This year, Jose & I went to West Halloweird to partake in an annual festivities of costume sharing, partying, and laughing. It was a fun experience and all the better made it convenient since Halloween was on Friday. Jose was Luchadore & I was Darth Vaderess (yes, I said it people...hehe). I purchased my Darth Vader children's mask two years ago for $0.99 & agreed to myself I'd finally use it. My costume was actually a pain-in-the-behind, the mask- well, I couldnt see properly (the eyeholes should have been cut). Additionally, I purchased a wig but because it was very long, it kept going everywhere...so long, it attached itself to my camera! We met up briefly with my cousin & his boyfriend.
The following day, we went to meet up with Kay who's friend was throwing a costume party. I revised my 
costume, no longer wearing the mask, rather attaching it to my cape. Let me tell you, much comfortable...
Washington Post, Sept 20, 2008In Rural Philippines, a Dearth of DoctorsThousands of Physicians, Retrained as Nurses, Take Jobs Abroad
By Blaine HardenWashington Post Foreign ServiceSaturday, September 20, 2008
ANAHAWAN, Philippines -- The government hospital here is supposed to have seven doctors on staff. But five of them have left the country. They became nurses and are working in the United States. Their departure is part of a health-care brain drain that is strangling rural hospitals across the Philippines. Health services are declining, and the proportion of Filipinos dying without medical attention has risen to 70 percent -- a figure not seen in this country since the mid-1970s.
The Philippines has long been the world's biggest exporter of nurses, sending more than 164,000 of them abroad in recent decades. But since 2000, at least 11,000 Filipino doctors have decided to retrain as nurses and join the exodus. More than 6,000 doctors-turned-nurses have left the country, and about 5,000 more are soon to go, according to the Philippine Medical Association.
They do it for the money. In the United States, a nurse can make 10 times the $4,700 annual salary of a government doctor in this seaside town on the Philippine island of Leyte. But what about the patients left behind and the doctors who stay in the boondocks to care for them? At the hospital here, two physicians now serve a regional population of 110,000. To cover for the five doctors who left, they alternate solo shifts. Each works five consecutive 24-hour days, sleeping when and if the workload allows. (Doctors in government hospitals are not supposed to be on duty more than 48 straight hours.)
On a recent Friday morning, four days into his shift, Ernesto J. Cahoy, a physician who is also the hospital's chief of staff, made his daily rounds. The hospital's electricity supply had failed two days earlier, and a standby generator was broken.
Moving through the darkened corridors, Cahoy attended to the needs of 35 patients. He squinted to read their charts in hot, ill-lighted wards where children fussed and adults silently followed him with their eyes.
One very sick man had been admitted the previous afternoon. He appeared to be in his 60s and was severely malnourished. He died while Cahoy was examining him. The doctor did not know the cause of death, nor did he have time to think about it. He closed the man's chart, handed it to a nurse and moved on. Thirteen children required his attention in the pediatric ward. "We are trying to have a quality service here," Cahoy said. "But even if we try, considering there are only two doctors, the patients will be affected. You are bound to have some lapses in your treatment because you are really tired."
The weakening of health care in the Philippines is an unintended consequence of a decades-old government policy that vacuums professional talent out of the country. Since the early 1970s, when the government of President Ferdinand Marcos passed labor export legislation, Filipinos have been encouraged to go overseas, work as hard as they can and send money home. "The government says they are heroes and patriots when they leave," Cahoy said. In many ways, the mass export of humanity has succeeded. To a greater degree than any other country, the Philippines powers its economy with remittances, according to economists at the University of the Philippines. Filipinos working abroad sent home $12.8 billion in 2006, accounting for slightly more than 10 percent of the country's gross national product.
Since 2000, remittances have played a substantial role in reviving the Philippine economy, which last year grew at a robust rate of 7.2 percent. Growth, though, has dovetailed with nearly a decade of shrinking government spending on health care. At the same time, the government has done nothing to regulate the departure of doctors and other health-care professionals.
A bill introduced in the late 1990s to require all graduates of medical courses to serve two years in rural health-care centers died without debate. Last year, a similar bill to require service from graduates of government-funded medical courses also went nowhere. "We are the only country in Southeast Asia without a national health service requirement," said Jaime Z. Galvez Tan, a physician and professor at the University of the Philippines College of Medicine, widely regarded as the country's best medical school. Galvez Tan has helped persuade his publicly funded medical school, beginning with the class that enrolls next year, to require three years of postgraduate work in the Philippines. It is the country's only medical or nursing school, public or private, to impose such a requirement.
The Philippines does not yet have a shortage of doctors, just a shortage of them in poor rural areas, according to Rey Melchor F. Santos, a physician who is president of the Philippine Medical Association.
"Most of the rural hospitals do not have enough doctors," he said. "We know there are rural hospitals that are no longer operating because they have no medical manpower."
Across the country, more and more nursing schools are busy turning doctors into nurses. With poorly paid government doctors as their primary source of students, these schools are part of an astonishing spike in nursing education in the Philippines. In less than a decade, the number of nursing schools has almost tripled, from 170 in 1999 to at least 470 now.
As nursing schools boom, medical schools wither, in part because it is much harder for a Philippine-trained doctor to pass medical board exams in a foreign country than for a Filipino nurse to be certified abroad.
Santos said that the global demand for nurses, combined with the convenient availability of nursing schools throughout the Philippine islands, has triggered a 40 to 50 percent drop in the number of students enrolling in medical schools in the past four years. "The view of greener pastures is making them go directly into nursing," he said. "I guess they are thinking that they might as well go into nursing for a four-year course and skip the nine years of medical training. If this trend continues, then it is going to produce a shortage of doctors in a few years."
The medical association and other physicians' groups here are trying to get foreign governments to acknowledge the adverse consequences of the global job market on the health of poor Filipinos. They want foreign countries to compensate the Philippines for the cost of medical training and for the socioeconomic impact of the brain drain.
"We would like to hold accountable the governments who have imported our people," Galvez Tan said. "Let there be ethical recruitment. They should pay enough to educate three medical professionals here for every one they take away." Galvez Tan said he has received a sympathetic hearing from government officials in Finland and Canada, but not from the United States.
Asked about the medical brain drain, the American ambassador to the Philippines, Kristie A. Kenney, said that she has "never heard it discussed" and that she doubted the United States could "afford" such compensation. Here at Anahawan District Hospital, Cahoy said he sees nothing that can be done to keep doctors on staff. He accommodated the five doctors who retrained as nurses, arranging their work schedules so they could attend nursing school on the nearby island of Cebu.
Cahoy, 57, said he has never seriously thought of becoming a nurse and leaving the country, although his sister, who lives in New Jersey, has told him he should. The government has invested a lot of time and money in his training, which has included postdoctoral courses in surgery, orthopedics, obstetrics and X-ray examination, he said. "I have to stay," he said. "I owe it to the government." But Cahoy intends to work here for only three more years. "At the age of 60, I will have to retire," he said. "I am really tired."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/AR2008091903678_pf.html
costume, no longer wearing the mask, rather attaching it to my cape. Let me tell you, much comfortable...
