`… we had departed the MIA using brand new air bridges that connected the aircraft to the terminal.’
IT’S inevitable. If a Filipino gets to travel outside of the country to go to the usual regional destinations — Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam – he or she is bound to look around and conclude “napag-iwanan na tayo.”
I’ve excluded Japan in the list but let’s exclude Hong Kong and Singapore as well. All other regional destinations are destinations that, maybe 20 years or so and more, wouldn’t be able to hold a candle up to Manila and what the Philippines had to offer.
I remember in fact bringing my father’s older sister to Singapore in the 1990s, a gift after she had cataract surgery. We were slowly walking down Orchard Road when she turned to me to ask, “Where are we again?”
Singapore, I told her, leaving her stunned. You see, she had stayed in Singapore in the 1970s working with the RELC – Regional English Language Center. In the 1970s, Singapore was just a bit more modern than our Chinatown, and the Singapore River was in close competition with the Pasig River for being a stinking open sewer.
The Singapore she saw 20 years later was from a different world. And yet the Pasig remains a drinking sewer.
On my own first trip abroad — an all-expense paid student leaders trip to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1981 — the four “studentin-fuhrers” in our group took Lufthansa on a hop-skip-jump to Frankfurt. There were no straight flights to Europe then. And one of our stops was Bangkok’s Don Muang.
Was I one proud Filipino when I got off at Don Muang, as we had to get down the plane via a staircase and we had to walk to the terminal. Well, we had departed the MIA using brand new air bridges that connected the aircraft to the terminal. Haha. But that was then.
Today, Don Muang is still operational but the newer and bigger Suvarnabhumi airport is what makes Bangkok a major air traffic hub in Southeast Asia. It has over 30 gates and they’re building even more terminals! The airport building we departed from is now Terminal 1, all 40 years old, but not even our newest building, Terminal 3, can hold a candle to Bangkok’s.
And this is just all about airports. Let’s not even discuss public transport, or the stability of mobile phone service even when you’re along a main thoroughfare without any obstruction to signals. Seems to me that the only area where we have been able to keep in step is in the area of health facilities but the best hospitals here are beyond the reach of the pockets of the middle class or lower.
Now if this sounds (again) like another piece that puts down the Philippines, then I’m guilty as charged. But for as long as we don’t face up to the reality that we have fallen behind — way behind — then we won’t be able to take the necessary steps to correct course and start catching up with our neighbors.
That is, if the political elite of this country really cares.
