand and say "I'm Filipino too!" in this ocassion. The fact that I know that my fellow Filipinos are in good situation, and receive good feedbacks such as this story in this article, is very fulfilling.

How I wish I hear more stories like these and more positive posts in blog will be published here rather than most of the rants of the bad stuff. Time to improve, time to be known for the good side (if not for the best) . Go Filipinos! Be the pride of the world!

Discrimination, Indeed the World is Not Mature Nor Openminded Enough to Erase Discrimination

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:37:00 +0000

Discrimination. This is the content/feature of a featureimage/article I recently stumbled in a leading Italian newspaper,la Repubblica. If you can understand the caption, well good then, but if not, I can only tell that the girl in the image below is Chinese and she feels 100% (her father is African) being so but people there don't think so...why? She is black! But why? Why are we like that? We do we look at skin colors? Notcool huh? I mean, if you have any religion or something of that kind, don't you think the One who created you is the same One who created people with other skin colors? The world is getting older but its inhabitants are still so immature and narrowminded. Very sad reality.

Visiting Spain: The Conqueror and Oppressor of Filipinos For Hundreds of Years

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:53:00 +0000

Visiting Spain during the first week of September was very special. Can you imagine this country was only known for me courtesy of my Philippine History books during my studies in the Philippines? I can still imagine the pain and oppression and the killings and the war and so many atrocities Spanish caused the mother country that I have but while I was there, I could not actually see any evidence.

I learned that for the past few decades, Spain has lagged behind among Western European countries in terms of economy but this decade, it has caught up so fast causing a very good economy and a very good place to visit as well.

Tour Guide Site I Created for Barcelona
My Barcelona Photos
It was a whole lot of fun while I was there. I could never connect what they did to the Filipinos on the current setting although whether we like it or not, there is this connection.
Why can’t we be like Spain? We have been behind our fellow Asian countries for so long and why don’t we advance this time? What’s been keeping us? How can we make our beloved country succeed? Do we have the means? And if we have, can we sustain it?

I have so many questions about my country that I hope the answers would be there before I leave this world of living. Philippines is a beautiful country and now that I am almost two years away from it, I am longing to go home. Sometimes the chaos there is something that one true-blood Pinoy can miss.

I am so glad I have Filipinos at least online and also another from work. There are also a bunch around that make me remember…. Food, culture, race, etc.

So let’s get back to the question: Will there be a leader like the Spanish leader Zapatero who can lead the Philippines causing the country to be strongly positive internally and externally? I wish so hard that the answer would be YES! But you know what, fellow Pinoy? It’s NOT in the leader alone! We have to share our efforts. Lets change for the better starting from our OWN self and household!

I Love Philippines Too Maintaining a Good Google PR of 3!

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:57:00 +0000

This very blog has been gifted with PR of 3 for more than a year already and I am so glad and so proud of it! Can you imagine posting something here and be easily searched or seen and my dream of having my ideas scattered/disseminated and shared all come true? Having or maintaining a constant good Google PR is quite a challenge. I know that as I maintain a lot of blogs, if I count, at least seven more others!

What do I do then? I do my best! With other blogs, I have also PR of 0 and even non-PR'd blogs but mostly, at least they're indexed by Google. How is that? Hard work is always an involved element. If you, he, she, or I is serious enough, you'd be inspired to submit your blogs' or posts' links to web directories. In fact, you need not shell out a cent to do that. There are so many freebies around such as this free web directory that may help us all bloggers promote what we have created and blogged about. But if you are more serious with your site or blog or posts and want to really invest on it, business web directory or directories are available for us.

In fact, this very post would surely be submitted to one of these free directories around to make sure that this very post, like the rest of the posts here will also be indexed by Google and be assigned a proper Page Rank.

Filipino Professionals Dreaming to be Abroad: Who's To Blame?

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 05:06:00 +0000

Being away from this mother nation Philippines for quite two years made me realize a lot of things. When I saw that article you see below from reading some current news about Philippines, it made me think right away. Did I dream to be abroad? What was my fellow professionals and student by then think about going abroad? What lies ahead in our own dear country? There are a thousand questions, there are a million probable answers but who knows? Who really know? As one of the professionals who's abroad, although I am no teacher at all, I ask myself who's to be blamed in the situation. I have to say that the quality of teachers and teaching methods in the country would worsen if all of those who have capabilities, greater talents and more responsible and brilliant teachers teach somewhere else instead of teaching their fellow Filipinos.

What I can say is, the quality of life and the surroundings where one has to teach also motivate the teacher: they have dream! Until these teachers see what lies ahead abroad, their dreams would be there, within themselves and so strong. We have the shortage in our own country and we have surplus for those who dream to be abroad.

The fact is, if one cannot eat and enjoy in his/her own country, it's better to be out, right? Government does not do nothing at all to alleviate the poverty. I mean, to do something does not necessarily mean to spend a lot of resources. Change start from the mind and the ideas, thus, implementing ideas that can stick in each Filipino mind, and heart and if the leaders themselves practice what they preach (this can be done on media ads in TVs, Internet, etc), change would come slowly. As they say, "Rome was not built overnight" so expect the long term effect of a long term plan!

Crazy But It Happens

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:21:00 +0000

Complains, clamours, dissatisfaction and a lot of negative things you read here about the Philippines. But as they say, the truth hurts and I usually just write the truth and others get hurt by it. But what can I do? To conquer our fears, we have to face it. Like the problems that we have in our country, to solve any of them, we have to acknowledge that problem's existence.
All I want to say is, I'd be two years out of the Philippines by November and how I wish I can gi back there this time and see how my dear country is. I miss the confusion, my friends and a lot of other things that is Pinoy.

I miss the jeep, I miss the dirt, I miss the noise, I miss the crazy heavy traffic jam! Am I crazy? Maybe it happens to you when you grow 22 years in that country and when you try to go away from practices and beliefs and customs that you later o, when you are at least 18 years of age, discovered to be stinking, lousy and useless practices..

My Fellowmen: Please Save the Nature to Save Our Future

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sat, 23 May 2009 06:23:00 +0000

Staying in Philippines for 22 years has its ups and downs. I was born in this motherland of ours, I was raised there and I was educated there. Living here in Europe is no bed of roses as well. It's always a different feeling to be at home and feel at home and just do the normal stuff I have been doing before. I tell you guys that it's no easy thing to go against what you have been doing for 22 years: culture, customs, weather, climate, people, language, race, beliefs and many other things. I really need to be adaptable, which I am lucky I am, but I still tell you that here is NOT my home.

Here, I have to obey everything. Here, I have to feel so much cold. Here, I have to do a lot of bureaucratic procedures to make one thing. Here I do not have a clue where to see bargains, which store is for the right budget, etcetera, etcetera. Here they speak Dutch and I speak English. There's always the difference here but here it's also cleaner here and people are making their nature livable, not only today but also in the future.

Although I never went abroad before 22 years, I had a lot of Korean buddies back in the University. And I quote one of them (Lee) when we talked about rivers: "We are not as stupid as you Filipinos to pollute our rivers." That was a piercing statement but that was true. What could I tell him? Should I tell him what he noted was not true? I could not! Why? Because the evidence was slapping my face right in front of us when he made that statement.

I was Lee's tutor for English conversations and proper usage of words and anything to have him pass the TOEIC examination. We made lessons in the hotel suite he rented until the examination time came. Such hotel is beside the river and the river stinks at certain hours of the day... more specifically, when we made lessons at around 3-4 in the afternoon. Outside that time frame, I don't know if the river still stinks because I'm out of the place already.

