Archive for October, 2008

(the women power to changing the world into a safer, greener and healthier place to live in)


What is the role of a 21st century Filipina in the injuring and failing environment, in the midst of global warming, economic failure(s), wars and other extreme privation ? How can a Filipina, as a woman, help save the world through right spending.  A Filipina, as a woman, can make a difference in building a better environment/world through her purse- her spending.

I am a Filipina, and I have been in the US for more than eight months now. I consider my every experience in this country as vital in pursuing my American dream. In the pursue of that dream, I think about my own country, the Philippines and our weakening environment and what I can do to be an advocate to helping save our mother earth.

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This morning, barely a week before American citizens exercise their right to vote, I read the freshly-crafted e-mails that came from Pro-Obama and Pro-McCain supporters — especially the ones written by my Filipina friends, such as Teresa Dosdos Ruelas, a Founder and Visionary Editor of Offerings Publications, Inc., based in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. Teresa and I have been trying to reconnect face-to-face since we rediscovered each other’s presence a few years ago but it seems it is our online communications that keep allowing us to strengthen our relationship.

Today, with our permission, Teresa and I are reprinting our e-mail responses to each other at the Filipina Images advocacy blog and news portal and her Offerings Publications website to introduce our readers to each other, especially the worldwide Filipina women networks within our midst.

Welcome to Filipina Images, Teresa! We look forward to your contributions in helping us live our lives with purpose and passion.

THE E-MAIL THAT STARTED IT ALL

On 10/27/08 7:40 PM, Teresa Dosdos Ruelas’s friend wrote:

Dear friends,

Election in the USA is very crucial let us pray that McCain will win who is a pro-life advocator. My husband (name deleted), yesterday attended an archdiocesan meeting at the archbishop (residence) requesting for us all who have friends and relatives in the states not to vote for Obama who approves abortion and encourages gay relationship to be taught in schools. A bishop from the States have asked Cardinal (name deleted) to inform us all of the threat to our Catholic faith after the US election wherein our own families may be future victims of the downgrade of moral values. Take care and God bless!

(name of Teresa Dosdos Ruelas’s friend deleted)

REPLY FROM TERESA DOSDOS RUELAS

From: Teresa Ruelas
Date: Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 7:50 AM
Subject: Re: election in the US

Dear (names deleted),

I have been wondering about the sentiments of the Filipinos in the US and at home during these elections. So, thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. I can see how you would ‘vote’ and pray the way you would. And I hope you have it in your hearts to listen to a different point of view; that this is a forum for diversity of perspective and for stretching what we know and believe to be true.

I want to say here – with heartfelt respect to you and to the Catholic Church in the Philippines (I say “in the Philippines” as this is not necessarily the exact stand in other countries including the US) - that, whether you believe in pro-choice or pro-life, electing McCain is not your answer. There are people who hold both beliefs in both parties. It is more complex than that…and throwing “moral values” as the difference to vote for McCain is false….pro-choicers are not against the value of life no matter how others like to think it…. I know it makes the argument clean and easy to look to others who do not think like us and assume we know their values. The difference in this longtime and very touchy argument is in the understanding and belief of when life starts, and what we believe about death, and whether the quality of life of a being is put into consideration. It is not a difference of values.

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On October 2, 2008, Natalie Coughlin (pronounced “cog-lin”), a Filipina American Olympic swimmer who had won six medals in the Beijing Olympics, including a gold and two silvers (yes, being a quarter-Filipina makes one an American of Filipina ancestry!) was honored with the Achievement Award for Sports and Entertainment during the prestigious 11th Filipinas Magazine Achievement Awards at the South San Francisco Conference Center, South San Francisco, California. The award was sponsored by Anheuser-Busch Companies and presented by Jim Cho, Senior Manager, Community Relations.

Although I regret not being able to join my sister, Noemi Dado, in her Missouri countryside adventures since, as a member of the Filipinas Magazine family, I had to be present at this awards event, meeting Natalie Coughlin for the first time made up for the loss of cherished family time.

My assignment was simple: pin a corsage on every awardee. However, when Natalie arrived from the ABS-CBNi studios where she had done a TV interview, if you look at the pretty silk blouse she was wearing, there was no way I could pin a corsage without destroying the fabric. If you haven’t met her yet, let me assure you that Natalie Coughlin is VERY tall! Just like any celebrity, Natalie had her fair share of fans during that night. I gave up trying to have a souvenir photo with her although she posed with us for the Filipinas Magazine staffers’ annual group picture.

There were some friends who told me that they had never heard Natalie Coughlin talk about her Filipina heritage during her interviews. What I replied was, “Whether Natalie felt that mentioning her Filipina heritage was appropriate or not, that is her call. We need to respect her decision. After all, if you listen closely to her, Natalie chooses to talk about her passion: swimming. What is important is that she acknowledged her Filipino heritage by showing up at the awards event. Her presence indicates that she does accept the Filipina in her. Maybe this is the right time for Natalie to rediscover some of her ancestral roots, where her grandmother came from.”

