IT IS INTERESTING to note that Filipinos are almost everywhere in the world. We did not expect that Wuhan, China has many Filipinos working and also settled there.
We have travelled across Europe when we joined a tour group from Rome in 2005 and passing major cities up to London in the UK. Even on a hilltop at a snow-capped resort at Mt. Pilatus near Zurich, Switzerland we saw a Filipina working as cashier in a restaurant. Busy as she was, she waived at us upon recognizing that we are a Filipino couple in the tour group. Going downhill at the town center we saw another Pinay working at a glassware store.
Las Vegas, Nevada in the US which we visited way back in 2001 is a place where there are many Pinoys. We have an engineer cousin who works in a hotel there to maintain the air-conditioning system while his wife who is a nurse works at the hospital.
At the hotel where we booked for the week, the girl servicing our room to change the sheets in the morning was a Filipina from Manila. She left home and family to be able to work and earn a living and send her three children to college. When we hailed a taxi for the airport to go back to L.A., the driver was a Filipino who has stayed in Las Vegas for three years. But they claim the US is strict on their visa requirements for them to work in the US.
We are a country of 7,500 islands with only 2,000 of them inhabited and 5,500 are still unnamed and untilled with no settlers. Before the Chinese that we now allow freely to enter our country settle on them without our knowledge, what is our government doing to guard our islands from intruders?
Filipinos are all over the world but the host countries where they are settled are strict on their work and residential requirements.
In our case, what safeguards have we taken that aliens do not disappear and settle in one of our uninhabited islands in the archipelago? In the case of the visiting Chinese which we noted to have increased lately, let us beware that do not settle in our islands or mix with the local Chinese-Filipinos to stay here!
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GEM OF THOUGHT
“The river of Venice has provided billions of dollars in revenue through tourism; is there something that we can do to the Iloilo River to earn also tourist income for the city?” (For comments or re-actions, please e-mail to jnoveracompay@yahoo.com)/PN
