by Manny Soriano

The following entry is contributed by a Filipino-Canadian food and music enthusiast. He was born and educated in the Philippines and migrated to Canada in 1971. His mother was an excellent and practical pastry and savoury cook who operated a hotel with his father who was a coffee and cigar connoisseur. Manny started baking in highschool and worked as an accountant till 1999. He took baking courses since 1990 and opened a Filipino pastry shop in the west end of Toronto in 2000.

The hurricane that recently submerged the American gulf region has a particular vivid resonance for us Filipinos because the majority of us who have not left home live through the same fear and threat year in and year out. It seems that political leaderships everywhere are all alike in being blind, deaf and dumb to this never ever unforseeable disasters. In the coastal area of Tondo, the project that was designed to lessen the problem ended up aggravating it through corruption and bungling. Now they have flood all year round. How do our resilient people cope and survive, go on with their lives and rebuild? The only patch left to them for refuge is dangerously sloped and rather slippery at that.

You hear talk of the ruinous effects of global warming getting louder each year. That there is going to be stronger hurricanes, that more frequent floods will marinate more low-lying areas. But shall we claim that we have already been living through all these grim conditions in the last two centuries for which we have written account? The Spaniards summed up our climate as “cuatro meses de polvo, cuatro meses de lodo, cuatro meses de todo.” That adds up to two-thirds of the year being wet season. So apt then of Bino Realuyo to call his coming-of-age novel “Umbrella Country” or of our great painters invariably depicting Habagat (Monsoon) as a dark and sullen giant.
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By Cora Castellvi

(Below is an entry sent in by a Filipina-Canadian reader of her encounter with Sen. Aquino as they ate and talked about what else but food!)

Ontario, Canada - IT WAS FALL, 1981. Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino was the guest speaker at a symposium organized by a group of young Filipino-Canadian professionals in Toronto. I just wish I had something with me at that time to record the event and the next 24 hours when Ninoy was in town before he went back to Boston, where he was in exile with his family.

The evening was charged with so much energy. Ninoy spoke with so much passion and fire, for about 3 hours, non-stop - and only glanced at his notes, every once in a while to start a new topic.

He did not complain about the discomfort he was feeling right then. It was roughly a few weeks before when he hurt his ankle and he was walking with a little limp and was using a cane.
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