Lee explained that he took the hotel expecting a great river view and a good contact with nature. He noted that when he reserved that place, the photo he saw from online was clean. He did not expect that Philippines could be so dirty with thrown garbage and plastics right in the river as during low tides, these thrown objects rush to the river banks and the residue make up the stinky waters.

Why do we Filipinos are so selfish? Why are we not thinking of the future? Why do we throw garbage anywhere whenever we get the chance to? I don't know why! Maybe we are indeed stupid that we cannot understand what lies ahead in the future. We are so stupid to understand that we cause our own floods, we create our own land slides, and flash floods. That's for today and we just imagine the exponential effect to our next generation because of our irresponsibilities.

It's time to be properly educated. At least a little by little. If each one of us, around 100 million, just throw a single candy wrapper in the correct place, can you imagine what big improvement it already makes? Imagine those wrappers where thrown not in the trash cans but in open places? When rainy season comes, these wrappers will be carried by the water to water ways, drainage and rivers and would eventually cause clogs and floods.

Be a real Filipino who thinks of the Philippines. Be responsible at least for the little acts that can save our nature and save our future.

This is One Good Solution that I See Would Be Functioning...

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:08:00 +0000

Honestly, all of us are complaining for inflation, or shall we say, in vernacular terms, "increasing prices". But what does make the prices of almost everything go up? Why do we have to suffer so many consequences of rising prices? The answer is simple: We Deserve It!
The protests say it loud already...
But what really makes prices go up? Honestly, this is very technocal and more on analysis of the basics and complications of economics but believe me if I say it has to do with one very strong factor. I don't know if you have an idea by now what is this BIG FACTOR. All I know is, everyone is aware of it.. Yes, I remember my university days as "Iska" (mostly, only my fellow Isko and Iska understand this and I wont elaborate here what this means unless you are too curious and ask me to email you for the word's meaning) where we have this economics subject analysing supply and demand and all that stuffs giving rise to this and fall to that. However, there is only one answer: THE OIL! Yes, with oil, the world has become mad, has become too greedy, get involve in war, has weakened, has progressed, has risen to power or anything else. Oild cause many things to the world's existence, thus, a little movememnet in oil prices, moves the hell out of all the goods' prices.

Why am I discussing this? Isn't it obvious that we Filipinos is still sufferring from poverty? I know the rest of the world is complaining about oil prices too but let me focus on the Philippine situation for this is where this blog belongs. Expenxive oil = expensive prices. Expensive prices = inflation. Inflation = lesser purchasing power of money. Lesser purchasing power of money = getting poor. Getting poor now, tomorrow, the next week and so on = poverty. Yes, POVERTY! Poverty results to crime! POVERTY RESULTS TO CRIME! And crime results to greater poverty. And so on and so on.
How obvious the situation is... Poverty at its peak in Philippines...
I even rememebr the government having this summer program to lessen the number of office days simply to lessen the energy consumption in the offices. I was aware of this when I was sill back in the Philippines and the days of works has became Monday - Thurday, ommitting the Friday for the sake of "belt tightening" (I forgot the real term Macapagal used for it). However, this only happens in summer and during June-March, the regular working hours resume. I do not have any idea if this was indeed successful or simply made the workers enjoy their vacation and advantageous to thos lazy butts.. I just don't have evidence against it.

What I am tryin to suggest here is to lessen the use of oil. We have to admit that the roads in the Philippines are full of vehicles already. We have to admit from time to time we have the protests about oil. Why not make a long-term solution about it? Encourage an alternative then. Something that doesnt use oil! Yes, that is definitely my suggestion. If we can make skyways and rails, for sure we can make this project as well, and I do not think this entails a lot of money than those being pocketed by beefy and steeling and grafting politicians out there..
Protests are useless without suggesting a solution...
I have seen the bicycle culture around here in Europe and I see its potential if encouraged in the Philippines. I know for now that we do not have the culture of bicycle in the Philippines because everyone is complaining that it is "MAINIT" (HOT). Indeed it is! And my complain? NOT the HEAT but the Unhealthy Road side and UNSFAE Roadsides! There is just no place for bicylces!

What I am trying to push here is, the amount of oild consumed would be really diminished plus, the traffic would at least lessen in the main road when many shift biking instead of taking a taxi for short distances or taking a jeepney. It is a healthy act as well. However, this cannot be done without the government's mercy, or as long as the congress members receive payouts from oil companies or shall we say kickbacks?

The government needs to have the following and do and implement the following before this dream be true:

1. Make a cycle paths, either beside the road or in a different places as long as it can access like the roads.

2. Prohibit honking of cars to not make the cylists/cyclers not go deaf in their everyday life because of "bastos" (impolite) hoking-to-death vehicle drivers.

3. The cylce path must have at least roofs/covers or have trees alongside to prevent the HEAT which more "maarte" Pinoys always complain about.

4. Truly screen vehicles for the emissions they have to protect the health of the cyclers.

5. Encourage the cycling industry. Give incentives to bike makers, incentives to cyclers, make cars more expensive and cycles very cheap.

6. Provide cycle parks in offices adn other places.

7. Encourage. Encourage. Encourage and LEAD!
See those very useful bikes...
Now I make my points here. This also cannot succeed without the participation of the public but government is in power to make the actions. Advertisements..yes, advertisements in various media always help. Be a model, let politician cycle and its followers will do the same. Let an actor or two cycle their way to shooting setting or studio and I am sure many will follow! This act is healthy Dude!

Bicycles here in Europe is a culture. Especially where I live. It is sometimes funny to see in my everyday life here that a military corporal in uniform is just cycling his way around... or an executive in perfectly elegant coat n tie cycle around with another executive riding behind him in the same bike.. Women in elegant skirts, dresses cycling their way to health and beauty!
..and more biky solution....
It is possible. I know not in all parts of the country but at least in cities. I know it is. Cities are flat and if the government is serious about it, it can be done. I am dreaming to cycle our way to health, poverty alleviation and progress!

The Big Difference: Why Filipinos Are Mostly in Debt?

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:03:00 +0000

What is the minimum salary in Philippines for a university graduate? The answer would depend on so many things: where you graduated; what profession or degree; where you are having a job. What can you afford as newly graduate? As a neophyte? As a newbie? As a freshperson? A cheaply paid job that is more often than not an insult to your education and effort to finish... or is it? I have to admit it really depends on which one you are: overqualified, underqualified or unidentified. I also have o admit that diplomas are rebuttable as the quality of education all over the country is not the same: others are superior while others, let's admit is, are... well you know what I mean, right?

The topic that I have had with someone last weekend it the poverty in Philippines. This person told me that television is sucking each and every soul of Filipinos. Why? Because of the commercials: buy this car, buy this phone, this TV brand, all the appliances and electronic gadgets you can think of. The truth is, how much does it cost? Say the cellular phone is around Php 10,000 (majority of and you bought it. If you are a newly grad, do you think you can still live for the remaining days of the month after you bought the phone? Say your gross income for the month (an even bigger estimate compare to average) is Php 15, 000, you still have Php 5,000 left. But the truth is, you still have to pay taxes and it's around Php 750. You are left with Php 4,250. Are you renting a place? Are you sharing expenses with parents? Are you buying load for that phone you bought? Are you eating at all? Are you commuting for work? In short, it is very difficult to live with such salary if one has to buy a gadget. Or an electronic appliance for that matter: television set, DVD player, sterio, MP3 player, washing machine and all these things. Add the fact that you have siblings to spend for.

