MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY

Do You Know Some Manners?
By Kizmet, Forum member

Every week on Saturday, I often have a date with my best friend on Skype Messenger for a few hours to exchange news. She works in one of the international MNCs in Dubai, which is among the beautiful destinations known today for tourists and employment seekers. 

Though a nation of Arabs with Islam as her religion, Dubai employs many of our Filipino graduates, undergraduates, and even the unlettered—whether Christian, Protestants, and fellow Islam adherents.

Dubai is a clean nation with disciplined inhabitants. The Filipinos, though, often manage to showcase their lack of manners there. Apparently, staying in a highly advanced country does not rub on some etiquette into these individuals, especially if they are in the company of fellow Filipinos.

Defined by the dictionary as social comportment, manners are supposedly implied. They are cultivated at home by our parents or by elderly family members. These are the polite standards that constitute our character, our being. It does not take an expensive education to learn how to give deference to the existence of others or to understand the reason why.

For instance, when somebody is still sleeping when you wake up in the morning and do the necessary preparation, reason dictates that you respect those who are still having their sleep by being discreet in your actions and words. You would not want to wake them up with your loud noise. That—is a specified rule.

Such is not the case among many Filipinos who are more concerned with their own interests like pursuing materialistic goals, often circumventing laws and doing other forms of violations. While these goals certainly improve their economic condition, wealth and material possessions cannot buy the owner some manners. These cannot make people human.

In her book Philosophy: Who Needs it?, Ayn Rand advocates that “reason is not merely a distinguishing attribute of man. It is his fundamental attribute; his basic means of survival.”

This means that if man would only use his reason coupled with philosophy, he can think, act, and live.

The problem with most Filipinos is that they often misuse their reason in their endeavors. When they do their activity—whatever it is—they do so without regard for others who also have similar rights as theirs. Ironically, they dismiss the old axiom that their rights end where the rights of others begin, on the presumption that our rights are never absolute.

Despite their high salary, many Filipinos in Dubai just rent bed space for their housing accommodations. Maybe it’s the expensive rental fee that keeps them from having their own private place. Or perhaps it’s the Filipino culture of wanting to be around fellow Filipinos, so they’d rather huddle together in a space as small as a room.

Unlike in our country, the rooms in Dubai are further subdivided to accommodate many bed spacers, yet at the same time allow each bed spacer some privacy despite being in one room with technically, six or 12 bed spacers (and this holds true even in condominiums, apartments, and pads).

A few of my friends in Dubai complain of the noise from fellow Filipino bed spacers, especially in the morning when they have to go in and out of the room while preparing to go to the office.

Also, when they engage in conversations with their fellow bed spacers late in the evening or sometimes even after midnight, they talk like they own the whole room or like they are having a party. They do not consider that others who are in the same room may already want to have their rest but cannot do so because of the loud noise.

And to think that they all pay the same rental fees.

A similar thing can be said in using the television, DVD player, and videoke, which usually starts in the morning of Friday or Saturday (Dubai’s weekend) to late in the evening.

There are also situations where Filipinos talk with someone on their mobile phones with voices so loud that everybody can hear their conversations in every detail.

If you try to confront them about it, they would apologize, yes, but this actually does not stop them from doing the same thing. Others would claim they are just curing their loneliness or the longing for their loved ones back in the Philippines. If you persist with your complaint, they would accuse you of being insensitive, inconsiderate, and incapable of understanding because maybe, they’d say, you don’t have a family or are never close to them when you were still in the Philippines or wherever.

In another scenario, despite the written reminder about the house rules that are posted conspicuously, many Filipinos just ignore them—like maintaining cleanliness in the kitchen, toilet and bathroom and the proper use of available appliances such as the TV, refrigerator, and stove.

In the book What Makes Man Truly Human, the author Michael Morga says that we humans are only considered to have reached our full humanness—and thus become truly human—when we became aware of and learn to use our physical potentials, cognitive abilities, and human sensitivity.

Of course, to make ourselves truly human, we should also develop these traits through many years of learning and training that start at home and continue outside the home in our interactions with fellow human beings and with different institutions and sectors in the world. It is during this time when we incorporate philosophy in our lives, a time when we became acquainted with manners.

The attitude of Filipinos described earlier is not exclusive. Nor can it be said that it is the place that makes them forget their manners. In the Philippines, similar stories abound in boarding houses, apartments, dormitories, and in work places especially in the BPO industry.

At times, they happen even in our very own houses.

Morga stated nevertheless that throughout their lives, not all humans make themselves truly human as many fail to procure the requirements of becoming one. This means that some people, including Filipinos, never learn to understand the truth about human sensitivity, particularly in practicing good manners.

This article has previously been published on Definitely Filipino and Kuro-Kuro.

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