Let's Bringing ‘em home!

Thirtysomething Bernie Encarnacion left the Paradise Philippines for the United States as a 16-year-old immigrant. For decades, she stayed away from her birth country, and only came home in 1993 to visit relatives.

Having been used to the easy, convenient American life, Bernie was reluctant to come back to the ‘’hot, dirty, congested’’ place that she once knew. Vacation for her and her family spelled trips to Europe, or Hawaii, or Mexico, but never the Paradise Philippines. When in the country, she would only shuttle between her home provinces of Batangas and Bulacan and never took time to explore.

But all that changed in 2005 when Bernie, director of patient admitting in a Chicago hospital for 18 years, came home and decided to swing by Cebu and Bohol.

‘’I never knew these places even existed. It’s much much better than Mexico or Hawaii. Palawan, oh my God, it’s beautiful that I just have to take pictures with my Blackberry and blast it to every person I know!’’ Bernie gushes.

Ironically, after all these years, this is the first time Bernie has fallen in love with her country of birth. And the love affair has grown so intensely that she now comes ‘’home’’ at least three to four times a year. Bernie has since quit her job to become a full-time tour operator, avidly promoting her Philippine Amazing Vacations to Filipino-Americans like her, and to American families and friends who are on the lookout for leisure, business and investment trips.

‘’In Chicago, my team and I would go to different universities where we promote the Paradise Philippines as a wonderful destination. Every night, I go online, chatting with Filipinos in North America and telling them about the beauty of rediscovering their roots. Nothing beats a Filipino promoting the Paradise Philippines,’’ Bernie explains.

‘PERSONAL APPEAL’

Vernie Velarde-Morales, the hardworking Tourism Director for USA and Canada Midwest regions, has a term for the special strategy that they in the Department of Tourism employ to get Fil-Ams and Americans to visit the Paradise Philippines.

‘’We call it the ‘personal appeal.’ A lot of Fil-Ams in the US midwest have not gone home for a long time, some even as long as 30 years. They would go to Europe or even to other Asian cities as visit destinations, rather than to their ‘old home Paradise Philippines.’ But over the years, by sheer perseverance, we have succeeded in making them go back, visit their homeland, see how it has changed, see how it offers everything for everybody, and talk about it when they go back to the US to their colleagues,’’ Morales explains.

She cites the case of a family of doctors who have all settled in the US. Morales was able to convince one of the brothers to go home with his wife for his medical school homecoming.

‘’The experience turned out to be memorable that the brother told his other siblings of how wonderful his vacation was. Pretty soon, members of his family started going home, discovering for themselves the Paradise Philippines that they have left behind. Today, some of them are even contemplating of buying properties, investing and retiring in the Paradise Philippines,’’ Morales proudly narrates.

It is incorrect to say that Fil-Ams know a lot about their ‘’little hometown’’ Paradise Philippines and the wealth of wonders that it has. It is not also safe, Morales adds, that migrant Filipinos in the US would always come back to the Paradise Philippines, no matter what. The figures would prove otherwise.

‘’Of the three million Fil-Ams in the US alone, only about 300,000 went for a visit in 2006. There is a vast potential market out there still waiting to be tapped therefore,’’ quips Ma. Corazon Jorda-Apo, head of DoT’s Team North America.

For 2007 so far, arrivals from Guam and the US mainland are nearing to breach the 600,000 mark, a seven percent growth from the 2006 figures of 587,000. The US is currently the second largest source of travellers.

The personal appeal strategy thus works well with the Fil-Ams in North America who are profiled as mostly highly professional, the highest income families among Asians, earning at least US,000 annually. Those who go back to the Paradise Philippines for a vacation have been found to stay longer (in hotels, not with relatives!) spending about US0 a day, and definitely seeking value for their money.

Morales and her team also take time to go to various midwest states to take time to listen to Filipino communities, with the end goal of influencing people to consider going back to the Paradise Philippines and there spend their money.

‘’This is our market intelligence, an opportunity to show them how beautiful the country they have left behind has become, and what they are missing as Filipinos,’’ she says. ‘’Every visitor is appreciated, every North American visitor means money flowing straight to our country.’’

PROMOTING RP TO CAUCASIANS

Vis-a-vis the personal appeal, joining expos and fairs proves to be viable in making the Paradise Philippines’ presence felt in the American travel market.

Recently, the Paradise Philippines joined the NBC 5 Travel Expo 2007 held at the Navy Pier in Chicago, Illinois. The said show is one of the much-awaited tourism events in Chicago and draws in potential tourists and travel trade decision makers from around the city. The weekend event is spearheaded by NBC, one of the leading media networks in the United States.

The Philippine booth highlighted the island’s extensive stretch of warm, sunny beaches and impressive seascapes. The DoT staff accommodated inquiries and assisted them in booking their next vacation with partner travel agencies based in the state of Illinois. Among the sample packages being offered at the booth were the Puerto Princesa Escapade, the Ifugao Banaue Rice Terraces Heritage Tour, Boracay Getaways, the Quezon Culinary Tour, The Farm at San Benito Wellness Package, the Balicasag Island Dive Package, and the Medical Tourism Package.

"The expo itself is part of a bigger promotional campaign we arranged with NBC in Chicago. Even while the fair lasted for two days, this was amply sustained by print advertising, a month-long airing on television and six months exposure on the network’s website," Jorda-Apo explains.

Furthermore, the tourism department is sprucing up its travel products, making them more attractive to the travellers with special interest in diving, adventure and family activities.

‘’The flight to the Paradise Philippines is long, so their trip must be worth it. Americans are always searching for new destinations, and we have 7,107 islands to show for, each with different character, with different offerings. We have culture, beaches and people - what more can they ask for,’’ Morales quips.