What I am saying is, Filipinos has the same aspirations in terms of material stuffs as western people do. But is the income the same? Television has redefined what is a need and what is luxury: all that is advertised in TV now is somewhat a "NEED". And that is bad. People are having debts just to buy these gadgets... is it good? It is good if you don't get buried in debts which happens usually. It is good if you are not thinking of your future and save for yourself. Why? I have to tell you that you are not 100% healthy all the time. Do you have health insurance? Do you have dental insurance? These things? Think about your future. gadgets only cause you to spend more. Buy the necessary, not the poshy that you don't actually use those functions as I know people can ever hardly use the call function there. Phones are mostly use to brag and that is not so good.

Mind you, here in Netherlands, regular salary, the basic, the lowest salary for a newly graduate is €1,700. And how much is the price of a mobile phone? A colored, with camera, with radio phone can cost as low as €30 and that has a €15 load in it already. Now do you see the difference? The percentage to gross salary in Philippines versus here in Netherlands is 0.0176 % versus 66.67%. Now do you see? Save for your lives, these gadgets can be stolen, lost and even not be properly used. Bragging and making the gadget as a social symbol is a shame. Build your future instead!

The Citibank America Caller in Philippines

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 13:20:00 +0000

I got that audio file from a friend in Philippines. Yes, that’s the Citibank of America client who was airing her disappointment and she obviously DESPISES Philippines.

She talked the straightest Filipino though and of course she is Filipina (I believe strongly).

I wish to upload the audio file here so that you can hear as well and I would like to solicit opinions about it from all other fellow Filipinos. Also those who can understand the Filipino language but are not Filipinos are as well welcome to share their views.

As per my own opinion, I nether side with that caller nor go against her. She has reasons for reacting so. She has her deep … I can even say VERY deep reasons for alleging that ALL Filipinos are either corrupt or prostitutes/sluts. Can you imagine that? I would like to know what are the reasons behind those deep hatred… And if I would discover, maybe I can understand her better. For all Filipinos reading and who might have heard, your fair opinion, if you share here, would be highly regarded.

How is the World Without Filipinos?

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:03:00 +0000

The following articles was sent by a friend from the Philippines. I posted it here and it is all about the importance of Filipinos to the world... I d hope we Filipinos realize this too and it is supposed to be felt by us and not by a foreign individual..sad, huh?

The Future of Higher Learning and UP* by Maria Serena I. Diokno

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:18:00 +0000

The following was a letter to many of us from our dear professor back in the university, but now, since we are in the same level, some of my friends comfortably call her in her first name, Mariel... I quote the very good content of this mail and I would like to share this all to all of you, for this NOT only apply to us who are/were connected with UP but to everyone... I have yet to write my reaction on this...

Note: Prof. Diokno was former UP Vice-President for Academic Affairs, daughter of the late Statesman Jose Diokno, and a great historian.

The Future of Higher Learning and UP* by Maria Serena I. Diokno

It might surprise you that a historian like myself has chosen to address the future rather than dwell on our past. My reason is straightforward. We have begun our second century! Invigorated by our first hundred years of achievement as the nation’s university, the university of our people, we embark on our second century standing on solid ground, confident of our strengths, humbled by the lessons of past failures and yes, proud that despite our imperfections, we have been able to attract young Filipinos who, at least while under our guardianship, represented the promise of a bright future. It is this promise that in the main has kept us going. The future that has yet to unfold, the future we have some power to direct, is the university’s logical orientation. We converse with the young who represent tomorrow’s players and decision makers; we design programs with the future in mind; we produce knowledge that does not always have instant application but which we believe, or earnestly hope, will help create a better society and a more inhabitable world. That the university speaks to the future is the implicit backdrop of change in the academe: standards become more rigorous with time; curricula are updated and advanced; knowledge is constantly pushed beyond what we once saw as its limits. Our job as academics, in short, is to hark to the future; our job is also to help create it.

Recent studies of tertiary education show that the future of societies, local, national and global, will rest increasingly on higher learning. In its report in 2000 on developing countries, the Task Force on Higher Education and Society proclaimed: “Higher education is no longer a luxury: it is essential to national social and economic development.”[1] Yet developments in recent decades have tended to undermine this assertion. My purpose in this lecture is to discuss trends and global projections about the future of higher education and the impact on or implications for UP. I will cite data on the United States and England on purpose, to draw out what, on the surface, are implausible comparisons.

What are present global conditions like? Three trends ended the last century and inaugurated the 21st: the massification of higher education, with more students entering college than ever before (the National University of Mexico and the University of Buenos Aires each have an enrollment of more than 200,000 students![2]); the differentiation of universities into basically teaching institutions, polytechnic colleges, junior colleges, and high-end research universities; and the exponential growth of knowledge at an ever-quickening pace.

In 2004, worldwide, there were 132 million students in higher education compared to 68 million in 1991. About a quarter came from the East Asia and Pacific region, which experienced the largest growth in absolute number (by 25 million from 1991 to 2004), and another quarter from the U.S. and Western Europe.[3] In Southeast Asia, as Figure 1 illustrates (slide 1), the Philippines until the 1990s had the highest gross enrollment ratio[4] at the tertiary level in the region (percent of population in the five-year age group following the official age secondary school is completed), second only to Singapore since then. We have long had the largest number of college students, overtaken by Indonesia only more than a decade ago, as Figure 2 shows (slide 2). But the largest expansion in college enrollment has taken place in Thailand and Indonesia (slide 3), from nearly 131,000 Thai students in 1975 to 1.2 million in 1995, and close to 280,000 Indonesian students in 1975 to 2.3 million twenty years later.

To cope with the demand for tertiary enrollment, many countries in the world responded horizontally, by creating more universities or taking in greater numbers, and vertically, by putting up institutions that cater to diverse capacities (community college, technical institute, comprehensive university, distance education, research university). In developing countries, however, higher education institutions are less diversified than in high-income countries. In our case, junior and community colleges do not exist perhaps because of the overwhelming cultural value we assign to a four-year college diploma, even if it comes from an institution hardly more advanced than a high school.

The challenge of marginalization

On the other hand, and this is the paradox of our century, higher education faces the grave challenge of marginalization at a time when knowledge so rigorously demands it. The university budget is typically the most visible articulation of marginalization efforts for several reasons. The global fight against poverty gives primordial significance to basic education; higher learning must take a back seat while functional literacy is raised. In the developing world, fundamental needs of health care, education and social security battle it out in the tragedy of the commons. And in countries like ours that are ruled by governments with self-serving priorities and without a vision of the future except for Fantasy Island (think Enchanted Kingdom), even the beleaguered budget for education becomes an arena of corruption, patronage and mediocrity (think textbook scam).

However, even in the developed world, or what used to be so, university budgets have remained at insufficient levels. Prof. Alison Richard, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, laments that British universities are “hopelessly under-funded.”[5] All over the U.S., even prior to the implosion of Wall Street, public universities voiced a similar complaint.

