A beautiful country

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‘The Philippines is a beautiful country just waiting to be approached in its entirety by its very own people.’

THE weekend brought me to Davao and GenSan, two cities I have rarely visited since moving on from a non-alcoholic beverage company in 2012. That company had bottling plants all over the country and part of my job was dropping in on them once in a while to interact with my counterparts and discuss government relations and media issues as part of my responsibilities.

The beauty of those responsibilities was they gave me the opportunity to meet different people from all over and see parts of the Philippines someone born and raised in Manila hardly gets to see.

I concluded then that the Philippines was a beautiful country.

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My trip to Davao and GenSan over the weekend simply reinforced that belief.

In the last 12 years of my professional life, I’ve been going to parts of the Philippines I never got to see working for that beverage firm — simply because mining areas are not usually the same areas where you find factories and manufacturing plants. So, when I put together images of Palawan or Samar (places I visit often these days) with images of the coastlines of Ilocos or the summits of Apo, Mayon and Matutum, I am left with an even stronger impression that we have a beautiful country that even to most Filipinos remains relatively unexplored.

It is a beauty that is also manifested from outside the airplane windows I so often look out from — whether it is to look down on Taal Volcano, or to see the beaches of San Vicente (Palawan) or the little islands in the area between Masbate and Leyte, and Cebu and Bohol.

Even the memory (rekindled recently) of a high school batchmate who perished climbing down from Mt. Guiting-Guiting made me imagine the beauty that our mountaineers must be able to behold from above 10,000 feet. Not to mention the beauty beneath our seas that divers have long been gushing about.

It’s a beautiful country that deserves being given more attention, and being appreciated in its entirety. Too often and for too long we have been too localized, too parochial in our sense of ourselves: Ilocanos and Ilonggos and Cebuanos and Kapampangans, Tagalogs and Warays and those coming from our autonomous regions.

I am happy that in many parts of the Philippines, once remote locations are now linked by relatively good and someone’s really wide roads (with the sole exception, I am told, being in Western Samar!!!). You can travel from most of Mindanao’s major cities to another one on really wide and well-paved roads, just as you can drive the lengths of Palawan island on a highway wide enough at times to rival EDSA.

Airports, too, have greatly improved, though the iconic escalator or urinal under repair remains a constant. Hospitals in major cities are now well-equipped. There is still much to be done on connectivity (mobile services can still be spotty even in a major destination like Puerto Princesa) and our inter-island vessels are still steamboat-slow.

I think what’s missing is a credible narrative of a country that is beautiful in its diversity and a people blessed with talent and high EQ. But who is the one with credibility who can broadcast that narrative? Not our political parties and our political types. Not our civil society organizations that oftentimes are also too politically identified. The academe perhaps, if they can do so in a more layman’s language? Younger people maybe? Or someone (singular or plural) yet to be discovered out there?

The Philippines is a beautiful country just waiting to be approached in its entirety by its very own people.

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