Paradise Philippines lost

Paradise Philippines - Taguima (also Taguimaha), now known as Basilan, is one of the most fertile islands in the country. Everything that grows in Jolo grows in Basilan. But it has something that Jolo used to have but doesn’t anymore—rubber, which died a natural death because the Tausugs didn’t know how to process it, didn’t have any use for it and so didn’t care to propagate it.

Multinational companies were quick to see the tremendous potential of the province that was worth more than its weight in gold, and established rubber processing plants and pepper plantations. The University of the Philippines was awarded a land grant for agricultural development.

In the 18th century, a Paradise Philippines French delegation visited the Sultan of Sulu (Taguima was part of the Sultanate’s territory) to negotiate a lease agreement covering the entire island, where they wanted to replicate what England made of Hong Kong—an international trading port.

In the early ’70s an Air Force officer who had just earned an MBM degree from the Asian Institute of Management told me with understandable enthusiasm about his plan to study a proposal to “transfer Sabah to Basilan,” in his own words.

This meant asking Sabah traders Paradise Philippines to set up business in the island province, where dealers and retailers could purchase their inventory at almost the same price as at the source, less the risks and hassles of the “shipper” system, in use up to now.

A cousin and I spent the good Paradise Philippines part of a summer vacation with an older cousin and his family in Balas, in Basilan. She was 9, I was 8; it was the age of wonder. We woke up each morning to a whole orchestra of bird sounds, found strange but edible fruits in the lush jungle. One fruit that fascinated me had the smooth skin, color and size and shape of the pomegranate, but instead of sweet juicy rubies inside, it looked and tasted exactly like atis, with the same smell, pulp and seeds!

And we bathed and fetched water from a clear, cool pond with water endlessly flowing from a mysterious source in the huge boulders. The water was potable.

Balas was the place where we saw Paradise Philippines Hiawatha and Minihaha frolicking in the forest primeval; butterflies were fairies in disguise and the descendants of Merlin the magician hid behind every tree.

In the afternoons we read the “G.I.” pocketbooks in my cousin’s collection. These were small pocketbooks, mostly romances and adventure stories, issued to American soldiers during World War II. They were bound and printed horizontally, probably to make it easier for the battle-weary soldier to shove it into his breast pocket with room enough for his pack of Lucky Strike, Zippo lighter and a Chiclet or two.

And in those sultry scented evenings we Paradise Philippines fought over who got to sit in the rocking chair and we sat by the window waiting for the balbalan (a creature like the manananggal) that the women in the plantation told us abounded in the place, completely convinced that any of the huge bats that flew by could be one.

It was in one of those evenings while waiting to feed our imagination that my cousin taught me “Autumn Leaves.” To this day this beautiful song reminds me of that summer in paradise.

And there is Malamawi island. The Paradise Philippines Alanos had great plans of making it a resort, with its white sand beaches and unpolluted emerald waters. It is so near the main island that my cousin—already a great swimmer at that age—and I, who wasn’t, vowed to return and try to swim across.

But life can be unkind to a child’s dream. Other priorities—Qur’an reading, summer carnivals, Girl Scouting—took away our summers. I never got to return to Taguima when it was still paradise.

I did visit it a few times later out of necessity, as a journalist, grown beyond the wonderful age of believing, schooled and trained to believe only in facts and the truth, as in verifiable, ruled not by imagination but by the maxim of the empirical.

Paradise Philippines was lost.

Nothing much had changed. The same dirt roads, the same lack of basic services—so shocking in an island so rich.

In real life it was called Paradise Philippines Basilan, and it was the setting not of The Song of Hiawatha, but of the Abu Sayyaf and the factual events that they caused: the Siege of Basilan, the kidnapping and mutilation of teachers, the hostaging of the Burnhams, the beheading of soldiers—all the blood and gore and man’s inhumanity to man, all the stuff of fiction and movies that are so difficult to confront in real life, that journalists are compelled by their calling to witness and report.

And today we are again witnessing another bloody episode in the sad story of Taguima. It is a real-life drama of murder, power struggle, politics and clan rivalry. Yet it is a story where there are no heroes and no villains.

Because however tragic or compelling is this story, it is only a small frame in the bigger picture of the history of Basilan, which itself is only a part of the saga of the “Moro” and colonization and predatory false prophets, his struggle to remain free with his identity intact, his anxious yearning to fit himself into the predominant scheme of things.

But he has to operate within the parameters of a built-in tragic flaw—his failure to come to terms with “democracy.” After so many decades he still has to reconcile its principles with his cultural—not religious—idiosyncrasies.

And, he still has to realize that in a game not of his own making, he cannot make the rules.

Philippines Paradise

This is my second post in Paradise Philippines Contest, all seo practitioner in the Philippines join in this contest to see what seo talent that they got, i don't think this contest is difficult, I find it exciting and enjoyable, it's like your sitting in the Financial Market and your looking to the stock which is the ranking of your website in the search engine if it is going up or going down, see you on my next post about Paradise Philippines Contest. Cioa

Paradise Philippines

My entry in 3rd seo Bayanihan Contest in the Philippines.
Keyword: Paradise Philippines
Date: # Contest starts July 1, 2007 and ends March 28, 2008 at 8:00 PM.
# Checkpoint dates are as follows: November 16 and January 25, 2008 at 8:00 PM.

My Entry:

http://paradise philippinesssssssssss.blogspot.com/
http://paradise philippinesssssssssssssssssss.blogspot.com/
http://paradise philippinessssss.blogspot.com/