Expat
I have been working for my boss since 1999, and in this count I include the two years that I spent away from the company because we never really lost touch with each other. My boss is an expat from the United Kingdom but has Scottish ancestry and has lived part of his life in Hong Kong and the Middle East, so you can say he’s seen a few things. My co-workers and I have had ample exposure with expats from different places, mostly from Europe and Australia, and yes even an American or two, since around 70 percent of our clients are non-Filipinos. At work I’m known as Vikki (short for my real name Victoria), and I’ve become accustomed to clipped European tones that rise on the last syllable, and drawn out Aussie drawls that always sound like they are off to the pub.
When I went to Singapore for a few days in 2006, several Filipino friends who had migrated there to work showed me around the city in our off hours. Such a fascinating city it was, with its residential zones and business zones, and specific areas where one can find and buy specific things. I remember being thrown off guard by the right-hand drive traffic, and suddenly remembering to look to the right instead of the left for oncoming vehicles when crossing the street. It took me a while to get used to the street noise and the sound of the sidewalks, even the slant of the sunlight in the morning looked different.
When I was there, Lala and Elyse and Cord and Edwin, all former co-workers, made sure I saw as much of the city as I could for the duration of my stay. Edwin, who had been in Singapore for more than three years at the time, took me out to an early dinner on my second night there. While he was telling me about his life as a single working guy in the Lion City, he said something that got me thinking. He said:
Dito Ms. Vikki, tayo ang expat.
Matter-of-fact, he said it, a plain declaration of what was indeed true of him and hundreds of other Filipino workers in Singapore, no matter what job description. This was a foreign country and they were the expats.
And I thought of what the word expat and foreigner meant to me, and perhaps quite a few other Filipinos here in our country the Philippines. The word “foreigner” (porener) had generically replaced the more common term “Amerikano” (or Merkano as we Visayans are more apt to say) in reference to any caucasian person from overseas.
But on a different level, I have always disliked the way some of our countrymen show preference and deference to foreigners in a crowd, or in a line, or even on restaurant tables. I haven’t figured out if it was because of potentially bigger tips that an expat is more likely to give because we are still under the illusion that expat customer = more money than a pinoy customer, and even if it were true—would the same thing apply to me if I were the expat in another country. Apparently not, if we are to read some of the grim events that have befallen our countrymen in other countries.
I am writing this now, partly because of my kumare and former co-worker Chu who will have been in Singapore for a week tomorrow. By now she would have settled in at work comfortably, hopefully with a rising sense of confidence in herself as she deals with her new co-workers, perhaps every now and then thinking to pick up the phone and dial a local to check whether Abi was ready for lunch and then suddenly remembering that Abi was hundreds of miles away back in the old office. I know for a fact that she cries at night and at random hours in the day when she remembers the husband and three children she left behind in the Philippines so she can earn three times her salary there in Singapore.
I was chatting with Saro a few nights ago (yes Chu, we were talking about you). Saro, a young husband and father of two very young kids, is also leaving for Singapore three days from now. He had given up on trying to find Chicago jobs. He said sacrifices had to be made, he knew it was going to be difficult, but there was no other choice. There’s just no place for him here, for the several reasons I and various other people concerned about the brain drain have written about.
So. Expat ka na Chu. In a few days si Saro din. One thing’s for certain. There are enough of you Pinoy expats there to hold each other up. That’s one thing I do know. Where ever we are, this group of people formerly known as Imaginet employees, we take care of our own.
Ingat kayong lahat dyan.
Captcha for a Cause
You (yes very) precious few visitors to this blog may notice that I have implemented a captcha form on my comments area. CAPTCHA means (and I discovered this only today) “Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart.”
I did this not because I think there are robots among my very precious few readers, but because of reCaptcha.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
—What is reCAPTCHA?
Comprehension and the human eye are more reliable than a scanner’s optical character recognition software. So everytime you provide the answer to a captcha code before submitting your comment, you are actually helping reCAPTCHA digitize books two words at a time.
So I beg your patience for the additional step you need to take before submitting a comment, but I assure you it’s for a good cause. Allow me to explain the three icons that you can see on the form.
Clicking on this icon will bring up a new captcha image in case the current one is much too illegible for you to decipher.
Clicking on this icon will start the playback of a voice reading off eight numbers, and you need to enter the numbers that the voice dictates into the box.
Clicking on the question mark icon will bring up the small help screen as a pop-up window.
reCAPTCHA can be implemented as a plugin for WordPress blogs, as well as other widely used CMS software.
In addition, reCAPTCHA has something that can help you cloak your email address, a technique which you can use for your signatures in forums and websites.
Welcome to the Rock (The Corrector)
It is humbling, to say the least, when you visit a site that you know only from history books—a place that you’ve heard about only in documentaries and movie adaptations—and you meet someone who was actually part of history and hear straight from his mouth the events of 40 years ago.
Jibin Arula was a young husband and father when he left Mindanao to join what eventually become the Jabidah commando unit which was formed under Operation Merdeka, which is now pegged in infamy as a vain attempt to conquer Sabah gone horribly wrong.
The story behind Operation Merdeka is best told by Paul F. Whitman of The Heritage Battalion. But only Jibin Arula himself could relate how he and a fellow Moro soldier were being led unarmed through a tunnel in the pitch dark towards Kindley Airfield, when they heard the sound of an M2 carbine rifle’s magazine falling to the ground. To them that meant only one thing—that their escort had tried to release the safety switch on his rifle but in the dark had hit the magazine release switch instead. That was when Jibin Arula knew for sure that something was wrong. It was sheer presence of mind and the will to live that kept Jibin Arula alive in that dark morning of March 18, 1968.
For more reading on what the Jabidah Massacre was about, the following links are highly recommended:
Paul F. Whitman’s “THE CORREGIDOR MASSACRE - 1968″
Chronology of Events - summarizing the history of the Moro struggle and the Philippine Government’s attempts at diffusing a so-called time bomb.
Commemorating the 40th Year of the Jabidah Massacre - a blog entry by Sam on Travel Light
After 40 Years, a marker commemorating Jabidah Massacre is now installed - from the Anak Mindanao Website
For more photos of what Corregidor used to look like during the war check out:
Paul Whitman’s album
Corregidor Then and Now
For why the island was named Corregidor, click here
Also if you click the Welcome to Corregidor photo at the beginning of this post, you will be taken to my Flickr set of photos from today’s activity.
Bonus: History returns. Click on the photo to view a full-size version, and Sam’s blog on Jibin Arula then and now.
GMA’s Strong Economy as Explained by the Incredible Expanding Pandesal
The paper bag on the left contains leftover pandesal from yesterday’s breakfast. They cost P1 apiece from the Bitonio Bakery at the nearby talipapa. We had quite a bit left over because Kuya Maui wasn’t around to finish them off.
The paper bag on the right contains today’s breakfast pandesal. Noticeably larger and presumably more nourishing, it also now costs P2 apiece. The bakers were profusely apologetic for this 100% increase, but tried to appease us by saying that the pieces were indeed bigger to match the price.
Who wouldn’t want anything bigger and better, one might ask. Today’s pandesal is bigger yes, but is it better? Looking at the picture above today’s pandesal does look at least 90% bigger than yesterday’s pandesal. But today’s pandesal is also noticeably softer (something which I cannot show you here, sad to say) than yesterday’s pandesal, and not because yesterday’s is “bahaw” or day-old as we say it in Visayan. Today’s pandesal is softer because there’s more air in it, meaning more leavening has been used with less flour.
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