Of “Pagpag” and Pinoy poverty

I am human. My life constantly depends on nature. From the air that I breathe; from the food that I eat; from the water that flows from the underground to my thirsty mouth, I am all-human.  It feels saddening, though, that despite the equality of every human depending from these natural resources, life isn’t really equal.  Amidst the ever growing technological breakthroughs as well as the advancement Science, poverty lingers like a rust-stain in the fibers of a white, cotton shirt. 

Food is one of our sources of life.  It is in that where we can see the myriads of differences between the poles of human status. The quality of life typically depends not on the kind of food we eat being offered in our tables but the quality of food we eat. I believe you’ve heard the kind of food known as “Pagpag”.

Philippines is supposed to be a rich country. Its natural resources and the beauty that goes with it are astonishing. We’ve been blessed with unparalleled provision of nature from the mountains to the valleys and to the land and seas. But why when we look at our country particularly the places of urban poor and far-flung rural areas, we can’t help but to take solace to the remaining strength our psyche can summon.  How these places endured by human when what you see are rubbish all around with stench so strong you would hold you breath to the point throwing up.  Roads littered with human excrement and animals with their waste scattered around. The place is where children spend the day and even nights, all without proper shelter, clothing and food. That is how we learned of “Pagpag”: the recycled remains of food already consumed but still worth some portion that are salvageable.

For many it is garbage. Food that was left by someone from restaurants and popular fast food are being collected and dumped. Chances of dirt, bacteria and diseases that could penetrate its containers are of huge possibility. But for some, Pagpag is like a piece of heaven rained down on Earth during one’s birthday party. The chances of finally having something to fill-in the stomachs, which for days stayed empty, have finally arrived. 

Pagpag can be a stigma that would further deteriorate Filipinos integrity in the eyes of the world. But we cannot deny that it is a symbol of our people’s survival, and of inventiveness and of improvisation. 

ORATION: Today’s Jose Rizal, I am

Flowing within my veins is the blood of the first Filipino. The blood that was spilled in the spoils of war, dropped from the slugs of riffles and the blades of the swords. It stinks to the bone from the decaying flesh of those who sacrificed their lives. It reeks of pungency from sweeping the entire legion of fallen warriors but splashed the sprouting courage that bloomed to become the next generation of fighters for liberty. 

 

Allow me to greet you a pleasant day and continue with a quote that says, “It is the fervor of the youth that holds the world’s temperature at its normal state; when the youth cools, the rest of the world freezes.”

In his youth, the great Jose Rizal captured the imagination of the world with his resilience, courage and intelligence more than any other person in the Philippines. His penchant for politics reaches beyond the shores of our 7,107 islands when he led the reformists to use the mighty pen against our tormentors. It was when he published his two great works, the Noli and El Fili, which upon reaching the Philippines stirred the consciousness of the people, blazing their courage into an inconsumable fire. It enraged the Spaniards that consequently caused Rizal’s imprisonment and brought his untimely death in Bagumbayan. All these are proofs of his overgrown prestige as the premier national hero who is being revered with almost larger-than-life status. Legend has it that some even see him as a god of mythological proportions –an apparition of a great warrior from long ago.

But let me digress a bit off his legend and imagine him time-travel to where we are today. Can you visualize Dr. Jose Rizal in front of a laptop with Facebook loaded on its browser, displaying him all the menus, the icons, the tabs and the graphical interfaces he had never seen before? What could possibly happen when suddenly the Android phone rings beside him with rap music by Gloc 9, or Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball or Psy’s Gentleman? Can you picture him replying to text message or see him press his thumb in the built-in finger print scanner of the latest Iphone 6?

That would’ve been outrageous. He might had had his nose-bleed or suddenly knocked out by heart attack barely five minutes since his arrival. I’m telling you that would have been crazy!

The greatness of Jose Rizal is unparalleled. His life, his works and brain may have been unmatched. But his time already came and went. He is an icon until today and the future. A legend. An inspiration. His monuments will speak for him. But we are now in a different era where greatness such as his has entirely changed. Ours is a new world of different horizons but our strength, as a youth, makes no thing impossible. For impossible for us is nothing.

