What is Filipino Pride?

Filipinos leave the country every year in pursuit of more gainful employment abroad. They’re laying pipelines in Siberia, mining diamonds in Angola and sailing ships in all the world’s oceans. They clean thousands of homes a day from Hong Kong to Dubai to London; Bahrain’s prime minister employs some 50 Filipinos in his own household (Philippines: Workers for the World, Newsweek, Oct.4, 2006.) The Philippines is currently the world’s leading exporter of nurses, with 164,000 or 85% of the country’s trained nurses are working abroad, with doctors becoming nurses. About 200 hospitals have recently closed down across the country because of a lack of doctors and nurses with another 800 hospitals considered to be “partially closed” due to the lack of qualified health personnel

As Barth Suretsky, an American expat who lived and died in the Philippines lamented, the fundamental thing wrong with this country is a lack of pride in being Filipino. “All Filipinos want to be something else. The poor ones want to be American, and the rich ones all want to be Spaniards. Nobody wants to be Filipino.” No pride, no identity, no recollection of his glorious past that can project him in leading the future of his country. “A people without a sense of history is a people doomed to be unaware of their own identity.”
George Farwell, a Brit who went to the Philippines several times, left an interesting study before he died. In his book, Mask of Asia: the Philippines, he said that one of the mysteries of Asia, at least from the Western viewpoint is the small role assigned to the Philippines in international affairs… “The West’s colonial godsons, rebelliously or not, have now come of age. They have inherited much of our materialist desires, impeded only by industrial inexperience and corroding poverty.”

The focus and priorities of millions of Filipinos going abroad are not necessarily “FOR THE COUNTRY”. While we look for gadgets and toys (pasalubong to beautify our image), the Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and the Koreans would go to the West and gather TOOLS to equip themselves by getting the best education in the great learning institutes so they could invent a new mobile phone, design a new car, or create their own business at home. They brought with them things that could be used to improve their situation and in effect those around them, whichever place they choose to stay. They brought with them better skills and funds that could assist their family and their society back home.

Until we are able to dream correctly, dream selflessly, and train utterly, we will forever remain a funny mystery to the world as a barren land of gold and supreme, silly natural and intellectual resources.

We are very much capable of solving our own problems, we were once envied by our neighbors which has now overtook us, we must look more inwards than outwards and we must have the courage, the will to change for the better. Do it not for yourselves but for the next generations of Filipinos.

Note: Some text were taken from the http://www.thebrownraise.org/

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