Our elementary and high school Social Studies teachers taught us year after year that we Filipinos are famous the world over for being “gentle,” “gracious,” “kind,” “hospitable,” “warm,” etc. I think it was in Grade 5 when I started to get tired of hearing those words (and their synonyms) every single school year. Cynical me even doubted this claim, which I felt was rather self-serving. After all, anybody can easily say anything about himself or his own race.

Fast-forward to September 2003 in Barcelona, Spain. Resting our aching legs after hiking on the Montserrat Mountain, my hostess, a caregiver in Barcelona, and I sat on a bench beside an old lady. She eyed us curiously and asked us a question in Spanish. When my hostess replied, “Filipino,” the old lady’s face lit up and she exclaimed: “Muy simpatico! Muy simpatico!” and engaged us in a conversation.

Thanks to my hostess-cum-translator, I learned that the lady once had a Filipino maid whom she found to be very efficient at her job, and that she had met other Filipinos whose friendliness and warmth made a lasting impression on her. I gathered from subsequent conversations with my hostess and her friends that in Barcelona, employers preferred hiring our compatriots as housemaids because they give everything into their jobs (“may puso kung magtrabaho”) and have a most charming attitude.

Meeting more locals and fellow tourists in the succeeding weeks there, as well as in Paris, Rome and Amsterdam, I felt good as a Filipino to hear compliments like, “Oh, you Filipinos are so nice and friendly,” “Everybody in the Philippines is so warm,” “I was in Manila last year, the people were so hospitable,” etc. We develop a fresh perspective when we travel abroad. I realized, among other things, that our Social Studies teachers were right after all.

In November 2005, while on tour with the University of Santo Tomas’ academic theater group to five cities in the United States to perform Nick Joaquin’s “Portrait of An Artist as Filipino,” I saw a magazine about nursing at the home of our hostess in Bergenfield, New Jersey. It was a quarterly magazine which had the picture of a Filipina on the cover. The caption read “Nurse of the quarter.”

This led us to ask our hostess about the reputation of Filipino nurses working there. She said that our compatriots—whether nurses, doctors or caregivers—had the reputation of being caring, compassionate, hard-working and patient, and were generally the “favorites” of patients.

Last Oct. 23-25 saw me at the Sofitel Philippine Plaza working as a voiceover for the Philippine Health and Wellness Tourism Summit 2008 organized by the Department of Tourism. Its objective was to promote our country’s readiness to provide first-class medical, health and wellness services to patients all over the world. In the souvenir program, Tourism Undersecretary Cynthia L. Carrion wrote: “It seems as though it is only now that the Philippines is opening its doors to medical travelers and seekers of health and wellness from all over the world, simply because we Filipinos do not really like to brag.” But now, the time is ripe to say goodbye to modesty (another Filipino trait) and start blowing our horn in the name of Philippine medical tourism.

I knew at the outset that the Filipino conference speakers, most of them doctors who studied and trained at prestigious universities and medical institutions abroad, would trumpet our world-famous traits, and most of them did, of course. But I thought, “So what else is new? Is that all?”

Our doctors went on to speak with authority on their respective fields. In the panel discussion on “Showcasing the Centers of Excellence in the Philippines,” five doctors, each representing a prestigious Philippine hospital, discussed the services that their respective hospitals provide, including state-of-the-art technologies that enable them to perform sophisticated medical procedures and surgeries. Their topics dealt with caring for the heart using the latest advances in medicine, joint replacement surgery, the importance of patient education on his/her own medical condition, surgical options when diet modification fails, and facial surgical rejuvenation (and other highly technical and scientific topics and subtopics).

Samuel Bernal, a physician, lawyer, molecular biologist and an expert in regenerative medicine, had this to say: “That we can bring over here in the Philippines patients from Europe and other Asian countries and that they can receive medical care that is at par—or even above par—with medical care in so-called more advanced countries already speak volumes about the kind of quality health care available in the Philippines’ best hospitals… Filipinos think that they can get better medical care abroad, when in fact, we have patients from Russia, from Europe, from Hong Kong and Singapore, coming to the Philippines because they could not get cured in their home countries.” Coming from someone with highly impressive credentials and many letters attached to his name, I did not feel cynical at all about his statement.

I pray for the success of this endeavor. I would be very happy if our country were to earn the distinction of being the “Health and Wellness Capital of Asia” or the world even. Our distinctly Filipino traits and the expert medical services our doctors deliver can make the Philippines perfect for this role in a globalized world. However, I hope that this push toward enticing foreign patients to come here does not lessen our attention to the equally important medical and health concerns of our fellow Filipinos here at home. It’s all very well if we can be of service to foreigners, for besides doing what they profess to do, our medical and health and wellness professionals will be able to help enhance our international image. But it would be equally, if not more, gratifying to know that they are able primarily to help improve the health and wellness of millions of Filipinos.

If we Filipinos can be caring, compassionate, friendly, gentle, gracious, hospitable, kind, nice, patient and warm to foreigners, we can and should be all that to each other first. Let’s be “muy simpatico” right here and now.

Claude Lucas C. Despabiladeras, 26, is an education graduate of the University of Santo Tomas. He teaches at JASMS-Quezon City and is a voice talent for TV and radio commercials and English-dubbed local TV soaps.