If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, well, the short answer is I’ve been writing at Filipinovoices.com:
My wife, a travel agent, got fuming mad at a “friend” last weekend. Her “friend” inquired regarding passport renewal application with a caveat: “friend’s” birth certificate has some problems, preventing her from obtaining one from the NSO. My wife asked if she had consulted her local civil registrar or a lawyer to fix whatever her problems are. The reply (this was going on in SMS, if I recall correctly) made my wife hurl:
Nagpagawa na ako ng birth certificate sa Recto. Nakaprint naman sa NSO paper.
The “friend’s” excuse for taking desperate measures is the fact that she wants to become an OFW — our latest breed of national hero. And doubtless, nothing will stop her — if she has resorted to Recto to rectify (pun intended) her birth certificate issues and the DFA refuses to issue her a legit passport, she would doubtless return to those run-down shanties alongside the LRT Line 2 terminal at that avenue to obtain a fake one.
Filipinos and Entrepreneurship: What’s the real score?
The result of the GEM Philippines 2006-2007 National Report, as cited by CVJ, is baffling, to say the least. In the study, GEM Philippines states that the distribution of entrepreneurs by socio-economic status is as follows: Class ABC+ 7%, Class C- 19%, Class D 54%, Class E 20%.
Results show that four out of 10 Filipinos (39.2%) aged 18 to 64 have businesses (see Figure 3) and the Philippines ranks second among the 42 countries surveyed by GEMfor 2006. The country is only second to Peru among middleand low income countries and ranks first among benchmarked countries in Asia.
This appears to state that Filipinos are, in fact, business-oriented. This is in stark-contrast to the often maligned notion of the Filipino as culturally biased against entrepreneurship, and having a seek-employment mentality as opposed to a business-oriented culture.
Hope you check out Filipinovoices.com 
1 response so far ↓
1 Linguist-in-Waiting // Jul 24, 2008 at 5:36 am
I was blog-hopping somehow through Sidney Snoeck’s defunct site, and I ended up in yours.
Anyway, I do whole-heartedly agree with the sentiment in your Reciprocity article. I suppose I identify most with the middle class as well, and so I never internalized the problems that the militants were protesting for. While in UP quite a few years back, I never saw the point in joining marches and rallies.
You do have a point, and I really echo that, that the militants should be doing what they want their enemies to be doing to them as well. They shouldn’t expect a fair treatment if they themselves are short-changing others.
The world is ironic, isn’t it?
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