The announcement came at around 5 in the afternoon. “How do you feel about the President coming over and bringing dinner?” Vic Agustin, chairman of the editorial board, asked us editors seated on the H-shaped tables. My first impulse was to eye the egg pie and the silvanas that I had brought from home. Sayang naman. If I had known there would be dinner, I would have left these treats to the kids who were bound to be hungry after their day in school. The second was a feeling of relief that I had decided against wearing my flip-flops to work that day. I had on black slip-ons, something I had not worn in quite a while. It still revealed a lot of flesh but was much dressier than the flip-flops. I had on jeans and I black polo t-shirt, the one that said “No woman should die giving life”...hardly corporate, but certainly the look of a thinking person. The shirt was from my NGO,pro-reproductive health bill friends.
It was a busy day,not only for me but for the entire desk. The guys have not yet quite decided on the banner. For my part, I had been dealing with another request from one of my columnists who somehow felt entitled to ask for little favors from the office, specifically from me, and who had to be turned down really politely, and really effectively if it was possible, if he was to be reminded of certain basic courtesies. On that Thursday, this columnist was asking of I could print, IN FULL,his article of two thousand seven hundred words. On the bright side, I was getting to practice my assertion skills. Diplomacy, too.
Things began turning funny when my boss started obsessing about the bathrooms. See,my office is in Port Area,Manila, right by the passenger piers. Standard Today prides itself in being an AB paper, and I've heard feedback that while it certainly can't compete with the Big 3 in terms of circulation and ads, we are one of the more intelligent, and better edited, broad sheets. But we certainly can't boast of the best editorial offices. Indeed our fixtures are worse than those of government offices, and outdated,too. The walls, which used to be grimy, are now painted in too-bright blue and yellow. Small roaches crawl over the tables, the chairs are rickety, and the bathrooms are decrepit – and smelly. My computer needs to be turned on by an assistant an hour before I arrive just so I could work smoothly at once upon getting to my seat.
I just do really love my job that's why I am able to get past all these.
Anyway the Palace people started arriving. They checked the names and the offices and the bathrooms. All too soon, the President was there. Thankfully she confined herself to the conference room up front and did not quite find her way to the sweat shop that is the editorial department. (I was worried my computer would hang while the Facebook window was showing.) The company's executives and the most senior editors went to the room ahead, finished or not. That hour was witching hour in our trade. I was wrestling with my columnists, and I was among the last who went to the conference room. When I arrived, there was an empty chair where my name tag “Adelle Tulagan, Opinion Editor” was propped on. I sat down, and soon dinner was served. The president was small talking with the others on the GDP figures that were released earlier that day. I was happy to see shrimps on the plate. Hmmm. Fancy.
There was wine, too, and my colleague Sarsi said it was good. I didn't touch it. Not that I did not want to, but I have this thing against consuming alcohol in public. I attacked the food while listening to the conversation among my office mates and the President, who did not look as old and as puffy as I had expected her to. She was very pleasant, and she had a captive audience. In the meantime, I was asking myself: What's the deal?
It was, of course, part of the charm offensive we've been hearing about. She's on her way out and the general sentiment is that she is not going to be missed. I wondered how complex such a small fellow could be. (This was the first time I'd seen her up front except the time I ran into her,when she was on her way out of and I was on my way to the wake of Raul Roco, my former boss.) All those vile things they say about her! All those shady transactions and that legendary temper! I looked at her closely and saw nothing but a woman making an effort to be nice. Sincerity? Innocence? Honesty? Frankly, I really couldn't tell. I did not see these, but I could not say for sure they were not there either. What was the truth, anyway?
Soon the conversation became lighter. The lifestyle people asked her if she was able to see some movies lately. What restaurants did she like, and how did she hear about them? When she asked our managing editor where the Tomeldans come from,I took my name tag and hid it away from her view. I was worried she would ask me if I was from Pangasinan. What was I supposed to do if she did? Tell her, and everybody else, that yes, the Tulagans were from Pangasinan, and the former Congressman Tulagan was the uncle of my husband, but I have been separated for the past three years and a nullity case is pending, and that I am really a Chua, but that is my mother's last name because I was born out of wedlock, etcetera etcetera. How complicated can an explanation about a name be?
The dinner lasted an hour and I did not ask a single question. I did not want to. I was content on observing the President, especially her facial expression as Mr. Agustin talked about a certain phone call to an election commissioner, and how everybody called commissioners all the time. But Mrs. Arroyo's face was blank. Alas, despite the niceties, the great food and the very obvious gesture of reaching out to the media, the President failed to connect with me. I had expected that somebody in that position would be so charismatic that one would be a convert after one has seen her, dined with her. I remained neutral. I do not dislike her, because I do not have enough firsthand observations to claim to know her, but I am not a fan, either.
So neutral, in fact, that when the whole thing was finally over and we were on our way back, she smiled at me as I was about to go out the door, and held out her hand. I shook it, smiled and said thanks. The thought of telling her my name and rank did not even cross my mind until I was back on my table and finishing up on my editing tasks. I decided it was not much of a loss.
A bright point: at least, much to my boss' relief, the President did not have to use the bathroom.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Life with the loom
Cecilia Gison Villanueva, a small, soft-spoken woman in her seventies, recalls that day in the 1980s when presidential security guards descended on her house on Osmeña Street, Arevalo, Iloilo City. “I got scared and wondered what I did wrong.” Pretty soon the guards had blocked a good portion of the street. Only then did they tell her: “Imee is coming.”
Imee, of course, is the daughter of President Ferdinand Marcos. The family was still very much in power then. Imee came to the house, chose from among Villanueva's finished products – shawls, dresses, kaftans, and barongs for the men, made from jusi or cotton or pina or silk or abaca, handwoven from traditional looms. “I never met anybody who just bought and bought and never even asked how much things cost,” Vilanueva says. “She just told me to collect from the bank, and so I did.”
The anecdote gives us an idea of the reputation of Arevalo Sinamay Dealers among Ilonggos and non-Ilonggos alike. Villanueva' clients comprise well-heeled members of society, politicians and their wives, men and women in business, balikbayans and foreigners. Indeed on that cloudy Saturday morning, as Villanueva takes a break from our interview to greet her granddaughter's friends from school, I look around the spacious ancestral home and note that, aside from a traditional loom and a big black car under the wide stairs and authentic turn-of-the-(twentieth)century pieces like chests and a cabinet and a brass telephone mounted on the wall, the old woman has on display a picture with the late President Corazon Aquino and a framed letter from the office of the Princess of Wales. Sometime in 1990 or 1991, a British woman wandered into her house looking for a gift for “a friend.” When Villanueva learned that the friend was no less than Princess Diana, she asked the Brit to give another shawl to the princess. “It was a beige one,” she recalls, wistfully.
Villlanueva has been managing the business since 1958 when her mother Rosario died. The family enterprise has always been in the two-story home built by Rosario's grandparents. In a city famous for ancestral homes – grand old houses that give Iloilo a timeless feel – Villanueva's home seems almost commonplace, except for the sign that announces the business that is inside it.
And then you know you have stepped into an extraordinary place. Villanueva admits business has been slow. Demand peaked in the 1980s, when she had at least ten weavers working the looms. It slid in the nineties. Now she is down to three weavers. There also remains a lot of room in the imposing narra aparador that houses the stocks. What do you do between orders, I ask. The old woman looks around, smiles and shrugs her shoulders.
Villanueva and her weavers produce between five and six pieces per week-- if there are no orders. It takes a week for them to finish one piece of an ordered product. It, of course, is worth the wait – and the price tag. A shawl costs P650; a barong tagalog, P1,200. The price of ordered materials vary with the specifications.
“We don't really operate on volume,” she says. “What keeps us going is that our products are unique. They are designed and handwoven by us so you won't find them anywhere else. That's how we keep our customers and attract new ones.”
**
But isn't sinamay a kind of raw material used to make any of the products mentioned above? Villanueva explains that sinamay in the Arevalo sense refers particularly to handwoven products. “Samay” is a verb that means “to make” or “to design.” Thus, one cannot take out the human-touch factor when one talks about sinamay.
Alas, there are hardly any young people interested in learning to work the loom anymore. Villanueva says girls in her area nowadays are interested in pursuing medicine-related careers or anything that could land them well-paying jobs either in Manila or abroad. Worse, they see weaving as old-fashioned, something dead or dying. Going into this field is something beneath these girls who dream of a more prosperous life. Small wonder that Villanueva's three weavers are all middle-aged women, wives of farmers who are only grateful for additional, albeit small, income.
Still, Villanueva intends to keep the family business alive, or at least afloat. Her siblings are now both in Manila and she has the house all to herself. Well, not quite. Actually her daughter, Corona Villanueva de Leon, sells cookies under the brand Mama's Kitchen on the first floor of the ancestral home. Villanueva is confident that her own children will continue the family tradition. The sinamay house, after all, has been a must-see place for Iloilo visitors for ages.
I end the interview marveling at the old woman's bearings. She does not seem to be worried that the business has seen better days and that she has to wait for the buyers to come instead of going after them. She seems quite content that she only has a few workers and that the job orders vary from month to month. While she is sad that weaving as a career is not as appealing to girls as it used to be, but I think she is happy at just being able to carry on what her mother has started. Is she aware that it is possible to breathe new life into her gem of a business? Then again, I am an outsider. What do I know?
I ponder all these as I make my way to a bread house further down the street to stock up on pasalubong. On my way back, I go past Villanueva's house again – there are now three vans parked on the shoulder of the road, foreigners are alighting from the vehicles and making their way into the house. They are bound to be as wowed as I am. It looks like the aparador will be even roomier after that morning. Maybe there will even be more orders. It's not a bad day at all.
That it is rustic and laid back gives Iloilo its charm. Residents feel no compulsion to wave flags to call attention to themselves. And yet, despite this, people keep coming back to this great place. As I will.
Imee, of course, is the daughter of President Ferdinand Marcos. The family was still very much in power then. Imee came to the house, chose from among Villanueva's finished products – shawls, dresses, kaftans, and barongs for the men, made from jusi or cotton or pina or silk or abaca, handwoven from traditional looms. “I never met anybody who just bought and bought and never even asked how much things cost,” Vilanueva says. “She just told me to collect from the bank, and so I did.”
The anecdote gives us an idea of the reputation of Arevalo Sinamay Dealers among Ilonggos and non-Ilonggos alike. Villanueva' clients comprise well-heeled members of society, politicians and their wives, men and women in business, balikbayans and foreigners. Indeed on that cloudy Saturday morning, as Villanueva takes a break from our interview to greet her granddaughter's friends from school, I look around the spacious ancestral home and note that, aside from a traditional loom and a big black car under the wide stairs and authentic turn-of-the-(twentieth)century pieces like chests and a cabinet and a brass telephone mounted on the wall, the old woman has on display a picture with the late President Corazon Aquino and a framed letter from the office of the Princess of Wales. Sometime in 1990 or 1991, a British woman wandered into her house looking for a gift for “a friend.” When Villanueva learned that the friend was no less than Princess Diana, she asked the Brit to give another shawl to the princess. “It was a beige one,” she recalls, wistfully.
Villlanueva has been managing the business since 1958 when her mother Rosario died. The family enterprise has always been in the two-story home built by Rosario's grandparents. In a city famous for ancestral homes – grand old houses that give Iloilo a timeless feel – Villanueva's home seems almost commonplace, except for the sign that announces the business that is inside it.
And then you know you have stepped into an extraordinary place. Villanueva admits business has been slow. Demand peaked in the 1980s, when she had at least ten weavers working the looms. It slid in the nineties. Now she is down to three weavers. There also remains a lot of room in the imposing narra aparador that houses the stocks. What do you do between orders, I ask. The old woman looks around, smiles and shrugs her shoulders.
Villanueva and her weavers produce between five and six pieces per week-- if there are no orders. It takes a week for them to finish one piece of an ordered product. It, of course, is worth the wait – and the price tag. A shawl costs P650; a barong tagalog, P1,200. The price of ordered materials vary with the specifications.
“We don't really operate on volume,” she says. “What keeps us going is that our products are unique. They are designed and handwoven by us so you won't find them anywhere else. That's how we keep our customers and attract new ones.”
**
But isn't sinamay a kind of raw material used to make any of the products mentioned above? Villanueva explains that sinamay in the Arevalo sense refers particularly to handwoven products. “Samay” is a verb that means “to make” or “to design.” Thus, one cannot take out the human-touch factor when one talks about sinamay.
Alas, there are hardly any young people interested in learning to work the loom anymore. Villanueva says girls in her area nowadays are interested in pursuing medicine-related careers or anything that could land them well-paying jobs either in Manila or abroad. Worse, they see weaving as old-fashioned, something dead or dying. Going into this field is something beneath these girls who dream of a more prosperous life. Small wonder that Villanueva's three weavers are all middle-aged women, wives of farmers who are only grateful for additional, albeit small, income.
Still, Villanueva intends to keep the family business alive, or at least afloat. Her siblings are now both in Manila and she has the house all to herself. Well, not quite. Actually her daughter, Corona Villanueva de Leon, sells cookies under the brand Mama's Kitchen on the first floor of the ancestral home. Villanueva is confident that her own children will continue the family tradition. The sinamay house, after all, has been a must-see place for Iloilo visitors for ages.
I end the interview marveling at the old woman's bearings. She does not seem to be worried that the business has seen better days and that she has to wait for the buyers to come instead of going after them. She seems quite content that she only has a few workers and that the job orders vary from month to month. While she is sad that weaving as a career is not as appealing to girls as it used to be, but I think she is happy at just being able to carry on what her mother has started. Is she aware that it is possible to breathe new life into her gem of a business? Then again, I am an outsider. What do I know?
I ponder all these as I make my way to a bread house further down the street to stock up on pasalubong. On my way back, I go past Villanueva's house again – there are now three vans parked on the shoulder of the road, foreigners are alighting from the vehicles and making their way into the house. They are bound to be as wowed as I am. It looks like the aparador will be even roomier after that morning. Maybe there will even be more orders. It's not a bad day at all.
That it is rustic and laid back gives Iloilo its charm. Residents feel no compulsion to wave flags to call attention to themselves. And yet, despite this, people keep coming back to this great place. As I will.
Roots
Four hours after landing on Iloilo, I had eaten authentic Batchoy in La Paz, gone on a drive to Dad's seaside hometown of Dumangas, seen the site of their torn-down ancestral home and visited the high school where he graduated valedictorian in '61. The research part of the trip – we are co-writing a book that will be out in April – was easy. But there was one more stop. Dad said I needed to meet some people: his relatives sometime soon, but the dead, that day.
The cemetery (or patio) was less than a minute's drive from the high school. The family's site was also very near the gate. They just had the niches refurbished. Some empty ones were added, they were painted white, and everybody had new lapidas. Dad's father and grandfather were there. I tried to soak in the significance of what was happening. The links were missing no more. Dusk was lovely and serene as ever. I slept well that night.
The town was home to one half of me. Finally, I was there.
The cemetery (or patio) was less than a minute's drive from the high school. The family's site was also very near the gate. They just had the niches refurbished. Some empty ones were added, they were painted white, and everybody had new lapidas. Dad's father and grandfather were there. I tried to soak in the significance of what was happening. The links were missing no more. Dusk was lovely and serene as ever. I slept well that night.
The town was home to one half of me. Finally, I was there.
Friday, January 29, 2010
The real thing
I usually have not had dinner yet when I arrive home from the office at nine or ten in the evening. My son Josh usually waits up for me unless he's really plastered from the day's activities. He likes it when we share a late night meal, talking about his day and mine, usually serenaded by music he had just downloaded into his music player. We like cream cheese on bagel, black pepper spam sandwich, and Lucky Me instant no-cook noodles, La Paz Batchoy flavor.
This is why I missed Josh during the late lunch I had today. Dad's and my first stop in Iloilo after we had unloaded our bags in our respective hotel rooms was Deco's Batchoy House right at the heart of La Paz Market. The restaurant was not fancy, much like the inexpensive eateries with colorful plastic pitchers and forks and spoons served submerged in a glass half full to customers. Other Batchoy houses in the area had modernized, adopting a fastfood-like atmosphere complete with the counter and the bright colors, but Deco's looked like it came out of a sixties movie. That was part of the charm.
We ordered, what else, La Paz Batchoy and two servings of 3 puto pieces wrapped in banana leaves. There was a method to enjoying this dish in the very city where it originated, Dad said. You sip the clear soup while munching on the puto. Before long I was dunking the puto in the soup. When all the liquid is gone, you tackle the noodles and the innards. I attacked only the noodles though. And then I asked for more soup,which was bottomless. The chicharon was still crisp. The puto disappeared. All this as Dad and I caught up on the days and months and years we had missed.
When I get back to Manila, and next time I come home late to a waiting – and hungry – Josh, I will bring puto along with the noodle soup package. It may not be the real thing, but I am sure it will taste just as great.
This is why I missed Josh during the late lunch I had today. Dad's and my first stop in Iloilo after we had unloaded our bags in our respective hotel rooms was Deco's Batchoy House right at the heart of La Paz Market. The restaurant was not fancy, much like the inexpensive eateries with colorful plastic pitchers and forks and spoons served submerged in a glass half full to customers. Other Batchoy houses in the area had modernized, adopting a fastfood-like atmosphere complete with the counter and the bright colors, but Deco's looked like it came out of a sixties movie. That was part of the charm.
We ordered, what else, La Paz Batchoy and two servings of 3 puto pieces wrapped in banana leaves. There was a method to enjoying this dish in the very city where it originated, Dad said. You sip the clear soup while munching on the puto. Before long I was dunking the puto in the soup. When all the liquid is gone, you tackle the noodles and the innards. I attacked only the noodles though. And then I asked for more soup,which was bottomless. The chicharon was still crisp. The puto disappeared. All this as Dad and I caught up on the days and months and years we had missed.
When I get back to Manila, and next time I come home late to a waiting – and hungry – Josh, I will bring puto along with the noodle soup package. It may not be the real thing, but I am sure it will taste just as great.
The perennial first-timer
I've traveled by air a few times already, and in varying distances, but every time I do, I always get into a state of disbelief. I always find difficult to grasp the reality that I would soon be breaking routine and seeing places I have never seen before. As the date of departure comes closer, I prepare myself externally. I make a checklist days before my trip. Im good at making lists, mind you, and I like doing them. I Google my destination. I print my ticket. Eventually I pack my bags, hoping I bring everything I need and don't take anything I don't. My hands shake as I present my ticket printout to the check in personnel at the airport. Did I mix up the dates? Was I not supposed to leave yesterday – or tomorrow? Do I share a name with somebody on the Immigration watch list? IN front of the gate, I wait to board, sitting among other passengers who look as though they were in line for the next Ayala bound Tamaraw FX. Why can't I appear as damn cool as they do? In the aircraft, I fiddle with the seat belt, scared I would not know how to fasten it. Take-off, and for a minute as the aircraft gathers speed, I remember the movie Final Destination and those episodes of Air Crash Investigation and Seconds from Disaster I've seen and realize there is nothing I can do to stop the plane and disembark. I look out the window and see roofs of houses, getting smaller, smaller. Oh, dear, I'm really flying.
This time I am lucky. Dad's with me and our conversation easily takes my mind away from the fact that I am airborne. Before I know it, we are touching down, and everybody scrambles to turn his cell phone back on. I think flying could be great once I get used to it, but getting back to earth is always reassuring.
This time I am lucky. Dad's with me and our conversation easily takes my mind away from the fact that I am airborne. Before I know it, we are touching down, and everybody scrambles to turn his cell phone back on. I think flying could be great once I get used to it, but getting back to earth is always reassuring.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Nest
still from my college senior paper,circa 96-97
Hospitals present varying images to different people. Kids see it as a torture chamber, doctors and nurses as the workplace, anxious people as a security blanket. To me, hospitals are like rearview mirrors – they transport me to a distant past where I, though I have gotten back to my feet and on with my life, still exist sometimes.
I practically lived in Room 404, New Wing, of the Chinese General Hospital, during the first months of my senior year in high school. My mother had cancer of the colon. She had been going in and out of the hospital for two years, so staying with her was nothing new for me.
I was seven when my mother married Tatay Rudy. Several months later, I had a new baby sister, Shelby. The year after that brought Unica, and two years later, Raissa Bea came. Suddenly, mom had a family. I found it hard to belong especially since I preferred to stay behind and live with my grandmother. In hindsight, nobody really asked me what I wanted; they just assumed I would prefer to stay behind.
As a result, Mommy and I saw each other only twice or thrice a week. The highlight of my days was when she brought me along to work. She was a journalist, a reporter for The Manila Standard covering the Malacanang beat. This was during the time of Cory Aquino. I remember the deteriorating,off-white furniture, the large television sets and the row of phone booths in Kalayaan Hall in Malacanang. There was also the elevator in Elizalde Building along Ayala Avenue which took us to the sixth floor of the Standard's office. Her friends marvelled at how we looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. (She was just turning twenty when she had me). Around six in the evening, she took me to the then Makati Commercial Center where she let me spend an hour in the bookstore, and bought for me any two books I had chosen.
I remember the long bus rides home. During those trips I sat by the window – airconditioned buses weren't as popular then as they are now-- lay my exhausted head on her shoulder, and stare outside. As the bus sped along Edsa, I drowned my face in the wind until it felt numb, and looked at the city lights that were like low stars,until I fell asleep. Then she awoke me as we neared our stop. She kissed me good night on the forehead, pinched my nose and rumpled my hair when she dropped me off at Lola's house. I went to sleep, very happy, because I had another weekend spent with my scarce mother – and I had two delicious new books.
The good days and the bad days came in cycles. At one point, all her hair fell due to the chemotherapy, and she vomited every so often. When she could not stand, she woke me up in the middle of the night to get the bed pan and clear it for her. It sounds so noble now, written down, but when you're there you think of love and service less and your interrupted sleep more.
I thought it was mean, because she used to be such a beautiful woman who took care of her looks. On some days,she grew so thin and there were dark circles under her eyes – ghastly, almost.
But the good days made us forget the bad ones. She was so jolly that she ordered a Family Super Supreme and had it delivered to the room. She took out her kikay bag, drew false eyebrows on her face and applied too-red lipstick on her dry lips. My little sisters climbed all over her bed and she put each one's hair in pigtails. And the food she asked for in the oddest times! She wanted blueberry cheesecake one night at ten, sinigang na hipon on a stormy afternoon, and another time the two of us sneaked out and went to Ermita because she felt like eating steak. She was like a craving pregnant woman, and she drove us crazy sometimes, but we were happy – enthusiasm showed in her eyes and, of course, we got our share of the food, too.
