beyond toxicity

“We, Filipinos are resilient enough with adversities; we can even smile despite the fact that the city has been indundated or houses have been covered with ash fall. We are just one bunch of happy people.”

I uttered these lines or so the other day to one of our senior colleagues who heads the Medical department and hails from Pakistan when she sat with me and another friend-colleague in our university canteen while having our mid-morning snack and talked about the nature’s wrath in Japan recently. My Pinoy friend even told her that Filipinos’ smiles are even wider when there’s a TV camera flashed in front of them during typhoon and other calamity coverage. I could not agree more.

A poet once said, “A Filipino is pliant like a bamboo. Neither typhoons nor monsoons could break the Filipino spirit; like the bamboo, it sways and bends with nature’s relentless onslaughts, but it refuses to yield or die.”