One effect of marginalization is the tendency toward market-driven education, or what some call the corporatization of the academe. Public universities struggle to survive amid reduced budgets, growing competition among tertiary institutions, faculty piracy prompted by indecent salaries, and reputations that increasingly rest upon global rankings of universities. The current drive for the internationalization of universities, which the survey of The Times Higher Education Supplement lays heavy emphasis on, is partly an attempt to pirate the best talents in the world, both faculty and students. Countries like the UK, where tuition at top universities has remained low compared to Harvard and other American universities in their league, are under tremendous pressure to raise fees. Vice-Chancellor Richard of Cambridge complains: “There is a prevailing view in the UK that students, all students, are a source of income, not an investment in the future.”[6] Across the Atlantic, scholarships based on need are being replaced by merit-based awards as American universities attempt to raise their ranking by taking in better qualified students, who usually do not come from lower income, black or Latino families.[7]

The issue of access

Access to higher education, then, has become a major global concern and not just in obvious cases such as ours and other developing countries. Although tertiary enrollment in England rose in 2000 compared to 1994, for example, the Higher Education Funding Council pointed out that the proportion of poorer students “hardly changed at all.”[8] Furthermore, college-age students in England’s wealthiest neighborhoods have a better than 50% chance of entering university, compared to 10% for students residing in the poorest areas. In the U.S. the trend favors white American students, 30 percent of whom obtained bachelor’s degrees in 2006, compared to only 15 percent of African American students and 10 percent of Hispanic students.[9]

While entrenched divisions between rich and poor in the West might offer solace to those who have long been familiar with inequity, the issue of access in the ‘developed’ world is approached quite differently from ours in the less developed countries. In the United States, for instance, the issue of access arises from the shift in a manufacturing-driven industrial economy to a Third Wave service economy propelled by information and technological innovation.[10] About 54% of new job openings in America in the decade 2004-2014 are expected to be filled by workers with some postsecondary education,[11] unlike the old economy, which did not require college-level knowledge and skills. Today, in anticipation of greater changes to come, a call to develop a ‘college-going culture’ has been made.

Ironically in the Philippines, such a culture has not been foreign to us. Even a secretary here is required to possess a college degree, unlike in England, for example, where ‘O’ level credentials are sufficient. Yet, the fastest growing domestic job openings here do not demand higher-order competencies; only the ability to speak English with an alien twang. The fact is that in the developing world outside the West, the concern with access emanates from the stark condition of poverty and its twin, social inequity. Our Commission on Higher Education frames its vision and thrust toward poverty reduction but unfortunately, makes no projection about the local job sector in its Medium-Term Plan for Higher Education, 2005-2010 and says little else beyond a bland statement about the need to advance knowledge “for the improvement of academic instruction, productivity enhancement and job creation, and in addressing the key issues confronting the Philippine society.”[12]

Marginalization also finds articulation in the quality of learning. Listen to this: “73% of all colleges still find it necessary to offer remedial classes for entering students.”[13] Sounds like universities in a third world country, right? Wrong! The description speaks of the U.S.A. The OECD (Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation) found that 15-year-old American students placed 35th in mathematics and 36th in science among 57 countries that took part in the 2006 Programme for Student Assessment. Moreover, even the highest-achievers among American students performed below their international peers.[14] There is, too, concern in the United States that it will soon pale in the shadow of Asian universities, particularly Chinese, in the field of science and technology. For instance, The Task Force on the Future of American Innovation singles out as a contrast to the U.S., China’s recent declaration that it would transform 100 of its universities into the world’s best research institutions, a matter of Chinese national priority. China expects to do this by tapping Chinese specialists trained abroad and Chinese-American experts.[15] I have little doubt China will command its resources and meet this objective.

Now what about us? We all agree that our education pipeline is poorly constructed to begin with, and being at the other end of the pipeline, there is little we can do to clean out the rot or remove the rust or deepen the pipeline. But even in UP, higher education has become increasingly remedial not just at the level of incoming freshmen, who experienced the XDS program in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and summer bridge programs in the ‘90s, but also juniors and seniors who do not possess or are not adequately being prepared for 21st century competencies. Yet, they enter the world with our diploma.

Each year I worry that we will graduate students with a bachelor’s degree who do not know how to write, or do not understand what they read in a critical way (or perhaps read very little), or are unable to analyze what they learn before recycling it in an essay exam or a term paper. The inabilities of incoming students we can blame on basic education—the clog in the pipeline—but the responsibility for the failed abilities of upper undergraduate students rests at least partly on our shoulders.

Dealing with corrective needs

My sense is that we are not prepared to deal with the corrective needs that plague higher education. First, our attitude is that we are here to advance knowledge, not to cure it. When students enter UP, we assume they possess the prerequisites and if they do not, that is their problem, not ours. Second, if we were to spend our energy and resources on remedial education, less would be left for real education, which is our primary, many would argue, sole, task. Third, by doing remedial courses we diminish our standards and thereby shortchange our students.

All these are valid arguments. But what is not acceptable is when we ourselves lower standards to ensure that our courses will always have students or because teaching is too painstaking and eats up far too much of our time. For instance, a number of colleagues have suggested to me that the reason for the surprisingly large number of honor graduates is that our GE program has become effortless. With 45 units easily in the bag, our students can still attain honors even if they perform less ably in their major courses. I do not know if this is true but if it is, the fault is ours and ours alone. Have some of us succumbed to the market orientation that in order to attract students and sustain departmental access to, say, equipment funds, our GE courses must be easy to pass? Are the learning materials we have developed, including those that apply educational technologies, too simple, too remedial that we end up sacrificing substance for form? Do the GE readings challenge our students? And do the exams we subject GE students to actually test their ability to think critically, to be creative, to write coherently, to argue on the basis of sound judgment, and so on? The strength of the GE program is its ability to challenge, and this is, or ought to be, the very source of its attractiveness.

Whenever I cringe at my students’ essays, whether written in Filipino or English, they tell me that one reason they did not learn to write in UP is that when their papers or exams are returned, all they see is a number. No indication whatsoever is written about what the number actually means, about which part of the essay is poorly argued or badly written and why. So they repeat the same mistakes—because they passed those courses anyway—until they get to me. I tell them that at the senior level it is a little too late for me to undo what they have internalized, even as I apply the weapon of fear followed by horrifying grief upon reading their first draft.

Working backwards

What strategy could possibly address this problem? First, I propose we take a look at our methods courses and work backward in terms of the knowledge and competencies we expect our majors to acquire along the way. We can do this in clusters of disciplines although, given the transdisciplinal nature of knowledge, discussions across fields would be instructive. Second, let us review the GE program along the lines I noted above. Third, I strongly urge the administration to bring UP into the network of universities that do CPR, Calibrated Peer Review, an online self-learning tool developed by UCLA that began in chemistry because American educators were alarmed that science majors did not know how to write. CPR exposes the student to excellent reading material, teaches the student how to read the article, and finally, how to tell whether an essay is well or badly written. Hence the term ‘calibrated peer review.’ As its website explains, CPR “enables frequent writing assignments even in large classes with limited instructional resources” and actually “can reduce the time an instructor now spends reading and assessing student writing.”[16]

What we should work on is our own web-based tool for writing in Filipino. Alternatively, although this could be costlier, there is the model of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, which has a writing center (called Center for Higher Education Development) where students are sent and then, in groups, are guided to rewrite their essays. The center also deals with remedial problems in numeracy. Faculty at the center work full-time and, like any other faculty, are expected to research on problems in their field in addition to mentoring students.

Finally, and this is where we as an institution have been remiss, we need to make public our expectations of basic education. I do not suggest this as a guide to passing the UPCAT but as a response to the changing demands on pre-collegiate education arising from the pace of knowledge creation, with which we are most familiar. If we inform the Department of Education and schools about rising expectations, the more committed ones will hopefully strive to meet them.