I was studying, but I stayed with my mother most of the time. I liked it because except for the nurses, and after all the visitors had gone, I had her to myself. In the hospital, I alternated between going through my textbooks and talking on the phone with my friends. I wrote in my journal at midnight, until she told me to quit and turn off the lights. I did, but continued writing in the bathroom – I was not quite as squeamish then,
My mom wished me good luck on the National College Entrance Examinations. It was going to be the last audible, intelligible phrase he would throw at me.
On the afternoon of Saturday, October 3, 1992, I was on board the elevator, headed for the ground floor. The body had been sent to the morgue and I was carrying a thermos bottle on my left hand and a bagful of clothes and blankets on my right. My grieving grandmother, cousin, aunt, and two uncles were with me. But what I was feeling was not grief. Before I was out of the building I was already missing Room 404.
Hospitals present varying images to different people. Kids see it as a torture chamber, doctors and nurses as the workplace, anxious people as a security blanket. To me, hospitals are like rearview mirrors – they transport me to a distant past where I, though I have gotten back to my feet and on with my life, still exist sometimes.
I practically lived in Room 404, New Wing, of the Chinese General Hospital, during the first months of my senior year in high school. My mother had cancer of the colon. She had been going in and out of the hospital for two years, so staying with her was nothing new for me.
I was seven when my mother married Tatay Rudy. Several months later, I had a new baby sister, Shelby. The year after that brought Unica, and two years later, Raissa Bea came. Suddenly, mom had a family. I found it hard to belong especially since I preferred to stay behind and live with my grandmother. In hindsight, nobody really asked me what I wanted; they just assumed I would prefer to stay behind.
As a result, Mommy and I saw each other only twice or thrice a week. The highlight of my days was when she brought me along to work. She was a journalist, a reporter for The Manila Standard covering the Malacanang beat. This was during the time of Cory Aquino. I remember the deteriorating,off-white furniture, the large television sets and the row of phone booths in Kalayaan Hall in Malacanang. There was also the elevator in Elizalde Building along Ayala Avenue which took us to the sixth floor of the Standard's office. Her friends marvelled at how we looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. (She was just turning twenty when she had me). Around six in the evening, she took me to the then Makati Commercial Center where she let me spend an hour in the bookstore, and bought for me any two books I had chosen.
I remember the long bus rides home. During those trips I sat by the window – airconditioned buses weren't as popular then as they are now-- lay my exhausted head on her shoulder, and stare outside. As the bus sped along Edsa, I drowned my face in the wind until it felt numb, and looked at the city lights that were like low stars,until I fell asleep. Then she awoke me as we neared our stop. She kissed me good night on the forehead, pinched my nose and rumpled my hair when she dropped me off at Lola's house. I went to sleep, very happy, because I had another weekend spent with my scarce mother – and I had two delicious new books.
The good days and the bad days came in cycles. At one point, all her hair fell due to the chemotherapy, and she vomited every so often. When she could not stand, she woke me up in the middle of the night to get the bed pan and clear it for her. It sounds so noble now, written down, but when you're there you think of love and service less and your interrupted sleep more.
I thought it was mean, because she used to be such a beautiful woman who took care of her looks. On some days,she grew so thin and there were dark circles under her eyes – ghastly, almost.
But the good days made us forget the bad ones. She was so jolly that she ordered a Family Super Supreme and had it delivered to the room. She took out her kikay bag, drew false eyebrows on her face and applied too-red lipstick on her dry lips. My little sisters climbed all over her bed and she put each one's hair in pigtails. And the food she asked for in the oddest times! She wanted blueberry cheesecake one night at ten, sinigang na hipon on a stormy afternoon, and another time the two of us sneaked out and went to Ermita because she felt like eating steak. She was like a craving pregnant woman, and she drove us crazy sometimes, but we were happy – enthusiasm showed in her eyes and, of course, we got our share of the food, too.
I was studying, but I stayed with my mother most of the time. I liked it because except for the nurses, and after all the visitors had gone, I had her to myself. In the hospital, I alternated between going through my textbooks and talking on the phone with my friends. I wrote in my journal at midnight, until she told me to quit and turn off the lights. I did, but continued writing in the bathroom – I was not quite as squeamish then,
My mom wished me good luck on the National College Entrance Examinations. It was going to be the last audible, intelligible phrase he would throw at me.
On the afternoon of Saturday, October 3, 1992, I was on board the elevator, headed for the ground floor. The body had been sent to the morgue and I was carrying a thermos bottle on my left hand and a bagful of clothes and blankets on my right. My grieving grandmother, cousin, aunt, and two uncles were with me. But what I was feeling was not grief. Before I was out of the building I was already missing Room 404.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Bring them home
There is an attempt to create a DNA profile database that would help reunite trafficked children with their families.
A child is put up for adoption. A woman who says she is the mother tells authorities that because of dire poverty, she cannot afford to give her child a good future. The woman is dressed in shabby clothes to prove her point. Ultimately, new parents from another country are found for the child. The minor is whisked off to a foreign country, the woman gets a windfall...except that the child is not really her own to begin with. The child's real family has reported a kidnap case.
Another child is rescued from a prostitution den. She says she was brought to the big city by a woman who claimed to want to help her by giving her a job. She wants to go home but does not know where her family is.
Yet another kid is taken from a sweat shop, where he has been subjected to inhumane working conditions. He also wants to go home, but since it has been so long since he left home, he does not know whether his relatives are still looking for him.
Republic Act 9208, also known as the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003, defines trafficking as the recruitment, transport, transfer, harboring or receiving of a person for the purpose of exploitation within or outside the country. The word “child”, on the other hand, refers to persons below 18 years of age.
Trafficking is a serious, pervading crime. The United Nation says this phenomenon affects at least 161 countries which serve as sources, transit points, and destinations of persons trafficked. There are an estimated two million people trafficked each year, across international borders or within the borders of their country. Almost half of these are below the age of 17.
Among these, 95 percent experience physical or sexual violence. Seventy-nine percent are trafficked for sexual exploitation. Eighteen percent are made to undergo forced labor. Other outcomes include illegal adoption, sale of organs, forced marriage and recruitment for militant activities. Indeed human trafficking may just dislodge arms and drug trade as the number one organized crime in the world, experts say.
In the meantime,prosecution of traffickers remains difficult. Here at home, for instance, Justice Undersecretary and Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking acting chairman Ricardo Blancaflor says that out of 750 complaints for trafficking, 400 have reached the preliminary investigation level and only 199 have been docked in the courts. He says that trafficking is one of the crimes that rely heavily on testimonies. But witnesses, as we know, may be influenced by many things. When the witness, usually the trafficked child, loses interest in testifying, the case crumbles altogether – unless there is forensic evidence, DNA profiles, for instance, at hand.
We are lucky if we even get to the prosecution level. The more daunting first task is to bring the trafficked children back to their homes.
**
Two experts in DNA technology visited the Philippines last week to see how their organization can tie up with Philippine authorities in using science to reunite trafficked children with their families and eventually deter the crime.
Jose Lorente, M.D., PhD is professor of legal and forensic medicine at the University of Granada in Spain. He is also the director of the Laboratory for Genetic Identification. Six years ago, he established DNA-Prokids (Program for Kids Identification with DNA Systems). He became inspired to help return children to their parents after seeing many kids roaming the streets during his many travels abroad. He wondered whether the families of these children could ever hope to be reunited with them.
Arthur Eisenberg, PhD, is professor and chairman of the Department of Forensic and Investigative Genetics and co-director of the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification. On a forum held at the Malcolm Theater at the College of Law of the University of the Philippines, Eisenberg talked about his job at home before discussing his involvement in Prokids.
His job is real-life CSI and it's nowhere as easy and as glamorous as how it is made out on television. And, after all this time, he still could not feel detached. “These are not just remains,” he says, as a slide of bones is flashed on the screen. “These are somebody's loved one.”
The duo came to the Philippines in their bid to include at least 13 pioneer countries plus the United Nations in their worldwide crusade. Not many are aware that DNA technology is now already available in the country, and in four places actually: The St. Luke's Medical Center (which takes on only private cases like paternity tests), the National Bureau of Investigations, the Philippine National Police and the DNA Analysis Laboratory of the Natural Sciences Research Institute of the University of the Philippines. (I wrote about DNA profiling in the Philippines in a series of three articles, called “It's in the genes,” in this space in August-September 2008.)
The idea is to help partner countries put in place a national database of DNA profiles from victims on one hand and another database for reference samples from family members with missing children on the other. Both data are essential to establishing identities. Aside from database development and eventual linkage to an international network (the child a family is searching for, after all, may already be halfway across the globe), there will also be use of shared protocols for DNA sample collection, supply of technical equipment and training of genetics experts.
Pro kids is also pushing for having DNA profiling a requisite of adoption processes in countries all over the world. This is to ensure that parents giving up a child for adoption are his real ones.
Eisenberg is also quick to add that the database would not violate any privacy rights of the profiled individuals since the system will only contain reference numbers and will not be used for any other purpose aside from matching kids with their families.
Maria Corazon de Ungria, PhD, who heads the UP DNA Analysis Laboratory of UP, has signed the memorandum of agreement with Prokids to establish Prokids Philippines. She emphasizes, though, that the initiative is not meant to work only with UP. In fact, it was her agency that organized the forum that brought together the IACAT, the NBI, the PNP and other organizations so that Prokids can work with the entire system already in place in the country.
Secretary Esperanza Cabral, who used to co-chair the IACAT in her former capacity as secretary of Social Welfare and Development, says that trafficking can be traced to poverty in the countryside. People can get vulnerable when they are desperate for a better life.
DNA technology in the Philippines is just in its newborn stages but its potentials are limitless. These experts are hoping that science will be used as a tool to help the vulnerable and to bring them closer to justice. The gains will not be realized overnight, to be sure, but when one more child is reunited with his family – where he should be – the work is done, at least for the day.
A child is put up for adoption. A woman who says she is the mother tells authorities that because of dire poverty, she cannot afford to give her child a good future. The woman is dressed in shabby clothes to prove her point. Ultimately, new parents from another country are found for the child. The minor is whisked off to a foreign country, the woman gets a windfall...except that the child is not really her own to begin with. The child's real family has reported a kidnap case.
Another child is rescued from a prostitution den. She says she was brought to the big city by a woman who claimed to want to help her by giving her a job. She wants to go home but does not know where her family is.
Yet another kid is taken from a sweat shop, where he has been subjected to inhumane working conditions. He also wants to go home, but since it has been so long since he left home, he does not know whether his relatives are still looking for him.
Republic Act 9208, also known as the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003, defines trafficking as the recruitment, transport, transfer, harboring or receiving of a person for the purpose of exploitation within or outside the country. The word “child”, on the other hand, refers to persons below 18 years of age.
Trafficking is a serious, pervading crime. The United Nation says this phenomenon affects at least 161 countries which serve as sources, transit points, and destinations of persons trafficked. There are an estimated two million people trafficked each year, across international borders or within the borders of their country. Almost half of these are below the age of 17.
Among these, 95 percent experience physical or sexual violence. Seventy-nine percent are trafficked for sexual exploitation. Eighteen percent are made to undergo forced labor. Other outcomes include illegal adoption, sale of organs, forced marriage and recruitment for militant activities. Indeed human trafficking may just dislodge arms and drug trade as the number one organized crime in the world, experts say.
In the meantime,prosecution of traffickers remains difficult. Here at home, for instance, Justice Undersecretary and Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking acting chairman Ricardo Blancaflor says that out of 750 complaints for trafficking, 400 have reached the preliminary investigation level and only 199 have been docked in the courts. He says that trafficking is one of the crimes that rely heavily on testimonies. But witnesses, as we know, may be influenced by many things. When the witness, usually the trafficked child, loses interest in testifying, the case crumbles altogether – unless there is forensic evidence, DNA profiles, for instance, at hand.
We are lucky if we even get to the prosecution level. The more daunting first task is to bring the trafficked children back to their homes.
**
Two experts in DNA technology visited the Philippines last week to see how their organization can tie up with Philippine authorities in using science to reunite trafficked children with their families and eventually deter the crime.
Jose Lorente, M.D., PhD is professor of legal and forensic medicine at the University of Granada in Spain. He is also the director of the Laboratory for Genetic Identification. Six years ago, he established DNA-Prokids (Program for Kids Identification with DNA Systems). He became inspired to help return children to their parents after seeing many kids roaming the streets during his many travels abroad. He wondered whether the families of these children could ever hope to be reunited with them.
Arthur Eisenberg, PhD, is professor and chairman of the Department of Forensic and Investigative Genetics and co-director of the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification. On a forum held at the Malcolm Theater at the College of Law of the University of the Philippines, Eisenberg talked about his job at home before discussing his involvement in Prokids.
His job is real-life CSI and it's nowhere as easy and as glamorous as how it is made out on television. And, after all this time, he still could not feel detached. “These are not just remains,” he says, as a slide of bones is flashed on the screen. “These are somebody's loved one.”
The duo came to the Philippines in their bid to include at least 13 pioneer countries plus the United Nations in their worldwide crusade. Not many are aware that DNA technology is now already available in the country, and in four places actually: The St. Luke's Medical Center (which takes on only private cases like paternity tests), the National Bureau of Investigations, the Philippine National Police and the DNA Analysis Laboratory of the Natural Sciences Research Institute of the University of the Philippines. (I wrote about DNA profiling in the Philippines in a series of three articles, called “It's in the genes,” in this space in August-September 2008.)
The idea is to help partner countries put in place a national database of DNA profiles from victims on one hand and another database for reference samples from family members with missing children on the other. Both data are essential to establishing identities. Aside from database development and eventual linkage to an international network (the child a family is searching for, after all, may already be halfway across the globe), there will also be use of shared protocols for DNA sample collection, supply of technical equipment and training of genetics experts.
Pro kids is also pushing for having DNA profiling a requisite of adoption processes in countries all over the world. This is to ensure that parents giving up a child for adoption are his real ones.
Eisenberg is also quick to add that the database would not violate any privacy rights of the profiled individuals since the system will only contain reference numbers and will not be used for any other purpose aside from matching kids with their families.
Maria Corazon de Ungria, PhD, who heads the UP DNA Analysis Laboratory of UP, has signed the memorandum of agreement with Prokids to establish Prokids Philippines. She emphasizes, though, that the initiative is not meant to work only with UP. In fact, it was her agency that organized the forum that brought together the IACAT, the NBI, the PNP and other organizations so that Prokids can work with the entire system already in place in the country.
Secretary Esperanza Cabral, who used to co-chair the IACAT in her former capacity as secretary of Social Welfare and Development, says that trafficking can be traced to poverty in the countryside. People can get vulnerable when they are desperate for a better life.
DNA technology in the Philippines is just in its newborn stages but its potentials are limitless. These experts are hoping that science will be used as a tool to help the vulnerable and to bring them closer to justice. The gains will not be realized overnight, to be sure, but when one more child is reunited with his family – where he should be – the work is done, at least for the day.
Dynamo
more from my college senior paper, written 1996-1997
III: DYNAMO
On my writing process
Fiction
Although I have been writing for many years, I am a raw fictionist. I only started writing stories during the 1996 Ateneo Summer Creative Writing Workshop. On a shallower level, the workshop took the guise of a requirement and thus compelled me to “expand.” Moreover, i genuinely felt confident, at that time to venture into a new genre. in my mind, the jumbled-up emotions and vague characterizations seemed to be plotted and structured out. The encouragement I had been getting from the workshop gave me the final shove.
I am also unpublished, not because my works have been rejected, but because I still have not mustered enough guts to submit them. Nevertheless, the decision to embark on this creative-writing thesis is, for me, a milestone. It is an indication that I have started to brave the painful risk of vulnerability on paper.
I come from a lower middle class family. To get to school, I commute for an hour and a half; to get back home, I commute for just as long. Every day, I spend long hours alongside strangers in public vehicles. My neighborhood is quite unlike the carefully tended villages which my classmates call home. Our rented two-story apartment in Valenzuela has a window which looks out onto the street, where tricycles speed past, local tambays play basketball, gossip-monger get together,lice-infested children run around. There is a video shop, a beauty parlor, and a sari-sari store.
I write from these places. I write through these people.
I begin with the face of a person,a would-be main character. Often, I end up telling the story from this person's point of view. The face may be that of someone I know. If I feel too guilty, I change the details a little. But it is always a real person whose story has touched something in me. We have some affinity,and my own life's story cannot but come into play.
I set the limit afterwards. I know that a short story needs discipline, so I decide if I should be as faithful as possible to actual events or if I should intervene as much as I want. At this point, I usually intervene. I determine the other characters and identify the dramatic situation around which the rest of the story will evolve. I decide how the story will end.
At this point, I take hold of a pen and begin to write.
I follow the movements of the characters as they take place in my mind, within a composition of place that must be vivid in my imagination. Sometimes, I indulge in dialogue; sometimes, in streams of consciousness. Everything depends on the mood that the story demands. I must hear the characters talk, if they talk in the story. I must know the sound of their voices. I must be able to believe, even for a fleeting moment, that I can actually touch them.
I elaborate on everyday details and on familiar sights that we often take for granted, and try to give my reader a new experience of the commonplace. Most importantly, I focus on images that are, as far as I can be conscious of it, related to the theme of the story.
As a beginning fictionist, I only try to write about thing I know, things I have with me. I do not attempt to be flashy or sophisticated. I believe simplicity is a powerful virtue, and at this stage of my writing career, I know I cannot afford to be anything but simple.
Nonfiction
The inner linings of an empty pocket are turned inside out,revealing the holes, when one has run out of coins – I used to see writing personal essays in this manner. In those days, I still could not reconcile my compulsion to write on my journals to my excitement over assigned compositions in class. I felt that there was only a finite number of aspects I could explore about my life, that eventually I would run out of things to say.
The operative word being significant, however, I later realized that it is the essence of creative writing to prove life inexhaustible. I had not needed to feel inferior about the things I could say, after all. To a writer, reality is a spring, no matter how bleak or commonplace it may seem. Rilke says in Letters to a Young Poet:
“...for the creator, there is no poverty and no poor,insignificant place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sounds, wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?”
From memories, indeed, i start. During one of my frequent musings – waiting in line for a Katipunan jeep inside UP Campus, for example, or looking out the window during a boring lecture, or lying awake at night, waiting for sleep to come – the events, the places, and the people of my life rush in, without my having to call them into being. Like fairies, they dance around my head,swirling fast, as if deciding who among themselves would, on that occasion, take hold of me.
With a particular episode pinned down, the Flash comes. It hits me,like a sudden leg cramp in a comfortable hike, and I walk around with the same lighted bulb, the same perked-up senses. Oh, I go back to what I have to do – I board the jeep, stand up when the bell rings and go to the next class, and finally descend into my dreams-- but the feeling stays. I suspend taking hold of a pen for once, for fear it may come out raw. Instead, I wait patiently for my mind to gradually flesh out the hologram with each detail, each face, word, and feeling.
Because the self is so involved, little deliberation is needed. But also because of that, it is easy to fall into the trap of literary babbling, the pen going along with each rush of memory. It is here, then, that I struggle to step back and begin to work on the form of the nonfiction narrative. First, I determine the point I want to make. Do I want to want to communicate the sadness, recreate the exhiliration, get the regret through? Through this decision, the mood of the essay becomes obvious. I organize it, deciding whether to narrate chronologically or make it revolve around a particular event or detail. Next, I pick out images which both stand out vividly from my clutter of memories and pose a potential literary significance to the text. Then, I begin to write.
In the act of writing, I try to approximate the excitement I felt when the idea first hit me. As I end the narrative, I aim for yet another hyped feeling: that, upon affixing the last punctuation mark, tells me that all the energy I could possibly generate has gone to the work. And I feel drained, spent – but never wasted.
III: DYNAMO
On my writing process
Fiction
Although I have been writing for many years, I am a raw fictionist. I only started writing stories during the 1996 Ateneo Summer Creative Writing Workshop. On a shallower level, the workshop took the guise of a requirement and thus compelled me to “expand.” Moreover, i genuinely felt confident, at that time to venture into a new genre. in my mind, the jumbled-up emotions and vague characterizations seemed to be plotted and structured out. The encouragement I had been getting from the workshop gave me the final shove.
I am also unpublished, not because my works have been rejected, but because I still have not mustered enough guts to submit them. Nevertheless, the decision to embark on this creative-writing thesis is, for me, a milestone. It is an indication that I have started to brave the painful risk of vulnerability on paper.
I come from a lower middle class family. To get to school, I commute for an hour and a half; to get back home, I commute for just as long. Every day, I spend long hours alongside strangers in public vehicles. My neighborhood is quite unlike the carefully tended villages which my classmates call home. Our rented two-story apartment in Valenzuela has a window which looks out onto the street, where tricycles speed past, local tambays play basketball, gossip-monger get together,lice-infested children run around. There is a video shop, a beauty parlor, and a sari-sari store.
I write from these places. I write through these people.
I begin with the face of a person,a would-be main character. Often, I end up telling the story from this person's point of view. The face may be that of someone I know. If I feel too guilty, I change the details a little. But it is always a real person whose story has touched something in me. We have some affinity,and my own life's story cannot but come into play.
I set the limit afterwards. I know that a short story needs discipline, so I decide if I should be as faithful as possible to actual events or if I should intervene as much as I want. At this point, I usually intervene. I determine the other characters and identify the dramatic situation around which the rest of the story will evolve. I decide how the story will end.
At this point, I take hold of a pen and begin to write.
I follow the movements of the characters as they take place in my mind, within a composition of place that must be vivid in my imagination. Sometimes, I indulge in dialogue; sometimes, in streams of consciousness. Everything depends on the mood that the story demands. I must hear the characters talk, if they talk in the story. I must know the sound of their voices. I must be able to believe, even for a fleeting moment, that I can actually touch them.
I elaborate on everyday details and on familiar sights that we often take for granted, and try to give my reader a new experience of the commonplace. Most importantly, I focus on images that are, as far as I can be conscious of it, related to the theme of the story.
As a beginning fictionist, I only try to write about thing I know, things I have with me. I do not attempt to be flashy or sophisticated. I believe simplicity is a powerful virtue, and at this stage of my writing career, I know I cannot afford to be anything but simple.
