One-Armed Filipino Pianist plays in Sacramento

The audience watched with bated breath as pianist Mary Grace Gellekanao walked with measured steps towards the piano. She began playing “Let there be Praise,” her right stump playing the melody and her left fingers expertly playing the accompaniment and making the necessary improvisations.

It was a spellbounding performance, something you would expect from a classical pianist. But Mary Grace has an obvious disability, thought to be the result of amniotic band syndrome, a congenital malformation. She plays with her right elbow that gets painful and even bleeds after a series of concerts. Aside from that, her right foot is eight inches shorter than the left, a condition that necessitates a corrective platform shoe.

She played mostly spiritual pieces, some of which she had composed herself like “God’s Promise.” Another number, “From a Distance” was played almost effortlessly while “How Great Thou Art” proved specially moving. The Americans in the audience were amazed that she could play “Flight of the Bumblebee” which got her fingers and her stump flying all over the keyboard. Her grand finale “To God be the Glory” made us soar.

The 27-year-old pianist with an easy smile and sweet disposition exchanged pleasantries with us before she left for another concert in Sacramento that same evening. We found out she was born in Talisay City, Bacolod. She said growing up was difficult.

“I couldn't do much, not even simple things like buttoning my dress or taking off a candy wrapper. I felt so sorry for myself, especially when kids made fun of me.”

She was never invited to social gatherings. Her parents often asked her to go to her room when they had visitors to protect her from stares and nasty remarks. But her grandmother turned things around when she looked for somebody to give Mary Grace piano lessons from age six until she finished high school.

“My Grandma saw my interest when I was five years old and found a piano teacher for me. The first three piano teachers she approached didn't want to teach a one-handed student. But my Grandma told them to teach me in one hand and she'd pay for two.
Finally, the fourth teacher took me in. After I started my piano lessons, I found out that I could play with my stump. Playing the piano became the outlet to all my sadness.
Sometimes my back and my stump hurt when I play but I like to inspire people through my music. It has become my passion.”



Mary Grace showed so much promise that Sylvia Javallana, a well-known pianist in their province, brought her along to a European tour in the late 1990s, along with a cultural group. They performed in Germany and toured Switzerland, Italy and France for three weeks. Later she gave a concert in Canada and then in Korea as part of a missionary group. She stayed there for two years.

“Traveling got my mind off self-pity. I began to understand that everything happens for a reason.”

Mary Grace said that if she had not been disabled she would have taken things easy and not focus on developing any of her talents. She would not have engaged in a constant dialogue with God.

“I tell people there is no such thing as junk. God creates only the best although we may have disabilities or misfortunes. It’s up to us to develop what we have and rise above apparent limitations.”

She graduated from La Salle Bacolod with a degree in Psychology. In 2001, during a trip to the US, she met Reva Moore, a Filipina married to an American and has two biological sons. Reva later adopted Mary Grace. They currently live in Louisiana.

Six years ago, Reva Moore established the Adopt a Minister International with the support of Mary Grace. The proceeds of her concerts go to Filipino pastors who are unemployed by the local missions. There are around 500 unemployed Theology graduates in the Philippines. Now the ministry also supports ministers in other Asian countries.

Mary Grace performs practically every weekend all over the United States. She is open to performing for any church or organization. You can contact her at 225-664-8174 or you can email her at revawall@bellsouth.net

Filipinos look after Alzheimer's Patients

One in eight Americans is over 65. Many of them suffer from Alzheimer's, a degenerative and incurable brain disease characterized by short-term memory loss, spatial disorientation, trouble with words and arithmetic, and some impairment of judgment.

The aging of the US population is expected to intensify the demand for caregivers who have to take a certified nursing assistant training course, First Aid, CPR and pass a background check. If they want a fair wage with medical benefits, they need to have a Social Security number, which means they have to be greencard holders or US citizens.

Many Filipinos have set their sights on working as caregivers, thinking it is going to be a piece of cake. What they may not be aware of is that aside from changing diapers, lifting patients and pushing wheelchairs, they will have to deal with patients who suffer from dramatic mood changes, hallucinations, severe disorientation and paranoia.