The Oxford Question

It is difficult to speak about remedial education apart from the question of access since there is a positive correlation between income and UPCAT score. The higher the applicant’s declared annual income category, the higher the subtest scores except in test items in Filipino. Tempting as it is to shy away from the question, access goes straight to the heart of our purpose as a public university, a purpose that is being debated elsewhere in the world. Posed by a professor who teaches at both Oxford and Stanford: “The fundamental question—call it the Oxford Question—underlying all the others is this: can we, in Europe, have social justice in higher education and world-class research universities? Or must we choose?”[17] Cambridge Prof. Richard argues that it is wrong for government to look upon universities as “engines for promoting social justice:”[18]

We try to reach out to the best students, whatever their background. One outcome of that is that we can help to promote social mobility. But promoting social mobility is not our core mission. Our core mission is to provide an outstanding education within a research setting.[19]

And yet this year Cambridge announced that the proportion of students it admitted from state schools rose to 59%, the highest since 1981. (State schools educate 93% of all English students.)[20] Oxford, for its part, applied a new procedure this year that takes into account the applicant’s neighborhood (poor, middle-income, wealthy). Mike Nicholson, the university's director of undergraduate admissions, explains why: “We want to make sure that we are not missing pupils because we are using A’s at GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education] on their own without more information about the context within which they were gaining those grades.”[21] Achieving top grades under difficult conditions, Nicholson maintains, suggests high potential. “Using grades alone,” he says, “is too crude. I want to make sure that, if students are applying from places that have very few people progressing into higher education, we recognise that they are breaking the mould.”[22]

I find it paradoxical that as elite universities in the UK are changing admissions policy to take in poorer students, we in UP have taken the opposite route. Dissatisfied with the affirmative action component of the previous admission scheme because, among others, it did not discriminate among high school grades, Diliman opted to correct high school grade inflation by pegging school marks to the UPCAT score. The high school grade, which is supposed to indicate student diligence in learning over a stretch of time, has thus been merged with the UPCAT, a one-time measure. Two students with identical high school grade averages—previously a one-to-one correspondence—can now be assigned entirely different marks, depending on the UPCAT performance of the school’s graduates. This adjustment index, which can be equal to, greater or less than one, is, according to proponents, a truer, more accurate indicator of student merit.

However, as Prof. Claude Steele, Psychology Department Chair at Stanford University, points out, scores on standardized admission tests are also inflated by such advantages as private school training, admission test review classes, access to books and computers at home, and so on[23]—advantages, in short, enjoyed by children in better-off families. It is thus no surprise that 93 of the 100 high schools with the highest UP adjustment factor in 2008 are private, while 70 of the bottom 100 schools are public (general).[24] The adjustment index, then, is also an indicator of affluence or lack of affluence. By correcting one sort of inequity, have we not created or aggravated another?

In a way our problem with social inequity is like that of deteriorating basic education. We are at the receiving end of both and are powerless to change the reality that precedes entry into UP. One could argue that it is not the University’s job to cure the ills of basic education or to reduce social inequity. Perhaps so, but neither is it ours to make policy that keeps qualified entrants at a remedial level, or that reinforces inequity or punishes those with less.

The purpose of the university

In all the discussions we have had on admissions, there is one thing we entirely overlooked, and that is the relationship between merit-based admissions and the purpose of the university. William Bowen, president of Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and before that, president of Princeton University for 16 years, explains that

the starting premise [of admissions] is that a school has an obligation to make the best possible use of the limited number of places in each entering class so as to advance as effectively as possible the broad purposes the school seeks to serve. Within the very real limits imposed by the fallibility of any selection process of this kind, a school should try hard to be fair to every applicant; but the concept of fairness itself has to be understood within the context of the obligations of a university. Accordingly, in making these difficult choices among well-qualified candidates, considerations other than just test scores and grades come into play.[25]

These considerations, in turn, are premised upon not just the qualities of individual students but also, Bowen adds, the shared features of an entire group of students who, by their common characteristics, enrich the learning environment and bring into it the diversity that is an indispensable part of university life. As a Princeton graduate remarked, “People do not learn very much when they are surrounded only by the likes of themselves.”[26]

And this is true. Before I entered UP I was exposed to only private school students, having studied in Catholic schools since kindergarten. My father, himself the product of private education, insisted we children study at UP precisely so that we would meet people from all walks of life. A few years ago De La Salle University tracked down its ‘Star’ scholars (the equivalent of our ‘Oblation’) who had declined admission. One reason they cited for choosing UP was our heterogeneous population in contrast to La Salle’s elitist character.

Valuing diversity

But I think the question before us is not that a diverse student population offers immense learning opportunities to everyone all around, but rather, whether UP values this diversity enough to count it among its purposes. If UP does, then merit in admissions would take on additional meaning beyond the rigid convention of high grades and test scores. If, on the other hand, this is not our purpose, then we can end all discussions on admissions here and now.

There are a couple of other implications of global trends that I wish to take up. The university will no doubt retain its role as arbiter of academic worth but with a difference, for in this century, goals and targets will no longer be fixed as before because of rapid advances across all disciplines. Just when we think we are nearing our mark, it moves farther away. Moving targets thus change the meaning of laggard: an intellectual laggard in this century is not only the one left behind but also the one who stays put. It will no longer be sufficient, and neither should it be permissible, for departments, colleges, campuses to simply coast along in our second century. The rapid movement of knowledge also demands that we select our leaders at all levels with this in mind. Academic leaders who find comfort in the isolated quiet of their offices, or are buoyed by the absence of discussion or debate, or who mistake the stony silence of faculty indifference as implicit support, will never take us forward. UP’s second century has no place for laidback leaders who move only when prodded or threatened.

To attract and encourage the best leaders, we also need to rethink our search process. The matrix of candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, which is usually the end product of the search process, actually ought to be just the starting point. In what context are candidates’ attributes perceived as strengths and weaknesses, and relative to what goals, needs or direction? A perceived weakness could, in a different context or relative to a certain thrust, actually be a strength and vice-versa. There is, too, little value added by search committees that are not allowed to exercise any judgment beyond the enumeration of candidates’ attributes.

In the final analysis, the kind of leaders we desire will depend on what we aspire for as an institution of higher learning and a community of scholars. For example, the presidents of the world’s leading universities were studied in order to answer the question: Are the best universities led by top researchers? The universities were taken from the 2004 edition of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranking, whose criteria are presented on the screen (slide 4). The study counted the number of each president’s scholarly publication citations, rated the numbers against disciplinary citation norms, and then correlated the normalized figures with the ranking of the universities.

The pattern that emerged is as follows. The higher the global ranking of a university, the more likely that the citations of its president are also high. Heads of the top 50 universities, for instance, are two and a half times more highly cited than those at the bottom 50. A president of a top 20 university is cited nearly five times more than a leader in the bottom quintile. In short, the study found that although “a simple link between the position of a university and the research history of its leader does not explain causality …. [the] results do, however, suggest that being a good manager and leader is enhanced in a university context if a president is a successful researcher.”[27]

I cite the study to stress that in light of the profound changes in knowledge and learning and at an unprecedented pace, the type of leaders we want at any and all levels, and the scale of scholarship we expect from them will, in the end, depend on what our collective and institutional ambitions are. So as with the question of access, we once again return to our purpose: what do we wish to become in the 21st century?

Thankfully it is not my task to answer all the questions I raise. Whatever we decide—and we must do so with deliberate thought and discussion—let us keep sight of our mission to advance and share knowledge in and beyond the classroom. The university, after all, is not a gated subdivision; it is and always will be engaged in the life of the community, the nation, and the world. We celebrate our successes at a time when nearly everywhere around us, at home and in the world, voices of optimism struggle to be heard amid the wail of human suffering or the deceptive silence of apathy or despair. The paradox of celebration amid tribulation is a stern reminder that we belong to a public community larger than our academic republic. More than a community that supports us and to which we are answerable, it is a community to which we are wedded, good times and bad.