Nonfiction
The inner linings of an empty pocket are turned inside out,revealing the holes, when one has run out of coins – I used to see writing personal essays in this manner. In those days, I still could not reconcile my compulsion to write on my journals to my excitement over assigned compositions in class. I felt that there was only a finite number of aspects I could explore about my life, that eventually I would run out of things to say.
The operative word being significant, however, I later realized that it is the essence of creative writing to prove life inexhaustible. I had not needed to feel inferior about the things I could say, after all. To a writer, reality is a spring, no matter how bleak or commonplace it may seem. Rilke says in Letters to a Young Poet:
“...for the creator, there is no poverty and no poor,insignificant place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sounds, wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?”
From memories, indeed, i start. During one of my frequent musings – waiting in line for a Katipunan jeep inside UP Campus, for example, or looking out the window during a boring lecture, or lying awake at night, waiting for sleep to come – the events, the places, and the people of my life rush in, without my having to call them into being. Like fairies, they dance around my head,swirling fast, as if deciding who among themselves would, on that occasion, take hold of me.
With a particular episode pinned down, the Flash comes. It hits me,like a sudden leg cramp in a comfortable hike, and I walk around with the same lighted bulb, the same perked-up senses. Oh, I go back to what I have to do – I board the jeep, stand up when the bell rings and go to the next class, and finally descend into my dreams-- but the feeling stays. I suspend taking hold of a pen for once, for fear it may come out raw. Instead, I wait patiently for my mind to gradually flesh out the hologram with each detail, each face, word, and feeling.
Because the self is so involved, little deliberation is needed. But also because of that, it is easy to fall into the trap of literary babbling, the pen going along with each rush of memory. It is here, then, that I struggle to step back and begin to work on the form of the nonfiction narrative. First, I determine the point I want to make. Do I want to want to communicate the sadness, recreate the exhiliration, get the regret through? Through this decision, the mood of the essay becomes obvious. I organize it, deciding whether to narrate chronologically or make it revolve around a particular event or detail. Next, I pick out images which both stand out vividly from my clutter of memories and pose a potential literary significance to the text. Then, I begin to write.
In the act of writing, I try to approximate the excitement I felt when the idea first hit me. As I end the narrative, I aim for yet another hyped feeling: that, upon affixing the last punctuation mark, tells me that all the energy I could possibly generate has gone to the work. And I feel drained, spent – but never wasted.
Forge
more of my college senior paper, written 1996-1997
II. FORGE
My influences
In grade school and high school, I was involved with the school paper. In those earlier years, my inclinations leaned heavily on journalism. My mother, herself a journalist, encouraged me. On Saturdays, when I tagged along with her to work, her friends from the Malacanang Press Corps of her comrades from The Manila Standard thought I was doing practicum for a profession I wished to pursue.
My work in the Gracean Envoy (I was features editor in sophomore year, associate editor in junior year, and editor in chief in senior year, as I was in the sixth grade for The Graceanette) tempered my writing with responsibility and an imperative to work with people. Together with some of my school mates, I represented the school organ in press conferences. I competed for features writing, editorial writing, and newswriting, and I learned the conventions of these “genres”.
It was also through these activities that I became exposed to people of similar inclinations. My friends from the paper helped me with the issues I tackled in my editorials. Often, I commented on school issues, but I also wrote about the conflicting feelings of growing up, or loss,or how futile out two Our fathers and two sardine cans for the earthquake or lahar victims seemed.
These, as well as the occasional poems I wrote at the height of some crush, comprised my public writing. But aside from the journal entries I very carefully kept in a handwriting which even I myself cannot sometimes read now, I was nourishing an unexplainable sensation in the things I used to take for granted. I wrote about it in my first creative writing workshop at the Ateneo last summer:
I can be awake in two ways. One is when I open my eyes, perform my duties,and face the world. The other is when I am by myself and I am seized by a higher spirit. Many things can spark this unguarded coming of The Flash – blinking lights,a carefree cruise on an avenue, a cool, quiet night, a rainy day, or dusk. But every time, I am possessed by a higher consciousness, a more deliberate sensitivity, a more ardent desire to hold on to the ungraspable. For a moment, I find that I am endowed with the power to draw the curtain and peek into a world of awesome beauty, and to capture this transient high.
And so I fish for a pen in my bag or pocket, and I scribble like mad in half-darkness,or in the middle of a history lecture, or in a moving vehicle. Whether I create a line, or a poem, or a journal entry,or a character sketch,it does not matter. The important thing is that something is created from my hand at that moment of ecstasy – words wanting to be stirred to life, images wanting to be called into being.
My Flash is an arrogant and demanding entity. It does not know timing, nor does it recognize responsibilities. At that precise moment,it has to be fully embraced or totally abandoned. It can enable me to write miracles but compromises all my other functions as a person.
Thanks to Lucy Maud Montgomery's Emily Trilogy (Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs and Emily's Quest), I was able to name the unnamable and what I thought was peculiarly mine alone. Emily Starr, the heroine of the trilogy,is a struggling writer in Prince Edward Island in Canada in the twenties when the only accepted profession for women were teaching and housekeeping. Emil7y, who eventually climbs to the top of her alpine Path and ends up marrying her childhood best friend, gets a glimpse of some celestial beauty which she calls The Flash.
I have not abandoned my conviction that literature stems from personal experiences. The novels of Judy Blume, particularly Deenie, It's Not the End of the World, and Then Again, Maybe I Won't that deal with pre-teeners who feel alienated from the world, were my faithful companions during the angst attacks of my pre-teen years. It was during this time that I decided to be a writer. I was no longer intimidated by the distance between the printed pages that I came across in bookstores and the pages of my own journal.
As I grew up, I realized there were more books to read. During my freshman year in high school, I bought a copy of Antoine de Saint Exupery's The Little Prince. I liked the story because the language was very easy to grasp, as thought it were from a young person. I found this simplicity sincere and haunting. I was charmed by the rose and tamed by the fox. I grew to love the little prince. And every time I red the book,it does not fail to mean something more. I still read it every now and then,and especially after sixteen units of college philosophy, I cannot help being amazed at how reading it once more becomes a new experience.
My encounter with the classics was a product of the will. Our school paper adviser Mr. Reynaldo Binuya, who was also our English teacher in our third and fourth years, influenced me greatly because he taught English literature with a passion. He walked into the classroom with nothing but his chalk case, but when he started talking, he transported me to an enchanting dimension. I showed my enthusiasm not by dominating class discussions for which the girls would have hated me, but by reading on my own. I frequented the classics section of National Bookstore and squatted for long hours in front of the books.
As a fifteen year old, I started with novels about girls. I read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Jane Auster's Emma and Charlotte Bronte's Viillette and Jane Eyre. Later on, in my college literature courses, I began to read with more sensitivity, and my girlhood fancy turned into more in-depth understanding of the female consciousness. Aside from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter which we had to read in class, I also read D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Sons and Lovers, as well as Thomas Hardy's Tess of d'Urbervilles.
My class in modern literary criticism revealed the myth of the Western canon. In the following semester, I took Third World Literature. Again,aside from the required readings, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ariel Dorfman's Last Waltz in Santiago and Other Poems, and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek. I think that this course provided a turning point in my perception of both literature and my own writing. As a literature student in a Third World country, I realized that literature can – and sometimes must – deal with pressing social issues without having to sacrifice the aesthetic quality of the text. I saw the responsibility that went with responding to the call to write. Aside from the universal human drama that all writers in the world explore, I have my own story to tell. I am a Filipina writer. On top of all these, I have my peculiar stories -- my own loves, pains hopes, failures, losses, dreams. The essays of Kerima Polotan in Author's Choice and Adventures in a Foreign Country made me see how honesty can be painful and glorious at the same time. Of course, the wit with which she tells her own tales charmed me from page to page. From Virginia Woolf's essay, A Sketch of the Past from her book Moments of Being, I realized the role of vivid imagery in remembering the past and creating a new perception of the present and future from memories.
Many people have encouraged me to keep on writing. Aside from Rey Binuya, Doreen Fernandez,my En 13/14 professor in Ateneo, built up my confidence by frequently singling out my compositions in class. I was also much affected by Danton Remoto's comments on my essays in our En twelve slash twenty six class. During the 1996 Ateneo Summer Writers' Workshop, I got to know Clinton Palanca, who although only two years my senior,had already won Palanca awards for his prose. It was also during this workshop that I became acquainted with Rofel Brion. The first text of mine that he ever read was a poem in Filipino, and even then, he gave encouraging comments and asked me to let him read some more of my work.
These teachers helped me believe in myself. They are respected, much-published, and awarded writers and I can only take their word when they say that I, indeed, have the feel for words. It is never easy to suspend the confidence, however, and I feel that by letting people read what I write, I give them license to see right through me. Most of the time I am still tempted to confine myself to my journal entries again.
But no,I cannot turn back now. I realize that this risk is part of the vocation I must heed. And whenever I feel that y grip is loosening, Letter I of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet serves as my inspiration.
I also write poetry,but I must admit that I lack the economy which most accomplished poet usually have. When I write poems,I write as if I were merely talking,often in Filipino. This,however, does not prevent me from reading diverse forms of poetry – in either language. My favorite poems are Edna St. Vincent Millay's “Dirge Without Music”,for I have always been a little in love with death, and e.e. cummings' “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” which the encompassing quality of love. Among poems written by Filipinos, I particularly like Fatima Lim's “Gift” because of its detached honesty and sensuousness, and Ramon Sunico's “Kung Paano Magpaalam” for the marriage of subtlety and power.
All of these, along with my experiences and education, have shaped me into the writer that I am today.
II. FORGE
My influences
In grade school and high school, I was involved with the school paper. In those earlier years, my inclinations leaned heavily on journalism. My mother, herself a journalist, encouraged me. On Saturdays, when I tagged along with her to work, her friends from the Malacanang Press Corps of her comrades from The Manila Standard thought I was doing practicum for a profession I wished to pursue.
My work in the Gracean Envoy (I was features editor in sophomore year, associate editor in junior year, and editor in chief in senior year, as I was in the sixth grade for The Graceanette) tempered my writing with responsibility and an imperative to work with people. Together with some of my school mates, I represented the school organ in press conferences. I competed for features writing, editorial writing, and newswriting, and I learned the conventions of these “genres”.
It was also through these activities that I became exposed to people of similar inclinations. My friends from the paper helped me with the issues I tackled in my editorials. Often, I commented on school issues, but I also wrote about the conflicting feelings of growing up, or loss,or how futile out two Our fathers and two sardine cans for the earthquake or lahar victims seemed.
These, as well as the occasional poems I wrote at the height of some crush, comprised my public writing. But aside from the journal entries I very carefully kept in a handwriting which even I myself cannot sometimes read now, I was nourishing an unexplainable sensation in the things I used to take for granted. I wrote about it in my first creative writing workshop at the Ateneo last summer:
I can be awake in two ways. One is when I open my eyes, perform my duties,and face the world. The other is when I am by myself and I am seized by a higher spirit. Many things can spark this unguarded coming of The Flash – blinking lights,a carefree cruise on an avenue, a cool, quiet night, a rainy day, or dusk. But every time, I am possessed by a higher consciousness, a more deliberate sensitivity, a more ardent desire to hold on to the ungraspable. For a moment, I find that I am endowed with the power to draw the curtain and peek into a world of awesome beauty, and to capture this transient high.
And so I fish for a pen in my bag or pocket, and I scribble like mad in half-darkness,or in the middle of a history lecture, or in a moving vehicle. Whether I create a line, or a poem, or a journal entry,or a character sketch,it does not matter. The important thing is that something is created from my hand at that moment of ecstasy – words wanting to be stirred to life, images wanting to be called into being.
My Flash is an arrogant and demanding entity. It does not know timing, nor does it recognize responsibilities. At that precise moment,it has to be fully embraced or totally abandoned. It can enable me to write miracles but compromises all my other functions as a person.
Thanks to Lucy Maud Montgomery's Emily Trilogy (Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs and Emily's Quest), I was able to name the unnamable and what I thought was peculiarly mine alone. Emily Starr, the heroine of the trilogy,is a struggling writer in Prince Edward Island in Canada in the twenties when the only accepted profession for women were teaching and housekeeping. Emil7y, who eventually climbs to the top of her alpine Path and ends up marrying her childhood best friend, gets a glimpse of some celestial beauty which she calls The Flash.
I have not abandoned my conviction that literature stems from personal experiences. The novels of Judy Blume, particularly Deenie, It's Not the End of the World, and Then Again, Maybe I Won't that deal with pre-teeners who feel alienated from the world, were my faithful companions during the angst attacks of my pre-teen years. It was during this time that I decided to be a writer. I was no longer intimidated by the distance between the printed pages that I came across in bookstores and the pages of my own journal.
As I grew up, I realized there were more books to read. During my freshman year in high school, I bought a copy of Antoine de Saint Exupery's The Little Prince. I liked the story because the language was very easy to grasp, as thought it were from a young person. I found this simplicity sincere and haunting. I was charmed by the rose and tamed by the fox. I grew to love the little prince. And every time I red the book,it does not fail to mean something more. I still read it every now and then,and especially after sixteen units of college philosophy, I cannot help being amazed at how reading it once more becomes a new experience.
My encounter with the classics was a product of the will. Our school paper adviser Mr. Reynaldo Binuya, who was also our English teacher in our third and fourth years, influenced me greatly because he taught English literature with a passion. He walked into the classroom with nothing but his chalk case, but when he started talking, he transported me to an enchanting dimension. I showed my enthusiasm not by dominating class discussions for which the girls would have hated me, but by reading on my own. I frequented the classics section of National Bookstore and squatted for long hours in front of the books.
As a fifteen year old, I started with novels about girls. I read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Jane Auster's Emma and Charlotte Bronte's Viillette and Jane Eyre. Later on, in my college literature courses, I began to read with more sensitivity, and my girlhood fancy turned into more in-depth understanding of the female consciousness. Aside from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter which we had to read in class, I also read D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Sons and Lovers, as well as Thomas Hardy's Tess of d'Urbervilles.
My class in modern literary criticism revealed the myth of the Western canon. In the following semester, I took Third World Literature. Again,aside from the required readings, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ariel Dorfman's Last Waltz in Santiago and Other Poems, and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek. I think that this course provided a turning point in my perception of both literature and my own writing. As a literature student in a Third World country, I realized that literature can – and sometimes must – deal with pressing social issues without having to sacrifice the aesthetic quality of the text. I saw the responsibility that went with responding to the call to write. Aside from the universal human drama that all writers in the world explore, I have my own story to tell. I am a Filipina writer. On top of all these, I have my peculiar stories -- my own loves, pains hopes, failures, losses, dreams. The essays of Kerima Polotan in Author's Choice and Adventures in a Foreign Country made me see how honesty can be painful and glorious at the same time. Of course, the wit with which she tells her own tales charmed me from page to page. From Virginia Woolf's essay, A Sketch of the Past from her book Moments of Being, I realized the role of vivid imagery in remembering the past and creating a new perception of the present and future from memories.
Many people have encouraged me to keep on writing. Aside from Rey Binuya, Doreen Fernandez,my En 13/14 professor in Ateneo, built up my confidence by frequently singling out my compositions in class. I was also much affected by Danton Remoto's comments on my essays in our En twelve slash twenty six class. During the 1996 Ateneo Summer Writers' Workshop, I got to know Clinton Palanca, who although only two years my senior,had already won Palanca awards for his prose. It was also during this workshop that I became acquainted with Rofel Brion. The first text of mine that he ever read was a poem in Filipino, and even then, he gave encouraging comments and asked me to let him read some more of my work.
These teachers helped me believe in myself. They are respected, much-published, and awarded writers and I can only take their word when they say that I, indeed, have the feel for words. It is never easy to suspend the confidence, however, and I feel that by letting people read what I write, I give them license to see right through me. Most of the time I am still tempted to confine myself to my journal entries again.
But no,I cannot turn back now. I realize that this risk is part of the vocation I must heed. And whenever I feel that y grip is loosening, Letter I of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet serves as my inspiration.
I also write poetry,but I must admit that I lack the economy which most accomplished poet usually have. When I write poems,I write as if I were merely talking,often in Filipino. This,however, does not prevent me from reading diverse forms of poetry – in either language. My favorite poems are Edna St. Vincent Millay's “Dirge Without Music”,for I have always been a little in love with death, and e.e. cummings' “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” which the encompassing quality of love. Among poems written by Filipinos, I particularly like Fatima Lim's “Gift” because of its detached honesty and sensuousness, and Ramon Sunico's “Kung Paano Magpaalam” for the marriage of subtlety and power.
All of these, along with my experiences and education, have shaped me into the writer that I am today.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Genesis
In 1996-1997,during my senior year in college, soft copies were not as widespread as they are today. The printed word was superior, then. Printed,as in, hard copy. When you lose your printout, you lose all.
In a grand stroke of luck, after thirteen years I finally got my hands on the last remaining copy, hard or otherwise, of Suns and Dragonflies, my senior thesis at the Ateneo. Graduating students could do a full-blown thesis work, of course, but I chose to do a creative writing folio. It was the ultimate project, one which I had a grand time doing.
My mentors Rofel Brion, PhD, now chairman of the Interdisciplinary Studies program of the College, and Danton Remoto, now founder and leader of the party-list group Ang Ladlad, gave me such encouragement at a time when I was figuring out what to do with my life after graduation.
What was I thinking? I was already writing. I had been doing what I was meant to do,even then.
In encoding the entire text – a tedious but gratifying task – I make no editorial changes. I hope,dear readers, that you have fun getting acquainted with my musings as a twenty-year-old. It's still me, and I am honored to share this with you in this blog.
By the way, I got an A for two semesters' work.
***
I. GENESIS
Beginning to write
When I was a child, I believed that if I stared hard enough at some sunlit object – a tree,perhaps,or a patch of grass,or the swing i wanted to board – it would turn dark before I finished counting to ten. The experiment never failed me: after only a few seconds of wrestling wits with the sun, the sunny became shady. I believed I was powerful.
No one knew that I thought of myself this way. I did not think any of my playmates would understand. And even when I learned in science class that clouds actually sailed in the sky, causing the sun to play hide and seek with the earth below, I was not disillusioned. I knew that the sun respected me.
That image set me apart from the other children. They always thought I was too fat, anyway. They were always able to touch the sleeve of my shirt during patintero. I could not hit the shorter stick when we played shato. I could not even run fast.
But I could catch the most elusive dragonflies.
I was an odd ball when all I wanted was to be regular – to be the girl whose name no one can remember unless mentioned alongside other names. But being mainstream did not seem possible. Sometimes,I stood out, as in math or essay-writing contests. But most of the time, I stuck out. And I hated it.
It was not as if I went to school with my hair dyed green or that I spoke in a funny accent. Outwardly I was all right, except maybe for the extra twenty pounds. But I was different in the things that all the other children took for granted. They complained about their nagging parents; I was not even living with mine. They got caught up in games that I could not play well. In their seats, they talked and giggled; I stiffened at the slightest jolt of my chair, half expecting an earthquake. I sensed that they did not even know I was very different from them. Somehow, that made me feel more insignificantly odd, or oddly insignificant. So while I desperately tried to connect with my playmates and classmates – I secretly practiced Chinese garter using the legs of a chair, and joined their study groups although I preferred to study on my own – hoping to be regarded as a plain kid, I was aware that deep inside I was beginning to be someone else.
I had begun to write.
The stationery fever which swept my fourth grade class in Our Lady of Grace Academy extended our class time by fifteen minutes each day – for swapping sessions. Eventually, this fascination for pastel-colored, scented paper grew into a fascination for pastel-colored, scented notebooks. This was the diary epidemic. We wrote on these notebooks every day after dinner, recounting the day's events, and “compared notes” with each other the next day in class. After a while, I found it stupid to rewrite the same paragraph three or four times, laboring for the best possible penmanship, and to let at least ten people rad what I wrote and compete for what we judged the best entry of the day. In the fifth grade, however, the perfumed notebooks became juvenile. The talk moved on to puberty, and we waited to give due respect to the girl who would get her period before everyone else.
I, however, did not abandon the scented pages. i continued recounting my day's events on them. And when i ran out of paper, I bought a regular Corona notebook. After that, I got one with darker pages, then one with rougher pages, and then I bought newsprints, and notebooks with moviestars on the cover.
Meanwhile, we all went past puberty. High school became the most memorable years of my life. My “feeling odd” attacks came less frequently. I even slimmed down. I became part of a group of twelve girls and we called ourselves Teen Petite. We used our Saturday speech choir practices as an excuse to see the latest Michael J. Fox movie at SM City. We talked breathlessly about how our crushes smiled at us when the school bus went past their basketball court. We laughed at the glaring grammatical mistakes in the love letters we got.
And then came 1992, my Terrible Year.
I even managed to fall in love. I met my boyfriend during rehearsals for aa Good Friday play in my parish. As a senior, I filled out my college applications with anticipation. I studied hard for the entrance tests. I drafted a ten-year plan that included a college degree,marriage, two babies, and law school.
But my mother's cancer shook our lives.
Everything became blurred months after her passing. It was like watching my own life on a drama anthology on television, where a resolution was expected before the hour-nd-a-half was over.
Of course, the dust finally settled. If I had not moved on, it would have been a form of suicide. I entered the Ateneo,where I earned a 100% scholarship grant. I married John, the Good Friday guy, in 1994. In the same year, I bore Beatrice Adeline; a year and eight months later, Joshua Anthony.
Today, as a 20-year-old college senior, I live my life in a delicate balance among almost disparate concerns. Aside from this project, I wrestle with twenty one academic units this semester so I can graduate with my batch in March. John is in Toronto, trying to fast-forward professional and financial stability. Two and a half year old Beatrice begins to ask deceivingly innocent questions (Bakit isa lang ang Bea?) while one year old Joshua practices his first steps on a walker. My children and I live in my in-laws' house from Monday to Friday. We spend weekends in my grandmother's house, where I had grown up.
But thinking about all this now, I realize that my relatively young,but colorful, life is not a mere case of one-chapter-closes-another-chapter-begins. The link is found in the twenty two notebooks stored in the bottom shelf of my book cabinet. I have been writing for the past twelve years.