Giving psychotropic drugs may not always solve the problem. When overused, these drugs may cause depression and agitation. A number of nursing homes had been found guilty of overmedication and abuse of patients that their licenses got revoked. Filipinos who work in some nursing homes attest to difficult patients being given pills or shots to knock them down. With a ratio of one caregiver to every 10-20 patients, it is impossible to supervise all patients so sedating the "unruly" ones has become routine. There had been cases of elderly slipping out and walking aimlessly in the streets. Still more fell from their beds and had to undergo hip and back operations.

A number of caregivers are new immigrants and poor, single mothers with low educational attainment. Tourists also work as relievers on weekends. I met a Filipino seaman who worked in a nursing home owned by a former Marcos crony. He said he had to look after someone with bipolar illness. Being a caregiver is like an initiation rite to most Filipinos, whatever may be their profession or social standing in the Philippines. Male caregivers are now preferred because the task requires heavy lifting and men are more up to this task.

While taking paralegal studies in Washington, I visited some adult family homes owned by Filipino acquaintances who were encouraging me to put up one. An adult family home normally admits five to ten elderly residents who pay from $3,000 to $8,000 each depending on the level of care they needed. A nursing home can admit as many as a hundred patients. An assisted living is for seniors who can still manage on their own and just need occasional help.

What struck me most about the elderly who suffer from dementia was how they acted out their memories, or what remained of them.

An 84-year-old lady was always in a hurry to leave, saying she had to go home and cook for her husband who had long passed away. Another woman in her mid-70s would chant “Put the reindeer in the oven” countless times until she fell asleep. A 99-year-old lady would not let any male come near her whether he was ten, twenty or eighty. She was the toast of their town in her youth and had countless suitors. In her old age, she still thought she was irresistible.

A man in his 80s would wear his elegant suit each morning and attempt to leave for the airport, thinking he still worked as an airline pilot. His roommate was bedridden. Whenever someone cleaned him up, he would get abusive, calling everyone a "square head". He wrestled with alcoholism and drug addiction all his life.

The owners of the nursing homes often joked that perhaps, when they got old, they would also betray their lifestyle, or worse, their obsessions. One said that he would not want to start his sentence with "When I was in Las Vegas...."

I realized that due to their circumstances, old people mainly live by their memories. They are bitter if their memories are mostly bad. They are cheerful when memories are good.

The late Luis Buñuel, founder of surrealist cinema, said that "you have to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all.... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing."

As Alzheimer's disease catches up with America's graying population, children find it difficult to deal with their folks. "They often have this blank look in their eyes. It's as if they have lost their soul,” a daughter said.

What is interesting is that caregivers themselves eventually absorb their patients’ dementia as they do not get enough sleep and they work for months without a dayoff. Half of all Alzheimer's caregivers reportedly struggle with clinical depression.

Filipino Doctors as Nurses in America

The Philippines has given the world its best medical professionals for decades but as the "brain hemorrhage" continues, public health officials warn of its dire consequences. Around 1,000 hospitals have reportedly closed in the past five years because of a shortage of doctors. Likewise, a number of medical schools have ceased operating because of declining enrollment.
Patriotic Filipinos bemoan the fact that we are losing 70 to 90 per cent of our medical graduates to the United States. "This is a glaring insult to the blood, sweat and tears of our people," says Dr Jose Tiongco, a University of the Philippines graduate and chief executive officer of the Medical Mission Group Hospitals/Health Services Cooperative-Philippines Federation.

As US immigrants, our doctors have one of the highest average incomes per household in America. But if they are enjoying the good life, they most certainly deserve it after spending more than ten years in medical school.
Dr Francisco Marasigan, a Manila Central University graduate who is now based in California, was a rural doctor in Batangas for two years. "Many of my patients were so poor they could only pay me with vegetables from their farm."
He opened Marasigan and Marasigan Clinic in 1980 with wife Linda who also specializes in Family Practice. She came in 1968 when there was a high demand for doctors in Chicago. Although she had passed the Philippine board examination, she had to take two years of residency and one year of internship in the US.
When life in the Philippines was simple and peaceful (that is, prior to martial law, hyperinflation and the AIDS epidemic, when our economy was the envy of other Asian countries), our doctors were content to stay put, making house calls and trudging through rice fields. They felt it was their calling to treat the poor barrio folk who could hardly pay them. In return for their dedication, these rural patients respected and loved them to the point of shielding their eyes from the sun.
This kind of respect is something that eludes some of our contemporary doctors who have chosen to practice in another country. A Caucasian patient in New York reportedly demanded that he be treated by a "real doctor", not by a Filipino. Two Filipino doctors working as nurses in Texas were recently deported because they had changed the orders given by the actual (American) doctors on duty.

