I never thought young filipinos would be like this. Since I and my brother established our business, we’ve been meeting a lot of young entrepreneurs from different schools and places.

Yesterday may have been the busiest day of my life. We went to see Mr. Dy for another deal, an expansion move for our business. I was still sleepy but t soon payed off when we sealed the deal for designing garments for ABS-CBN, Ateneo Blue Eagles and a possible tie up with FEU. Mr. Dy was glad we accepted it. I was glad it ended up quickly. I was starving at that time. haha!

After the meet with Mr. Dy at his factory, we rushed to SM for another meeting. This time it was with Mr. Galauran of UST. I thought he was old enough for his business. But when he entered at Max’s (where we decided to set the meeting), I was shocked when I knew he was as young as me. Our business venture went smooth all the way.

At my school alone, we have two more competitors, all of them young but already business-minded. Mr. Galauran is one successful example. Well, maybe, young people nowadays are thinking differently than what our parents thought we could. It’s way better than going to discos, parties or shouting up and down the street for the government’s downfall.

For a better, richer Philippines, young Filipinos should think what is important and not just what we want.

My lecturer in my Mathematics in Business class told us a story that made me laugh so hard, I ended up coughing for the rest of the day. The story goes like this;

There was a woman named Betty who went to the Bank of Canada and demanded the tellers that she wanted to speak to the Bank Governor. The Bank Governor having been intrigued by Betty’s perseverance and a considerable amount of money she wanted to deposit to the bank, invited her to his office.

“What seems to be your concern?” the governor asked.

“What would you say if I tell you that your testicles are square?” Betty told him.

The shocked governor asked her how she said so and demanded she proved to him how it is possible.

“I am sure my balls are not square!” the irritated governor said.

“Then let us do a bet. I will give $25,000 to prove that your balls are square,” Betty suggested.

The governor was sure that Betty was out of her self so he made the bargain. The $25,000 bet was set and the two agreed to meet again the next day before 9:00 A.M.

The next day before 9:00 A.M., Betty came with a lawyer and a bag full of money.

“So, are you ready for the deal?” Betty asked the governor.

“With the money that much, you should be sure!” the governor said.

“I will now prove that your testicles are square. Will you lower your pants?” Betty requested.

“With the money that much, you should be sure!” exclaimed the governor while lowering his pants.

“Can I touch it?” Betty asked again.

“With the money that much, you should be sure!”

So Betty touched the governor’s balls.

Suddenly, the governor saw the lawyer banging his head on the wall.

“Why is your lawyer banging his head on the wall?” The governor asked Betty.

Betty smiled and said,

“Lately, I had a $100,000 bet with this lawyer that before 9:00 A.M today, I will hold the balls of the governor of the Bank of Canada.”

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Ahahahaha!

The 6 years of anxious waiting is finally over. China’s 7-year preparation for this grand sports extravaganza has ended after just 17 days. But then again, it’ll be a part of history. A history that marked the awakening of the chinese people.

I still couldn’t believe that I’ll be waiting for 4 years again just to feel the olympic spirit. Oh my.

Well, let’s talk about what happened last night. Goodness, I stayed up for the rest of the night just for Beijing’s conclusion of the games.

Personally, I’d say the ceremonies were all about scrolls and drums. Don’t you think? The Chinese culture is so broad they can’t present it in a single show (unlike the Philippines’ which is always portrayed with folk dances, terno-clad women, barong tagalog, fiesta and some other weird house chores.) The Ghuangzhuo handover at the 15th Asian Games for example showcased the Chinese calligraphy. The Beijing handover at the Athens Olympics portrayed about martial arts and opera while the Paralympics handover portrayed the Thousand Hands (ingenious, totally ingenious).

The ceremonies were full of olympic spirit and I can feel the athletes shouted with joy as they were about to depart from Beijing the next day and wanted to party the whole night.

But, (yes, there will always be buts), when London finally came in, I scoffed. Why can’t most western countries (who always have the most complex cultures) show their culture in a more enthusiastic way? London showed chaos just like what Vancouver did in Torino. They danced like bitches. By the way, what the hell did that Zeppelin guitarist do there? Showed his butt? I don’t need your guitar buddy!