I can still feel odd,maybe all the more so now, because I see how different I really am from my carefree classmates. I think, then, that my writing is a coping mechanism for my perennial angst. I am, almost exclusively, a writer of personal narratives and essays. When I write stories,which I began to do only recently, I come up with stories of people whom those close to me will recognize at once. But I keep on writing, and I exert effort to improve my craft. I take teachers who are also renowned writers and try to converse with them, and I attend creative writing workshops. And I chose to do this creative writing thesis because I believe that the things I articulate in my journals are experienced by a lot of other people, and I wish to assert my oneness with them. Keeping my confidence in the way the sun and the dragonflies respected me, I know I am THIS person,THIS woman, for a purpose. And my writing is an essential part of that vocation.
In a grand stroke of luck, after thirteen years I finally got my hands on the last remaining copy, hard or otherwise, of Suns and Dragonflies, my senior thesis at the Ateneo. Graduating students could do a full-blown thesis work, of course, but I chose to do a creative writing folio. It was the ultimate project, one which I had a grand time doing.
My mentors Rofel Brion, PhD, now chairman of the Interdisciplinary Studies program of the College, and Danton Remoto, now founder and leader of the party-list group Ang Ladlad, gave me such encouragement at a time when I was figuring out what to do with my life after graduation.
What was I thinking? I was already writing. I had been doing what I was meant to do,even then.
In encoding the entire text – a tedious but gratifying task – I make no editorial changes. I hope,dear readers, that you have fun getting acquainted with my musings as a twenty-year-old. It's still me, and I am honored to share this with you in this blog.
By the way, I got an A for two semesters' work.
***
I. GENESIS
Beginning to write
When I was a child, I believed that if I stared hard enough at some sunlit object – a tree,perhaps,or a patch of grass,or the swing i wanted to board – it would turn dark before I finished counting to ten. The experiment never failed me: after only a few seconds of wrestling wits with the sun, the sunny became shady. I believed I was powerful.
No one knew that I thought of myself this way. I did not think any of my playmates would understand. And even when I learned in science class that clouds actually sailed in the sky, causing the sun to play hide and seek with the earth below, I was not disillusioned. I knew that the sun respected me.
That image set me apart from the other children. They always thought I was too fat, anyway. They were always able to touch the sleeve of my shirt during patintero. I could not hit the shorter stick when we played shato. I could not even run fast.
But I could catch the most elusive dragonflies.
I was an odd ball when all I wanted was to be regular – to be the girl whose name no one can remember unless mentioned alongside other names. But being mainstream did not seem possible. Sometimes,I stood out, as in math or essay-writing contests. But most of the time, I stuck out. And I hated it.
It was not as if I went to school with my hair dyed green or that I spoke in a funny accent. Outwardly I was all right, except maybe for the extra twenty pounds. But I was different in the things that all the other children took for granted. They complained about their nagging parents; I was not even living with mine. They got caught up in games that I could not play well. In their seats, they talked and giggled; I stiffened at the slightest jolt of my chair, half expecting an earthquake. I sensed that they did not even know I was very different from them. Somehow, that made me feel more insignificantly odd, or oddly insignificant. So while I desperately tried to connect with my playmates and classmates – I secretly practiced Chinese garter using the legs of a chair, and joined their study groups although I preferred to study on my own – hoping to be regarded as a plain kid, I was aware that deep inside I was beginning to be someone else.
I had begun to write.
The stationery fever which swept my fourth grade class in Our Lady of Grace Academy extended our class time by fifteen minutes each day – for swapping sessions. Eventually, this fascination for pastel-colored, scented paper grew into a fascination for pastel-colored, scented notebooks. This was the diary epidemic. We wrote on these notebooks every day after dinner, recounting the day's events, and “compared notes” with each other the next day in class. After a while, I found it stupid to rewrite the same paragraph three or four times, laboring for the best possible penmanship, and to let at least ten people rad what I wrote and compete for what we judged the best entry of the day. In the fifth grade, however, the perfumed notebooks became juvenile. The talk moved on to puberty, and we waited to give due respect to the girl who would get her period before everyone else.
I, however, did not abandon the scented pages. i continued recounting my day's events on them. And when i ran out of paper, I bought a regular Corona notebook. After that, I got one with darker pages, then one with rougher pages, and then I bought newsprints, and notebooks with moviestars on the cover.
Meanwhile, we all went past puberty. High school became the most memorable years of my life. My “feeling odd” attacks came less frequently. I even slimmed down. I became part of a group of twelve girls and we called ourselves Teen Petite. We used our Saturday speech choir practices as an excuse to see the latest Michael J. Fox movie at SM City. We talked breathlessly about how our crushes smiled at us when the school bus went past their basketball court. We laughed at the glaring grammatical mistakes in the love letters we got.
And then came 1992, my Terrible Year.
I even managed to fall in love. I met my boyfriend during rehearsals for aa Good Friday play in my parish. As a senior, I filled out my college applications with anticipation. I studied hard for the entrance tests. I drafted a ten-year plan that included a college degree,marriage, two babies, and law school.
But my mother's cancer shook our lives.
Everything became blurred months after her passing. It was like watching my own life on a drama anthology on television, where a resolution was expected before the hour-nd-a-half was over.
Of course, the dust finally settled. If I had not moved on, it would have been a form of suicide. I entered the Ateneo,where I earned a 100% scholarship grant. I married John, the Good Friday guy, in 1994. In the same year, I bore Beatrice Adeline; a year and eight months later, Joshua Anthony.
Today, as a 20-year-old college senior, I live my life in a delicate balance among almost disparate concerns. Aside from this project, I wrestle with twenty one academic units this semester so I can graduate with my batch in March. John is in Toronto, trying to fast-forward professional and financial stability. Two and a half year old Beatrice begins to ask deceivingly innocent questions (Bakit isa lang ang Bea?) while one year old Joshua practices his first steps on a walker. My children and I live in my in-laws' house from Monday to Friday. We spend weekends in my grandmother's house, where I had grown up.
But thinking about all this now, I realize that my relatively young,but colorful, life is not a mere case of one-chapter-closes-another-chapter-begins. The link is found in the twenty two notebooks stored in the bottom shelf of my book cabinet. I have been writing for the past twelve years.
I can still feel odd,maybe all the more so now, because I see how different I really am from my carefree classmates. I think, then, that my writing is a coping mechanism for my perennial angst. I am, almost exclusively, a writer of personal narratives and essays. When I write stories,which I began to do only recently, I come up with stories of people whom those close to me will recognize at once. But I keep on writing, and I exert effort to improve my craft. I take teachers who are also renowned writers and try to converse with them, and I attend creative writing workshops. And I chose to do this creative writing thesis because I believe that the things I articulate in my journals are experienced by a lot of other people, and I wish to assert my oneness with them. Keeping my confidence in the way the sun and the dragonflies respected me, I know I am THIS person,THIS woman, for a purpose. And my writing is an essential part of that vocation.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Missing Malcolm
I was at the UP College of Law this morning. I was invited to a forum on DNA technology as it applied to the resolution of child trafficking cases. This will find my way to my newspaper column on Monday next week, and I will archive it here under Chasing Happy. For now I am blogging about the experience of returning to Malcolm Hall after almost five years, after being disallowed to progress into Second Year of Bachelor of Laws on account of my not-so-spectacular grades.
I had expected to be nostalgic upon setting foot in the College. For several years I had fancied becoming a lawyer. I deferred it after college because my priorities then had shifted to earning a living. In 2003, with 4 kids and at age 27, I took the Law Aptitude Exam and was among those who were not anymore required to undergo a panel interview. I marched into law school with high hopes and images of the version of me, seven years hence, with a new appendage to my name. Also, it was UP Law. Surely I must have not endured this wringer for nothing.
But too many things were happening then. My fault was that I allowed these things to affect my determination to find the time and the energy to keep up with my readings and attend my evening classes, exhausted though I was from the many concerns of my life. Excuses, excuses. Maybe I just did not want it badly enough.
This morning, on my way out of the forum, I passed by the administration office of the college. The thought of popping in and asking if I could even hope to apply for admission anew crossed my mind. After all, I had time in the morning, and I had shed my "issues." I could start over and it was likely I would do a good job this time around.
But I kept on walking. I realized I had let go of this dream. I've dealt with my failure, I've accepted the consequences of my weaknesses -- and I've got a job I love. I want to keep doing what I do, writing and editing, both. I don't even want to be a lawyer any more.
So no, I don't really miss Malcolm Hall. I grieved, I got over it, and now I am fine.
http://www.manilastandardtoday.com/2007/feb/9/adelleTulagan.htm
Monday, January 18, 2010
Work-life
I was pretty pleased with myself this weekend.
I was productive professionally, domestically, maternally. I wrote about the forum organized by civil society climate advocates on Wednesday. As always, writing my column was hard work but rewarding. I rarely write about myself and my experiences anymore except on special occasions. There is this blog to do that in. Instead I use my column space to write about events I attend and people I talk to,often relating to my pet subjects. I'm hoping I can build some sort of a reputation, my little corner in this world, through this.
As always, too,I was insecure with the draft especially my interpretation of the facts,since I was writing about a technical matter. The organizers also asked us not to directly attribute statements to the speakers since their observations were mostly unofficial-- and painfully honest. It might compromise their slots in the negotiating teams. I first cleared the article with my contact; she thanked me for my hard work and said the piece was okay.
I was also able to finish the second full draft of the book I am co-writing with dad. Fifteen chapters and I think we are right on schedule. (More on this at the right time and venue.) Suffice it to say that planning, enthusiasm and discipline played a crucial role in my being able to finish all the chapters in six months' time. I am also happy to be instrumental in dad's attainment of his decade-old dream.
At the homefront, I rearranged the living room furniture again. I realized I needed a center table because there are times I want to watch television AND work at the same time. I put the television on top of the cubbyholes instead I noticed that the shoe racks were not very pretty to look at, especially since I am fancying my house to be orderly, systematic, pleasing to the eye and evocative of serenity and inspiration. I see enough squalor and chaos outside, I want my home to be a sanctuary, and a reflection of who I am and where I want to be.
I used some of the gift certificates that were left over from Christmas to get three shoe cabinets, on sale for a little over 600 each. Now the shoes are right where they are but are tucked away neatly. The pictures speak for themselves.
I tried to be there for Bea as she explored her options for college and beyond.
I opened a Powerteens savings account for my Josh, who turned 14 last week and who is trying to acquire the discipline to save. He tried last year but failed (he fell below balance and the bank closed his account.) Now he's on his way. The initial deposit is my birthday gift to him.
I spent quality time with Sophie, eating sour cream flavored french fries and buko shake at the SM foodcourt, after meeting some of her batch mates who cam over to the house to practice a dance number.
I finally got an appetite stimulant for Elmo and batteries for his educational laptop (a toy), my Christmas gift to him in 2008.
I got a massage.
I was able to make my home office bigger, making use of more cabinet and drawer space. One does not like the sight of things just lying around. Every drawer has a description for its contents. These mundane activities give me such a high.
And, on Sunday night, after arriving from work and sharing a light dinner with josh, I planned he rest of my week. Yes there was a lot to do. Yes, there are humongous challenges, on every front and sometimes all at once, but the fact that I can think up words to describe them, write them down on my planner with my RVM print made prettier by m favorite red gel pen, I feel they are at least half done.
I am in control. What a nice thought to bring to bed.
I was productive professionally, domestically, maternally. I wrote about the forum organized by civil society climate advocates on Wednesday. As always, writing my column was hard work but rewarding. I rarely write about myself and my experiences anymore except on special occasions. There is this blog to do that in. Instead I use my column space to write about events I attend and people I talk to,often relating to my pet subjects. I'm hoping I can build some sort of a reputation, my little corner in this world, through this.
As always, too,I was insecure with the draft especially my interpretation of the facts,since I was writing about a technical matter. The organizers also asked us not to directly attribute statements to the speakers since their observations were mostly unofficial-- and painfully honest. It might compromise their slots in the negotiating teams. I first cleared the article with my contact; she thanked me for my hard work and said the piece was okay.
I was also able to finish the second full draft of the book I am co-writing with dad. Fifteen chapters and I think we are right on schedule. (More on this at the right time and venue.) Suffice it to say that planning, enthusiasm and discipline played a crucial role in my being able to finish all the chapters in six months' time. I am also happy to be instrumental in dad's attainment of his decade-old dream.
At the homefront, I rearranged the living room furniture again. I realized I needed a center table because there are times I want to watch television AND work at the same time. I put the television on top of the cubbyholes instead I noticed that the shoe racks were not very pretty to look at, especially since I am fancying my house to be orderly, systematic, pleasing to the eye and evocative of serenity and inspiration. I see enough squalor and chaos outside, I want my home to be a sanctuary, and a reflection of who I am and where I want to be.
I used some of the gift certificates that were left over from Christmas to get three shoe cabinets, on sale for a little over 600 each. Now the shoes are right where they are but are tucked away neatly. The pictures speak for themselves.
I tried to be there for Bea as she explored her options for college and beyond.
I opened a Powerteens savings account for my Josh, who turned 14 last week and who is trying to acquire the discipline to save. He tried last year but failed (he fell below balance and the bank closed his account.) Now he's on his way. The initial deposit is my birthday gift to him.
I spent quality time with Sophie, eating sour cream flavored french fries and buko shake at the SM foodcourt, after meeting some of her batch mates who cam over to the house to practice a dance number.
I finally got an appetite stimulant for Elmo and batteries for his educational laptop (a toy), my Christmas gift to him in 2008.
I got a massage.
I was able to make my home office bigger, making use of more cabinet and drawer space. One does not like the sight of things just lying around. Every drawer has a description for its contents. These mundane activities give me such a high.
And, on Sunday night, after arriving from work and sharing a light dinner with josh, I planned he rest of my week. Yes there was a lot to do. Yes, there are humongous challenges, on every front and sometimes all at once, but the fact that I can think up words to describe them, write them down on my planner with my RVM print made prettier by m favorite red gel pen, I feel they are at least half done.
I am in control. What a nice thought to bring to bed.
A mother's love
Images of the arrest of Jason Ivler haunt me. I was home all morning, fixing up things in the living room while tuned in to the news. It was Monday and I needed to rejoin the real world after a gratifying weekend. Then I learned that the NBI had finally arrested this fugitive, the killer of another young man in a case of road rage.
I don't like people with temper/anger management problems. I would rather not be associated with them in any way. This got me into thinking about Marlene Aguilar, Ivler's Filipino mother, who was also arrested for harboring her son and lying to authorities on his whereabouts. Why, she even made a public plea – in makeup and in tears -- for him to turn himself in!
This morning she had no make up whatsoever and it was clear she had woken up to a nightmare. She had been keeping her son all along in a secret room in her house in Blue Ridge, Quezon City.
Maybe she was scared of her son too and did not know how to manage him. She loved him that much? Would any mother have done the same? I can imagine how a mother would put herself on the line to protect her child, but when the child kills another human being just because he was having a bad day, would she still go as far?
Would I go as far?
I like to think I'm raising my kids so they would be responsible adults later on. Im basically doing it alone so while others may feel it is doubly hard, I say it's actually easier since I am unchallenged. I try to be a good example, to use reason instead of passion. I go from the very basic tenet that your own cubbyhole/ study table/ shoe cabinet/ closet is your own space so your things go only there and not anywhere else. If you lose something, or find your space upside down, blame yourself.
And when somebody gets on your nerves, you don't shout or throw things at him. You keep quiet, make yourself scarce, and wait until you're calm before you talk to that fellow and tell him why. I employ the same style when I get upset with them. I believe it's more effective, though not easy. I try hard.
And so I hope I won't ever have to have a dilemma remotely akin to what Marlene went through. In handcuffs herself, she can only look on as her son was dragged away by NBI agents, even as he howled in pain (he engaged authorities in a shooting match) and resistance.
Genetics aside, kids are largely how we raise them. And raising them well means loving them enough to help them help themselves. We do a great job when our kids do not ever feel the need to run to us for cover when they mess up instead of owning up to the consequences of their actions.
I don't like people with temper/anger management problems. I would rather not be associated with them in any way. This got me into thinking about Marlene Aguilar, Ivler's Filipino mother, who was also arrested for harboring her son and lying to authorities on his whereabouts. Why, she even made a public plea – in makeup and in tears -- for him to turn himself in!
This morning she had no make up whatsoever and it was clear she had woken up to a nightmare. She had been keeping her son all along in a secret room in her house in Blue Ridge, Quezon City.
Maybe she was scared of her son too and did not know how to manage him. She loved him that much? Would any mother have done the same? I can imagine how a mother would put herself on the line to protect her child, but when the child kills another human being just because he was having a bad day, would she still go as far?
Would I go as far?
I like to think I'm raising my kids so they would be responsible adults later on. Im basically doing it alone so while others may feel it is doubly hard, I say it's actually easier since I am unchallenged. I try to be a good example, to use reason instead of passion. I go from the very basic tenet that your own cubbyhole/ study table/ shoe cabinet/ closet is your own space so your things go only there and not anywhere else. If you lose something, or find your space upside down, blame yourself.
And when somebody gets on your nerves, you don't shout or throw things at him. You keep quiet, make yourself scarce, and wait until you're calm before you talk to that fellow and tell him why. I employ the same style when I get upset with them. I believe it's more effective, though not easy. I try hard.
And so I hope I won't ever have to have a dilemma remotely akin to what Marlene went through. In handcuffs herself, she can only look on as her son was dragged away by NBI agents, even as he howled in pain (he engaged authorities in a shooting match) and resistance.
Genetics aside, kids are largely how we raise them. And raising them well means loving them enough to help them help themselves. We do a great job when our kids do not ever feel the need to run to us for cover when they mess up instead of owning up to the consequences of their actions.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Discord over an accord
Discord over an accord
Blurb: In Copenhagen, didn't world leaders just agree to keep talking?
Imagine a gathering of forty or so people at the function room of a Japanese restaurant in Quezon City. It looked like any other meeting among friends. These people had been moving in the same circles for
several years now, brought together by their common passion – the environment. They were now everywhere: in the government, the diplomatic corps, the academe. Most were with civil society.
That morning, everybody was buzzing about the just-concluded climate change conference in Copenhagen. The meetings in Denmark were aimed at obtaining commitments from 193 countries, developed and developing alike, on how they would cut global emissions to lower the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. At the same time, the parties would figure out how best to help the most vulnerable nations cope with the effects of global warming.
Some of those present in the meeting had just returned from Copenhagen, participating in different capacities. Actually, they had been to many other talks leading to this last one -- all the way from Bali, Bangkok and Poznan. All were eager to share their observations, experiences and opinions.
Merely “noted”
The Copenhagen Accord was born at the end of the two-week talks. Western media hailed it as a victory. The 2009 Nobel Peace laureate, United States President Barack Obama, the quintessential deal broker, was there, after all.
Actually, the accord was a three-page document that says the Conference of Parties was
agreeing to talk some more. There will be another meeting in June, followed by the next conference in Mexico in November or December. Nations are given until the last day of this month to declare heir adoption of the accord and submit their commitments to the secretariat.
The document says the parties recognize “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” and that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius. Developing countries, though, want the target pegged to 1.5 degrees by a specific year. The accord also says that the peaking of global and national emissions should be “as soon as possible.” Vague, critics say. Scientists say greenhouse levels should peak within five years if the human race even hopes to reverse the warming. Financing, on the other hand – and billions of dollars have been pledged during the meetings – will flow through the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund.
But the accord was arrived at during the last hour of the negotiations, borne out of a meeting among the “Friends of the President” -- a 26-member group of nations that the president of the conference said was “representative” of the plenary. Apparently, with the heads of state already arriving in the city, they felt they cad to come up with something. Anything, in fact. But there was just so much disagreement over the document that agreeing on it was just impossible. Hence, the parties just decided to “take note” of the accord. What does “taking note” mean? It is “a way of recognizing is there but not going so far as to associate yourself with it,” explains United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change executive director Yvo de Boer.
The accord was also only politically binding, contrary to the wishes of the developing countries. The words “legally binding” were conspicuously removed from earlier drafts.
Some ugly truths
There were some gains in this round of talks, according to the Filipinos who were there or who monitored the proceedings. There was deeper and better quality participation by the developing countries. But this participation was not enough to do away with fundamental and hence persistent stalemates between and among countries, especially in mitigation and financing. Emission cuts, of course, is not congruous with increasing economic output. Towards the end, there were even insinuations that financing would be closely linked to a country's adoption of the accord.
In sum, the supposed leadership and statesmanship of developed countries for the shared destiny of the planet took a backseat to their national interests.
But more than the outcome of the talks (or the lack of it), what outraged these observers was the way processes and even basic decency were disregarded. “Disappointed” would be an understatement, another Filipino delegate to Copenhagen said. The negotiations, especially in the few remaining hours, were opaque. What the group of 26 countries managed to arrive at – what became the Copenhagen Accord-- was rammed into the throats of the remaining countries in an effort to get them to agree. They didn't, and, as we know now, the conference ended with a resounding “Noted!”
Philippine negotiators had their own share of woes. They encountered accreditation problems and were not pleased at all to learn that the official delegation was a presidential delegation. Some of the Filipinos who knew the issues like the back of their hand had to be adopted by other countries just to be able to join the talks. “The Philippine delegation has to jell,” one of them said. It didn’t during this last one.
Many of those present in the Quezon City gathering think the Philippines should not rush in adopting the accord because it reflects so little of the science-based discussions they have been discussing over the years.
(Bad) deal or no deal
In the meantime, can the planet really afford to wait for climate negotiators to get their act together and forge a good-enough global deal?
It won't happen in his lifetime, another delegate to Copenhagen, an academician, concedes. He describes his moment of epiphany, walking in the snow back to his hotel. It was dawn and the previous day's talks had just wrapped up – another day of talking without breaking the deadlock. It occurred to him that if the world, especially the United States and China, could not overcome their fundamental differences, there was no chance that the international community would come to an acceptable deal anytime soon.
By acceptable, he meant that global temperatures would rise no higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius and the greenhouse gas levels would go down to 350 parts per million (it is now 372 ppm; scientists say if 450 ppm is reached, the world will reach the tipping point of irreversible climate change) within 10 to 20 years.
That recognition was, to him, as liberating as it was depressing.
This expert thinks the focus now should be on adaptation, especially for vulnerable countries
like the Philippines. He also suggests that we rethink the all-or-nothing, single-undertaking approach. There has been some progress made, especially in the area of reforestation. It is the aspects of mitigation and finance that are tricky. And while we must keep working on this as we join forces with the rest of the developing world, we should make do with what we have.
