"Home To A Handful Of Asia's Richest People"

(Today I introduce a section named "Unveil Philippines." It will appear in this site on a daily basis. "Unveil Philippines" is a collection of articles and commentaries written by either Filipinos or foreign nationals. I feel that because of the vast ocean of information available to us today, we might have missed reading many published thoughts about the Philippines and the Filipinos.)

Philippines
by Belinda Rhodes (Published in New Internationalist, September 2004)

THE route from Manila's international airport to the city centre is lined with expensive condominiums and teeming shanty towns. Your car may just as easily pull up beside a well-waxed, brand new four-wheel-drive vehicle as an undernourished street vendor selling chewing gum and lottery tickets. On Roxas Boulevard, hugging Manila Bay, you are likely to pass barefoot street children and begging mothers as you pass the glamorous yacht club and the arts centre complex built by former first lady Imelda Marcos.

The Philippines is home to a handful of Asia's richest people, and a great many of its poorest. Images of scavengers picking their way through smoking rubbish dumps are perhaps as familiar to foreigners as that of Imelda Marcos wearing a glittering gown and another pair of shoes. Three governments since the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986 have failed to lift the seriously poor, who account for around half of the population, above the poverty line.

Although the Philippines did not suffer as badly as some of its neighbours during the East Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, neither did it recover as quickly. The ups and downs of the economy are closely linked to conditions in the US and Japan, who take the bulk of Philippine exports.

But the country has long had one dependable major source of income: the remittances of overseas workers. Some seven million Filipinos, predominantly women, work in Hong Kong, the Middle East, Japan and Europe as domestic workers, healthcare professionals, seafarers and entertainers. They provide a valuable cushion that all Philippine leaders so far have been reluctant to relinquish.

With full employment at home still hard to find, a temporary contract abroad is what many Filipinos strive for. Others see migration to the US as the holy grail. Links with America and its already large Filipino community are strong, founded on a history of fairly benign colonization from 1898 when Spain ceded the Philippines to the US. From then on, despite almost four centuries of Spanish rule, English became the primary language of instruction and American-style institutions were put in place.

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