Thursday, October 02, 2008 Seares: ‘We’re so few’ By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
"OH my God!" exclaimed Jurgen Assman, a former prosecutor of Hamburg, Germany and now consultant to a Cambodian court, when he learned the Philippines with a population of 96 million has only 1,500 prosecutors.
Cebu prosecutors attending a seminar where Assman spoke laughed.
It was typical local audience reaction. Whenever a visitor does the math on our resources and those of his country and he's stunned, we natives laugh.
How many cops--or doctors and nurses, teachers, or classrooms, and so on do we have per 1,000 inhabitants? Compare them with the numbers in other countries.
In Germany, Assman said, there are 5,000 prosecutors serving 82 million people and the Germans are complaining.
Not that Filipinos didn't complain. They used to. After much whining and little result, Filipinos have come to accept any imbalance in number between people serving and those needing to be served.
But must it be a source of amusement?
It is, anyway. A Filipino trait is the capacity to laugh over our shortcomings and failures.
The weather
A national beauty contest winner joked over her pidgin English and the audience howled. The only ones scandalized: ex-beauty titlists immersed in exclusive-school English.
We do bitch about lack in government services whenever they affect us or a relative or friend. And griping over anything else beats the weather as gab topic on a sunny day.
When prosecutors can't rule promptly on a high-profile case, like that complaint against a priest who groped a teenage coed during confession, they have an excuse:
"We're so totally swamped with work and we're so totally few.
