LuisTeodoro.com

Wealth distribution is extremely unequal in the Philippines. Too few people get too much while too many get too little of the wealth the economy generates.

A handful of families earn millions annually and can afford several homes, a fleet of vehicles, the most expensive local if not foreign schools for their children, the best medical care, and trips abroad and other luxuries whenever they feel like it. »

Some Filipinos aren’t doing cartwheels over those three Filipino mountaineers’ being the first Filipinos to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. I’m one of them, but I’m not so much belittling their achievement as lamenting how it’s been damaged, and made to seem so much less, by what’s going on in this country.

I’m not about to whine that many other climbers from other countries have done it before, as some grouches are alleging. There are deeds worth doing again and again, and climbing Everest is one of them. (This former mountaineer who’s climbed, among others, Mounts Pulag and Banahaw knows what ordinary climbing entails–but can only imagine what climbing Everest in sub-zero cold and oxygen-thin air is like.) »