The root of all the poverty and misery in the Philippines is the pervasive corruption that permeates every level of society, that looms behind every transaction, that is behind the mind of every citizen who sincerely desires to contribute to the common good.

Our various governments have never hurdled this seemingly insurmountable obstacle that will always prevent us from forging ahead.

Instead of enabling the people to unite and work together for a common cause, our leaders have consistently betrayed us and divided us and the general feeling of hopelessness and cynicism is a direct result of the example we see each day from the people who are supposed to govern us.

This is one good reason why I think that being away for 17 years will turn out to be an advantage because I do not know anybody and I am not working for anyone else's agenda.

Before we expect the citizens to clean their yards and pick up trash and pay taxes and obey traffic laws and engage in civic action projects and plant trees and vegetables and walk to work and refrain from bribing public officials we will need a complete change in leadership. There is no other way.

This week has so far been a brutal one. We have already lost four patients. Becky, Peggy, John Wayne and Goldie. Another one is in the launching pad. The practice of medicine is such a profound privilege. Your patients place their lives within your hands. Each good bye teaches you lessons that no other profession will come close to providing.

Patients come and die and only valuable instructions on why we need to lead meaningful lives remain.

At the end of each day, I am so grateful at the opportunity to live in a free and clean and prosperous society. I will always be grateful for these blessings. But we need to move on and become a part of a movement that will hopefully make life better for many others.

Our familial rite of spring, my wife and I and our four daughters began cleaning up our yard. As we have done, annually, in the one house we have occupied in Guymon these last ten years, we began by clearing the infinite-seeming pine needles that littered our back yard. Then we raked the entire lawn and because there was a state-wide burn ban we could not conveniently place the detritus in our trustworthy chiminea-burner and instead deposited all the dead leaves and grass and flowers and twigs and roots at the back of my Chevy pick-up and I proceeded to dump the entire load in the lake dumpster as my now deceased 89 year old neighbor had instructed me so long ago. Then we painstakingly placed mounds of compost around each trunk of the myriad plants and trees that we had planted in our ten years of occupation (by the way, I brought my two younger daughters to the cemetery later in the newly sprung forward evening hours to see where our 89 year old neighbor was resting and my five year old asked if we should dig him up and quickly recanted as she did not want any zombie encounters).

Force of habit, rite of spring, we knew what we had to do even if this may be the first summer that we might not savor the beauty of our garden that has been twice voted "yard of the month" and has been a perennial selection for the annual garden tour. One of these days, when I get the technological know-how, I will post a video of our garden, with its fountains and music and trellises and pergola and you will understand why it has become an oasis for my wife and I as well as for others in the community. I wistfully thought of my neighbor as sweat streamed from my brow that he was not going to be a part of this spring.

Hot button issue these days is immigration. There are 11 million illegal aliens in the US today. I had to go through the arduous process of converting my J-1, "exchange student visa" into a working visa by doctoring in a medically-underserved community. The commitment was for 2 years but we never moved. Turned out to be a big blessing to work and live in a rural community in the Oklahoma panhandle.

I could have become a US citizen many years ago if it were not for the "I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen..." I found the words too difficult to utter. It would have allowed me to pass through customs and immigration in all other countries without much hassle; it would have saved me the trouble of acquiring visas and it would have qualified me to run for public office in the US. Oh but to entirely renounce and abjure the Philippines, for all its troubles and defects, poverty and pollution, diseases and corruption...

Then again, being foreign-born disqualified me from becoming the President of the US.

Just finished watching another great movie from the Wachowsky brothers. Only thing is it broke my cover. "The Count Of Monte Cristo" has long since been one of my favorite novels. My father long ago read to me from "The Plot Outlines of 100 Famous Novels" and that story stuck to me and I read the entire book while in high school and re-read it while I was in Brooklyn. I always treated every day as just another day of preparation for my eventual return. Truth is, I have no relatives active in Philippine politics today. I have about 70 first cousins and nobody is even on a school board. I certainly do not belong to the political elite. Unlike the Count, I am not returning with a personal agenda of vendetta.

Every day has been a day of preparation for my return. I do not want to offer my country an unfinished product. I have tried to learn lessons from most of my experiences as an exile. The Count was away for 20 years. I have been away for 17. This blog cannot even start to contain my ideas about everything that keeps the Philippines in the miserable situation that it is in. I look forward to the day when I can discuss everyday problems with fellow citizens and arrive upon common-sense/scientific solutions to each of these problems.