Other participants said that what made Copenhagen such a disappointment was the lack of sincerity of the representatives of the developed countries, who made such a big to-do about the conference in the media but employed their rogue behavior during the conference proper.
Okay, it happened, and yes, it was sad, but in the meantime, what can we do? Surely we can do better than agree to talk some more. The clock is ticking, after all.
The way forward
Given the many stumbling blocks, climate change advocates and the populace in general should focus on the way forward. For example, the implementing rules and regulations of the Climate Change Act of
2009 is now being drafted. The problem is that the Office of the Presidential Adviser on
Climate Change is reportedly under pressure to finish the IRR before May, even as it says that it has a provision making it easier for civil society organizations to engage with the government on
various aspects of the law. The non-government organizations hope this is not just lip service as they wonder: why the rush? They would rather have inputs from the next administration. Since the president sits as chairman of the Climate Change Commission, he will have a direct hand in the commission's work. The order of the day is to impress upon all presidential candidates that climate change, while not as sensational as the other problems of the nation, is just as urgent.
Again we are reminded that ultimately, the really fundamental stalemates are not questions of science, politics, even diplomacy. They are rather issues of basic human behavior – ego, selflessness, sincerity and trust, without which the most sophisticated meetings don't stand a chance to succeed.
adellechua@gmail.com
Blurb: In Copenhagen, didn't world leaders just agree to keep talking?
Imagine a gathering of forty or so people at the function room of a Japanese restaurant in Quezon City. It looked like any other meeting among friends. These people had been moving in the same circles for
several years now, brought together by their common passion – the environment. They were now everywhere: in the government, the diplomatic corps, the academe. Most were with civil society.
That morning, everybody was buzzing about the just-concluded climate change conference in Copenhagen. The meetings in Denmark were aimed at obtaining commitments from 193 countries, developed and developing alike, on how they would cut global emissions to lower the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. At the same time, the parties would figure out how best to help the most vulnerable nations cope with the effects of global warming.
Some of those present in the meeting had just returned from Copenhagen, participating in different capacities. Actually, they had been to many other talks leading to this last one -- all the way from Bali, Bangkok and Poznan. All were eager to share their observations, experiences and opinions.
Merely “noted”
The Copenhagen Accord was born at the end of the two-week talks. Western media hailed it as a victory. The 2009 Nobel Peace laureate, United States President Barack Obama, the quintessential deal broker, was there, after all.
Actually, the accord was a three-page document that says the Conference of Parties was
agreeing to talk some more. There will be another meeting in June, followed by the next conference in Mexico in November or December. Nations are given until the last day of this month to declare heir adoption of the accord and submit their commitments to the secretariat.
The document says the parties recognize “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” and that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius. Developing countries, though, want the target pegged to 1.5 degrees by a specific year. The accord also says that the peaking of global and national emissions should be “as soon as possible.” Vague, critics say. Scientists say greenhouse levels should peak within five years if the human race even hopes to reverse the warming. Financing, on the other hand – and billions of dollars have been pledged during the meetings – will flow through the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund.
But the accord was arrived at during the last hour of the negotiations, borne out of a meeting among the “Friends of the President” -- a 26-member group of nations that the president of the conference said was “representative” of the plenary. Apparently, with the heads of state already arriving in the city, they felt they cad to come up with something. Anything, in fact. But there was just so much disagreement over the document that agreeing on it was just impossible. Hence, the parties just decided to “take note” of the accord. What does “taking note” mean? It is “a way of recognizing is there but not going so far as to associate yourself with it,” explains United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change executive director Yvo de Boer.
The accord was also only politically binding, contrary to the wishes of the developing countries. The words “legally binding” were conspicuously removed from earlier drafts.
Some ugly truths
There were some gains in this round of talks, according to the Filipinos who were there or who monitored the proceedings. There was deeper and better quality participation by the developing countries. But this participation was not enough to do away with fundamental and hence persistent stalemates between and among countries, especially in mitigation and financing. Emission cuts, of course, is not congruous with increasing economic output. Towards the end, there were even insinuations that financing would be closely linked to a country's adoption of the accord.
In sum, the supposed leadership and statesmanship of developed countries for the shared destiny of the planet took a backseat to their national interests.
But more than the outcome of the talks (or the lack of it), what outraged these observers was the way processes and even basic decency were disregarded. “Disappointed” would be an understatement, another Filipino delegate to Copenhagen said. The negotiations, especially in the few remaining hours, were opaque. What the group of 26 countries managed to arrive at – what became the Copenhagen Accord-- was rammed into the throats of the remaining countries in an effort to get them to agree. They didn't, and, as we know now, the conference ended with a resounding “Noted!”
Philippine negotiators had their own share of woes. They encountered accreditation problems and were not pleased at all to learn that the official delegation was a presidential delegation. Some of the Filipinos who knew the issues like the back of their hand had to be adopted by other countries just to be able to join the talks. “The Philippine delegation has to jell,” one of them said. It didn’t during this last one.
Many of those present in the Quezon City gathering think the Philippines should not rush in adopting the accord because it reflects so little of the science-based discussions they have been discussing over the years.
(Bad) deal or no deal
In the meantime, can the planet really afford to wait for climate negotiators to get their act together and forge a good-enough global deal?
It won't happen in his lifetime, another delegate to Copenhagen, an academician, concedes. He describes his moment of epiphany, walking in the snow back to his hotel. It was dawn and the previous day's talks had just wrapped up – another day of talking without breaking the deadlock. It occurred to him that if the world, especially the United States and China, could not overcome their fundamental differences, there was no chance that the international community would come to an acceptable deal anytime soon.
By acceptable, he meant that global temperatures would rise no higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius and the greenhouse gas levels would go down to 350 parts per million (it is now 372 ppm; scientists say if 450 ppm is reached, the world will reach the tipping point of irreversible climate change) within 10 to 20 years.
That recognition was, to him, as liberating as it was depressing.
This expert thinks the focus now should be on adaptation, especially for vulnerable countries
like the Philippines. He also suggests that we rethink the all-or-nothing, single-undertaking approach. There has been some progress made, especially in the area of reforestation. It is the aspects of mitigation and finance that are tricky. And while we must keep working on this as we join forces with the rest of the developing world, we should make do with what we have.
Other participants said that what made Copenhagen such a disappointment was the lack of sincerity of the representatives of the developed countries, who made such a big to-do about the conference in the media but employed their rogue behavior during the conference proper.
Okay, it happened, and yes, it was sad, but in the meantime, what can we do? Surely we can do better than agree to talk some more. The clock is ticking, after all.
The way forward
Given the many stumbling blocks, climate change advocates and the populace in general should focus on the way forward. For example, the implementing rules and regulations of the Climate Change Act of
2009 is now being drafted. The problem is that the Office of the Presidential Adviser on
Climate Change is reportedly under pressure to finish the IRR before May, even as it says that it has a provision making it easier for civil society organizations to engage with the government on
various aspects of the law. The non-government organizations hope this is not just lip service as they wonder: why the rush? They would rather have inputs from the next administration. Since the president sits as chairman of the Climate Change Commission, he will have a direct hand in the commission's work. The order of the day is to impress upon all presidential candidates that climate change, while not as sensational as the other problems of the nation, is just as urgent.
Again we are reminded that ultimately, the really fundamental stalemates are not questions of science, politics, even diplomacy. They are rather issues of basic human behavior – ego, selflessness, sincerity and trust, without which the most sophisticated meetings don't stand a chance to succeed.
adellechua@gmail.com
Monday, January 11, 2010
Voting on reason
published 11 January 2010, MST
How do we choose a president? How should we?
Filipinos have been known to vote with anything but their minds. We buy into gimmicks and good looks, confuse the silver screen with real life, profess devotion to the underdog or decide in a wave of sympathy. We support whoever promises to improve our lives, settle for anybody whom we perceive to be the least evil among those in the running, or simply heed the recommendations of our church leaders.
Indeed these means to install public officials do not partake of an empirical, deliberate character. But if we really want change to happen, we should first start changing the way we choose our leaders.
An evolving project
Months before the presidential elections of 2004, the People Management Association of the Philippines, a group of human resource management and industrial relations professionals, conducted a research project which tried to determine the key roles of a president. The Management Association of the Philippines,
Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines and the Philippine Movement for Good Governance also helped put this project in place.
The research team looked into the principles of numerous management gurus and conducted an interview with two former presidents, a Senate president, a chief justice of the Supreme Court, a former chairman of the Commission on Elections, former Cabinet members, a labor federation president, publishers, journalists, political analysts, Muslim leaders and others who had a ringside view into the workings of the Office of the President.
The candidates in the 2004 presidential race were then evaluated on the basis of how they were likely to live up to the presidential roles determined by the research. According to Rex Drilon II, chief operating officer of Ortigas and Company Limited Partnership, a member of the PMAP research team and speakers bureau and now chairman of the corporate governance committee of the Management Association of the Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ranked first, the late Senator Raul Roco second, Senator Panfilo Lacson third,and the late movie actor Fernando Poe Jr. came in last.
But events in succeeding years prompted the team to modify the criteria, Drilon said. “The recent past has shown the overwhelming value of character in determining the success of leaders.” As a result, the scorecard now includes a section on the attributes of the ideal official.
The modified scorecard is contained in a flyer as part of the voter education project of the FINEX, the Institute for Solidarity in Asia, the Makati Business Club, the MAP and the PMAP. Drilon says that these groups are initially working to print half a million copies of the flyer for distribution to all the employees of their member-companies. They are also having a Filipino version of the scorecard. They would not mind at all if more copies are generated so that the more people from all walks of life can be guided.
The 2010 version
There are five roles of a chief executive, the scorecard says. A president has to be a navigator, a mobilizer, a servant leader, a captivator and a guardian of the national wealth and patrimony.
As navigator, the president acts as a strategist. He must have the clear vision to steer the country to its destination as a just and humane society, address poverty and other social problems, discern and prioritize among conflicting interests with the common good in mind, and address and manage crises.
As mobilizer, he leads the executive department. He pro-actively builds alliances to achieve complex objectives. He builds consensus. He attracts and empowers the right people with the right skills and motivations for government service. He anticipates and diffuses road blocks. He uses appropriate and legitimate persuasion techniques to gain support from from decision makers.
As servant leader, the president serves the people with a genuinely caring heart and is a good example to follow. He sacrifices personal, family or other vested interests for the common good. He is humble and reaches out to all sectors. He has a good work ethic and is a continuous learner.
As captivator, a president inspires. He elicits unity, trust and optimism among the people. He builds confidence in the presidency and in the government. He understands the ideals and aspirations of the ordinary Filipino. He conveys a simple but compelling picture of the country’s visions and goals. He effectively partners with media to inform and build support for programs and advocacies.
Finally, as guardian of the national wealth and patrimony, he ensures that the national wealth and resources are used properly. He has strong political will. He champions the fight against graft and corruption, ensures a level playing field and promotes competence and professionalism.
Equally important as the roles are the attributes of the president. These are easy to remember—the five Cs stand for character (integrity as shown in his personal vision and mission), competence (an excellent manager and leader: analytical, creative, articulate, a user of technology, a conceptual thinker and an intellectual heavyweight), commitment (in the defense of the Constitution and democracy, the eradication of poverty, protection of the environment and implementation of educational reforms), compassion (a person for others), and puts country above self (exemplifies the nation’s core values as embodied in the Constitution).
The scorecard asks voters to rate the presidential candidates in all ten respects (5 roles and 5 attributes) using a scale of 1 to 100 where 100 is outstanding. Total scores should determine their decision.
Making the effort
There are other factors that cannot be measured that influence voters’ decisions. A person may choose a candidate just because he is a relative, a friend, or a town-mate. The idea, however, is to stay as close to the criteria to arrive at a rational and logical decision.
It may be argued that the very act of ascribing scores per criterion to a candidate is a subjective move in itself, and hence the exercise is not as objective or empirical as it is made out to be. That’s true, too, but at least there is a step to take a good hard look at a candidate against a set of metrics. That’s ultimately more structured than, say, voting for somebody for the last name he bears, his charisma, his promises or the “good vibes” that he exudes.
Employees of the member-companies of the above-mentioned organizations are fortunate to be receiving such a guide that respects their ability to make rational decisions.
Would it not be good if the Filipino version of the scorecard can be made available to depressed communities in urban and rural areas in the country, as well? Company employees, being educated, already know they must subject their candidates to scrutiny. We wish the same could be said of the masses who have less sophisticated ways of choosing whom to vote for. After all, they comprise the larger part of voters in this country.
In the end, the metrics don’t really guarantee that the highest scorer would be the best choice. But it raises the likelihood of success. There are other criteria that can be used, too, but the point is that choosing a leader does not have to be done in a trance.
It’s time to acknowledge that Filipinos can think for themselves and not be swayed by no-brainer means employed by politicians who seem to be uncomfortable being placed under a magnifying glass.
And then someday we can claim that we truly get the leaders we deserve – and do so with a smile instead of the smirk with which we utter it today.
adellechua@gmail.com
**
Readers' comments:
Hi Ms. Adelle,
That's an excellent commentary you made in your column today. I am forwarding it to my friends and former colleagues in the US and in Saudi Arabia.
Thanx
Ronnie A. Dulay
Cyber City Teleservices (Philippines)
Clark Freeport Zone, Philippines 2023
Tel: (63-45)-599-5353 ext-10187
Toll Free in US (800)-254-4550
e-mail:rdulay@cctll.com
www.cctll.com
How do we choose a president? How should we?
Filipinos have been known to vote with anything but their minds. We buy into gimmicks and good looks, confuse the silver screen with real life, profess devotion to the underdog or decide in a wave of sympathy. We support whoever promises to improve our lives, settle for anybody whom we perceive to be the least evil among those in the running, or simply heed the recommendations of our church leaders.
Indeed these means to install public officials do not partake of an empirical, deliberate character. But if we really want change to happen, we should first start changing the way we choose our leaders.
An evolving project
Months before the presidential elections of 2004, the People Management Association of the Philippines, a group of human resource management and industrial relations professionals, conducted a research project which tried to determine the key roles of a president. The Management Association of the Philippines,
Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines and the Philippine Movement for Good Governance also helped put this project in place.
The research team looked into the principles of numerous management gurus and conducted an interview with two former presidents, a Senate president, a chief justice of the Supreme Court, a former chairman of the Commission on Elections, former Cabinet members, a labor federation president, publishers, journalists, political analysts, Muslim leaders and others who had a ringside view into the workings of the Office of the President.
The candidates in the 2004 presidential race were then evaluated on the basis of how they were likely to live up to the presidential roles determined by the research. According to Rex Drilon II, chief operating officer of Ortigas and Company Limited Partnership, a member of the PMAP research team and speakers bureau and now chairman of the corporate governance committee of the Management Association of the Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ranked first, the late Senator Raul Roco second, Senator Panfilo Lacson third,and the late movie actor Fernando Poe Jr. came in last.
But events in succeeding years prompted the team to modify the criteria, Drilon said. “The recent past has shown the overwhelming value of character in determining the success of leaders.” As a result, the scorecard now includes a section on the attributes of the ideal official.
The modified scorecard is contained in a flyer as part of the voter education project of the FINEX, the Institute for Solidarity in Asia, the Makati Business Club, the MAP and the PMAP. Drilon says that these groups are initially working to print half a million copies of the flyer for distribution to all the employees of their member-companies. They are also having a Filipino version of the scorecard. They would not mind at all if more copies are generated so that the more people from all walks of life can be guided.
The 2010 version
There are five roles of a chief executive, the scorecard says. A president has to be a navigator, a mobilizer, a servant leader, a captivator and a guardian of the national wealth and patrimony.
As navigator, the president acts as a strategist. He must have the clear vision to steer the country to its destination as a just and humane society, address poverty and other social problems, discern and prioritize among conflicting interests with the common good in mind, and address and manage crises.
As mobilizer, he leads the executive department. He pro-actively builds alliances to achieve complex objectives. He builds consensus. He attracts and empowers the right people with the right skills and motivations for government service. He anticipates and diffuses road blocks. He uses appropriate and legitimate persuasion techniques to gain support from from decision makers.
As servant leader, the president serves the people with a genuinely caring heart and is a good example to follow. He sacrifices personal, family or other vested interests for the common good. He is humble and reaches out to all sectors. He has a good work ethic and is a continuous learner.
As captivator, a president inspires. He elicits unity, trust and optimism among the people. He builds confidence in the presidency and in the government. He understands the ideals and aspirations of the ordinary Filipino. He conveys a simple but compelling picture of the country’s visions and goals. He effectively partners with media to inform and build support for programs and advocacies.
Finally, as guardian of the national wealth and patrimony, he ensures that the national wealth and resources are used properly. He has strong political will. He champions the fight against graft and corruption, ensures a level playing field and promotes competence and professionalism.
Equally important as the roles are the attributes of the president. These are easy to remember—the five Cs stand for character (integrity as shown in his personal vision and mission), competence (an excellent manager and leader: analytical, creative, articulate, a user of technology, a conceptual thinker and an intellectual heavyweight), commitment (in the defense of the Constitution and democracy, the eradication of poverty, protection of the environment and implementation of educational reforms), compassion (a person for others), and puts country above self (exemplifies the nation’s core values as embodied in the Constitution).
The scorecard asks voters to rate the presidential candidates in all ten respects (5 roles and 5 attributes) using a scale of 1 to 100 where 100 is outstanding. Total scores should determine their decision.
Making the effort
There are other factors that cannot be measured that influence voters’ decisions. A person may choose a candidate just because he is a relative, a friend, or a town-mate. The idea, however, is to stay as close to the criteria to arrive at a rational and logical decision.
It may be argued that the very act of ascribing scores per criterion to a candidate is a subjective move in itself, and hence the exercise is not as objective or empirical as it is made out to be. That’s true, too, but at least there is a step to take a good hard look at a candidate against a set of metrics. That’s ultimately more structured than, say, voting for somebody for the last name he bears, his charisma, his promises or the “good vibes” that he exudes.
Employees of the member-companies of the above-mentioned organizations are fortunate to be receiving such a guide that respects their ability to make rational decisions.
Would it not be good if the Filipino version of the scorecard can be made available to depressed communities in urban and rural areas in the country, as well? Company employees, being educated, already know they must subject their candidates to scrutiny. We wish the same could be said of the masses who have less sophisticated ways of choosing whom to vote for. After all, they comprise the larger part of voters in this country.
In the end, the metrics don’t really guarantee that the highest scorer would be the best choice. But it raises the likelihood of success. There are other criteria that can be used, too, but the point is that choosing a leader does not have to be done in a trance.
It’s time to acknowledge that Filipinos can think for themselves and not be swayed by no-brainer means employed by politicians who seem to be uncomfortable being placed under a magnifying glass.
And then someday we can claim that we truly get the leaders we deserve – and do so with a smile instead of the smirk with which we utter it today.
adellechua@gmail.com
**
Readers' comments:
Hi Ms. Adelle,
That's an excellent commentary you made in your column today. I am forwarding it to my friends and former colleagues in the US and in Saudi Arabia.
Thanx
Ronnie A. Dulay
Cyber City Teleservices (Philippines)
Clark Freeport Zone, Philippines 2023
Tel: (63-45)-599-5353 ext-10187
Toll Free in US (800)-254-4550
e-mail:rdulay@cctll.com
www.cctll.com
Sunday, January 3, 2010
One clear day
I recently saw a BBC show that featured the Nobel laureates (except for the recipient of the peace award, US President Barack Obama) for 2009. Most of them were men and women of science; one was a writer, a Romanian-born woman who fled the communist world in the 1980s.
Aside from making me want to get my hands on Herta Muller's works, the show reminded me that all great works stemmed from passion AND hard work.
Two of the physicists, Willard Boyle and George Smith, were recognized for the imaging work that they did forty years ago. Another, Charles Kao, was honored for his pioneering work in fiber optic technology, also many decades ago. Now this man suffers from Alzheimer's disease, but his wife -- who says, tearfully, that what she misses the most are the intellectual conversations she used to share with her husband -- is sure he appreciates how big a deal it is to win the Nobel.
One of three recipients of the award for physiology or medicine, Carol Greider, stumbled into a breakthrough in enzyme research one Christmas morning. This is very telling: why work on Christmas, unless your work is one you are truly and deeply passionate about? One of the economics laureates, Elinor Ostrom, studied the best possible way to manage common resources like water and forests. She was driven by the poverty from which deprived her of access to the most basic things as a child.
Muller felt her writing was a midst of survival amid repression in Eastern Europe. She did flee to the West in the mid-1980s but memories of her early years continued to haunt her “For a long time after arriving in West Berlin, my eyes hurt. I've never seen so much color,” she said. The grayness of her previous life, as well as from the knowledge that her father was an SS officer “who never talked about the war, like it was taboo,” filled her with the longing to express herself.
Alas, not even the Nobel Prize can erase bad memories.
What the Prize does,however, is to inspire others to do what they were meant to do, and exceptionally well.
**
On New Year's Eve, as others prepared elaborate meals for the media noche, lit the firecrackers they had just bought or watched year-ender programs on television, I rearranged the furniture in my living room. The children had gone to sleep after dinner, and our maid was on vacation, so I took advantage of my solitude.
I wanted to create a new atmosphere in the house by having more balance,efficiency and space. I used the two tall bookshelves as dividers between my home office and the rest of the first floor. I put the three-level cubbyholes on top of a long low cabinet. I dusted and swept. By the time I finished, there was a lot more room, all right. I was pleased with what I had done.
I had just enough time to rest for a while, take a quick shower, heat the food (lasagna and pizza, pre-ordered) before I had to wake the children up at a quarter to twelve. The kids and I shared a nice meal as we watched some concert DVDs, drowning out the blast noises from the street. I asked them whether they had drawn up their plans and targets for 2010 (the phrase “New Year's Resolutions”, an overused one, would have made them roll their eyes); they said they were still working on them and that we could exchange notes when they were done. The clock struck twelve, we said our Happy New Years, put away the dishes and then went to bed.
(It was on the first day of the year we cooked a real meal – a quick-fix fettuccine in tuna pesto in just-right servings. We did not really subscribe to the belief that one's dining table should be overflowing with round fruits and an excess of every dish imaginable to ensure prosperity the whole year round.)
In the morning I organized the contents of my bookshelves and the kids' cubbyholes. I had no time to do this the night before.
