Time Zone

I ended this day as usual like the past week when I was supposed to do my comprehensive review for my general exam come May 29, 2007 - nothing real however got into my memory! hhhmmmm...!

I just got disturbed of all the magazines, atlases, dailies and books all around me at the cozy IRRI library where I am doing my review with a Laos classmate, also a Plant Breeding major student. I entered the library around 2:30 in the afternoon and sat beside my classmate who was in his seat since earlier of the day. But instead of opening my review material, I grabbed one of the dailies instead for an update of the Julia Campbell story and the Virginia Tech shooting/massacre that had been revolving around the dailies and e-posts since last Tuesday, April 17th.

Julia Campbell, a known American journalist in her 40 and who had been working with the New York Times for quite a number of years left her career and headed to the Philippines as a Peace Corps volunteer. She had been staying in several places of the country since two years ago like Los Baños in Laguna, Sorsogon and Albay. She found a new home in Legazpi City where she became a teacher and trainer at the Divine Word College until her disappearance.

To while away her busy schedule from the school as it was a Lenten Season in the Catholic church and the school year has just ended she headed to some places in the Cordillera Region to find solace and visit some friends like in Sagada before her trek alone on a late afternoon of April 8, 2007 to the cold, serene and wonderful rice terraces of Batad in Banaue, Ifugao. There she met her death with a cause still unsolved as of this writing.

As I lifted and traced all the pages of one of the Philippine dailies bearing her death story by the Associated Press and some by Reuters, I came across one page citing her humorous stories that were archived from her blog describing how a person from an advanced country with all the comforts of life can cope up and live in countries like the Philippines. (Please understand that she is referring to the ordinary Filipino life and not that of the life of the few comfortable elites or elite pretenders). One funny thing that caught my attention is the Philippines' famous "Filipino Time" which she went on to say that even if this is the attitude of the Filipino people they can still manage to laugh and make more humors about it. She finally concluded that this attitude might be one of the reasons why the Philippines lag behind her other South East Asian neighbors!

Julia Campbell wondered how do Filipinos live in a very different time zone! I am a Filipino and also wonder how because a universal time zone that I know is any of the 24 longitudinal divisions of the Earth's surface in which a standard time is kept, the primary division being that bisected by the Greenwich meridian. Kaya nga tayo mga Pinoy eh! because we can adapt to any situation anytime, anywhere and can even make impossible things (to other people) possible! (laughs).