This will prob­a­bly take some get­ting used to. But once you do, it will save you a lot of time when you’re doing your laun­dry, or fix­ing your cloth cab­i­net, or when you’re pack­ing for an out-of-town trip.

Today is the feast­day of Cagayan de Oro City, where I grew up. I lived there until I trans­ferred here in Manila after high school. Here is a run­down of posts I have writ­ten that has some con­nec­tion to my City.

My hope is that peo­ple in Philip­pine gov­ern­ment offices read this because I’ve had numer­ous expe­ri­ences in our gov­ern­ment offices here where I go home feel­ing really dis­gusted and frus­trated and with a com­plaint. Name it, we have it: kilo­met­ric lines to get renewals for licenses, offices that have 3 hour breaks, per­son­nel that lead you to a wild goose chase span­ning sev­eral win­dows and floors just to get a one page gov­ern­ment doc­u­ment, Con­gress­men staff who close their offices in the after­noon just because they don’t want to work any­more, under­paid and angry gov­ern­ment employee who know noth­ing about cus­tomer ser­vice or who have already resigned their fate to the “system”.

It’s sad that here in the Philip­pines, when you talk about gov­ern­ment or “pub­lic” offices, insti­tu­tions and sys­tems, it’s usu­ally described as hav­ing lower class stan­dards com­pared to pri­vate insti­tu­tions. Our image of the Gov­ern­ment office is that dinghy, paint-running-off the wall, water marks run­ning from the ceil­ing, cramped, make-shift office in a run­down building.

One of the first things we lose when we grow up and when we start work­ing are our prin­ci­ples, spe­cially if we are in a very toxic envi­ron­ment and the place we are work­ing for does not sup­port our own long-held val­ues. Here is a video to make us pause and remind us that there are more impor­tant things in life.

Yabang Pinoy is about get­ting back our pride of being Fil­ipinos. It was founded by a group of Fil­ipinos who real­ized that one of the biggest prob­lems faced by the Philip­pines today is Fil­ipinos not believ­ing enough in their nation­al­ity. The goal of the “Yabang Pinoy” cam­paign is to unite the Fil­ipino peo­ple in believ­ing in them­selves and in fel­low Fil­ipinos. And I think this is such a timely goal con­sid­er­ing the myr­iad of things that have damp­ened our spirit about our coun­try the past few months.

Our pol­i­tics have given us infamy (we’ve been named one of the Most Cor­rupt Coun­try in the world)—and Bil­lions in debt. Our sports pro­grams are in shambles—our bright­est hope to win a gold in the Olympics, boxer Harry Tanamor, was humil­i­ated in the first round. We also lost in tae kwon do. We also had rebel Mus­lim groups attack our towns and cities in the last cou­ple of weeks partly because of a botched Peace Process, but also because there will never be last­ing peace with­out a bet­ter qual­ity of life for everybody.