And the bus, oh f*ck the bus! I wish the terrorists just blew it on the way to Beijing! Just like it’s hideous 2012 logo, London’s edition of the games will be hideous as well. I’m sure! They said the logo was designed like ass to reach young people and share with them the Olympic spirit. Hey, I’m part of the youth. And I’m sorry, it doesn’t reach me. Wrong buzzer! With that logo, I think you’re trying to reach babies. Duh!
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Because the Olympics is over as well, let me share you this inspiring story that nearly turned me into tears from Yahoo! News.

BEIJING – Samia Yusuf Omar headed back to Somalia Sunday, returning to the small two-room house in Mogadishu shared by seven family members. Her mother lives there, selling fruits and vegetables. Her father is buried there, the victim of a wayward artillery shell that hit their home and also killed Samia’s aunt and uncle.

This is the Olympic story we never heard.

It’s about a girl whose Beijing moment lasted a mere 32 seconds – the slowest 200-meter dash time out of the 46 women who competed in the event. Thirty-two seconds that almost nobody saw but that she carries home with her, swelled with joy and wonderment. Back to a decades-long civil war that has flattened much of her city. Back to an Olympic program with few Olympians and no facilities. Back to meals of flat bread, wheat porridge and tap water.

“I have my pride,” she said through a translator before leaving China. “This is the highest thing any athlete can hope for. It has been a very happy experience for me. I am proud to bring the Somali flag to fly with all of these countries, and to stand with the best athletes in the world.”

There are many life stories that collide in each Olympics – many intriguing tales of glory and tragedy. Beijing delivered the electricity of Usain Bolt and the determination of Michael Phelps. It left hearts heavy with the disappointment of Liu Xiang and the heartache of Hugh McCutcheon.

But it also gave us Samia Yusuf Omar – one small girl from one chaotic country – and a story that might have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been for a roaring half-empty stadium.

***

It was Aug. 19, and the tiny girl had crossed over seven lanes to find her starting block in her 200-meter heat. She walked past Jamaica’s Veronica Campbell-Brown – the eventual gold medalist in the event. Samia had read about Campbell-Brown in track and field magazines and once watched her in wonderment on television. As a cameraman panned down the starting blocks, it settled on lane No. 2, on a 17-year old girl with the frame of a Kenyan distance runner. Samia’s biography in the Olympic media system contained almost no information, other than her 5-foot-4, 119-pound frame. There was no mention of her personal best times and nothing on previous track meets. Somalia, it was later explained, has a hard time organizing the records of its athletes.

She looked so odd and out of place among her competitors, with her white headband and a baggy, untucked T-shirt. The legs on her wiry frame were thin and spindly, and her arms poked out of her sleeves like the twigs of a sapling. She tugged at the bottom of her shirt and shot an occasional nervous glance at the other runners in her heat. Each had muscles bulging from beneath their skin-tight track suits. Many outweighed Samia by nearly 40 pounds.

After introductions, she knelt into her starting block.

***

The country of Somalia sent two athletes to the Beijing Games – Samia and distance runner Abdi Said Ibrahim, who competed in the men’s 5,000-meter event. Like Samia, Abdi finished last in his event, overmatched by competitors who were groomed for their Olympic moment. Somalia has only loose-knit programs supporting its Olympians, few coaches, and few facilities. With a civil war tearing the city apart since the Somali government’s collapse in 1991, Mogadishu Stadium has become one of the bloodiest pieces of real estate in the city – housing U.N. forces in the early 1990s and now a military compound for insurgents.

That has left the country’s track athletes to train in Coni Stadium, an artillery-pocked structure built in 1958 which has no track, endless divots, and has been overtaken by weeds and plants.

“Sports are not a priority for Somalia,” said Duran Farah, vice president of the Somali Olympic Committee. “There is no money for facilities or training. The war, the security, the difficulties with food and everything – there are just many other internal difficulties to deal with.”

That leaves athletes such as Samia and 18-year old Abdi without the normal comforts and structure enjoyed by almost every other athlete in the Olympic Games. They don’t receive consistent coaching, don’t compete in meets on a regular basis and struggle to find safety in something as simple as going out for a daily run.

