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Publisher’s Note
HAPPY NEW YEAR! HAPPY THREE KINGS! As we are now in 2019, new year, new beginnings, new challenges and new opportunities. Everyone is entitled to make their new year’s resolution for as long as they keep it in mind and make sure that they do it to the best of their ability. When I was young [...]
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Effective, Accepted and Respected

By: Tigs Tidalgo

We are people with excellent social graces. We are known to partake in festivities and cultural cheerfulness with amiable distinction towards friendship. This is the nature of our heritage and we are proud of it. We are the friendliest people around. It becomes our trademark and we’ll keep it and go on with pleasure and hilarity.

In the midst of these, it is also fitting to spare a glance and to regard that there is more in us beyond the glitters of our songs and dances. It’s called responsibility. We are an integral component in society and therefore our community is part and parcel to all challenges. It is with feeling of disappointment to realize that with the top four major cultural groups in Calgary, we are the least in progress. This is sad indeed considering that we are said to be the biggest by population in the city today. There is something here that we apparently missed.

It is neither indolence nor lack of wisdom that we lagged behind. We have the ability and the audacity to push onward to achieve on what we want. We are equipped with right sense of skill, talent and potential to rank with the best. We are bold and proud people who refuses to admit that we are one amongst the inferior. We know by heart that we are not. But why then is progress so elusive?

There are many questions than answers. Food courts of shopping malls and anywhere Filipinos converge are full of theories and stories of our failure to collectively thrive onward. Some are with substance, but mostly are simply bordering between the absurd and the ridiculous. Regardless, it expresses free opinions with one underlying presumption that prosperity as a community is hardly ours to acquire and cherish.

We heard these kinds of excuses before when a group of five elderly citizens decided to put up a structure for the well-being of seniors. There were more negative assessment than positive. It didn’t discourage them at all. Instead it enforced a challenge to vigour eagerness and efforts to go through. They finally silenced the critics when they started to harvest the fruit of their labour. It is now one of its kind in all cultural groups in the city. It succeeded firstly because there was a need for it.

In the same token that the combined wisdom of the study group of twelve, whom I called the Magnificent Dozen will succeed primarily because there is also a need for it. Gathered to one focus from selected experiences, these individuals will draw a pathway to work on for our community structure to become effective, accepted and respected. This wanting is not just a walk in the park to come about. It requires enduring patience and hard work.

To realize a dream of this magnitude amidst the negative forecast of the unkind is not easy to bear. But like the five senior citizens, they too will persevere because the reward from toils of the good is always noble and blissful.

The mode of our community is to believe only when tangible result is evidently at hand. It is definitely on a show and tell basis that they trust. All community endeavours has to stand the test of candour and honesty. This attitude came into being based on foiled intentions in the past.

The principle of the Magnificent Dozen is quite simple and realistic. It is simply to merge together the responsibilities of CAFFA and the Filipino Congress into one autonomous entity known as the Filipino Community Association of Calgary. It has an open community wide general election. The term of office is for three years with option to re-elect. Target date to implementation is September of 2017.

Effective, Accepted and Respected

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