Here is the Balitang America segment Natalie Coughlin appeared in that afternoon on October 2, 2008.

I found another video of Natalie Coughlin being interviewed by late night talk show host, Jay Leno.

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Filipina bloggers and visitors, we need your help. Look at the latest search engine ranking in Google Philippines:

The bad news is FilipinaImages.com is now number 6 but the good news is we are still in page 1. The first five links are all dating sites. Let’s not allow FilipinaImages.com rank way below page 1.

Update- from USA google search engine results show us at Number 3.

We at Filipinaimages.com enjoin you to sustain our Filipina Online Campaign by writing about the Filipina in your blogs and continue to link the “Filipina” in your entries.

Aside from blog entries, we also need immediate help from you and your blogger friends.

How?

In your sidebar or footer, place this link. [Don't just write the word, "Filipina." Instead, insert the link. The highlighted, linkable keyword, "Filipina," will be the published result.]

<a href="http://filipina.eu.com/">Filipina</a>

If you have a large community of readers in your site, start a similar sitewide links campaign and use this Filipina link:

<a href="http://filipinaimages.com">Filipina</a>

or simply add Filipinaimages.com with anchor text “Filipina” to your blogroll.

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I am a member of Think Rich Pinoy Mailing list, ang recently I received an email from Thea Santos announcing the launch of her own Blog Think Rich Pinay. If you are like me, who is hungry for tips as to how I can achieve Financial Freedom, visit her blog and learn together with her.

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RichPinay

Domestic helpers. Mail-order brides. Exporters of human labor. Scammers.

These are how people the world over have come to know us, Filipinos. And sometimes, I can’t blame them. For though it’s not completely true that these are what constitute us as a people, it’s not completely false either.

Our main export product is our people. A big chunk of our population — roughly ten percent — are Overseas Filipino Contract Workers (OFWs), many of whom are working abroad either as domestic helpers, construction or factory workers, nannies, and health workers, among others. The government calls our OFWs “the modern-day heroes,” because they have saved the country’s economy many times over through their remittances. Without our OFWs, our economy would have long gone under.

We also have mail-order brides — women who have become wives of foreign nationals through dating sites. I do not think this phenomenon is true only among Filipinos, or South East Asian women for that matter, but our case seems to be out of proportion. Just type in the word “Filipina” in the search engine, and you’d see sites advertising Filipinas as if we were commodities.

Being a Filipina, this situation affects me greatly, more so because I cannot claim that the conception that Filipinas are mail-order-brides is entirely false. Many Filipinas have actually taken the easy road to financial security — by marrying a foreign national they met only through the internet and who they have never met before tying the knot, and someone they don’t — or at least, didn’t at first — love.

And so that’s what our women have come to be known — not just mail-order brides, but brides for sale.

 

When I was a sophomore student in the university, one of my professors, a tall, young, and light-skinned mestiza-looking woman once related to class one of her experiences in an Asian country during a get-to-know party among international scholars. A friend jokingly introduced her as a European, and everybody believed him. Then this friend introduced her as Chinese, and again, everyone believed him. Then Latin American. Again, everybody believed him. Until this professor told her friend to cut the game out, to tell everyone the truth: that she was a Filipina. So he did; but this time, no one believed him. They thought he was joking. No, it wasn’t because she didn’t look like a Filipina, but because they couldn’t believe there’s a Filipina who would be intelligent enough to be part of that group. They thought Filipinas were only either nannies or prostitutes.

Just recently, a friend of mine who works as a marketing assistant in Qatar told me that if only she had a job to come back to in the country, if she weren’t thinking about how difficult their financial situation back home was, she would have quitted her job. “It’s different here, Sis,” she told me. “They have very poor opinion about Filipinos. They would tell you face to face that Filipinos are stupid, and loose. It’s degrading. But you know what? Sometimes, you couldn’t blame them. There are really quite a number of Filipinas here who are… uhmm… misbehaving.”

There are many other related stories about discrimination and misconceptions about our country’s womenfolk; all disheartening. Mary’s sin is not necessarily Ann’s, but for some reason, their common denomination — nationality — make other nationals think they are the same. Logically speaking, this thinking is fallacious, but perception is not the domain of logic. Right or wrong, logical or not, this perception remains, and we shall be viewed through the lens of that perception, whether we like it or not.

I wouldn’t deny that there is a tinge of truth to other nationals’ misconceptions about us. We do have mail-order brides. We do have women who have become victims of the sex trade. We also have countrymen who have falsified their documents to gain entry to other countries. There are also those who do fishy business. We have women who shamelessly ask (demand?) financial support from their foreigner boyfriends. We have bar girls who do dirty tricks on their costumers. But still, I can’t help but wish that when others look at us as a people, they would look deeper than the skin color, beyond the one-word entry in the passport that reads ‘Filipino.’ Because while it is true that a number of our people had made mistakes in the past, and are committing the same mistake now, it doesn’t mean we are all the same. We share many things, but every person’s actions reflect the choices he or she made alone, not the choices his or her comrades made, are making, or shall make.

