By ALDWIN G. QUITASOL
www.nordis.net

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred. — John Gardner

Good news for graduating students this year, they do not need their high grades or pleasing credentials nor years of experience to have a job. You also do not need to undergo those gruelling interviews with human resource officers of different companies.

All you need is a small knife, a small beltbag or big pockets can do and a lot of patience and endurance under the weather is a must for this job. Equally important is you know where the main roads, barangay roads and well travelled routes of Baguio.

Last week, A man in his late 30s walked beside me along the side walk. When I noticed he was holding a small knife. I grew suspicious and scared he might do something to me. I was alarmed when suddenly he overtook me and crossed the street and I was able to breath.

He then caught my curiousity when he stopped in the middle of the road. I found out that he was picking coins stuck to the asphalt with his knife. The man smiled at me as he put the coins in his belt bag.

He returned on the sidewalk and he talked to me. Maybe he sensed that he had scared me so he apologized. He said he had been doing this for several months after he lost his job. He looks for dropped coins even those stuck in the asphalt on the roads.

Makasixty pisos ak met a nu makaadu ak ti kalsada” (I manage to earn sixty pesos the more roads I go) said the man. I failed to ask for his name.

This month or the next months, millions of graduates will again flood the world of the unemployed. So many of them will go job hunting amidst the scarcity of jobs and few of them will land on the job fitted to the course they finished.

If ever these graduates grow tired looking for the elusive jobs they can pick-up the “occupation” of the man I met last week. They can start trooping to the roads. The problem is, because there are so many new graduates, there will soon be a scarcity of roads for them to pick coins from. And, it is not easy to go to another city or town just to pick coins, nagrigaten ti dumayo.

Its so sad. The remedy of some of our kababayans is to go abroad to be domestic or factory workers. And just like in many cases, they will come headless, missing body parts or if alive, crazy because of the physical and mental abuse by their employers.

If only we had a government that really prioritizes its constituents instead of scrambling to answer the phone call of American presidents who call only to announce that they will extend their stay here in the Philippines.

And, if only the economic attitude of our country was not only foucused on how to welcome foreign investors or capitalists and instead be serious at addressing how graduates may land on decent jobs and a decent livable wage.

But this will be impossible, as the saying goes, it is good to put a patch to cover the hole of a pair of pants but it is best if you buy a new pair. If applied to our system, such a great society.

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Did you know that…

over 25,000 children die every day around the world?
That is equivalent to:
1 child dying every 3.5 seconds
17-18 children dying every minute
A 2004 Asian Tsunami occurring almost every 1.5 weeks
An Iraq-scale death toll every 16–38 days
Over 9 million children dying every year
Some 70 million children died between 2000 and 2007
the silent killers are poverty, easily preventable diseases and illnesses, and other related causes. In spite of the scale of this daily/ongoing catastrophe, it rarely manages to achieve, much less sustain, prime-time, headline coverage? (source: www.globalissues.org).

Despite President Barack Obama’s statement at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina Feb. 27 that he had ‘chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months,’ a number of Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), which have been the basic U.S. Army combat unit in Iraq for six years, will remain in Iraq after that date under a new non-combat label?

Obama’s decision to go along with the military proposal for a ‘transition force’ of 35,000 to 50,000 troops thus represents a complete abandonment of his own original policy of combat troop withdrawal and an acceptance of what the military wanted all along – the continued presence of several combat brigades in Iraq well beyond mid-2010.(source: by Gareth Porter* (washington)Wednesday, March 25, 2009,Inter Press Service “http://www.globalissues.org/” www.globalissues.org “http://www.globalissues.org/” ). # www.nordis.net