The sense of belonging

It concerns me that our students have become more self-absorbed and less caring about this broader community. In my GE class last semester, most of them said they are moved to act only when directly affected. Since they rarely read the papers or listen to the news, they cannot get affected by what they do not know (or do not bother to know). A combination of hard times, parental pressure, desire for security in the face of an uncertain future, and disenchantment with today’s leaders have caused the young to look upon their degree as little more than a job ticket. As a result, grades have taken precedence over learning; their real world has shrunk to their family and friends, while the one world they can freely venture into is the chat room, Friendster and other social networking sites, where they control the shift in boundaries of anonymity and familiarity and decide whom to let in and out.

There is, of course, no point developing a sense of humanity that connects one only to the tiny radius of relatives and friends or to the self-created virtual world. The sense of belonging to a collective larger than ourselves, our families, our immediate circle of friends and colleagues is fundamental to our humanity. As our history and that of humankind demonstrate, the most significant and uplifting human successes have been those born out of collective action. What would one’s personal success mean amid a sea of people wallowing in subhuman conditions? Indeed, what kind of humanity is it that selects the individuals it can relate to and deliberately disregards the humanness of others? I hope this kind of inward pragmatism—heedless to the needs of others—is just a phase of youthfulness. My senior students assure me they think differently from the freshmen I cited.

Do not think for a moment that I blame the students entirely for thinking this way. Such heedlessness could well be a reaction to or a product of a deeper pathology that engulfs our society. It is not my purpose to break down this social pathology into its anatomical parts. But allow me to offer a different take on the matter. Foucault explains that every conceptual apparatus sets its own restrictions of what is and isn’t possible, and within these limits, develops its own standard of normalcy.[28] During American rule, for example, the logic of imperialism deemed it rational to postpone political independence while we were perceived to be unready for it and in its stead, enjoy the benefits of progress American style. It was not rational and therefore not normal to insist, as the Katipunan and subsequent revolutionary societies did, that freedom is indivisible in all its forms and expressions. At the turn of the 20th century, Filipino society was classified into ‘poor and ignorant’ at one end, and ‘rich and intelligent’ at the other. Unthinkable it was to switch the colonial pairing around: ‘poor and intelligent’ or ‘rich and ignorant’ was simply not possible. And so each generation, each society declares its own meaning of normalcy according to its world of possibilities.

I hold that the task of the University is to depart from the realm of possibilities and the boundaries of normalcy it creates, and instead explore what historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls ‘the unthinkable’, or “that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions were phrased.”[29] To return to the ‘Oxford question’ as an example, the thinkable frame juxtaposes social justice against a world-class research university, presenting the two as the only options available in the matter of admissions. The unthinkable, on the other hand, would turn the question on its head and challenge its underbelly: why these two choices in the first place?

Thinking the unthinkable

Thinking the unthinkable will be the University’s primary challenge in the 21st century in every discipline and field of endeavor. This challenge will demand not just a shift in our mental inclinations but also new ‘instruments of thought’—concepts, methods, frameworks—that will enable this shift to happen.[30] Oftentimes we do not realize how normalcy—that is, keeping within established and comfortable limits of possibilities—has become the hidden curriculum because, as Foucault again points out, people’s thoughts are basically shaped by rules or assumptions they are not always aware of. In our case, bureaucratic thinking and a politicized approach to problems, goals and decisions block the academic’s pathway to the unthinkable.

A bureaucratic mentality ties the power of policy to the authority that enforces it rather than to the substance and merit of the policy. Backed by the weight of office, the bureaucrat’s appeal is legalistic, not intellectual. Rules are narrowly construed rather than understood in relation to issues that question, and quite possibly subvert, the very basis of the rules. The only possibility in the world of the bureaucrat, therefore, is compliance, and any attempt to question it is met with technicalities. The inability to explain the rationale of a policy, or the reference to its longstanding existence as an explanation, are typically bureaucratic responses, feeble but effective only because the mental device of the bureaucrat has become part of the academic’s sense of normalcy.

I do not mean to belittle our rules but the University is not a bureaucracy; it is an academic community. In our next hundred years some of our policies and rules will have to change in reasoned anticipation of the demands of knowledge, new modalities of learning, evolving relationships within the institution, etc. We must prepare ourselves for this future by learning to think outside the box. To do so, we must avoid one other pitfall, the politicized approach.

Competition, vested interest, power—these are things that play upon human nature and human institutions, the university not excepted. The question is, how do we frame these within our domain of possibilities? In the arena of politics numbers count because they are the expression of popular will. In contrast, in the academe what counts are the discussion and debate that precede the vote and give it value.

As a young instructor dismayed by the politics of elders in the department, I once sought the advice of the late law Prof. Haydee Yorac regarding a decision obtained by the majority’s show of hands. Her response was unequivocal: a majority vote does not turn what is essentially wrong into something right, pointing to decisions of the Marcos-led Batasang Pambansa as an example. Politicians get away with the tyranny of numbers because the conceptual apparatus of politics deems this not only possible but normal. If the same kind of thinking persists in the University, it is because we, too, have imbibed the politicians’ sense of normalcy. Hence we agonize between the academic and the pragmatic or politically palatable, between merit and livelihood as the basis for promotion, between competence and closeness to officials as the pivotal point in making decisions.

In sum, the politicized and bureaucratic mental frames are averse to change, the former in defense of the status quo or of self- or group interest, and the latter, hampered by limp intellectual muscle. In this century we will need to break out of the conspiracy of the normal, wean ourselves away from our comfort zone, and develop a frame of mind that is open to different possibilities, that eclipses old boundaries and invites novel ways of thinking, doing and learning. From the practice of our disciplines to our pedagogy, from how we relate to one another as colleagues to the structures that govern us, from channels to processes, the framework of the unthinkable will be a valuable guide with long-reaching effect. To think, speak and do the unthinkable, that is the challenge of our century.

Thank you.

* Centennial Lecture, NISMED, UP Diliman, 18 November 2008.

[1] Task Force on Higher Education and Society, Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise (Washington: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2000), p. 14.
[2] Task Force, p. 27.
[3] UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Global Education Digest 2006: Comparing Education Statistics Across the World (Montreal, 2006), p. 21.
[4] Percent of population in the five-year age group following the official age secondary school is completed.
[5] Jessica Shepherd, “Cambridge mission ‘not social mobility’, The Guardian, 10 September 2008.
[6] Shepherd.
[7] Robert M. Diamond, “Why Colleges Are So Hard to Change,” Inside Higher Ed, 8 September 2006, http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/09/08/diamond, accessed 25 September 2008.
[8] “Student Access Inequality Exposed,” BBC News, 19 January 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/ fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/education/4185697.stm
[9] Edward M. Kennedy, “What Spellings Got Right and Wrong,” Inside Higher Ed, 3 October 2006, http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/10/03/kennedy.
[10] Partnership for 21st Century Skills, “21st Century Skills, Education and Competitiveness: A Resource and Policy Guide,” p. 2, www.21stcenturyskills.org.
[11] D. E. Hecker, “Occupational Employment Projections to 2014,” Monthly Labor Review (November 2005): 80, cited in Pathways to College Network, “The Facts: Postsecondary Access and Success,” Boston: The Education Resources Institute, Inc., 2007, www.pathways@teri.org.
[12] Commission on Higher Education, Medium-Term Development Plan, 2005-2010: Responding to the Challenges of a Dynamic Environment, p. xviii.
[13] Kennedy.
[14] Partnership for 21st Century Skills, p. 8.
[15] The Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, “Measuring the Moment: Innovation, National Security, and Economic Competitiveness,” November 2006, p. 26, www.futureofinnovation.org. See also: “U.S. Slips in Attracting the World’s Best Students,” The New York Times, 21 December 2004; “China Luring Scholars to Make Universities Great,” The New York Times, 28 October 2005.