When Samia cannot make it to the stadium, she runs in the streets, where she runs into roadblocks of burning tires and refuse set out by insurgents. She is often bullied and threatened by militia or locals who believe that Muslim women should not take part in sports. In hopes of lessening the abuse, she runs in the oppressive heat wearing long sleeves, sweat pants and a head scarf. Even then, she is told her place should be in the home – not participating in sports.

“For some men, nothing is good enough,” Farah said.

Even Abdi faces constant difficulties, passing through military checkpoints where he is shaken down for money. And when he has competed in sanctioned track events, gun-toting insurgents have threatened his life for what they viewed as compliance with the interim government.

“Once, the insurgents were very unhappy,” he said. “When we went back home, my friends and I were rounded up and we were told if we did it again, we would get killed. Some of my friends stopped being in sports. I had many phone calls threatening me, that if I didn’t stop running, I would get killed. Lately, I do not have these problems. I think probably they realized we just wanted to be athletes and were not involved with the government.”

But the interim government has not been able to offer support, instead spending its cash and energy arming Ethiopian allies for the fight against insurgents. Other than organizing a meet to compete for Olympic selection – in which the Somali Olympic federation chose whom it believed to be its two best performers – there has been little lavished on athletes. While other countries pour millions into the training and perfecting of their Olympic stars, Somalia offers little guidance and no doctors, not even a stipend for food.

“The food is not something that is measured and given to us every day,” Samia said. “We eat whatever we can get.”

On the best days, that means getting protein from a small portion of fish, camel or goat meat, and carbohydrates from bananas or citrus fruits growing in local trees. On the worst days – and there are long stretches of those – it means surviving on water and Angera, a flat bread made from a mixture of wheat and barley.

“There is no grocery store,” Abdi said. “We can’t go shopping for whatever we want.”

He laughs at this thought, with a smile that is missing a front tooth.

***

When the gun went off in Samia’s 200-meter heat, seven women blasted from their starting blocks, registering as little as 16 one-hundredths of a second of reaction time. Samia’s start was slow enough that the computer didn’t read it, leaving her reaction time blank on the heat’s statistical printout.

Within seconds, seven competitors were thundering around the curve in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest, struggling to separate themselves from one another. Samia was just entering the curve when her opponents were nearing the finish line. A local television feed had lost her entirely by the time Veronica Campbell-Brown crossed the finish line in a trotting 23.04 seconds.

As the athletes came to a halt and knelt, stretching and sucking deep breaths, a camera moved to ground level. In the background of the picture, a white dot wearing a headband could be seen coming down the stretch.

***

Until this month, Samia had been to two countries outside of her own – Djibouti and Ethiopia. Asked how she will describe Beijing, her eyes get big and she snickers from under a blue and white Olympic baseball cap.

“The stadiums, I never thought something like this existed in the world,” she said. “The buildings in the city, it was all very surprising. It will probably take days to finish all the stories we have to tell.”

Asked about Beijing’s otherworldly Water Cube, she lets out a sigh: “Ahhhhhhh.”

Before she can answer, Abdi cuts her off.

“I didn’t know what it was when I saw it,” he said. “Is it plastic? Is it magic?”

Few buildings are beyond two or three stories tall in Mogadishu, and those still standing are mostly in tatters. Only pictures will be able to describe some of Beijing’s structures, from the ancient architecture of the Forbidden City to the modernity of the Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest.

“The Olympic fire in the stadium, everywhere I am, it is always up there,” Samia said. “It’s like the moon. I look up wherever I go, it is there.”

These are the stories they will relish when they return to Somalia, which they believe has, for one brief moment, united the country’s warring tribes. Farah said he had received calls from countrymen all over the world, asking how their two athletes were doing and what they had experienced in China. On the morning of Samia’s race, it was just after 5 a.m., and locals from her neighborhood were scrambling to find a television with a broadcast.

“People stayed awake to see it,” Farah said. “The good thing, sports is the one thing which unites all of Somalia.”

That is one of the common threads they share with every athlete at the Games. Just being an Olympian and carrying the country’s flag brings an immense sense of pride to families and neighborhoods which typically know only despair.

A pride that Samia will share with her mother, three brothers and three sisters. A pride that Abdi will carry home to his father, two brothers and two sisters. Like Samia’s father two years ago, Abdi’s mother was killed in the civil war, by a mortar shell that hit the family’s home in 1993.

