Hospices for the poor, piglets for women

How exciting and challenging it is to work among the young, the promising, the poor who are strong and who could claim a future. How wonderful it is to count the successes. But how noble it is to work among the forgotten and the least, among those who do not matter even to their own next of kin. They have no wealth to give back, except a smile and a thank you, and a lesson or two on how to love. I have just read about an Asia-Pacific Conference on hospice care that is starting today here in Manila. The Philippines must now be on the map of hospice...

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SOS call from a seaman

If I were to put together the feature stories I had written about overseas Filipino workers (OFW) they could probably fill one small volume. Come to think of it, I probably should put them between covers. They’re part of our history as a people in search of the land of milk and honey. One story was about a domestic helper who stabbed dead the Saudi princess she worked for and who maltreated her for so long. The stabbing happened while the DH and her mistress were on a holiday in Cairo. The maid’s tearful letters to home (the last from the Cairo...

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Sing, ‘fiat justitia ruat coelum’

Indeed, one can say, “nessun dorma”. No one sleeps as this benighted country awaits the rising of the sun and the day of judgment of former president Joseph Estrada. In Puccini’s last opera “Turandot”, no one sleeps as Calaf, the “Unknown Prince”, waits for Princess Turandot’s life-and-death answer to a riddle. Calaf’s fate hangs in the balance. I am starting to write this piece on the eve of the Sandiganbayan’s judgment on Estrada, accused of plunder and several other crimes. I continue writing tomorrow (yesterday, that is) after either his...

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In the dying light in a pauper’s eyes

MANILA, Philippines -- The absent one. This was how Mother Teresa referred to that absence that she felt in her life during her 50-year dark night of the soul. Where was the beloved, the one for whom she poured out the substance of her life, the one supposed to give meaning and purpose to her selfless daring to love the world’s most abandoned? Mother Teresa’s own revelations, kept and hidden even after her death 10 years ago, and made public just recently in a book (“Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light” edited by Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk), are now...

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