"The Philippines produces at least 4,000 doctors and more than 28,000 nurses a year. Eighty-eight percent of the nurses and sixty eight percent of the doctors go abroad," says Dr Tiongco. It is estimated that 8,000 nurses leave the country every year to work overseas, and almost 2,000 have medical degrees.

Because there is a higher demand for nurses than doctors especially in America, and it is faster to get a nursing license than a medical license, about 5,500 doctors are now enrolled in 45 nursing schools in the Philippines. In the last four years, 3,500 doctors left the country to take on nursing posts abroad. Some have even worked as caregivers in nursing homes.

A recent UST graduate enumerates some of the hurdles Filipino doctors face in the Philippines: taking the tough board examination after graduation, and if they want to go to the US, then taking the United States Medical Licensing Examination. A medical graduate says it would only cost her around P120,000 for the two-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing program.
While working as nurses overseas may be financially rewarding, public health experts in the Philippines say a dearth of medical practitioners is killing the country's health system. People complain of long waits in hospitals, women give birth without seeing a doctor, nurse or midwife. Meningitis or strokes are often fatal because no specialists are available.

Most Filipinos who are in America say they do not plan to retire in the Philippines. "We don't know how we can survive there anymore with the increasing violence in most areas. We cannot trust the government to protect us. Whereas here in the US, we feel relatively secure. We have great medical benefits and old age pension.”
That probably says it all.

‘Makati is flanked by cookie-cutter buildings, says Architect Lira Luis

Architect Lira Luis is a towering landmark on the Filipino-American landscape. Her work has been featured in leading American publications and exhibited in state museums. She is in the registry of “Who’s Who Among Executive and Professional Women in America (Honors Edition)” by Cambridge Who’s Who Registry of New York, 2007.

The only Filipino to have graduated from Taliesin West – Frank Lloyd Wright’s School of Architecture – since its establishment in 1937, she started a Lira Luis Brand, with offices in New York, Phoenix and Manila. She also heads Progressive Habitats Foundation, an organization that offers design services to the homeless and helps in rebuilding the flood-devastated Mississippi.

She first got our attention last year when she designed a $4-million mall in Arizona patterned after the Philippine nipa hut in collaboration with American Architect George Sheller. “It is not a literal interpretation of the indigenous house in our country, more of utilizing the bahay kubo’s stilts. The stilts for the mall were angled in such a way that they give the impression of movement and activity which are important elements in any restaurant or retail environment.”

Aside from this project, Lira became famous for her Portable Transient Shelter Pods, a runner-up in Metropolis Magazine’s NEXT Generation design competition. “It’s a housing solution that was originally designed for homeless seafarers in the Philippines. When the project did not push through, a British Columbia non-profit organization expressed interest in this idea for one of their disaster-stricken areas. Then came the Asian tsunami that found another use for the Pods.”

Lira has likewise come up with an affordable housing solution dubbed as the “M.O.D. House for an International Design Competition. It became a finalist out of over 440 entries in the HOME House Project: The Future of Affordable Housing competition organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) some years ago. She collaborated with Navin Pathangay and Chris Ilg – architect-friends from a leading architectural firm in Phoenix – and with Steve Soenksen, a fellow Taliesin graduate.

The project’s criteria included a design with environmentally conscious materials, technologies, and methods for single-family houses using Habitat for Humanity’s basic three- and four-bedroom house plans.

The M.O.D House has since been exhibited along with other select entries in prestigious venues like the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis and The Gallery of New York School of Interior Design. It is also featured in a book published by MIT Press. Prototypes of the HOME House Project finalists will soon be built in South Carolina.

“I want to be known as a socially responsible architect,” says Lira who is currently based in Chicago, the same city where Frank Lloyd Wright first built his Oakpark Home and Studio as a young architect, and where Ernest Hemingway lived. She admits that she has a soft spot for the homeless which could be the result of having studied in the School of the Holy Spirit in Quezon City (elementary and high school) and the University of Santo Tomas (BS Architecture). “Oh yes,” she chuckles, “those five years of Theology at UST!”