“We are very proud,” Samia said. “Because of us, the Somali flag is raised among all the other nations’ flags. You can’t imagine how proud we were when we were marching in the Opening Ceremonies with the flag.

“Despite the difficulties and everything we’ve had with our country, we feel great pride in our accomplishment.”

***

As Samia came down the stretch in her 200-meter heat, she realized that the Somalian Olympic federation had chosen to place her in the wrong event. The 200 wasn’t nearly the best event for a middle distance runner. But the federation believed the dash would serve as a “good experience” for her. Now she was coming down the stretch alone, pumping her arms and tilting her head to the side with a look of despair.

Suddenly, the half-empty stadium realized there was still a runner on the track, still pushing to get across the finish line almost eight seconds behind the seven women who had already completed the race. In the last 50 meters, much of the stadium rose to its feet, flooding the track below with cheers of encouragement. A few competitors who had left Samia behind turned and watched it unfold.

As Samia crossed the line in 32.16 seconds, the crowd roared in applause. Bahamian runner Sheniqua Ferguson, the next smallest woman on the track at 5-foot-7 and 130 pounds, looked at the girl crossing the finish and thought to herself, “Wow, she’s tiny.”

“She must love running,” Ferguson said later.

***

Several days later, Samia waved off her Olympic moment as being inspirational. While she was still filled with joy over her chance to compete, and though she knew she had done all she could, part of her seemed embarrassed that the crowd had risen to its feet to help push her across the finish line.

“I was happy the people were cheering and encouraging me,” she said. “But I would have liked to be cheered because I won, not because I needed encouragement. It is something I will work on. I will try my best not to be the last person next time. It was very nice for people to give me that encouragement, but I would prefer the winning cheer.

She shrugged and smiled.

“I knew it was an uphill task.”

And there it was. While the Olympics are often promoted for the fastest and strongest and most agile champions, there is something to be said for the ones who finish out of the limelight. The ones who finish last and leave with their pride.

At their best, the Olympics still signify competition and purity, a love for sport. What represents that better than two athletes who carry their country’s flag into the Games despite their country’s inability to carry them before that moment? What better way to find the best of the Olympic spirit than by looking at those who endure so much that would break it?

“We know that we are different from the other athletes,” Samia said. “But we don’t want to show it. We try our best to look like all the rest. We understand we are not anywhere near the level of the other competitors here. We understand that very, very well. But more than anything else, we would like to show the dignity of ourselves and our country.”

She smiles when she says this, sitting a stone’s throw from a Somalian flag that she and her countryman Abdi brought to these Games. They came and went from Beijing largely unnoticed, but may have been the most dignified example these Olympics could offer.

My blog is simple, I have quite a few readers and I read quite a few blogs other than mine and I post entries I don’t even know where it came from. Haha!

But some of our colleagues have turned blogging into an achievement. On September 21, The 2nd Philippine Blog Awards commends outstanding Filipino bloggers for exemplary blogging.

I wanted to volunteer for the awards night but it seems that I am late for the registration. Too bad!

Goodluck to the nominees!

for more info, visit www.philippineblogawards.com.ph

Whenever I sit down in the oval grass, I wonder what it is like to be simple again. I’ve been so preoccupied these days and I don’t know what to do first. I miss the times when I’d just sit around, play, eat and chat with my mom or scribble on my sketchpad (which now lay forgotten under my bed).

Later this afternoon I decided to be alone at my favorite spot at the oval, eating my favorite pie when I thought hard and wondered what makes people become unhappy with great things that are happening to their lives. I don’t know myself actually. Maybe, when things are too big to handle, even if they are for their own good, they still want what they are comfortable of doing.

My mom once told me, that opportunities knocking at your door should not be grabbed all at once. There are certain things people choose not to do because they want it to be done by someone else or they are afraid they might realize their defeat. So these people choose to live in simplicity, choosing what they are most comfortable and secure with.

I glanced at my side and there I saw a goat, devouring overgrown grasses on the field. I envy the goat, though. All it did was eat the whole day and not thinking about something else. It doesn’t feel what kind of mental stress I’m going through. It doesn’t feel how tired I am after every day and thinking how stressed i will be again tomorrow. Maybe I should live just like the goat. Carefree, simple yet peaceful.

Or maybe I just need a little rest. I’m feeling uneasy. Hmpf.