deebeedee

It all happened so fast but we are now host to a foreign exchange student from South Korea. We were approached last Wednesday by a lady looking for families in the area who are willing to host foreign exchange students. One particular student was due to arrive on Monday from South Korea but his original host family was struck by a sudden emergency and could not take him. By Friday, my father-in-law had agreed to host him and signed the papers. The 16-year-old student will be going to the high school a block away from the house. Today, he arrived with the program coordinator who picked him and another student up from the airport. She briefed us on the hosting experience, had my father-in-law sign some more papers, and went on her way.

The tired lad is resting right now. We scrambled to empty and clean a room previously occupied by my wife’s nephew and gave the room to him. At such short notice, the emptied contents of the room are sitting in the middle of the house in several boxes. The next few days will be busy as we do some more cleaning and rearranging of stuff. We’re a little anxious but surely excited about the prospect of being a host family for a year to a student from a far-away land.

I give props to Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) for ending the Cold War but I’d like to think the Filipino people helped inspire the world to fight oppressive regimes in the 1980s. The People Power Revolution that followed Ninoy Aquino’s assassination in 1983 catapulted his widow, Cory, to run, and eventually win, against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos during snap elections held in 1986. It was this revolt that gave hope, I believe, to oppressed people worldwide. I remember in 1987 watching South Korean protesters on TV holding up the “L” sign, the initial of Cory Aquino’s LABAN party, as they appropriated the symbol for themselves in their own fight against unfair elections. I see the image of the lone guy standing defiantly against a tank in 1989’s Tiananmen Square protest mirrored in the image from 1986 of nuns and ordinary citizens praying in front of tanks during a rally in Manila. Even as Reagan set the stage in his resolve to rid the world of communism in the 1980s, the People Power movement demonstrated to the world how non-violent peaceful resistance is done.

Update: found this interesting article on the legacy of People Power.