MEDICINAL FRUITS & VEGETABLES by JZ Tan and RM Tan

MEDICINAL FRUITS & VEGETABLES by JZ Tan and RM Tan.  The Philippines is home to more than 1,500 different kinds of medicinal herbs. However, the use of medicinal plants has been limited because of the difficulty in identifying these herbs. Thus, this book on medicinal fruits and vegetables was conceptualized to make it easier for the general public to benefit from the bounty of Mother Nature's medicine.

From Exile to Diaspora by Epifanio San Juan, Jr.

From Exile to Diaspora by Epifanio San Juan, Jr.

excerpt from the Introduction. “...Filipinos now “belong” to the whole world... Formerly redundant liabilities, they become assets, “human capital,” when they transplant themselves.  This crisis of deracination and unsettlement (permanent or temporary) afflicting a whole society becomes pronounced in the phenomenon of the “brain drain,” a factor that explains the continuing underdevelopment of the South or “Third World.”  It is not a joke to say that the Philippines, an economic basket case during the last decade of Marcos’ despotic rule, produces every year thousands of doctors, nurses, scientists, and engineers for the world market.  As exchangeable commodities, many of them immediately head for the United States–note that there are several million “warm body exports” now inhabiting the Middle East and Europe–whereas in the Philippines, where 80 percent of the people are poor and 30 percent of the children malnourished, most towns and villages lack decent medical and health care... For the new settlers, this sorry plight is now erased from memory, translated into a safe language, or set aside for retrieval on occasions when a need arises to justify why they left the no-longer-hospitable homeland. 

Journeys of Filipino Volunteers Overseas. Barbara Fortunato, editor

Journeys of Filipino Volunteers Overseas. Barbara Fortunato, editor

In 2000, Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) started recruiting Filipinos for volunteer placements in other developing countries. Today, there are over 100 Filipino VSO volunteers working in 30 countries in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. VSO named this program Bahaginan (sharing).

This book describes the experiences of ten Bahaginan volunteers who were posted overseas in 2001 and 2002. Some are still overseas, others have already returned to the Philippines. We can’t completely say “home,” because in our host communities abroad, we also found a home.