[16] Calibrated Peer Review, http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/.
[17] Timothy Garton Ash, “Can We Have World-class Universities as well as Social Justice in Education?” The Guardian, 29 May 2008.
[18] Quoted in Shepherd.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Shepherd.
[21] Anushka Asthana, “Oxford Targets the Poorest Postcodes,” The Observer, 17 August 2008.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Claude M. Steele, Expert report prepared for Gratz, et. al. v. Bollinger, et. al., No. 97-75321 (E.D. Mich.), “The Compelling Need for Diversity in Higher Education,” January 1999, http://www.vpcomm.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/steele.html
[24] Vice-President for Academic Affairs A. Guevara, October 2007.
[25] William G. Bowen, Expert report prepared for Gratz, et. al. v. Bollinger, et. al., No. 97-75321 (E.D. Mich.), http://www.vpcomm.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/bowen.html
[26] Quoted in ibid.
[27] Amanda Goodall, “The Leaders of the World’s Top 100 Universities,” International Higher Education 42 (Winter 2006), http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number42/p3_ Goodall.htm
[28] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, Inc. 1970).
[29] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 82.
[30] Pierre Bourdieu, cited in ibid.

I Would Vote Obama if I Could!

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:49:00 +0000

I am not an Ammerican and there is no way I could vote. However, before any winner could be declared, I would like to express my preference. I would like Obama to win. This is my personal choice and this blog just express the author's choice. I have read alot of bad and good things online and offline but still, no matter how I weigh it, I always go for a democrat candidate whenever I have to choose.. Am I that liberal? Hmmmm.... I just do not know.

I actually read a very beautiful story today from yahoo! and I would like to share it with you. I hope I can partially copy it and it would be all right and just gve you the link if you would like to continue reading.

Anyway, what is there for Filipinos if Obama wins? For me I see two things: 1. CHange (of course!) and 2. HOPE. For all Filipinos out there, these two words speak for themselves when it comes to how we are as Filipinos, as a nation, as a people and as all... We know it in our heart. If Obama wins, hope and change is restored in this world... Well, time to share that story I was mentioning up...

My wife made me canvass for Obama; here's what I learned:

Charlotte, N.C. – There has been a lot of speculation that Barack Obama might win the election due to his better "ground game" and superior campaign organization.

I had the chance to view that organization up close this month when I canvassed for him. I'm not sure I learned much about his chances, but I learned a lot about myself and about this election.

Let me make it clear: I'm pretty conservative. I grew up in the suburbs. I voted for George H.W. Bush twice, and his son once. I was disappointed when Bill Clinton won, and disappointed he couldn't run again.

I encouraged my son to join the military. I was proud of him in Afghanistan, and happy when he came home, and angry when he was recalled because of the invasion of Iraq. I'm white, 55, I live in the South and I'm definitely
going to get a bigger tax bill if Obama wins.

I am the dreaded swing voter.

So you can imagine my surprise when my wife suggested we spend a Saturday morning canvassing for Obama. I have never canvassed for any candidate.
But I did, of course, what most middle-aged married men do: what I was told.

At the Obama headquarters, we stood in a group to receive our instructions. I wasn't the oldest, but close, and the youngest was maybe in high school. I watched a campaign organizer match up a young black man who looked to be college age with a white guy about my age to canvas together. It should not have been a big thing, but the beauty of the image did not escape me.

Instead of walking the tree-lined streets near our home, my wife and I were instructed to canvass a housing project. A middle-aged white couple with clipboards could not look more out of place in this predominantly black neighborhood.

We knocked on doors and voices from behind carefully locked doors shouted, "Who is it?" "We're from the Obama campaign," we'd answer. And just like that doors opened and folks with wide smiles came out on the porch to talk.

Grandmothers kept one hand on their grandchildren and made sure they had all the information they needed for their son or daughter to vote for the first time.

Young people came to the door rubbing sleep from their eyes to find out where they could vote early, to make sure their vote got counted.... The original story is found here. If you read till here, I know you'd click this!

Charice Pempengco and Manny Pacquiao: Philippines' Most Famous

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:41:00 +0000

I have been reading lately about the youtube sensation on Charice and so I am here, after listening and watching her songs and performance. For thos who does not have any idea wo this Charice Pempengco is, you may google this name and you will get a lot of results for sure... or see her own website here.. But why am I blogging about her here? For a very simple reason: she is a Filipina.

And who is Manny Pacquiao? I can say that this person is the "knuckles" of the Philippines. And naturally, he is a Filipino.

Both Pempengco and Pacquiao are successful in their respective chose fields, in singing and boxing, respectively. They have awaken the awareness of not Filipinos alone but the whole world with their talents and success. And naturally, all the Filipinos are clapping their hands (that includes me) for them. They are praised, adored, prided over and became the talk of the town whenever there is an evernt where they are involved. They are celebrities, popular and symbolic.

The whole Filipino community has been thrilled with the performance of the two persons. All I wish is that they become good models as they are so known to each and every Pinoy and Pinay worldwide. I just hope they set as good standards and worthy models for everyone... I hope their fame stay solely for that purpose.. I hope they would teach to all that only a very few percentage can really achieve extraordinary success and luck as what they both have. I just hope they teach the value of individual hard work for one's success and relying to others all the time is NEVER good.. I just hope.. i have lots of hopes actually.

As for the rest of my fellowmen, we must be proud of them indeed. We shout to the world that they both are our countrymen.. But we should also accept some negatives on us being Filipinos and just don't be a Pikon when our bad side is touced. Let us accept our weaknesses and only in this way we can improve and remove those weaknesses.

To the two, Charice Pempengco and Manny Pacquiao, congratulations.

Another Good Move That Can Help the Whole Philippine Nation!

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:23:00 +0000

Honestly, you can just be left open-mouthed at the simplicity of idea. But before that, I would like to note some things.

First, my country, the Philippines, has this outstanding clamour that its people just go out and work abroad rather than help the country improve.

The overflowing trash...
Second, scholars have been sent out to observe and share their ideas back home to give way to improvements, comparisons and better practices.

Third, I am sharing my ideas what I see from out of Philippine territoty/bounday and I am sharing through blogging for I cannot be personally there to make it happen.

Fourth, even if I am present in the Philippines, who would hear me if I don't have money? Not a politician, not an actress and not the one who can pay people to listen to me? Now this is the problem! We cannot really tell that those scholars do not go back or did not go back! It is also possible that they are/were back in the Philippines full of enthusiams but those ideas were just sprayed with malicious preventions from those who are in power and do not want change. However, it is also possible that those scholars and abroad workers, the creams of the crops, just choose to settle away in order to avoid a lot of disappointments that are currently going on in the Philippines.

How nature and beauty is damaged by these garbages...
What I am driving here? Ideas. Yes, ideas. Ideas are many. I have seen them in my friends back in the university supported by the entre Filipino tax-payers. Yes, the Iskolars ng Bayan (The Nation's Scholars) as they say and I was/am one of these people. I have to apologize however to my countryment for I am not there to burden the sufferings you are currently encountering. Plus, I want to admit that if indeedI was there, as I was a couple of years ago, I was only a slave of a multinational organization making me work 24 hours and draining my brain and body with pleasant thoughts and energy. So what is the difference? Nothing eally much... but in my opinion, much is the difference. I can blog and share my views and really see our own short-comings as Filipinos, admit it, and make move for the change. Moreover, since the value of money here is greater when spent there, a little savings from here can help me help my feelows in need in the future back there.

Back to the "move" I was talking about on top, it actually refers to minimizing the garbage. This is not just plain criticism but I have to admit that the cities in the Philippines are dirty! And so are the provinces, though the latter is not that obvious since they are not as crowded as the cities. One reason? Plastics! Yes, even that alone can constitue a lot of garbage!

