by Avigail M. Olarte
WHEN RAJ Singh smiles, you will want to pay him, even if you don’t owe him money. The polite 28-year-old Indian knows his way with Filipinos, especially with those he has to deal with in his money-lending business, an informal financing scheme called “5-6” that Indians in the Philippines are known for.
We are already on our second female head of state, and for some people that may be enough to say we have achieved gender equality. We can also point out that the female participation in the labor force is quite high; one business advisory firm says as well that 85 percent of local companies have women in senior positions. Girls are even doing better in school, and have higher retention rates than the boys.
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THE story of the Bugkalot, the last of the Philippine headhunting tribes, is a chronicle of loss. Like many indigenous peoples in many parts of the world, they have been dispossessed of their land, their culture destroyed, and the forests from which they derive sustenance exploited by outsiders.
by Lala Ordenes-Cascolan
EVEN AS a child, Renato Zosimo Evangelista knew he was different. For one, he dreaded Christmas. Unlike other children who would get excited at the first whiff of the “–ber” breeze, he would get anxious for the coming days ahead.
It gets colder in the mountains during those months. But it was not the cold that bothered him too much; Christmas was the time when his fellow Mangyan would come down from the mountains and ask for money from the lowlanders. As the youngest Mangyan studying in predominantly Tagalog Holy Infant Academy in Calapan, Oriental Mindoro, he was often bullied by his classmates who would tell him: “Bakit ka nandito? Doon ka sa mga kasama mo. Di ka ba mamamasko? Nasaan ang bahag mo? (Why are you here? Go stick to your own kind. Aren’t you going to ask for Christmas charity? Where’s your g-string?)”
by Rorie R. Fajardo
SHE SAID it was a crucial journey for her children’s future.
Weeks before classes opened last month, Myrna Verde packed few clothes, gathered her four school-age children, and boarded a bus for Manila, some 138 kms from their village in Zambales. It was their first time to travel that far from home, but Verde, 57, had a mission: to look for kind-hearted city people who would give her money or any kind of help so that her children — all blind since birth — could continue going to school.
by Isa Lorenzo
IN HER school uniform and with an accent that is more Sandra Oh than Sandara Park, Sarang Lim does not look or sound too different from the rest of her schoolmates at the country’s oldest university. But the 24-year-old is part of the latest foreign invasion to hit the Philippines, although her countrymen, contrary to public perception, have not been flocking to our shores only recently. In fact, Koreans have been coming over in significant numbers for at least two decades now, many of them making the trip as families.
by Clinton Palanca
AS A people, we tend to be fond of boxes. When we leave for a foreign country or come home, we pack up our lives in a box and take it all with us. Coming home is even more of a box-laden set of affairs; no balikbayan worthy of the name returns home without one, or, more likely, more than one. We’re good at packing things in boxes. We’re good at putting people in boxes, too. Gender discrepancies are okay, as long as they fit neatly in a box. Homosexuals are all right if they announce themselves as so, and limit themselves to the roles that society allows them. Different ethnicities are all right as well, as long as they jump out of the box on cue and do what they are supposed to do: the black import to win the basketball game; the Indians to do the 5/6 thing and then ride off on their motorcycles; and the Chinese to provide a continuous supply of haw flakes and Ma Ling.
by Lala Ordenes-Cascolan
TO A common Juan, a Chinese is a Chinese is a Chinese. Ask him to distinguish between the old and the new and you might as well ask him what jiuqiao and xinqiao mean. They’re alien to him, pardon the pun.
But the Tsinoys want to make sure people can discern the differences between the jiuqiao and xinqiao, and several of them have even written papers to help ensure this.
by Michael L. Tan
ASKED WHAT Filipino culture is like, we sometimes answer, “Three hundred years in a convent and 50 years in Hollywood,” suggesting a hybrid culture.
HERE’S one reason for staying in the Philippines: the world has been coming to our doorstep, anyway, so why even leave?
