Maniolas

No Limitation By Ted Laguatan 12:22 am | Thursday, September 5th, 2013 All Filipinos are slaves including the well to do. We are slaves to the all-pervading institutionalized corruption in the Philippine government that permeates all facets of our lives. Even Filipinos working and living abroad are slaves. They bear the burden and shame of coming from a country with a reputation of being poor, weak and corrupt. And like the hard earned money of their fellow  Filipinos in the homeland, a significant amount of the billions of dollars they send to their relatives back home – will find their way to  the pockets of corrupt dishonest officials and other personnel in all branches and all levels of the Philippine government: bureaucracy clerks; traffic policemen; palengke kubradors; tax collectors; customs people; restaurant inspectors; immigration officials:  court personnel; authorities involved in the licensing or registration of vehicles, businesses, land titles, etc ; and super greedy Senators, Congressmen and judges. Filipinos have continually been slaves to government corruption for so long now.  The terrible resultant effects of this slavery are seen everywhere in the Philippines: Children digging into smelly garbage cans for scraps of pagpag food; One third of our people going to bed hungry at night; Sick people dying because of not having medicines; Children with educations stopping at grade six because of limited funds; Millions living in subhuman squalid slums;  Substandard eroding roads, dangerous bridges and other infrastructures;  Inferior government services… Thousands of our people are separated from their children Read More …

MAGSAYSAY AWARDS By DJ YapPhilippine Daily Inquirer 4:27 am | Friday, August 30th, 2013 On her first day at university in the late 1960s, Lahpai Seng Raw was put in the boys’ dormitory by mistake because school administrators thought her native Kachin name meant she was a boy. The only daughter in a house full of boys, Seng Raw didn’t make a fuss and proceeded to drop her bags and boxes in her assigned room in the dormitory. “So all the boys left and right looked at me and told me, ‘Hey, you cannot stay here,’” she said, laughing. “And I said, ‘Why not? That’s my name there,’” said the woman who would later on become a leading light of Burma’s civil society and a recipient of the 2013 Ramon Magsaysay Award. Eventually, administrators at Rangoon University resolved the mix-up and placed the psychology major in the girls’ dormitory. The incident illustrates how Seng Raw, a widowed mother of one, has never considered her gender to be an impediment to her endeavors, especially in spurring development in the marginalized borderlands of her country, which is still reeling from decades of military dictatorship. “I always forget that I’m a woman, anyway,” Seng Raw, 63, said in an interview with the Inquirer ahead of the presentation ceremony tomorrow of the Ramon Magsaysay Awards, one of Asia’s highest honors and sometimes described as its version of the Nobel Prize. If anything, she said her being a woman was actually something of an advantage Read More …