I attended today a meeting of dedicated volunteers who are working towards educating people about their voting responsibilities. They began with a well-crafted presentation regarding the age-old problems besetting the Philippines and they proposed to put an end to most of these problems through the education of the electorate.

Very noble goals pursued by well-meaning and sincere people. I truly hope they will succeed. The biggest obstacle will be the generalized cynicism that envelopes this nation. The cynicism and corresponding apathy is so deep it is palpable. The tropical humidity that is close to 100% does not compare to the prevailing degree of cynicism.

I wish that all it will take to resolve these ancient problems will be careful and thoughtful analysis but I know better. Everyone knows about the corruption and the pollution and the poverty and the diseases and the unacceptable disparity in wealth. But it will take more than an all out war against the progressive elements in the countryside and it will take far more than finding new onerous tax revenues for the government and it will take more than paying the criminal interest rates on the many loans that were secured in behalf of the Filipino people that ended up being used in the innumerable election campaigns and it will certainly need more than changing the constitution once again.

A personal revolution is required from each one of us. That being too ideal and impractical, a personal revolution is required from a few of us. This is what will take to change this nation.

I have been all over the country this past week and for some reason, I could not access blogstream from the southern part of the Philippines.

I am back in Manila and I am here to report that I have not seen much progress during my 20-odd-year absence. There are way too many people and much more hopelessness.

This is a battle that cannot be prosecuted from the air alone. Ground forces are required. No longer can I feel that I am doing my part by sending money and drug samples and used equipment home or by occasionally participating in a week-long "free charity clinic" because the problems are immense and the roadblocks are daunting.

My wife and I live very simple lives and for as long as we know that we are not depriving our daughters from our basic obligations towards them (food, shelter, education, security) we realized that in order to lead meaningful lives we need to serve and to give back in the most committed way that we can.

We are no longer youthful idealists. We have been dutifully paying our dues these last 20 years, preparing for this return and making certain that the needs of our children are met. We are fully aware that the problems that appall us into action have been the same old problems that Filipinos have been writing about and sacrificing and dying for since the late 18th Century. The problems have been restated again and again and the solutions are well known. What is needed is a generation of leaders willing to endure personal sacrifice. A generation that will awaken and unite 85 million Filipinos into committing themselves towards lasting goals that will particularly raise the little children from the despair and the disease and hopelessness they find themselves in today.

Seems like every other Filipino adult smokes. We don't have any of the anti-smoking messages regularly broadcast in the US and advertisements for tobacco products are ubiquitous. Anybody can buy cigarettes here which are often sold by the stick in the traffic congested streets.

The government will not curb this national addiction because of the tax revenues that tobacco brings. The media will keep off this subject because of the huge advertising revenues. Smoking prematurely disables productive workers and smoking causes a lot of pulmonary and cardiovascular diseases that our country (which still suffers from endemic intestinal parasitism) can ill afford.

The Filipino worker overseas is the real present-day hero. Why did I suddenly spring this seeming non-sequitur? Because most of the billionaires (in US dollars) in the Philippines today are engaged in the sale of tobacco, alcohol and serve as middlemen in retail trade. These billionaires hardly produce anything at all. They compete for the $25 a month remittance from abroad from nurses who work brutally long hours, maids who get regularly abused and laborers in Muslim nations who are not free to practice religions other than Islam.

Poverty is terrible and I would hate to deprive people who already have so little but we must think of long-term consequences. A lot of smokers in the provinces smoke in order to ward-off mosquitoes. The government should instead assist the people in cleaning up their immediate environs. There remains a lot of land that is unused in the Philippines and there needs to be a master plan in the creation of new self-sustaining communities that will attract people in the congested cities to relocate.

One very important contribution of Benjamin Franklin was the organization of an efficient postal system. This system has turned out to be one of the key pillars in the phenomenal growth that the United States has enjoyed in the last 200 years. Improvements to the system through FedEx and DHL and UPS have resulted in unprecedented profits for these corporations.

We have a very poor postal system here in the Philippines. Mail delivery is inefficient and unreliable. We can only wonder how progressive this country could become if we had Ben Franklin for a postmaster general. Think alone of all the vehicles that congest our already overloaded highways. Many of these trips (legal documents, money transfers, delivery of goods) can be prevented with an efficient postal system. Think of all the savings in fuel, labor-costs, pollution and above all in time.

Why can't we have a good postal system? I hate to go back to the squatting problem once again but if millions of people do not have permanent addresses then it will be very difficult to set-up an efficient system. People need to stay put in a legal address so that the taxes they pay towards their government may be effectively remitted back to them in the form of reliable public services.

If you thought Medicare Plan D was lopsidedly in favor of drug companies then you need to see the Philippine situation. Atenolol is a beta-blocker that has probably been available in a generic formulation for more than 20 years. Atenolol is available as Tenormin and sells for 80 cents a tablet. In the US, atenolol sells for 12 cents a tablet. Oral nystatin is a very common anti-fungal commonly used for infants with oral thrush sells for $7 for a 120 ml bottle. In the US, 120 ml of nystatin would probably cost 70 cents.

Widely available here in generic form are the common antibiotics and a few diabetes medications. A lot of anti-hypertensive medications come only in branded preparations. Drug stores have very little stocks the few times generic equivalents are available. This is a disaster, especially in a country where a majority of the people get by on less than ten dollars a day. People continue to die in their forties from complications of high blood pressure and diabetes because of an inability to purchase medications.

I understand why the biggest drug store chain in the Philippines prefers branded pharmaceuticals (higher profit margin) but why the government cannot import generic formulations from India and Israel does not make any sense to me at all. Just another example of a glaring lack of political will to enforce social consciousness and ruffle the feathers of a billion-dollar drug store conglomerate as well as the behemoth drug companies that profit every single time a Filipino is forced to take a branded product manufactured abroad.