Tempest over the balikbayan box

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo I have never personally received a balikbayan box from abroad addressed to me, nor have I sent one home from abroad to myself (to, say, avoid airline excess baggage fees). But I have surely received items that came from someone’s balikbayan box, like not-so-easy-to-find food items that I want (flax seeds, for example). I also receive bath and beauty stuff, health supplements, American-made fruit...

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Remembering in August

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo Photo by Recto Mercene “Think back,” presidential aspirant Raul Roco, seemingly lost in a fog of memories, mused in 2004. “Think back on all the tales that you remember of Camelot.” The words from the 1960s Lerner-Loewe musical cascaded from his lips as he thought back on how King Arthur sang “that once there was a fleeting wisp of glory, called Camelot.” “We were the Camelot boys,”...

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Saving the last ecological frontier

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo Part of the Foundation for the Philippine Environment’s (FPE) first Sarihay Award for journalists were out-of-town trips to FPE project sites. Four of us chose to go to Palawan, the others went to Surigao del Sur and Negros Occidental. If you’re a journalist, you know you would be on a working trip, and you hope to stumble upon some surprises on the rugged terrain or at the end of the road. This...

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"Tiwalag'

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo It is the root word of a Filipino noun and verb (in various tenses) that mean expulsion, expel, expelled, etc.: “tiwalag.” This T word brings fear among the Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) followers because, to them, being stripped of membership means certain damnation to the fires of hell. The INC teaches that only through this church can one attain salvation—that is, go to heaven. It is the powerful...

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