And in the afternoon, in lieu of the luxurious holiday nap, I stayed in the spare room and the terrace of the second floor, which had become a convenient dumping ground for things we did not need but whose fate we were too lazy to decide. When you have children aged 15, 13, 9 and 7 in the house, you have every imaginable item ranging from old test papers, broken crayons, discarded toys, guitar straps, pictures of friends, second-hand paperbacks whose covers have been torn off, even printouts of previous things you have written.
Dealing with these was not easy. There was always the temptation of reading an old notebook or smiling at wacky pictures. The task of sorting required discipline and focus. I had to stick to the categories of “garbage”, “for washing”, “ for repair.” I also had to be firm on whether I was still going to need/ want a certain item at some later date, keep it, remember that I kept it, and where. Or whether I could do without it. I must have spent over three hours upstairs; fortunately, the afternoon breeze was lovely.
What was even lovelier was finding treasures I thought I had lost – a special-edition magazine whose contents I could not find online, a flask disk that contained old files, a long-lost pair of shades, my older daughter's letters to me when she was seven, even the soundtrack CD of Leaving Las Vegas.
I had to abandon the task at dusk, although I wanted to do more. Some of the children's friends would be dropping by, I was told, and so I hurried to fix myself and something to serve them, besides. I made a program to spend the next two Fridays finishing my clearing activity.
Even then, I already had a mountain of items for disposal. Again there was a lot more room. I felt light, purposeful and optimistic. The exercise was like a domestic detox experience; it educated me on what was really important. You rejoice at finding long-lost treasures while getting rid of junk that had accumulated, without your noticing it, over time. You now have room for new treasures, real ones worth keeping. You become wiser and more able to tell between what you need,what you want,what you can live without and what can make you live better.
On the first day of 2010 I did not go out of the house at all. I had no great holiday adventure to speak of, no out-of-town trips, grand makeovers or insanely abundant food on the dining table. But I felt wonderful. It was one of the best New Year celebrations I ever had.
A clean slate, best symbolized by a New Year, is liberating. It does not absolve us of the consequences of past actions, but it gives us room to make new memories as wiser,more deliberate individuals.
**
Readers' comments:
Adelle:
I like it for its light treatment. I was "overdosed" by the New
Years's celebration. Your article reminded me of a practice we
continue. We gather, as many fruits as we can, we had 21 in all,
in a container at the center of the table. It is hoped the following
year, would be bountiful to us, as the past. Is this superstition>
If, it is. It is a nice one. Warmest regard to you and yours> Did
i read somewhere, you reside in the U>S?
maximo p. fabella
Aside from making me want to get my hands on Herta Muller's works, the show reminded me that all great works stemmed from passion AND hard work.
Two of the physicists, Willard Boyle and George Smith, were recognized for the imaging work that they did forty years ago. Another, Charles Kao, was honored for his pioneering work in fiber optic technology, also many decades ago. Now this man suffers from Alzheimer's disease, but his wife -- who says, tearfully, that what she misses the most are the intellectual conversations she used to share with her husband -- is sure he appreciates how big a deal it is to win the Nobel.
One of three recipients of the award for physiology or medicine, Carol Greider, stumbled into a breakthrough in enzyme research one Christmas morning. This is very telling: why work on Christmas, unless your work is one you are truly and deeply passionate about? One of the economics laureates, Elinor Ostrom, studied the best possible way to manage common resources like water and forests. She was driven by the poverty from which deprived her of access to the most basic things as a child.
Muller felt her writing was a midst of survival amid repression in Eastern Europe. She did flee to the West in the mid-1980s but memories of her early years continued to haunt her “For a long time after arriving in West Berlin, my eyes hurt. I've never seen so much color,” she said. The grayness of her previous life, as well as from the knowledge that her father was an SS officer “who never talked about the war, like it was taboo,” filled her with the longing to express herself.
Alas, not even the Nobel Prize can erase bad memories.
What the Prize does,however, is to inspire others to do what they were meant to do, and exceptionally well.
**
On New Year's Eve, as others prepared elaborate meals for the media noche, lit the firecrackers they had just bought or watched year-ender programs on television, I rearranged the furniture in my living room. The children had gone to sleep after dinner, and our maid was on vacation, so I took advantage of my solitude.
I wanted to create a new atmosphere in the house by having more balance,efficiency and space. I used the two tall bookshelves as dividers between my home office and the rest of the first floor. I put the three-level cubbyholes on top of a long low cabinet. I dusted and swept. By the time I finished, there was a lot more room, all right. I was pleased with what I had done.
I had just enough time to rest for a while, take a quick shower, heat the food (lasagna and pizza, pre-ordered) before I had to wake the children up at a quarter to twelve. The kids and I shared a nice meal as we watched some concert DVDs, drowning out the blast noises from the street. I asked them whether they had drawn up their plans and targets for 2010 (the phrase “New Year's Resolutions”, an overused one, would have made them roll their eyes); they said they were still working on them and that we could exchange notes when they were done. The clock struck twelve, we said our Happy New Years, put away the dishes and then went to bed.
(It was on the first day of the year we cooked a real meal – a quick-fix fettuccine in tuna pesto in just-right servings. We did not really subscribe to the belief that one's dining table should be overflowing with round fruits and an excess of every dish imaginable to ensure prosperity the whole year round.)
In the morning I organized the contents of my bookshelves and the kids' cubbyholes. I had no time to do this the night before.
And in the afternoon, in lieu of the luxurious holiday nap, I stayed in the spare room and the terrace of the second floor, which had become a convenient dumping ground for things we did not need but whose fate we were too lazy to decide. When you have children aged 15, 13, 9 and 7 in the house, you have every imaginable item ranging from old test papers, broken crayons, discarded toys, guitar straps, pictures of friends, second-hand paperbacks whose covers have been torn off, even printouts of previous things you have written.
Dealing with these was not easy. There was always the temptation of reading an old notebook or smiling at wacky pictures. The task of sorting required discipline and focus. I had to stick to the categories of “garbage”, “for washing”, “ for repair.” I also had to be firm on whether I was still going to need/ want a certain item at some later date, keep it, remember that I kept it, and where. Or whether I could do without it. I must have spent over three hours upstairs; fortunately, the afternoon breeze was lovely.
What was even lovelier was finding treasures I thought I had lost – a special-edition magazine whose contents I could not find online, a flask disk that contained old files, a long-lost pair of shades, my older daughter's letters to me when she was seven, even the soundtrack CD of Leaving Las Vegas.
I had to abandon the task at dusk, although I wanted to do more. Some of the children's friends would be dropping by, I was told, and so I hurried to fix myself and something to serve them, besides. I made a program to spend the next two Fridays finishing my clearing activity.
Even then, I already had a mountain of items for disposal. Again there was a lot more room. I felt light, purposeful and optimistic. The exercise was like a domestic detox experience; it educated me on what was really important. You rejoice at finding long-lost treasures while getting rid of junk that had accumulated, without your noticing it, over time. You now have room for new treasures, real ones worth keeping. You become wiser and more able to tell between what you need,what you want,what you can live without and what can make you live better.
On the first day of 2010 I did not go out of the house at all. I had no great holiday adventure to speak of, no out-of-town trips, grand makeovers or insanely abundant food on the dining table. But I felt wonderful. It was one of the best New Year celebrations I ever had.
A clean slate, best symbolized by a New Year, is liberating. It does not absolve us of the consequences of past actions, but it gives us room to make new memories as wiser,more deliberate individuals.
**
Readers' comments:
Adelle:
I like it for its light treatment. I was "overdosed" by the New
Years's celebration. Your article reminded me of a practice we
continue. We gather, as many fruits as we can, we had 21 in all,
in a container at the center of the table. It is hoped the following
year, would be bountiful to us, as the past. Is this superstition>
If, it is. It is a nice one. Warmest regard to you and yours> Did
i read somewhere, you reside in the U>S?
maximo p. fabella
Sunday, December 27, 2009
(Bitter) Sweet Reunion
Ninongs and ninangs and kids. This was taken at my house on Dec. 26.
Couple-friends Ron and May and Bong and Winnie
In my previous life I belonged to a circle of couple-friends who were godfathers and godmothers of each other's children. There were five such couples – the men of which grew up together, having attended the same elementary school. The wives somehow managed to hit it off, as well,or at least suffer the company of the others.
For many years this group held Christmas and New Year parties, potluck style and with exchange gifts to match. Sometimes we drove to Tagaytay and back on a whim. The babies grew into children who ran around and played together, the wives talked about such mundane things as recipes and report cards and in-laws, while the husbands reminisced about being five-year-olds and fourth-graders together, went off for a drive and maybe did other things they didn't want their wives to know.
That was long ago. A lot of things had happened since those days. Two of the five couples had separated; three of the men had gone to the Middle East; one of the women had gone to live with her parents in Butuan City.
This Christmas became a reunion of sorts although not all the members of the original group were present. There were three gatherings in three different places, owing to the sensitivities of the estranged couples who refused to make a public appearance – and be grilled as to the whys and the how comes – together. There was not much food, to be sure, because the meetings were spontaneous, but the children, all of whom were so much bigger now but who re-connected instantly even though they had not seen each other for years, had a ball. A late afternoon snack lasted all the way to eleven o'clock at night.
In a few days, those on vacation will board their planes and everybody will resume his normal routine. It leaves a warm fuzzy feeling, though, that despite the upheavals and the decisions one makes in other aspects of one's life, there are people who will remain your friends, want to make sure you are really okay, and show concern for your children – their godchildren, after all -- as though they were their own.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Strawberry signs
One Friday afternoon in December, I was in Manila to have lunch with a friend. The trip was difficult and I was fretting over a lot of things: expenses for the upcoming holidays, my daughter's prospects for college and elswehere, the need to spend more time with bunso, as well as the deadlines I had to meet. Walking along Pedro Gil street just after alighting from the train,it began to drizzle – and I did not have an umbrella. Just great, I thought. I worried not so much about being rained on but walking on the mud and dealing with the spattering of passing vehicles. This was Manila, after all, not exactly the most pleasant-smelling place on earth.
But then I passed by strawberries wrapped in square styrofoams and being sold for fifty pesos per pack, and I managed to smile. I loved strawberries, loved the contrast of red and green, the way you can dip a piece into honey and pop it in your mouth. I loved, as well, the urgency of consuming a pack within x number of hours lest the crispness fade. And then I found myself uttering a wish, or a prayer, or whatever.
If someone would give me strawberries soon, I thought, or even something in the form of a strawberry, I could start hoping for better days. I am doing well, nowadays, of course, but I can just sink under all the pressure on my shoulders – manage my household, be a good mother, live up to being an up-and-coming writer who uses her writing to nudge people into action.
In the meantime, how about me? How about being worried about, for a change, being taken care of, being told, for once, to “Relax. Let me handle it.”? How about being asked what you need and want? Not worrying about your late-night companions in the jeepney? Being able to talk when you feel like talking? Not having to talk when you don't want to? Being gone out of somebody's way for?
Four days later, I was at a Christmas party for some NGOs and a friend, Vigie, handed me a cushion in the form of... strawberry. I thought it was something you used for pins, but the strawberry in fact transforms into a reusable bag when you turn it inside out. When you don't have use for it anymore, it becomes a strawberry again.
It's been in my bag since. I carry it around like a charm, a reminder that there is reason to be hopeful. Hope – a very nice Christmas present, indeed.
(Thanks, dear readers, for bothering with my musings. I know I have not blogged as much as I did in the beginning. I'll try to do better next year. Merry Christmas! -- Adelle)
But then I passed by strawberries wrapped in square styrofoams and being sold for fifty pesos per pack, and I managed to smile. I loved strawberries, loved the contrast of red and green, the way you can dip a piece into honey and pop it in your mouth. I loved, as well, the urgency of consuming a pack within x number of hours lest the crispness fade. And then I found myself uttering a wish, or a prayer, or whatever.
If someone would give me strawberries soon, I thought, or even something in the form of a strawberry, I could start hoping for better days. I am doing well, nowadays, of course, but I can just sink under all the pressure on my shoulders – manage my household, be a good mother, live up to being an up-and-coming writer who uses her writing to nudge people into action.
In the meantime, how about me? How about being worried about, for a change, being taken care of, being told, for once, to “Relax. Let me handle it.”? How about being asked what you need and want? Not worrying about your late-night companions in the jeepney? Being able to talk when you feel like talking? Not having to talk when you don't want to? Being gone out of somebody's way for?
Four days later, I was at a Christmas party for some NGOs and a friend, Vigie, handed me a cushion in the form of... strawberry. I thought it was something you used for pins, but the strawberry in fact transforms into a reusable bag when you turn it inside out. When you don't have use for it anymore, it becomes a strawberry again.
It's been in my bag since. I carry it around like a charm, a reminder that there is reason to be hopeful. Hope – a very nice Christmas present, indeed.
(Thanks, dear readers, for bothering with my musings. I know I have not blogged as much as I did in the beginning. I'll try to do better next year. Merry Christmas! -- Adelle)
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
All about choices
Last Tuesday I was invited to the joint Christmas party of the Philippine Legislators' Committee on Population Development and Reproductive Health Advocacy Network. The reproductive health bill may not have been passed in Congress, they said, but more Filipinos became aware of it and what it sought to do. And that, my hosts said, was a victory in itself. They gave certificates of recognition to members of the media -- including me -- who have reported on/ written about the issue and somehow sustained the debates for and against the bill.
I have written several pieces on the matter not because I want to limit the number of Filipinos. I believe, rather, that every family -- every woman -- should be able to plan and make informed choices on when she wants to bring another child into the world. Take charge, refuse to just go with flow.
How ironic it was, then, that on the day of that party, our house helper Alma told me that she was almost two months pregnant. She was nineteen and the pregnancy was unplanned. She feared her father's wrath (the family was in Pangasinan and relied partly on the money she sent them every month). She said she did not want to marry her boyfriend, whom she described as “maloko,” a milder term for a jerk.
Alma wanted to induce an abortion. She said a friend had offered to accompany her to look for the "wonder pill" that would take care of her problem. And she would do it that weekend, during her day-off.
Some of us have friends, acquaintances or even family members who have resorted to taking a few pills (usually an anti-ulcer drug, available in Manila's dingiest streets) upon learning that they were pregnant. I personally know at least three women who have done so, in varying degrees of success. These women were lucky they did not bleed themselves to death or ended up giving birth to kids with abnormalities. But these extremes happen – I am sure my NGO friends have the statistics to back it up.
I waited for the perfect opportunity to talk to Alma and tell her how I, as her employer and hopefully some sort of an older sister, felt. Much as I was pushing for empowerment via choice, I did not think that anybody had the right to terminate a life that had already started inside a woman's womb.
There were no further choices to be made now. The only point of choice was that moment when my helper decided to have unprotected sex with the jerk, and before that, when she decided to have sex with him at all regardless of possible consequences. Well, her unplanned pregnancy was a consequence of that action, and she now had to live with it.
Still, it was her life and not mine. The call was Alma's and ultimately the most I could do was to hope that her choice would be the better one. I had no authority to impose my will on her, and so that Saturday morning when she stepped out for her day off -- a trip to Quiapo, I later on learned -- I could only sigh.
I did not expect her to be back so soon. From what I've heard, these pills can make a woman bleed for several days. But two days later, there she was again at my doorstep. I asked her how she was. "Hindi natanggal, (I wasn't able to remove it), ate, ” she said. I winced at the way she referred to the baby like it was a cyst or an ingrown nail.
It's been a week since then and Alma has been moving about the house attending to her chores. I had offered her the opportunity to work until her seventh month, and to return to my house after her delivery. For now, however, she has to face the challenge of telling her parents about her condition, keeping her fingers crossed that her baby, despite those pills she took, would turn out fine.
It is sad that I have written so much about the need to make women, especially the young and the undereducated, aware that they do have a choice. Yet in my own home, my backyard, there was somebody who rushed blindly and fell anyway.
Fortunately, our fall is not our ending. Alma has the rest of her life to redeem herself, make it up to her child and make the right choices from hereon.
I have written several pieces on the matter not because I want to limit the number of Filipinos. I believe, rather, that every family -- every woman -- should be able to plan and make informed choices on when she wants to bring another child into the world. Take charge, refuse to just go with flow.
How ironic it was, then, that on the day of that party, our house helper Alma told me that she was almost two months pregnant. She was nineteen and the pregnancy was unplanned. She feared her father's wrath (the family was in Pangasinan and relied partly on the money she sent them every month). She said she did not want to marry her boyfriend, whom she described as “maloko,” a milder term for a jerk.
Alma wanted to induce an abortion. She said a friend had offered to accompany her to look for the "wonder pill" that would take care of her problem. And she would do it that weekend, during her day-off.
Some of us have friends, acquaintances or even family members who have resorted to taking a few pills (usually an anti-ulcer drug, available in Manila's dingiest streets) upon learning that they were pregnant. I personally know at least three women who have done so, in varying degrees of success. These women were lucky they did not bleed themselves to death or ended up giving birth to kids with abnormalities. But these extremes happen – I am sure my NGO friends have the statistics to back it up.
I waited for the perfect opportunity to talk to Alma and tell her how I, as her employer and hopefully some sort of an older sister, felt. Much as I was pushing for empowerment via choice, I did not think that anybody had the right to terminate a life that had already started inside a woman's womb.
There were no further choices to be made now. The only point of choice was that moment when my helper decided to have unprotected sex with the jerk, and before that, when she decided to have sex with him at all regardless of possible consequences. Well, her unplanned pregnancy was a consequence of that action, and she now had to live with it.
Still, it was her life and not mine. The call was Alma's and ultimately the most I could do was to hope that her choice would be the better one. I had no authority to impose my will on her, and so that Saturday morning when she stepped out for her day off -- a trip to Quiapo, I later on learned -- I could only sigh.
I did not expect her to be back so soon. From what I've heard, these pills can make a woman bleed for several days. But two days later, there she was again at my doorstep. I asked her how she was. "Hindi natanggal, (I wasn't able to remove it), ate, ” she said. I winced at the way she referred to the baby like it was a cyst or an ingrown nail.
It's been a week since then and Alma has been moving about the house attending to her chores. I had offered her the opportunity to work until her seventh month, and to return to my house after her delivery. For now, however, she has to face the challenge of telling her parents about her condition, keeping her fingers crossed that her baby, despite those pills she took, would turn out fine.
It is sad that I have written so much about the need to make women, especially the young and the undereducated, aware that they do have a choice. Yet in my own home, my backyard, there was somebody who rushed blindly and fell anyway.
Fortunately, our fall is not our ending. Alma has the rest of her life to redeem herself, make it up to her child and make the right choices from hereon.
Feeding the mind
published 22 December 2009, MST
That mental ability is a joint function of nature and nurture is obvious. A mixture of genetic and non-genetic factors shapes the level of a person’s IQ, define his thinking process and even determine how he behaves and reacts to different events. We really can’t do much about the things we inherit from our parents; we can only wish we take after their better qualities—a strong artistic inclination, for instance, a calm and reasonable demeanor, an analytical mind, even a photographic memory.
But beyond genetics, there is a world of a difference between nourished individuals and malnourished ones. In a paper on nutrition and brain development, Aida Mendoza-Salonga, professor and chairman of the Department of Neurosciences in UP Diliman, says the crucial months for mental nutrition starts from the womb until the first few years of life. This is shown perhaps by the plethora of milk formulas in the market. They flood the supermarket shelves, each claiming to give “the proper nutrients for your baby’s superior development.” Why, at one point, a company was able to equate its brand with producing gifted children. I say that’s genius—not the babies, but the marketing blitz.
Of course there are other factors that affect a child’s mental nourishment in those crucial years: the home environment, exposure to media and other enrichment activities and eventually the school where the parents send the child.
The goal is for the child to realize his full potential. But that’s assuming that all parents have the capability to nourish their child practically from the moment of conception by having the mother have the best pre-natal care, encouraging her to breastfeed her baby, choosing from the many available supplements,buying the best educational toys and sending the child to the best schools.
But we know this is not the case for every Filipino family—not even most Filipino families.
The fact is that children during this stage need key nutrients—iodine, folic acid, iron, zinc, vitamin B6 and vitamin A, deficiency in which “can cause cognitive and behavioral deficits over a lifetime,” Mendoza-Salonga says.
To be more dramatic about the whole thing, think how in a few decades, malnourished children with their could-be-better brains will comprise the generation we have been counting on to get the nation out of this rut. What will happen to the quality of decisions made at the family, community, industrial (or corporate) and government levels?
***
Yvonette Duque, a community doctor, is with the health mission of World Vision Foundation Philippines. Duque has personally seen both sides of the spectrum in her professional practice. She used to work with organizations that charged their patients exorbitant amounts. Then she decided to become a doctor to the barrios, traveling to far-flung barrios in the country and even spending a year in Africa. Now she says the joys of her profession are not found in donning an immaculate white suit and collecting big professional fees.
At a Sulo hotel media forum on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Duque delivered a presentation on health issues confronting children. She started her talk by showing two scanned images of brains of two children, both below five years old. This was a study conducted by professor Ascobat Gani of Indonesia, she said. What’s the difference between the two brains?
The left image showed a big black area at the center of the brain. In the right, the black spot was much smaller. According to Duque, the one on the left was the brain of an undernourished child. There was literally nothing much inside the head—a tragedy because an empty brain is permanent. “There is an irreversible loss of opportunity,” Duque said. “This child will end up being a burden to his family and to society.”
The image on the right was the brain of a nourished child—and crucial nourishment should be given nine months before the child is born and 36 months after birth. This child will be quality human resource later on and is more likely to obtain higher income for his contributions.
If only bridging this gap were that easy. Actually, malnutrition is a vicious cycle that begins with having healthy parents. “If the father takes drugs and alcohol, smokes, and is himself malnourished, what kind of genes will he pass on to the child which he sires?” And of course, maternal health is a prime concern. If a mother is herself unhealthy, the quality of her egg cells, the conditions in her body that houses her child in the nine months before it is born, her ability to deliver the baby under normal circumstances, and her capacity to care for it well are all compromised.
And what if the child turns out to be a girl, subject to the same poor conditions growing up? She herself will not be a healthy child and a healthy adolescent, and her pregnancy and motherhood will be attended by the same difficulties that hounded her mother before her.
In the meantime, as these people struggle to meet their basic daily necessities, the attention on education and other means to improve mental health are relegated to the background.
Clearly there has to be intervention. But whose job is it to intervene?
Duque says that her work at the foundation has made her realize that World Vision and other organizations that go to the communities can, at best, only provide complementing services to existing efforts by the government. Even the national government, through the Health Department only plays supporting role.
