In an episode of "Desperate Housewives", one of the characters asks her doctor "OK, before we go any further, can I check these diplomas? Just to make sure they aren't, like, from some med school in the Philippines?"
Excuse me.
But as a pre-medicine student myself and someone who wanted to be a medical doctor and in fact, got accepted to attend - yes - one of the major medical universities in the Philippines, this is an insult.
In fact, it is not just an insult to doctors from the Philippines - it is an insult to all Filipino professionals who have graduated from any university in the Philippines.
I graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University - and just for the information of the writers of Desperate Housewives, Ateneo is one of the best-run universities in the world. So are the rest - the University of the Philippines, the University of Santo Tomas (one of the oldest universities in the world), De La Salle University, University of the East, San Beda College - and a whole lot more other tertiary, academic institutions.
In order for me to get my degree from the Ateneo, I need not only be knowledgeable in my chosen specialization - I also had to be good in Philosophy, in Theology, in English, in Filipino, in Literature, in a "foreign, non-English" language. We had to take all of these whilst we maintain our scholastic standing in 'specialization subjects'. And our GPAs - which we call Quality Point Indices (QPIs) - are monitored year on year.
True, there might be - and there are - some who simply want to get by and whose simple objective is to pass their subjects and get out of "university hell" with a diploma.
But there are some of us - in fact, I would believe, a lot of us - who strive to be excellent in whatever field that we decided to pursue. There are some of us who never stop learning. There are some of us who proceed to Harvard, to Stanford, to the University of Chicago, to the London School of Economics, to other research centers that make a difference in the world. There are some of us who go on and climb the corporate ladder - inside and outside our home country.
And there are some of us who dedicate our lives to service - raising kids that are not our own, cleaning and managing households that are not ours, nursing patients back to health in spite of them not being a part of our immediate family, constructing buildings that we will never live in. They are perhaps even more deserving of respect because they give themselves wholeheartedly to serve people who are not at all related to them by blood - "service by choice".
We deserve respect. Filipino professionals deserve respect.
And we deserve more than an apology.
Saying "there was no intent to disparage the integrity of any aspect of the medical community in the Philippines," the producers of a television show that insulted health workers here offered their "sincere apologies" to Filipinos on Wednesday.
In an episode aired Sept. 30, "Desperate Housewives" character Susan asks her doctor: "OK, before we go any further, can I check these diplomas? Just to make sure they aren't, like, from some med school in the Philippines?"
"Sorry" just don't cut it, ABC.