That we export labor is a sad thing. But I don’t think it should make me hang my face in shame. And no matter how “lowly” the jobs Filipinos hold abroad, I don’t think we should be ashamed of them. OFWs have gone to work overseas to do the things their employers hate doing, or can’t do. They care for their employer’s elders. They fix their mess. These jobs, though seemingly lowly and menial, are respectable. They care for their employers’ children, while inside they are hurting… hurting that their own children back home whom they left long before they were old enough to memorize their parents’ faces, are left uncared for. And the OFWs wonder, and hope, and pray, that the money they send their kids would be enough to pay for their absences (though knowing full well it won’t be), that the material comfort their remittances could buy their children would be enough to nurture them until they go back home to care for them, never to leave them again.

It’s true, there are thousands of OFW success stories, but for every thousand happy endings, is another thousand wrecked homes and children gone wild. Very sad, indeed. But sadder still is the fact that our government is doing nothing to solve the problem. Instead of creating jobs right at home, our government encourages its people to leave and find work abroad, and of course, send remittances. The saddest part of it all is the lack of realistic government programs to support our OFWs who, instead of finding success, meet up with failure abroad.

Yes, we Filipinos are up for sale. And we’re a bargain, with our medical specialists who work as nurses abroad, lawyers who work as hotel janitors, and professionals who work as nannies. But what can we do? For most of our countrymen, not having the guts to leave the country in the face of scarcity of employment opportunities back home is tantamount to succumbing to failure. For most of us, working abroad has become a matter of survival.

Ah, if only our government would wake up from its drunken stupor, if only it would finally learn to put its act together, it would cease being the hearse that leads the nation to its cavernous pit.

//SEBenosa; 03 August 2008
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Please post your comments/join the discussion about this post HERE.

So what do you think of the latest racial slur to affect our Filipina maid? A BBC comedy show portrayed a Filipina dressed as a maid aka sex entertainer for a depressed and aging British man. The Filipina “maid” was also made to dance in front of the British man as two others were egging him to have sex with the Filipina.

Here is a youtube video of that scene. (View clearer video)

In fact, the Philippines is demanding an apology from BBC.

All right! All right! Calm down, calm down” was always enough to placate the constantly bickering Scousers on Harry Enfield’s 1990s TV show. But it may not resolve the diplomatic row the comedian sparked yesterday after the Philippine ambassador in London accused him of racism and making light of sexual exploitation.

In a letter to the BBC, Edgardo B Espiritu demanded an apology for a skit in the Harry & Paul show in which a posh southern character tries to get his “pet northerner” to mate with his Filipino housemaid.

“Such portrayal and stereotyping of Filipino women as domestic workers and sex playthings is not only egregiously insulting to the Filipino community in the UK, it is also very malicious and is a blatant display of racial prejudice,” wrote Espiritu in the letter to Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust.

The Philippine government also protested about the sketch, which was screened on BBC1 on September 26.

Congresswoman Risa Hontiveros demanded the BBC publicly apologise and called on the Philippines department of foreign affairs to file a formal complaint to the British government.

Foreign secretary Alberto Romulo summoned British ambassador Peter Beckingham to discuss the matter. But Beckingham said that any apology should not come from government officials but from the network and the show’s producers.

Yesterday Tiger Aspect Productions, which makes the show, said: “Harry & Paul is a post-watershed comedy sketch series and as such tackles many situations in a comedic way. Set in this context, the sketch is so far beyond the realms of reality as to be absurd - and in no way is intended to demean or upset any viewer.”

But a spokeswoman at the Philippine embassy said: “If Tiger Aspect intended the episode to be a joke, we were definitely not amused. Neither did the Filipino community in the UK find it amusing. The UK is a country that is big on human rights issues as well as issues concerning women and racial equality. To stereotype Filipino women … is not only malicious but is also a blatant display of racial prejudice.”

She added: “And just for the record, Filipino domestic workers in the UK command one of the highest if not the highest salary among their counterparts. They are highly regarded by their employers because of their work ethics and their trustworthiness.” An online petition, attributed to the Philippine Foundation, condemning the “disgraceful” skit, had 685 signatures by 5pm yesterday.

A BBC spokeswoman said that the corporation had not yet received the letter from the Philippine ambassador, but that by 3pm yesterday, 54 members of the public had complained to the BBC about the negative stereotyping of Filipinas.

She said that no one had so far objected to the portrayal of northerners in Harry & Paul, but that last month 41 people had objected to a sketch in which a kitten was stamped on..

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