EDITORIAL | We Are Team Pilipinas

“These Filipinos never give up!” the FIBA announcers kept shouting.
They don’t know the half of it.
Sen. Grace Poe rode the MRT, taking two hours to get from North Avenue to Taft, ostensibly doing research ahead of a Senate hearing on the rolling disaster that is the MRT – and the even more epic fail that is the current leadership of the DOTC. Poe was lucky: the door on her coach was closed when the train ran. But the first and last thought on her mind, the senator said, was about the people all around her: Filipinos who would subject themselves to torture twice a day, taxpayers screwed by the system and insensitive leaders, but hardworking folk who, out of duty, lack of choice, but also with stubborn vision for their children, would still show up for work, waking up at 4 a.m., getting home near 10 in the evening, day in and day out, to go through the same gauntlet the next day. Below the trains gingerly running at 40 kph because doing the optimal 60 kph is now just too dangerous, even more of the people were being steamed like corn in uncertified buses.
Mura mura na lang pag may time.
And still they show up. Ready to rebound, ready to slam, giving up their bodies to clear way for another. Basketball, the No. 1 sport of Filipinos, dishes out so many metaphors, but nothing as great as the delight and heroism daily afforded by our love affair’s irony. This shouldn’t be working. Why is it working?
Our underpaid, under-supported soldiers and policemen practice rowing in Manila Bay and the Pasig River – diving for mussels in between sessions so they can have some extra energy – and that should all account for nothing. And yet there our rowers were, almost unheralded the same week our ballers were shocking the world, themselves no longer surprising as world champs. International rowing organizers had years ago declared, there is no point in having international competitions without Filipino rowers, because Filipino Rowers are by now the Brazilians of  Dragon Boat racing. So dominant, so colorful, all heart.
via EDITORIAL | We Are Team Pilipinas.