The Daily Guardian is a renascent Iloilo-based publishing firm and media outfit with bureaus across Western Visayas and beyond. Led by Iloilo's most respected journalists, we pledge to tell the Ilonggo story as seen through the various lenses of society so that every side may be told.
By Klaus Döring
Our globe and its population bear innumerable strange facts. In many people’s opinion, this world shows mostly worrying characteristics and symptoms nowadays. No wonder. Just try to consume and digest today’s headlines and news from all around the globe.
It is a world with quickly bridged distances — our Mother Earth is becoming smaller and smaller. Any tourist, even with little time and only a small budget, can travel to other faraway cultures. But joining them, as well as different races and religious communities, requires, first of all, great care, tact, instinctive feelings, empathy, and logical ideas.
The stranger whom we meet for the first time during a business meeting, for example, may be an uncommon, odd, and extraordinary guy. He may be someone from a foreign country who speaks another language and whose skin is of another color. He may be a migrant, a restless hiker, or an expatriate in our neighbourhood.
The foreigner beside you and me can become a provocation or a challenge. Strangeness can become exoticism. Maybe that’s why my family and I decided to move to the Philippines. On the other hand — going abroad can open other and even better horizons. We must not feel like “a stranger in paradise.” By the way, I never did, since I have toured around the globe many times.
However, a migrant bears a juxtaposition of optimism (even calculated optimism!), confused feelings, nostalgia, and homesickness. Yes, guys, during the first two years of my expat life in the Philippines, the round-trip ticket was always on my mind because no one among us can escape his native roots.
But I am really a lucky guy. I experienced amazing tolerance in the Philippines. A real, practiced tolerance. Already during my first business meetings, I met supportive, forbearing, and broad-minded people. A wonderful mix of different cultures without giving up their own identity. …
Every new challenge in a strange country means a change. Changes in life are necessary and important. Let’s alter or make a difference; let’s put one thing in place of another; let’s shift; let’s quit one state for another; let’s put on fresh clothing. Let’s burn the “lock fat” away. And remember: nothing comes from nothing.
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