Graduating cum laude from the University of Santo Tomas in 1995, she was offered a scholarship by prestigious schools in England and Scotland but she chose the Taliesin West scholarship.

Only a maximum of 35 students are accepted in Taliesin West’s Bachelor and MA programs every year, out of the thousands who apply from different countries. She took its masteral program for three years, staying in a studio at daytime and sleeping each night in a tent without electricity, phone and water, in its 600-acre property. It is part of the school’s experiential training that connects students to their environment in the Arizona desert. “We were trained to co-exist with nature.” The great Frank Lloyd Wright was a proponent of organic architecture. He believed that the structure should blend with, not impose, on nature. He also believed that humanity should be central to all design.

“I have always admired Frank Lloyd Wright. It was such a joy to study and live in a building that he designed. My other favorite structures are Fallingwater in Pennsylvania (with a stream and waterfall running under the building) and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York which is like a seashell.”

In 2006, she went back to Manila for the first time after seven years, and launched an audio book about FLW’s architecture titled “Frankly Speaking: It’s the Wright Way .” The book-launching was held at Oakwood Premier, by Ayala Land, Incorporated, a company she worked for ten years ago. On November 9-11, she will have a book-signing during the 75th Taliesen Fellowship reunion to be held in Taliesen West, Scottsdale, Arizona.

Lira is also a big fan of Ayn Rand who wrote “The Fountainhead”. “Did you know that Ayn Rand spent some time at Taliesin West while writing her novel and that her protagonist was patterned after Wright?”

Lira is exceptionally articulate, hardly pausing during the interview, as if she does not run out of ideas. She also sounds very enthusiastic about any topic that is brought up. No wonder she is often invited to speak at architects’ conventions in the US and the Philippines. Recently she spoke before the National Alzheimer’s Association about high performance buildings.

What does she think of the high-rise buildings in Hong Kong? Lira says they have their own charm and character. “I like the design of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building. It’s innovative.” But she says she does not care for the Cathedral of Sagrada Familia in Spain, designed by Antonio Gaudi. “It reminds me of melting candles.” This cathedral has been under construction for over a century.

Lira notes that after September 11, some American architects have designed buildings with a hole in the middle, perhaps a subliminal defense against another Twin Towers plane attack. They are also into green buildings.

She does not think the Philippines buys the principles of organic architecture very much. In her website, she freely expresses what she thinks of the Makati skyscrapers:

“Makati is flanked by cookie-cutter buildings designed by foreigners who have displayed a total lack of understanding of a tropical country in a lower latitude close to the equator. Why did we allow this to happen? Partly due to Filipino mindset of colonialism and branding. Anything imported, in this case designed by a foreigner, must be good. This is contrary to the organic architecture I’ve learned. A building needs to be site-specific. One can’t just pluck the floor plan of a building from out of an industrialized nation like America then build it in a country in different latitude. It’s like buying a fur coat in New York because it’s hip and trendy then wearing it in Manila where it’s 30 + degrees C.”

Lira thinks President Gloria Arroyo needs to support initiatives that create environmental awareness and responsibility. The government needs to establish a national benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high-performance buildings.

Architects need to help solve the environmental problem through design. “I’m currently pursuing accreditation from LEED to become a professional Sustainable Design Expert. Government buildings are now required to be LEED-certified in the U.S.”

Lira had passed the architectural board examination in Manila before she came over to America but she also took the US board soon after she finished her graduate studies in 2000. “The US Architect Registration Exam (ARE) is comprised of nine rigorous exam divisions that you need to pass and which you can take, one day for each subject. There was one that lasted eight hours straight. Not even a five-minute break for us to go to the bathroom.”

As expected, she passed the nine exams, but she was modest about this accomplishment. “It was hard in the sense that the US codes are different from what we were taught back home. But the software training I got in the Philippines is comparable to what they have in America.” She is proficient in many softwares including Autodesk’s Autocad and Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD.

Lira is equally modest about her background. “I come from a middle class family in Quezon City. My father is a retired military colonel while my mother is an educator.” She played keyboard in an all-women band in high school and now plays golf occasionally, and has performed in theatrical productions in Wisconsin and Arizona.

She reveals that her sun sign is Aquarius. “I am a bit eccentric, an out-of-the-box thinker. I am open and experimental.” She says her ideal home “should be part of nature, blends with nature, one with nature. It should definitely grace the landscape.”