Believe it or not, this grocery trolley can contribute hugely more than we realize how much...
Here, where I currenlty stay, plastics in department stores are sold. It is actually ranging from €0.30 - €2.50 depending on the quality and style and usability and durability and a lot more factors. This means, if one just throw his/her plastic bag, another expense would be made if there is another grocery purchase. And that hurts a lot! I mean the buget and the pocket!

What I am sugesting, is, since Filipinos are very difficult to discipline in terms of garbage, why would this plastics be sold instead of being freely given? This way, Filipinos would value these plastics better and not just throw them. A move from the congress making all stores put costs in the plastic bags would be a good "preventive" move to lessen garbage. Can you imagine 90 million individuals throwing at least 1 platic per week? Isn't that disturbing? It can be seen actually during low tide how dirty the seas get and the rivers and creeks are clogged due to garbage. I saw it myself in so many places in the country!

I know what will be the reply to this: A rally of opposition from the masses... but of we think of our future and the ultimate effect, this is for our own good. If you don't want to spend for plastic bags, buy one cloth or real bag for groceries and use it for years! It is just a matter of mind set how people can make situations to their advantage and not just oppose every move for progress everytime.

You dream of a clean environment for your children? So make this happen! Support and do not oppose! Plastics if burned are dangerous and it is really a thing that do not deconspose just on time... it is a very damaging material and we need to prevent the mutiplication of this kind of garbage (or any other garbage in the Philippines for that matter).

They say don't just complain unless you have a better solution. My solutions are set out in this blog and I do hope, people and some policy makers can discover this someday and they just stop dreamy beefy amounts in their pockets and bank accounts!

Please help a clean Philippines, try at least in your part. No littering, proper waste segreaìgating and use of recycled plastics will greatly help.

Hinanaing ni Asawang Banyaga (A Foreign Husband's Clamour)

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:05:00 +0000

If we are oppressed, or if we feel oppressed and feel poor, is it fair to swindle others? Below is one of the many notable responses to my posts. If you want to view the original posts, responses and the whole story, simply CLICK HERE.

Hi, As a foreigner married to a Filipina, I can sympathise with you, the young guy in Canada. I know Canada to be a place of relentless work for low pay, and cold-hearted company policies driven my the N American corporate moral-lacking ethic.
-It is not those who are in poverty that I mind helping, it is finding out that the Phil family medical bills were based on ailments that were never treated, despite the med money sent over.
-It is the spending of cash sent over, after a desperate plea for medical help, on a phone bill that is ten times what I pay in N America.
-It is the second request for med money after the first has been spent on the phone, or other items, and the medical situation is used again to extract money.
-It is the assumption that as I am a foreigner, I am rich, and therefore a bottomless pit that is used for money.
-It is the guilt trips put upon my wife to get her to send her earnings over there, instead of paying bills here. In a 12 year marriage that has been a delight in all other respects, I have seen the following:
-A $200 a month budget for family assistance exceeded by up to $400 a month as a regular thing.
-The Phil family quit work of any kind, then manipulate to get the $200 budget increased by regular "emergencies" to maintain their retirement
-My family here in N America increase its debt load by over 50,000 bucks, then file bankruptcy.

-My personal pension fund get ransacked to the tune of over $30,000 dealing with bills created by budget overruns.

-I have seen photos of DVD players in the background, when they were $400 items, and I could not afford one.

-I have seen photos of parties, at times when I cannot afford a birthday gift, or even flowers, for my wife.

- I have had a miserable Pinay individual who works at a local Walmart and who is a drug and alcohol user accuse me of being unreasonable as I married a Filipina, and part of that is that Filipinas have to send money home.

-I have had the same individual accuse me publicly and at her workplace of being unreasonable for not liking the small of burning fish, and complaining about it, this being when relatives paid me the continual insult of selecting fish as a toasted offering inside my house at times when I had a day off, yet never when I was away at work.

-I have today heard of a Filipina friend who currently on a visit home has had to go to her sisters house away from the city to avoid the relatives demands for money in large amounts, like amounts enough to buy cars, and then they get annoyed when refused.

-I can with all honesty say that in the years I have been involved, there has not been one single transaction involving money that has been honestly presented.

-Every demand or request for help has been later found to be based on a lie.

-About a year or so ago I attempted to assist with finance for the starting of a business, and all that transpired in the end was that a PC was purchased, and then the relative involved informed me that the Internet Cafe business was no longer any good, and so he would not be going ahead with it. This was coupled with a photo a few weeks later of the same relative working at his PC, a dual-core Intel processor with illuminated Neon case. Meanwhile, I am STILL using a PC that is 7 years old.

-This was followed some weeks later by the father of that same relative crowing about how well his son has done, and how his son has a better computer than we do.

- We some years ago paid for a university course on computers for the same individual, in order to qualify him as having had continuous education since high school, and he decided it was better to take the course money and spend it. He then needed to pay the course (another 700 bucks the wife sent that I advised was throwing good money after bad) to get the paperwork, but by that time had been refused immigration. Tough, Eh? It would be interesting to contact the university and see how much the 700 outstanding tuition really was. Probably another theft of funds from the rich americans

-I hate to say this, but if I had to do my life over again and went for a similar deal, I would make it clear: There will be no funds sent over at all, not a single penny, not for Christmas, none at all. No gifts that others, the recipients, decide what they are either. There would be a fund that will buy a second house in N America, and the rent once the house is fully paid for the rental income will be providing all sole funds after rental expenses. That way, right now, my wife would own a spare house that she can later rent out for her own retirement.

-We borrowed the airfare from a friend so that the family could come over here to live, against my advice and judgment. I was wrong on one thing. They do actually work now that they are forced to, having come out of the Philippine retirement that I (my wife even more so) financed for all those years. But they find the work in North America hard, and so they will be returning. Not on my money they won't. They now have a problem, they owe a load of airfare money for getting here, and drink and smoke too much to save for their return. And no doubt I will be left maxxing out my credit card again, and taking more pension out to pay it down, just to pay off the airfare that was spent getting them here. But the goose has laid it's golden egg, and will lay no more.

Can you imagine that? How such a person can write that long only as a response to some posts? We can be poor but with dignity but that is not the case, because I myself see how my countrymen are. If they see a lighter color or anyone from outside the country, all they cna see is money. As long as someone is out of the Philippines, Pinoys think it's money. A big shame. A bad attitude!

I AM Too Thankul To Have PR 3 from Google!

noreply@blogger.com (Filipina Ini) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:19:00 +0000

I admit I have abandoned this blog for a while. Actually, for a long time. Because of this, I never knew when this blog started to have a very good PR. I have to admit that the traffic over here sucks for the desertion that I have made. I am so glad however that it still got a PR from google. And that is PR 3.

What does it mean to me? It feels like a good accmplishment actually. I know my blog is not that much but this is my first blogger blog and this is where I learned. Now, I have domains which are customized for my current blogs. All the contents in this blog have paid out. I put my heart and soul in writing this actually. It was good that I never deleted this despite my shift of attention.

Now I would like to revive this blog and be more focused on the issues tacked in here which is more on Philippine culture and everything Philippines. I think the keyword density for the word Philippines or any other things related to Philippines such as Philippine culture, Philippine tourism, Philippine prostitution, Philippine business, Philippine economy, Filipinas, Filipinos and stuffs like that in this blog are just too heavy to ignore.

I am so thankful then and now I am very proud to have made this blog into its new position.

Do you want to link in this blog? If you don't have PR yet, you are welcome as well, just email me at weblogstuffs@gmail.com for that intention. Happy Blogging everyone!