By: Consul General Edgar B. Badajos This article was first published on March 22, 2021, via Rappler.com. Consul General Badajos has kindly allowed Manila Up! Magazine to share his opinion piece, to continue reaching and promoting the Filipino/Fil-Am community. As a diplomat, I frequently travel outside the country. In fact, at the moment, I am writing from the Middle East, where I will be stationed for the next 3 to 6 years following our rotation system in the Department of Foreign Affairs. In practically every country I have visited for the last 20 years, I would invariably meet a fellow Filipino who is either a temporary migrant worker or has become a citizen or permanent resident of the place. It was the Filipino diaspora reminding me of its pervasiveness. I have never truly appreciated the full extent of the Filipino diaspora until I visited Niue, a tiny island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean, for a two-day meeting in 1998. Niue is 2,400 kilometers northeast of New Zealand, east of Tonga, south of Samoa, and west of the Cook Islands. In 2016, it had a total population of about 1,600. Out of this number, there was one Filipino gentleman from Luzon, the only Filipino citizen in the entire island, who also owned and operated the only video shop in the entire island-nation. In Buenos Aires the following year, while unpacking my clothes at my hotel room for a 3-day meeting in the tango capital of the world, I was startled to hear the chambermaid speak in Filipino. She was from Pangasinan. And in 2001, I was with a team from the Philippine Consulate General in Toronto visiting Nunavut, the northernmost territory of Canada. An eskimo territory with a year-round polar climate that does not...... Read more on Full Issue!