The end of season sales, the coats now dominating the stores windows, the back to school sales, they all herald one thing: summer is (almost) over and the rainy season is about to begin.
It's time to bring those coats out from the back of the closet, dust of my plueys and start humming 'I'm singing in the rain'. Oh how I wish facing the challenge of the rainy season is that easy! Not on this side of the (third) world. Aside from the erratic weather, there is one thing that we people of the Philippines need to worry about: floods, traffic (a much worse one!), typhoons, dengue outbreak, clogged drainage, and floating trash.
A couple of minutes ago I saw this article from the internet. The headline read: Right Ecosystem Needed to Curb brain drain. This brought me back to an important point raised in the book The Lexus and the Olive Tree wherein the author points out that increasingly the intellectual and highly skilled workers prefer to live in areas which provide them intellectual stimulation. This has very interesting implications not only for employers and companies but also for governments.
In a world that is increasingly becoming borderless and hyperconnected, it is now so easy to work remote and find ways to earn a Wall Street Income without actually going to wall-street. I was thinking that as a country that is so beautiful and rich in natural resources, we should be able to attract or at least retain our knowledge workers. Ironically, the opposite is true: migration is an aspiration and labor is our number one export.
The thought of leaving the Philippines to settle in another country - could be NY, Europe, Singapore, Australia etc. - has crossed my mind, several times maybe too often that I have already lost count. It has not because I have lost my love for the Philippines, I still have though little by little I am starting to lose hope. Pollution in the Philippines is getting worse, transportation is a perennial problem, infrastructure is almost nil, and the idea of basic services is nonexistent.
This article published on Bloomberg summarizes how i feel. It is an article which discusses elections, but nonetheless relevant for the Pearl of the Orients current sorry state.
This video does not even hint how beautiful the Philippines is:
Portulano Diving Scenes June 2009 from Ferdi on Vimeo.
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