The real decision makers who do make a difference at the grassroots level are the local government officials, according to Duque. It is they who decide whether a project is worth pursuing—not just starting, only to lose steam later on.
World Vision, for instance, can only adopt communities under its Nutrition Jumpstart program and prescribe the 7-11 intervention method. The method has seven points for pregnant women: adequate diet, iron and folate supplements, tetanus toxoid immunization, malaria prevention, healthy timing and spacing of birth, de-worming and access to maternal health service. It also has 11 points for children 36 months and below: appropriate breastfeeding, essential newborn care, hand washing, appropriate complementary feeding, adequate iron, vitamin A supplementation, oral rehydration therapy, care seeking for fever, full immunization, malaria prevention and de-worming.
Even the national government can only make sure that there are funds available when they need to be tapped.
So how can we make sure that good intentions do not get lost in politics?
Advocacy is key, Duque says. In turn, the people at the community must know the issues that must be tackled head on. To Duque’s mind, children’s nutrition during the crucial 45 months—with its implications on the IQ level, cognitive ability and behavior of the future generation—should be a priority, and a long-term one.
Christmas is the season for children and for hope. Would it not be easy if we can take the gift of good nutrition for every Filipino child, put it in a box and wrap it with bright paper? Since we cannot, let’s do the next best thing and not allow these real issues to wax and wane with what goes on in politics. We should demand that candidates, especially local ones, seeking our vote in the coming elections know their priorities and are prepared to see them through.
A blessed Christmas to all.
**
Readers' comments
Adelle,
I read your article, "Feeding the Mind". I think along the same lines, and wrote a book I believe you would enjoy, called NUTRITION AND YOUR CHILD'S SOUL. You may read about it on my website, www.dolevgilmore.com. Should you decide you'd like to order the book, contact me through the form on the website, and I can send you a PayPal invoice in any currency, and I'll pay half of the shipping cost. It would be a great honor to send a book to your country.
All the best,
Dolev Gilmore
(Israel)
That mental ability is a joint function of nature and nurture is obvious. A mixture of genetic and non-genetic factors shapes the level of a person’s IQ, define his thinking process and even determine how he behaves and reacts to different events. We really can’t do much about the things we inherit from our parents; we can only wish we take after their better qualities—a strong artistic inclination, for instance, a calm and reasonable demeanor, an analytical mind, even a photographic memory.
But beyond genetics, there is a world of a difference between nourished individuals and malnourished ones. In a paper on nutrition and brain development, Aida Mendoza-Salonga, professor and chairman of the Department of Neurosciences in UP Diliman, says the crucial months for mental nutrition starts from the womb until the first few years of life. This is shown perhaps by the plethora of milk formulas in the market. They flood the supermarket shelves, each claiming to give “the proper nutrients for your baby’s superior development.” Why, at one point, a company was able to equate its brand with producing gifted children. I say that’s genius—not the babies, but the marketing blitz.
Of course there are other factors that affect a child’s mental nourishment in those crucial years: the home environment, exposure to media and other enrichment activities and eventually the school where the parents send the child.
The goal is for the child to realize his full potential. But that’s assuming that all parents have the capability to nourish their child practically from the moment of conception by having the mother have the best pre-natal care, encouraging her to breastfeed her baby, choosing from the many available supplements,buying the best educational toys and sending the child to the best schools.
But we know this is not the case for every Filipino family—not even most Filipino families.
The fact is that children during this stage need key nutrients—iodine, folic acid, iron, zinc, vitamin B6 and vitamin A, deficiency in which “can cause cognitive and behavioral deficits over a lifetime,” Mendoza-Salonga says.
To be more dramatic about the whole thing, think how in a few decades, malnourished children with their could-be-better brains will comprise the generation we have been counting on to get the nation out of this rut. What will happen to the quality of decisions made at the family, community, industrial (or corporate) and government levels?
***
Yvonette Duque, a community doctor, is with the health mission of World Vision Foundation Philippines. Duque has personally seen both sides of the spectrum in her professional practice. She used to work with organizations that charged their patients exorbitant amounts. Then she decided to become a doctor to the barrios, traveling to far-flung barrios in the country and even spending a year in Africa. Now she says the joys of her profession are not found in donning an immaculate white suit and collecting big professional fees.
At a Sulo hotel media forum on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Duque delivered a presentation on health issues confronting children. She started her talk by showing two scanned images of brains of two children, both below five years old. This was a study conducted by professor Ascobat Gani of Indonesia, she said. What’s the difference between the two brains?
The left image showed a big black area at the center of the brain. In the right, the black spot was much smaller. According to Duque, the one on the left was the brain of an undernourished child. There was literally nothing much inside the head—a tragedy because an empty brain is permanent. “There is an irreversible loss of opportunity,” Duque said. “This child will end up being a burden to his family and to society.”
The image on the right was the brain of a nourished child—and crucial nourishment should be given nine months before the child is born and 36 months after birth. This child will be quality human resource later on and is more likely to obtain higher income for his contributions.
If only bridging this gap were that easy. Actually, malnutrition is a vicious cycle that begins with having healthy parents. “If the father takes drugs and alcohol, smokes, and is himself malnourished, what kind of genes will he pass on to the child which he sires?” And of course, maternal health is a prime concern. If a mother is herself unhealthy, the quality of her egg cells, the conditions in her body that houses her child in the nine months before it is born, her ability to deliver the baby under normal circumstances, and her capacity to care for it well are all compromised.
And what if the child turns out to be a girl, subject to the same poor conditions growing up? She herself will not be a healthy child and a healthy adolescent, and her pregnancy and motherhood will be attended by the same difficulties that hounded her mother before her.
In the meantime, as these people struggle to meet their basic daily necessities, the attention on education and other means to improve mental health are relegated to the background.
Clearly there has to be intervention. But whose job is it to intervene?
Duque says that her work at the foundation has made her realize that World Vision and other organizations that go to the communities can, at best, only provide complementing services to existing efforts by the government. Even the national government, through the Health Department only plays supporting role.
The real decision makers who do make a difference at the grassroots level are the local government officials, according to Duque. It is they who decide whether a project is worth pursuing—not just starting, only to lose steam later on.
World Vision, for instance, can only adopt communities under its Nutrition Jumpstart program and prescribe the 7-11 intervention method. The method has seven points for pregnant women: adequate diet, iron and folate supplements, tetanus toxoid immunization, malaria prevention, healthy timing and spacing of birth, de-worming and access to maternal health service. It also has 11 points for children 36 months and below: appropriate breastfeeding, essential newborn care, hand washing, appropriate complementary feeding, adequate iron, vitamin A supplementation, oral rehydration therapy, care seeking for fever, full immunization, malaria prevention and de-worming.
Even the national government can only make sure that there are funds available when they need to be tapped.
So how can we make sure that good intentions do not get lost in politics?
Advocacy is key, Duque says. In turn, the people at the community must know the issues that must be tackled head on. To Duque’s mind, children’s nutrition during the crucial 45 months—with its implications on the IQ level, cognitive ability and behavior of the future generation—should be a priority, and a long-term one.
Christmas is the season for children and for hope. Would it not be easy if we can take the gift of good nutrition for every Filipino child, put it in a box and wrap it with bright paper? Since we cannot, let’s do the next best thing and not allow these real issues to wax and wane with what goes on in politics. We should demand that candidates, especially local ones, seeking our vote in the coming elections know their priorities and are prepared to see them through.
A blessed Christmas to all.
**
Readers' comments
Adelle,
I read your article, "Feeding the Mind". I think along the same lines, and wrote a book I believe you would enjoy, called NUTRITION AND YOUR CHILD'S SOUL. You may read about it on my website, www.dolevgilmore.com. Should you decide you'd like to order the book, contact me through the form on the website, and I can send you a PayPal invoice in any currency, and I'll pay half of the shipping cost. It would be a great honor to send a book to your country.
All the best,
Dolev Gilmore
(Israel)
Monday, December 14, 2009
Basking in brilliance
On Sunday I saw a show on BBC that featured the Nobel laureates (except for peace) for 009. Most of them were men and women of science (chemistry, physics, medicine or physiology and economics). One of them was a novelist, a Romanian-born woman who fled the communist world in the 1980s.
Aside from making me want to get my hands on Herta Muller's works, the show reminded me that all great works stem from passion and hard work.
Two of the physicists were recognized for work that they did forty years ago.
Another was honored for his pioneering work in fiber optic technology, also many decades ago. Now this man is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, but his wife – who says, tearfully, that she misses her husband's intellectual discourses – is sure he appreciates how big a deal it is to win the Nobel.
Another scientist stumbled on a breakthrough in ribosome technology one Christmas morning. Which is very telling – why work on Christmas, unless your work is one you are truly and deeply passionate about?
One of the economics laureates studied the best possible way to manage natural resources like water and forests. She was driven by the poverty from which deprived her of access to the most basic things as a child.
And Muller felt her writing was a midst of survival amid repression in Eastern Europe. She did flee to the West in the mid-1980s but memories of her early years continued to haunt her.
“For a long time after arriving in West Berlin, my eyes hurt. I've never seen so much color,” she said. The grayness of her previous life, as well as from the knowledge that her father was an SS officer “who never talked about the war, like it was taboo,” filled her with the longing to express herself.
Alas, not even the Nobel Prize can erase bad memories.
What it does,however,when you get past the fact that it came from the last will and testament of the man who invented the dynamite, is to inspire you. To do what you were meant to do,work hard, and be the best version of yourself.
Aside from making me want to get my hands on Herta Muller's works, the show reminded me that all great works stem from passion and hard work.
Two of the physicists were recognized for work that they did forty years ago.
Another was honored for his pioneering work in fiber optic technology, also many decades ago. Now this man is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, but his wife – who says, tearfully, that she misses her husband's intellectual discourses – is sure he appreciates how big a deal it is to win the Nobel.
Another scientist stumbled on a breakthrough in ribosome technology one Christmas morning. Which is very telling – why work on Christmas, unless your work is one you are truly and deeply passionate about?
One of the economics laureates studied the best possible way to manage natural resources like water and forests. She was driven by the poverty from which deprived her of access to the most basic things as a child.
And Muller felt her writing was a midst of survival amid repression in Eastern Europe. She did flee to the West in the mid-1980s but memories of her early years continued to haunt her.
“For a long time after arriving in West Berlin, my eyes hurt. I've never seen so much color,” she said. The grayness of her previous life, as well as from the knowledge that her father was an SS officer “who never talked about the war, like it was taboo,” filled her with the longing to express herself.
Alas, not even the Nobel Prize can erase bad memories.
What it does,however,when you get past the fact that it came from the last will and testament of the man who invented the dynamite, is to inspire you. To do what you were meant to do,work hard, and be the best version of yourself.
An incentive to best practices
published 14 Dec 09, Manila Standard Today
In the Northern town of Tabuk, Kalinga, the local government created the Matagoan program in 2001 to create a more secure community and help settle tribal conflicts. Tribal warfare, after all, was a fact of life for these indigenous peoples. Tribesmen saw each other as brothers and even perceived wrongdoing against a brother in one tribe often led to bloodshed. Of course, the other side would not take this sitting down, and so began a cycle of violence. When these things happened, everybody suffered—everyday life was disrupted and economic activity ground to a halt.
A Mataogan Council also helped promote peace pacts and conduct annual renewals of peace and unity vows. Later on, the council expanded to include sub-tribes as well as immigrants from other provinces. It also strengthened relations between the police and the community. In the next six years, the program helped settle 33 of 35 tribal cases. Police records also say that crime solution efficiency improved from 80 percent in 2003 to 89 percent in 2007. As a result, the business environment also improved. In 2003 there were 651 registered business establishments in the province. Four years later, the figure was up 19 percent to 774.
Over in Parañaque City, the Adolescent Friendly Reproductive Health Services program seeks to “promote and provide quality health services that are responsive to the needs and protective of the rights of adolescents. Indeed this is a stage when young people try to assert their independence, question authority and experiment with prohibited drugs, cigarets, alcohol and sex. The program seeks to channel these restless young people’s energy into something productive and community based.
The adolescents themselves identify the kind of reproductive health services they need. They do peer counseling and become involved in other activities in the area. After being pilot tested in Barangay San Dionision and BF, the program was replicated in five other barangays. The objective is to see declining rates of teenage pregnancy, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases.
* * *
A nation constantly fed bad news would feast on gems such as these stories—true and in no way embellished or tainted with the slant of public relations. In fact, Tabuk and Parañaque are only two of 14 recipients of this year’s Galing Pook awards. The citations recognize best practices in local government units in the country in the hope of telling other communities that yes, it can be done. Galing Pook has been recognizing such feats since 1993.
If we think this year is a bad year for local governments, then we may just be focusing on a few very rotten eggs. Eddie Dorotan, executive director of the Galing Pook Foundation, says that one of the more difficult aspects of his job is trimming the list of noteworthy programs. The list normally starts from anywhere between 100 and 300 local government units, from the barangay to the provincial levels. After the applications and nominations are received and initially screened, members of the National Selection Committee—composed of distinguished and independent individuals from various fields of expertise—go to these places to see for themselves how the projects affect the respective communities. In the final stage of the evaluation, representatives of the short-listed projects fly to Manila to “defend” their programs before a panel. The committee normally settles for a final list of 10—except this year, which was deemed a “banner year.”
Aside from peace and order and health initiatives in Tabuk and Parañaque, other winning projects include programs in peace building, environmental protection, information system, access to social services and public-private partnerships.
Of this year’s recipients, seven are from Luzon, two are from Visayas and five are from Mindanao. There are no geographic criteria, nor are programs chosen or eliminated because of the political leaning of the officials behind them.
The programs are evaluated in terms of positive results (they should have visible, measurable impact on the community), people’s participation (officials should not be the only ones acting), innovation (new approaches even to age-old problems), efficiency (more ad better results with less resources), duplicability (can the program be easily copied in other communities anywhere in the country?) and sustainability. Local government units that have already won three or more awards are conferred with the Continuing Excellence award.
* * *
“We award the programs and the local government units that push them, not the officials,” Dorotan, a medical doctor and who was himself a two-term mayor of Irosin, Sorsogon in the 1990s, says. He does not deny that officials seeking re-election can very conveniently use the awards to boost their stock, but in the end, “this is not about politics but about leadership.” The real quality of these officials’ leadership will be revealed eventually to their constituents, after all.
Galing Pook, which is propped up by the Ford Foundation a well as by the Development Bank of the Philippines and the Land Bank of the Philippines, has expanded its functions in recent years. Aside from choosing these good examples, it also works with the government in replicating the award-winning programs. Winners in the area of public health, for instance, get to meet with national health officials to offer their input for future projects.
There is no dearth of worthy programs, according to Dorotan, and the most important thing is that these programs make people feel that they can improve. In the process, a new breed of local government officials who conceive of the programs and see them through is also revealed. “These leaders are likely to be good at the national level. Unfortunately, media consigns them, especially those from far-flung places, to oblivion.”
It’s not as if these leaders are elbowing each other out to gain national prominence, either. “Most of the time, they themselves don’t want to run for higher posts because they may not be able to fight, or even tolerate, the corrupt system.” What a waste.
Does being able to deliver winning programs entitle officials to build their dynasties in their so-called spheres of influence? And should the people put up with “tolerable” corruption in the barangay, municipal or city hall just as long as projects such as these are brought to them by their leaders?
“True leaders live what they preach,” says Dorotan. “If you say you are against wrongdoing in government, you will be uncompromising and shun it completely. It takes real leadership to do that.” The dynasty issue is simple, too: no individual nor family should be indispensable.
As we know, however, all these pronouncements are easier made than seen through. “It is up to the people to be vigilant.”
Dorotan notes that from the beginning, the programs have been addressing the same issues: poverty, environmental protection, peace and order, the delivery of social services. But the innovation factor is key: We have to keep improving on solutions.
Next year’s elections will be critical, not only for installing a new batch of local executives but for choosing good people at the national level to support and inspire local initiatives and serve as embodiments of good governance.
In the end, the idea is not only to have individual pockets of local government gems and honoring them with awards as though they were the exception. The Galing Pook awards will realize its vision when, as a rule, the governed and the governors work together and in concert all over the archipelago, in addressing the many challenges confronting the nation and working for a better life for all.
In the Northern town of Tabuk, Kalinga, the local government created the Matagoan program in 2001 to create a more secure community and help settle tribal conflicts. Tribal warfare, after all, was a fact of life for these indigenous peoples. Tribesmen saw each other as brothers and even perceived wrongdoing against a brother in one tribe often led to bloodshed. Of course, the other side would not take this sitting down, and so began a cycle of violence. When these things happened, everybody suffered—everyday life was disrupted and economic activity ground to a halt.
A Mataogan Council also helped promote peace pacts and conduct annual renewals of peace and unity vows. Later on, the council expanded to include sub-tribes as well as immigrants from other provinces. It also strengthened relations between the police and the community. In the next six years, the program helped settle 33 of 35 tribal cases. Police records also say that crime solution efficiency improved from 80 percent in 2003 to 89 percent in 2007. As a result, the business environment also improved. In 2003 there were 651 registered business establishments in the province. Four years later, the figure was up 19 percent to 774.
Over in Parañaque City, the Adolescent Friendly Reproductive Health Services program seeks to “promote and provide quality health services that are responsive to the needs and protective of the rights of adolescents. Indeed this is a stage when young people try to assert their independence, question authority and experiment with prohibited drugs, cigarets, alcohol and sex. The program seeks to channel these restless young people’s energy into something productive and community based.
The adolescents themselves identify the kind of reproductive health services they need. They do peer counseling and become involved in other activities in the area. After being pilot tested in Barangay San Dionision and BF, the program was replicated in five other barangays. The objective is to see declining rates of teenage pregnancy, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases.
* * *
A nation constantly fed bad news would feast on gems such as these stories—true and in no way embellished or tainted with the slant of public relations. In fact, Tabuk and Parañaque are only two of 14 recipients of this year’s Galing Pook awards. The citations recognize best practices in local government units in the country in the hope of telling other communities that yes, it can be done. Galing Pook has been recognizing such feats since 1993.
If we think this year is a bad year for local governments, then we may just be focusing on a few very rotten eggs. Eddie Dorotan, executive director of the Galing Pook Foundation, says that one of the more difficult aspects of his job is trimming the list of noteworthy programs. The list normally starts from anywhere between 100 and 300 local government units, from the barangay to the provincial levels. After the applications and nominations are received and initially screened, members of the National Selection Committee—composed of distinguished and independent individuals from various fields of expertise—go to these places to see for themselves how the projects affect the respective communities. In the final stage of the evaluation, representatives of the short-listed projects fly to Manila to “defend” their programs before a panel. The committee normally settles for a final list of 10—except this year, which was deemed a “banner year.”
Aside from peace and order and health initiatives in Tabuk and Parañaque, other winning projects include programs in peace building, environmental protection, information system, access to social services and public-private partnerships.
Of this year’s recipients, seven are from Luzon, two are from Visayas and five are from Mindanao. There are no geographic criteria, nor are programs chosen or eliminated because of the political leaning of the officials behind them.
The programs are evaluated in terms of positive results (they should have visible, measurable impact on the community), people’s participation (officials should not be the only ones acting), innovation (new approaches even to age-old problems), efficiency (more ad better results with less resources), duplicability (can the program be easily copied in other communities anywhere in the country?) and sustainability. Local government units that have already won three or more awards are conferred with the Continuing Excellence award.
* * *
“We award the programs and the local government units that push them, not the officials,” Dorotan, a medical doctor and who was himself a two-term mayor of Irosin, Sorsogon in the 1990s, says. He does not deny that officials seeking re-election can very conveniently use the awards to boost their stock, but in the end, “this is not about politics but about leadership.” The real quality of these officials’ leadership will be revealed eventually to their constituents, after all.
Galing Pook, which is propped up by the Ford Foundation a well as by the Development Bank of the Philippines and the Land Bank of the Philippines, has expanded its functions in recent years. Aside from choosing these good examples, it also works with the government in replicating the award-winning programs. Winners in the area of public health, for instance, get to meet with national health officials to offer their input for future projects.
There is no dearth of worthy programs, according to Dorotan, and the most important thing is that these programs make people feel that they can improve. In the process, a new breed of local government officials who conceive of the programs and see them through is also revealed. “These leaders are likely to be good at the national level. Unfortunately, media consigns them, especially those from far-flung places, to oblivion.”
It’s not as if these leaders are elbowing each other out to gain national prominence, either. “Most of the time, they themselves don’t want to run for higher posts because they may not be able to fight, or even tolerate, the corrupt system.” What a waste.
Does being able to deliver winning programs entitle officials to build their dynasties in their so-called spheres of influence? And should the people put up with “tolerable” corruption in the barangay, municipal or city hall just as long as projects such as these are brought to them by their leaders?
“True leaders live what they preach,” says Dorotan. “If you say you are against wrongdoing in government, you will be uncompromising and shun it completely. It takes real leadership to do that.” The dynasty issue is simple, too: no individual nor family should be indispensable.
As we know, however, all these pronouncements are easier made than seen through. “It is up to the people to be vigilant.”
Dorotan notes that from the beginning, the programs have been addressing the same issues: poverty, environmental protection, peace and order, the delivery of social services. But the innovation factor is key: We have to keep improving on solutions.
Next year’s elections will be critical, not only for installing a new batch of local executives but for choosing good people at the national level to support and inspire local initiatives and serve as embodiments of good governance.
In the end, the idea is not only to have individual pockets of local government gems and honoring them with awards as though they were the exception. The Galing Pook awards will realize its vision when, as a rule, the governed and the governors work together and in concert all over the archipelago, in addressing the many challenges confronting the nation and working for a better life for all.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Wavering on the call for "deep and early cuts"
What is the Philippine team really bringing to Copenhagen?
Two weeks ago in this space, in an article called “Getting dramatic over climate change”, I wrote about the Philippine position that our delegation would be bringing to Copenhagen, Denmark during negotiations for carbon-emission cuts. The resulting climate change pact – if one could be arrived at – would pick up from where the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol is perceived to have failed.
The talks begin today.
According to the Office of the Presidential Adviser on Global Warming and Climate Change, the Philippines, along with other developing nations that are historically not responsible for the alarming level of greenhouse gases in the air but which stand to lose the most from the effects of the warming planet, will push for “deep and early cuts” by industrialized nations.
