I am always amazed by the Filipino's ability to laugh in the face of extreme hardship or to make fun of the most serious of developments, including the possibility of a pandemic.
This picture of a 'dead' Kermit the Frog recently made the round of inboxes at the office. Most of us who grew up with Sesame St. and The Muppet Show immediately got the joke - he obviously got the swine flu from Miss Piggy.
I met a six-year-old girl at the Marcela Marcelo Elementary School in Pasay City last Saturday.
She caught my attention because she was half the size of my five-year-old daughter and she couldn't read. My daughter has been reading since...I don't remember anymore.
I was at the public school to write about what our employees were doing -- which was conducting a summer reading program for kids who couldn't read or had difficulty reading.
I came home to find my five-year-old daughter wearing high-heeled silver sandals that my US-based sister had worn to attend a wedding in Manila and had left behind.
It seemed she'd been wearing it the whole day INSIDE the house instead of slippers. Glass slippers, she called them, much like those of Cinderella's.
"Will you give them to me when I grow up, Mommy?" she asked me. "If it survives," I answer her. Not entirely understanding what I'd just said, she frowns.
