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...

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...

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...

‘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...

My Love Affair With Volcanoes

Indiana Jones would have loved her company.The alpha female from Aklan was a promising volcanologist who cracked the male clique at the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) in 1984. During a field work, Cheerie Tirazona Magalit discovered the oldest known fossil of a Stegodon, a genus of the elephant family, evidence that the Philippines may have been connected to mainland...

Romance, American Style

I knew I was in for some 'strange things mystifying' upon arrival in the United States when a 40-year-old American introduced a little girl beside him as his aunt. Seeing my puzzled expression, he said in an embarrassed tone, " Oh you know how it is with stepfamilies."Later, when I remarked how sweet those 70-something couples looked, holding hands and looking into each other's eyes, I was told they...

Laws That Make Us Cuckoo

A man phoned a California radio station to ask for advice on how to handle his 15-year-old daughter's sexual relationship with her 18-year-old boyfriend. Under US laws, this constitutes statutory rape. The caller was hesitant to throw the guy in jail because he was "a good kid" with a lot of things going for him.This case calls to mind Mary Kay Letourneau, a grade school teacher who served over...

A Filipino Priest In Rome

Pieta, Michelangelo’s marble sculpture, seems to cast a shadow on Filipino priest Rhett Sarabia as he drops by St Peter’s Basilica on this particular day. He chuckles at the thought that all roads led him to Rome – stirrings to embrace religious life in high school, an attempt to elope with his childhood sweetheart gone awry, restlessness at work in Metrobank, estrangement from his father. He has...

Confessions Of A Nurse

As a nurse in California, May has seen it all: the AIDS patient who pushed her to her limits, the wife who humiliated her husband on learning he had cancer, the Alzheimer’s victim who had no idea about the “thing” that was stuck under his fingernails, and the suffering hepatitis patient who refused to live.It’s an experience perhaps no different from that of other nurses in the Philippines, but coping...