“Specifically, our team will press for cuts of at least 30 percent between 2013 and 2017, at least 50 percent between 2018 and 2020, and at least 95 percent by 2050, all from 1990 levels,” I said, lifting from brochures handed out by that office during a media summit that coincided with the celebration of Climate Change Consciousness Week.
Secretary Heherson Alvarez, the presidential adviser, himself said that this Philippine position was “pretty much firm.” In fact, during the short interview I had with him, Alvarez talked more about administrative challenges to the Climate Change Commission, created by the just-signed Climate Change Act, for it to help the country adapt better to the effects of global warming, specifically more frequent and more powerful storms and resulting floods, landslides and mudslides.
But now a coalition of at least 36 civil society organizations, including members of the CSO Working Group on Climate Change and Development, is worried that the Philippine position may not be so firm after all, and that global political machinations may be behind this weakened stance.
Andres “Chito” Tionko, for instance, who was part of the Philippine delegation to Bangkok, finds it disturbing that President Arroyo now says the Philippines “need not insist on deep and early cuts in carbon emissions, but should require countries to make a commitment.” This apparent distancing from the “deep and early cuts” demand, he says, has been influenced by the recent visit of United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the country. The US has a lot to lose if it binds itself to cutting its emissions, especially in a recessionary environment.
The organizations are alarmed that the US and other developed countries may have been promising financial support for developing countries' adaptation programs in exchange for these countries’ going easy on them in the mitigation side.
And here's even greater cause for alarm: Bernaditas de Castro Muller, an adviser to the Philippine team and lead negotiator for the G77 + China bloc (actually a group of 130 developing countries), has been dropped from the official list of delegates to Copenhagen. Muller, a retired Filipino diplomat based in Switzerland, is known as “dragon woman” in environmental negotiation circles; she has been relentless and uncompromising representing the interests of the bloc – representing two-thirds of the world's population.
A profile of Ms. de Castro-Muller, as well as insights into climate diplomacy, appear on the November 7 issue of The Guardian, entitled “Lifting the lid on climate change talks” by John Vidal (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/07/climate-change-talks-2009).
Crossing de Castro-Muller out of the delegation would compromise not just the Philippine position but the position of the entire bloc. Then again, that's exactly what the Annex 1 (developed) countries would love; the Filipino diplomat has been a thorn on their side during the grueling climate negotiations. Apparently,Vidal says, climate diplomacy is polite on the outside but vicious from within.
The civil society coalition now asks that the official list of delegates to Copenhagen be made so that the public would know whether those who are actually representing the Philippines are not in for the junket but are highly qualified and trained negotiators.
“The Philippine position is very progressive. It carries not just our national interests but the interests of vulnerable developing countries. But in order for our progressive positions to get through, they have to be effectively negotiated. Our negotiators and technical advisers play a strategic role in the negotiations; without them, most progressive positions become meaningless,” says Kala Constantino, advocacy coordinator of Oxfam in the Philippines.
Rowena Bolinas, coordinator of the working group, adds: “We believe the Filipino people deserve to be represented by negotiators who will not be coerced into agreeing to any worthless deal that will compromise our common future.”
(But what if another, less malleable developing country “adopts” Muller just so she could remain negotiating for the nations most imperiled by climate change, and what if she agrees?)
On the other hand, Secretary Alvarez insists there is no truth to the allegations that the Philippines is not anymore pushing for deep and early cuts. “The President is not backing off from that. But she is pushing instead for a broader policy approach called Green Philippines,” the adviser says. “The new Philippine position, thus, is not limited to the single issue of carbon cuts anymore.”
Alvarez also says that Muller’s exclusion from the list of delegates was an arbitrary decision of the Executive Secretary (Eduardo Ermita) in an effort to trim the number of delegates which had ballooned to 120. Ermita allegedly felt he had to cut the number of attendees lest the public accuse the administration of going on an excursion to Copenhagen. Alvarez adds: “It was an arbitrary move. Even some of the people I myself put in the team were also removed. How can Muller be excluded for pushing for ‘deep and early cuts’ when she is not its proponent in the first place?”
**
Tionko tries to correct a misconception. The world does not need yet another agreement on the climate; the Kyoto Protocol would suffice. After all, what's expiring in two years is the first commitment period, not the agreement itself. There is still a second commitment period, and the United States can join anytime, that is, assuming President Barack Obama's promises are not merely that. Another agreement – a Copenhagen Protocol, for instance – would need ratification by the Congresses of each of the nations represented in the talks. That's not swiftly done, and in the meantime, the clock is ticking.
And we thought that in this day and age, the world would be beyond the phenomenon of rich nations bullying the poor. Unfortunately it has just acquired another name: Historical carbon culprits, the developed economies, “softening up” developing ones through adaptation aid and other means of persuasion.
The Philippines, by itself, will not carry much clout as it would if it bonds with other countries that share its fate. Will President Arroyo buckle down under this pressure? Is the catch phrase “deep and early cuts” hollow, after all?
That's not really an offense against us. But it will be -- and an unforgivable one at that – against our children and our children's children.
adellechua@gmail.com
Two weeks ago in this space, in an article called “Getting dramatic over climate change”, I wrote about the Philippine position that our delegation would be bringing to Copenhagen, Denmark during negotiations for carbon-emission cuts. The resulting climate change pact – if one could be arrived at – would pick up from where the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol is perceived to have failed.
The talks begin today.
According to the Office of the Presidential Adviser on Global Warming and Climate Change, the Philippines, along with other developing nations that are historically not responsible for the alarming level of greenhouse gases in the air but which stand to lose the most from the effects of the warming planet, will push for “deep and early cuts” by industrialized nations.
“Specifically, our team will press for cuts of at least 30 percent between 2013 and 2017, at least 50 percent between 2018 and 2020, and at least 95 percent by 2050, all from 1990 levels,” I said, lifting from brochures handed out by that office during a media summit that coincided with the celebration of Climate Change Consciousness Week.
Secretary Heherson Alvarez, the presidential adviser, himself said that this Philippine position was “pretty much firm.” In fact, during the short interview I had with him, Alvarez talked more about administrative challenges to the Climate Change Commission, created by the just-signed Climate Change Act, for it to help the country adapt better to the effects of global warming, specifically more frequent and more powerful storms and resulting floods, landslides and mudslides.
But now a coalition of at least 36 civil society organizations, including members of the CSO Working Group on Climate Change and Development, is worried that the Philippine position may not be so firm after all, and that global political machinations may be behind this weakened stance.
Andres “Chito” Tionko, for instance, who was part of the Philippine delegation to Bangkok, finds it disturbing that President Arroyo now says the Philippines “need not insist on deep and early cuts in carbon emissions, but should require countries to make a commitment.” This apparent distancing from the “deep and early cuts” demand, he says, has been influenced by the recent visit of United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the country. The US has a lot to lose if it binds itself to cutting its emissions, especially in a recessionary environment.
The organizations are alarmed that the US and other developed countries may have been promising financial support for developing countries' adaptation programs in exchange for these countries’ going easy on them in the mitigation side.
And here's even greater cause for alarm: Bernaditas de Castro Muller, an adviser to the Philippine team and lead negotiator for the G77 + China bloc (actually a group of 130 developing countries), has been dropped from the official list of delegates to Copenhagen. Muller, a retired Filipino diplomat based in Switzerland, is known as “dragon woman” in environmental negotiation circles; she has been relentless and uncompromising representing the interests of the bloc – representing two-thirds of the world's population.
A profile of Ms. de Castro-Muller, as well as insights into climate diplomacy, appear on the November 7 issue of The Guardian, entitled “Lifting the lid on climate change talks” by John Vidal (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/07/climate-change-talks-2009).
Crossing de Castro-Muller out of the delegation would compromise not just the Philippine position but the position of the entire bloc. Then again, that's exactly what the Annex 1 (developed) countries would love; the Filipino diplomat has been a thorn on their side during the grueling climate negotiations. Apparently,Vidal says, climate diplomacy is polite on the outside but vicious from within.
The civil society coalition now asks that the official list of delegates to Copenhagen be made so that the public would know whether those who are actually representing the Philippines are not in for the junket but are highly qualified and trained negotiators.
“The Philippine position is very progressive. It carries not just our national interests but the interests of vulnerable developing countries. But in order for our progressive positions to get through, they have to be effectively negotiated. Our negotiators and technical advisers play a strategic role in the negotiations; without them, most progressive positions become meaningless,” says Kala Constantino, advocacy coordinator of Oxfam in the Philippines.
Rowena Bolinas, coordinator of the working group, adds: “We believe the Filipino people deserve to be represented by negotiators who will not be coerced into agreeing to any worthless deal that will compromise our common future.”
(But what if another, less malleable developing country “adopts” Muller just so she could remain negotiating for the nations most imperiled by climate change, and what if she agrees?)
On the other hand, Secretary Alvarez insists there is no truth to the allegations that the Philippines is not anymore pushing for deep and early cuts. “The President is not backing off from that. But she is pushing instead for a broader policy approach called Green Philippines,” the adviser says. “The new Philippine position, thus, is not limited to the single issue of carbon cuts anymore.”
Alvarez also says that Muller’s exclusion from the list of delegates was an arbitrary decision of the Executive Secretary (Eduardo Ermita) in an effort to trim the number of delegates which had ballooned to 120. Ermita allegedly felt he had to cut the number of attendees lest the public accuse the administration of going on an excursion to Copenhagen. Alvarez adds: “It was an arbitrary move. Even some of the people I myself put in the team were also removed. How can Muller be excluded for pushing for ‘deep and early cuts’ when she is not its proponent in the first place?”
**
Tionko tries to correct a misconception. The world does not need yet another agreement on the climate; the Kyoto Protocol would suffice. After all, what's expiring in two years is the first commitment period, not the agreement itself. There is still a second commitment period, and the United States can join anytime, that is, assuming President Barack Obama's promises are not merely that. Another agreement – a Copenhagen Protocol, for instance – would need ratification by the Congresses of each of the nations represented in the talks. That's not swiftly done, and in the meantime, the clock is ticking.
And we thought that in this day and age, the world would be beyond the phenomenon of rich nations bullying the poor. Unfortunately it has just acquired another name: Historical carbon culprits, the developed economies, “softening up” developing ones through adaptation aid and other means of persuasion.
The Philippines, by itself, will not carry much clout as it would if it bonds with other countries that share its fate. Will President Arroyo buckle down under this pressure? Is the catch phrase “deep and early cuts” hollow, after all?
That's not really an offense against us. But it will be -- and an unforgivable one at that – against our children and our children's children.
adellechua@gmail.com
Friday, December 4, 2009
Bunso
As was customary, I deposited Elmo into My Playroom which was just beside where I was going to have my weekly massage. There was a time when Elmo's eyes shone at the prospect of spending an hour or so at that place – toys,tikes,books and all-- so their parents could get some real shopping done. This time, however, Elmo was on the verge of crying. I had reprimanded him for touching everything in the mall he was not supposed to touch: stair rails, elevator rails, the surfaces of kiosks.
And then I remembered, these days I had been pretty hard on the boy: prepare for school on time,fix your bag,do your homework, brush your teeth, finish your food, etcetera etcetera. See he had not been exhibiting much enthusiasm for any of those things. The only things that perked him up were SpongeBob Square Pants and the Transformers. At six forty five in the morning, when every body is running late, a mom forgets her resolution not to nag or yell. What diplomacy? The bell is about to ring!
This afternoon Elmo's last words to me as he entered the playground were “Wag kang matagal ha?” (Dont be long, please) Poor baby, did he feel he was getting too big to be in that place full of toddlers? I knew he had wanted to be left in the internet cafe upstairs, where his Ate Sophie preferred to be left nowadays so she could tend to her farm and her pets on Facebook. But it was too cold there, he said, and they were fighting besides. That's another thing. Not too long ago Sophie, 9 and Elmo,7 were inseparable and got along just fine. Now they got on each other's nerves. Each wanted to spend time with me without bringing along the other. Elmo was especially resentful that I'd been spending more time with Sophie (okay, it's true.) I brought her to the office yesterday, I went to Bataan with her last Friday, took a boat and went swimming and kayaking on the beach. And on Sunday she would be accompanying me again at a christening in Bulacan. (At this stage shes the most manageable. Not yet a teenager yet not anymore a child you have to mind all the time).
And so I got my massage, just a shiatsu on my chronically painful back . Thirty minutes later I was done and observed Elmo from outside. He was on a bouncing ball,amusing himself. The other children were huddled somewhere else. I waved, and when he saw me, he jumped up and raced to the door at once. I gave the claim stub to the clerk and noticed that 1. Elmo could not stand straight 2. His nose was bleeding. What's up, I asked. He said he needed to go to the boys' room. I waited for him at the magazine stand at the corner. I figured such a small thing, going to the washroom unaccompanied, could be a big badge of accomplishment for my boy. When he went out he was still bleeding. Yet he was talking about french fries, and being torn between sour cream and barbecue. I pressed a tissue onto his nose.
I took his little hand (filthy, I thought) and regretted that I forgot my wet wipes or alcohol. When I looked at his face, though, I clutched his hand a little tighter. What thoughts were going into this boy's mind? Among the four he is the closest to his father. Among the four he is the one who always wants to be at the other house because of unlimited TV and unlimited play time. Among the four, and being the youngest, he is the most clueless about why what happened did happen. This is going to be the third Christmas of my new life and I am thriving, I am finally in control, running my household and my family unchallenged. I am supermom not DESPITE the fact that I am single. I am supermom BECAUSE I am single. But did my little boy know the separation was it not his fault and that I love him fiercely, nevertheless?
We claimed Sophie from the cafe at the third floor, and then she wanted to have fries, too. It was too early for dinner and I had cooked something at home; this was only merienda. She settled for sour cream, he asked for barbecue. She asked to taste his fries and he asked to take a few from her pack. And just like that, brother and sister were okay. Oh, children. Did they know that someday when I'm gone all they would have would be each other? I told them the story of the mother who died from a crushed heart. The doctors could not tell what caused it. But it was because her two children, both of whom she loved so much, were enemies. If you want my heart to remain healthy, I warned Sophie and Elmo, then you'd have to make allowances for and love each other. They knew it was fiction but nodded anyway – and shared a cup of Sprite while they wolfed down their fries. What joy.
Elmo's nose had stopped bleeding by then,but since it was the weekend, they had to spend the night at their father's,and I was dropping them off there first. What will you do when you arrive, I asked them. Take a bath. Put on clean clothes. Make a Christmas list (they had been saving the entire year and both had respectable amounts in their junior savings accounts). Next Friday, I announced as the tricycle roared noisily into dusk, Elmo and I will go shopping for his Christmas clothes and I will help him get his gifts for family and friends. Just Elmo and me,okay? I told Sophie.
I looked back at Elmo. Finally, for the first time, his eyes shone.
And then I remembered, these days I had been pretty hard on the boy: prepare for school on time,fix your bag,do your homework, brush your teeth, finish your food, etcetera etcetera. See he had not been exhibiting much enthusiasm for any of those things. The only things that perked him up were SpongeBob Square Pants and the Transformers. At six forty five in the morning, when every body is running late, a mom forgets her resolution not to nag or yell. What diplomacy? The bell is about to ring!
This afternoon Elmo's last words to me as he entered the playground were “Wag kang matagal ha?” (Dont be long, please) Poor baby, did he feel he was getting too big to be in that place full of toddlers? I knew he had wanted to be left in the internet cafe upstairs, where his Ate Sophie preferred to be left nowadays so she could tend to her farm and her pets on Facebook. But it was too cold there, he said, and they were fighting besides. That's another thing. Not too long ago Sophie, 9 and Elmo,7 were inseparable and got along just fine. Now they got on each other's nerves. Each wanted to spend time with me without bringing along the other. Elmo was especially resentful that I'd been spending more time with Sophie (okay, it's true.) I brought her to the office yesterday, I went to Bataan with her last Friday, took a boat and went swimming and kayaking on the beach. And on Sunday she would be accompanying me again at a christening in Bulacan. (At this stage shes the most manageable. Not yet a teenager yet not anymore a child you have to mind all the time).
And so I got my massage, just a shiatsu on my chronically painful back . Thirty minutes later I was done and observed Elmo from outside. He was on a bouncing ball,amusing himself. The other children were huddled somewhere else. I waved, and when he saw me, he jumped up and raced to the door at once. I gave the claim stub to the clerk and noticed that 1. Elmo could not stand straight 2. His nose was bleeding. What's up, I asked. He said he needed to go to the boys' room. I waited for him at the magazine stand at the corner. I figured such a small thing, going to the washroom unaccompanied, could be a big badge of accomplishment for my boy. When he went out he was still bleeding. Yet he was talking about french fries, and being torn between sour cream and barbecue. I pressed a tissue onto his nose.
I took his little hand (filthy, I thought) and regretted that I forgot my wet wipes or alcohol. When I looked at his face, though, I clutched his hand a little tighter. What thoughts were going into this boy's mind? Among the four he is the closest to his father. Among the four he is the one who always wants to be at the other house because of unlimited TV and unlimited play time. Among the four, and being the youngest, he is the most clueless about why what happened did happen. This is going to be the third Christmas of my new life and I am thriving, I am finally in control, running my household and my family unchallenged. I am supermom not DESPITE the fact that I am single. I am supermom BECAUSE I am single. But did my little boy know the separation was it not his fault and that I love him fiercely, nevertheless?
We claimed Sophie from the cafe at the third floor, and then she wanted to have fries, too. It was too early for dinner and I had cooked something at home; this was only merienda. She settled for sour cream, he asked for barbecue. She asked to taste his fries and he asked to take a few from her pack. And just like that, brother and sister were okay. Oh, children. Did they know that someday when I'm gone all they would have would be each other? I told them the story of the mother who died from a crushed heart. The doctors could not tell what caused it. But it was because her two children, both of whom she loved so much, were enemies. If you want my heart to remain healthy, I warned Sophie and Elmo, then you'd have to make allowances for and love each other. They knew it was fiction but nodded anyway – and shared a cup of Sprite while they wolfed down their fries. What joy.
Elmo's nose had stopped bleeding by then,but since it was the weekend, they had to spend the night at their father's,and I was dropping them off there first. What will you do when you arrive, I asked them. Take a bath. Put on clean clothes. Make a Christmas list (they had been saving the entire year and both had respectable amounts in their junior savings accounts). Next Friday, I announced as the tricycle roared noisily into dusk, Elmo and I will go shopping for his Christmas clothes and I will help him get his gifts for family and friends. Just Elmo and me,okay? I told Sophie.
I looked back at Elmo. Finally, for the first time, his eyes shone.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Can't get enough
(The editorial I have not yet submitted. I turned in something else today and my turn does not come again until Wednesday. – AC)
It's official: President Arroyo wants to “serve the hard-working people of [her] province” and is running as representative of the second district of Pampanga.
Arroyo has served the nation for eight years and ten months as chief executive. She will serve it for seven more months. One would think a 62-year-old would want to retire, go back to teaching, write a book, maybe enjoy her grandchildren. Then again, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is no ordinary woman.
They say a term is too short for a good president and too long for a bad one. Was Mrs. Arroyo a bad president? It's hard to say; every report and figure is so tainted with bias for and against her. The public does not know where to look for an objective assessment. The media, fed by attention deficient politicians, has been sensational. On the other hand, the President's defenders have been relentless, too.
Of course she's not seeking the same term – technically. Her constituency will shrink and if only because of that, a victory is likely. The perks will be there, even with an opposition president. Especially with a lame one.
The outrage is expected. The move does little to quell the speculation that Mrs. Arroyo is up to some tricks. After all, the House of Representatives has been servile to her when she was president, quelling several impeachment complaints and pushing, shamelessly, for a constituent assembly. Fortunately, an outraged public foiled this move. But because Plan A has been foiled, Plan B emerges, or so we are told.
But let us assume that there are no plans. Let us view Arroyo's decision without a past and without a future – whether or not she has been a good president, and whether or not she intends to steer the House of Representatives into something else.
The simple fact is that seeking another post, especially a lower one, after one has become president is repulsive. When you get elected to the presidency, it is assumed you have done your best. The law may be swayed so as not to bar you from running again, but your convictions should. If you wanted to do good, you should have done it while you could. When your time is up, you take a bow and suffer the legacy you have made for yourself.
Another former President, convicted plunderer Joseph Estrada has filed a certificate to run for president. Now the man says Arroyo is not qualified to run. The statement is downright comic when you remember it is Erap himself who faces disqualification questions.
When you are talking about the things you have to do to be worthy of the Office of the President, there is no room for comic relief or lame rhetoric.
It's official: President Arroyo wants to “serve the hard-working people of [her] province” and is running as representative of the second district of Pampanga.
Arroyo has served the nation for eight years and ten months as chief executive. She will serve it for seven more months. One would think a 62-year-old would want to retire, go back to teaching, write a book, maybe enjoy her grandchildren. Then again, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is no ordinary woman.
They say a term is too short for a good president and too long for a bad one. Was Mrs. Arroyo a bad president? It's hard to say; every report and figure is so tainted with bias for and against her. The public does not know where to look for an objective assessment. The media, fed by attention deficient politicians, has been sensational. On the other hand, the President's defenders have been relentless, too.
Of course she's not seeking the same term – technically. Her constituency will shrink and if only because of that, a victory is likely. The perks will be there, even with an opposition president. Especially with a lame one.
The outrage is expected. The move does little to quell the speculation that Mrs. Arroyo is up to some tricks. After all, the House of Representatives has been servile to her when she was president, quelling several impeachment complaints and pushing, shamelessly, for a constituent assembly. Fortunately, an outraged public foiled this move. But because Plan A has been foiled, Plan B emerges, or so we are told.
But let us assume that there are no plans. Let us view Arroyo's decision without a past and without a future – whether or not she has been a good president, and whether or not she intends to steer the House of Representatives into something else.
The simple fact is that seeking another post, especially a lower one, after one has become president is repulsive. When you get elected to the presidency, it is assumed you have done your best. The law may be swayed so as not to bar you from running again, but your convictions should. If you wanted to do good, you should have done it while you could. When your time is up, you take a bow and suffer the legacy you have made for yourself.
Another former President, convicted plunderer Joseph Estrada has filed a certificate to run for president. Now the man says Arroyo is not qualified to run. The statement is downright comic when you remember it is Erap himself who faces disqualification questions.
When you are talking about the things you have to do to be worthy of the Office of the President, there is no room for comic relief or lame rhetoric.
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