Letters To The Editor

SERIES PORTRAYED PHILIPPINES POORLY

The series of articles on the Philippines was very upsetting. Doesn't staff writer C. S. Manegold have anything else to write about the Philippines other than the poverty, the super rich, rebels killing and getting killed? If she is resourceful enough, as a responsible journalist should be, she will find that there are other things going on there.

What "lost hope" is she talking about? She interviewed a few people and enlarged it in a three-part series as though it was everything that mattered in the country! Did she expect a turnaround in the Philippine situation within two years? Most Filipinos are more realistic than that. The very system that was institutionalized by the Marcos dictatorship is painstakingly being changed for the better, slowly perhaps but surely.

Indeed, Ms. Manegold's report is unfair, even insulting, to those individuals and groups, both in the government and the private sectors in the Philippines who are working hard in helping the country rise above the quagmire of Ferdinand Marcos' 20 years of rotten rule. Not only that, it bespeaks ignorance of Filipinos outside of their country who had been reaching out to their less fortunate compatriots.

It is hard to imagine how difficult it is to really change the conditions in the Philippines that rapidly under the present economic situation. A greater bulk of the country's revenue goes mainly to the servicing of interest for loans borrowed by the Marcos government and his cronies, most of which were not used for the country.

The spirit and pride of the Filipinos as a people cannot be measured by material wealth alone. It is far richer than that. As they have planted a seed during the 1986 "people power" revolution, so will they nurture it. Its roots are growing slowly but steadily. Let us not keep pulling it out to see how much it has grown. It will need much time, care and hard work from its planter before it can yield its fruit.

Josie V. Banaag

Cherry Hill.

DEAF VIEW

I surely praise the Feb. 21 article "Reaching out to the deaf." I want to thank you a million times. It will help all hearing people to understand and to become more sensitive of the differences of other people and the feeling of others.

Leviticus 19:14 says, "Do not curse the deaf." God made us deaf people. Sign language and sign language interpreters are our God's gifts. Deafness is a language!