In a post I made regarding my purchase and reading pleasure of Arnold Arre's Martial Law Babies, I focused more on the aspects of refusing to grow up in a world that wishes to grow eternal with it's workers wishing they never wished they grew up so fast. I read it again today, after being on my re-read list for weeks. I always re-read books, hoping that I would come across something I never saw on my initial read. Probably a character I missed, a concept I forgot, a memory reborn. Books are fragments of people's memories capture in print. All of them hold something dear to both the reader and the author.

They also make me cry. My 9/11 comic always makes me cry. I don't know those people, didn't even believe it when it happened and only watched it on the news, the only time I remember that Miriam brought out TVs in the cafeteria.

So I read the graphic novel again and a spark of emotion emerged.

My age then, high school, young, flourishing, discovering what I wanted to be, and planning my route to get there was a scary yet exciting feat. I never realized that the road I chose then would take me here, happy, content, loving boys I never thought I could touch and have a hand at shaping their future. I am proud that I can teach such wonderful leaders of our future.

Then I wonder, as I observe how they move, that these boys, at an early age, know the meaning of faithfulness. They share secrets with friends, hold a bond that even the teachers can't undo and despite far-away classrooms and age gaps, they make friends, forge ideals and make their parents proud. Faithfulness, not loyalty. I had a heart to heart talk with my ninong who came home from the states and stayed here for the past two weeks. Here's a man who comes home to his roots, basking in the light of old memories and family, but tells me that there is no such thing as loyalty, and that if a company were to lay me off, it will not matter of the loyalty I gave it for the past years of my service. I don't think it's called loyalty. I think it's called Faith.

The same faith that keeps me here in the Philippines, amidst corrupt government officials, capitalistic marketeers, realistic societies and dreary living conditions.  In the end of it all, we smile, thank god that we have a Philippines and move on, brushing up on history, avoiding our past mistakes and learning from them, making sure that we teach the young to reach their goals, but reminding them that in life we share what we have, and we can make it good by believing in God and honoring him for his works. It is faith in my country and in my people that I can stay here, and honor my homeland. I am Filipino.

A blogpost on being Filipino yet speaking in english? What are you playing at?

True, I speak English. Our food is Mcdo. Our malls are run by the Chinese and Spanish. Our cartoons are Japanese. But even as it is so, it does not stop us from being who we are as individuals, the blood that flows in us that enkindles us to speak up during elections, pick up a piece of trash or two on our streets, remind the jeepney driver that he owes us our change, to laugh at the entities of floods and school on a storm day. These things, these "only in the Philippines" things are what shape us to become Filipinos.

And you can't find those anywhere else in the world.