Golf Anyone?

I was reviewing my Flickr account when I came across this picture taken during a coverage I made on the Baguio Country Club’s Centennial:

I remembered how this greenskeeper at the Baguio Country Club kept going around in circles while combing the putting green with his low-tech tool to remove the dew that blanketed the manicured grass. I was amazed at his dedication. No wonder the BCC, despite being the oldest golf club in the Philippines, has one of the most beautiful courses in the country.

Later on however, I found out that many of BCC’s workers are paid about $8.00 a day, perfecting the playgrounds of the richest families and their friends in the country. But then again you see a lot this in RP: carpenters building mansions and world-class condominiums only to come home to poor uninhabitable shanties, waiters serving food that they can only taste in their dreams, rich children pampered by nannies whose own children grow up without their mothers' care.

Is it any wonder that the pinoy diaspora is happening at such a gigantic scale? More than just poverty, which is probably the most important reason for the exodus, it’s this glaring social inequality that makes staying unbearable for many. Of course this may sound too simplistic and that there are other motivations for pinoys to leave. I think, however, that there is no other reason more compelling than hunger and oppression.

If the country weren’t surrounded by treacherous waters, I doubt if there would be many left to work these bottom-feeding jobs.