(This is an excerpt from a Powerpoint presentation given by Madame Getsy S. Tiglao before the Women’s International Club of Athens, last April 2, 2008, at an event entitled, “Meet My Country – Philippines.)

Good morning everyone. Thank you for this opportunity to be able to introduce to you my country the Philippines. As you heard from the introduction I was a journalist for many years before becoming the ambassador’s wife. History, culture, and politics are subjects close to my heart so preparing for this talk was a real treat for me.

I hope that through this presentation, you will understand the Philippines and its people a bit more, especially since we have so many Filipino citizens working in Athens and in other parts of Europe.

Filipinos are friendly, hard-working, and peaceful people. They’re comfortable with foreign languages and can adapt to almost any culture. Given the Philippines’ historical experience, notably 400 years under Spain and 50 years under the United States, the Filipino was practically moulded to become a Global Citizen.

But who is a Filipino you may ask? What is our difference from other Asians?

A Filipino is a unique mix of Oriental and Western blood and culture. Even before the first Europeans arrived in 1521, the Filipinos already had extensive contacts with foreigners particularly the Chinese and the Arabs.

Historians note that the Philippines was mentioned in ancient Chinese documents as “Ma-I” and later “Seludong or Selurong” (modern-day ‘Luzon’). It took note of trade missions from “Ma-I” that brought local goods to Guangzhou, sometime in the 7th to the 10th century.

Our ancestors used wooden boats called “balangay” to travel to China and other nearby lands to do business. Several of these balangays have been excavated in Butuan in Mindanao, and some are as old as 320 A.D.

When Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the Cebu islands in 1521, he found that the Cebuanos were already using a sophisticated language. This was noted down by his chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, who noted that the native word for youth was “benibeni”, a married woman was “babai”, the navel “pussud”, and silver was called “pilla”. It’s amazing that with just slight changes these are still the same words we use in the Filipino language.

And now we have physical evidence to add to this historical account. The Laguna Copperplate Inscription is the first written document using ancient Filipino language. This copperplate was found in 1989 on the shores of Laguna de Bay. It talks of releasing a man named Namwaran of his debt in gold, and mentions places still existing in the Philippines such as Tondo, Pila and Pulilan. It even has a date on it “Saka Year 822” which is equivalent to 900 A.D.

Philippine pre-history goes even further if we take a look at archaeological evidence. The ancestors of Filipinos have been living in the islands as far back as 50,000 years ago.

Archaeologist Robert Fox and his team from the Philippine National Museum discovered in 1962 the fossilized remains of a stone-age Filipino in Tabon Cave in Palawan province. The fossils of “Tabon Man” were carbon dated to 22,000 B.C. while the cave itself showed signs of human habitation for at least 50,000 years.

Other caves in Palawan revealed prehistoric items such as shell necklaces, stone tools, and pottery. The most famous is a secondary burial jar from Manunggul Cave in Palawan which dates to 2,710 years ago. This is even older than the Parthenon of Greece, which is dated to 2,500 years ago.

The Manunggul Jar had a cover that featured a “ship of the dead” with a boatman ferrying the newly-dead into the spirit world. This idea is similar to Greek mythology where you have Charon as the ferryman of Hades. This shows that ancient Filipinos already had profound ideas about death, the soul, and the afterlife.

Anthropologists and linguists have determined that present-day Filipinos are the descendants of Austronesians that originated from Formosa (now Taiwan) and moved southwards via Batanes into the Philippine mainland. They displaced the indigenous tribes such as the Ati who moved further into the mountains.

With the arrival of other foreigners through the centuries there were more inter-mixing and cultural exchanges. Today the Filipino stands proud as the original global citizen. He has a rich history and culture behind him, which endowed him with a facility for languages and cultural adaptability. This heritage ensures that the Filipino will always have a place anywhere in the world