Just think of what we can accomplish now that we are free from the war-torn epoch with all the tools and technology at our disposal. Just remember our recent predecessors when they were able to conquer those places, which they thought were impossible to reach. The vastness of the ocean, now we know how compact it really is; The height of the sky, we scaled it by planes and drones; The outer space, which was feared, we now can set foot not only on the moon but soon even the planets and far-away galaxies.

For it is within our hands that we can make things possible. We may put our lives on the line like what Rizal did but we can do even more. The fervor, that fire we carry inside our consciousness could stir not just a country but an entire world and beyond. The frigid, lifeless worlds will turn ablaze with just a flick of our fingers. And the one thing we can put this fervor into full throttle like Rizal is in that most impermanent thing: CHANGE.

The young people are today’s Jose Rizal. They carry the ultimate power to change the world. They have enough strength to shape the future. And I am one of them.

OPINION: The problem with the Rizal-GAD free day (3rd day)

I was still thinking exactly when the issue surrounding the recent Gender and Development (GAD) training was in full swing following the lecture presented by a certain law graduate from a certain law school in Manila but under-bar Nick Cudia with the hints jabbed by Orlando Braga which eventually made the district supervisor, Plerida Payawal, went berserk with the defense of the GAD budget to the diversionary misinterpretation of the question from Jingle Bilog Pestaño and finally the looking-like-a-gobbledygook-question, "...Free day or training day?!"

To the bemusement of almost all the 270 educators present in the seminar that day, the question was either something that wasn't pocketed well or an intentional junction from an otherwise clearer-than-water query. And to paraphrase that very simple point: If the third day is a free day, what are we going to do with the budget allocated for that day since no one's having any expense to where the program was aligned? Or to simplify it even better: What are we going to do with the budget for the 3rd day when it's a free day?

The question raised the bar from where the previous one left off. When the whooping 218,000 pesos allocation was announced by the supervisor herself, too many eyebrows crooked while the eyes bulged in full. Not to mention when she was island-hopping each school-group, fetching an answer more inclined to the YES -for nobody would want to come back, probably, the next day for a training. Who would not trade a training day for a free day...with pay by the way?

None.

Big NONE.

But the supervisor's question of choosing between "Training Day" and "Free Day" was a logical fallacy from the outset. In English parlance, they call it "false premise". It is an incorrect proposition that forms the basis of an argument or syllogism. It is rooted to the idea that since everyone was asking for some specific information to which the subject appeared not too keen on divulging, then it was generalized that the proponent and those who agreed do not want to have "the free day." A far cry from what really was the issue at hand.

But all of these started with one, base idea: Going out-of-town for the GAD training. With the huge resources at hand and while the others, even those relatively smaller districts, could manage to pick pebbles out from resorts and venues away from their districts, why wouldn't we? And yes, we could if only we would.

But the supervisor doesn't think so. She claimed to factor security first before anything else.
"Pa'no kung maaksidente kayo o may masamang mangyari? E di mag-isa kong sasagutin kayo!", she exclaimed over the microphone.

From then on, we knew her reason. However we see it, it was like looking at a mother hen folding her wings, guarding her chicks and warming them up against the deadly cold of the night as well as the sharp edges of a predator's claws. It's called security. And none has the courage in complete sanity to counter that. Perhaps, other than me and a few others who have shared my belief.

Let us try to look at the matter differently this way. What if we went out somewhere out-of-town during the free day? But remember, that is with the attendance you signed covered the 3rd day -where you are inside the Don Lorenzo Elem School sitting in a monobloc chair sponsored by SAGUN, listening intently to a lecture in Science or that ethical standards lecture by a principal BUT then you have encountered an accident somewhere in Cabanatuan.

Huh?!

Eyebrows could be raising again by now. Then you ask how would that be even possible. Well, we are in a 3rd day which is a free day therefore we could be anywhere at that point. But the attendance and the signature speak differently. Now who will be responsible? Isn't it the supervisor?
"Paano kung maaksidente kami o may masamang mangyari sa amin (out-of-town because of the free day)?" E di mag-isa po ninyong sasagutin kami!"

If only we can go back a few weeks ago and have the committee reassess the GAD program they supposed to have planned many months ago, would they have our training move to other venue or not? That is if they knew that the security breaches the supervisor were yapping about are the same security breaches the teachers could suffer now that the 3rd day-free day was already in the roll?

Yes or no, we can never tell. It is like a chess piece that was moved too early and then you realized that it was a blunder. You wanted to pull the move back to the original square but the opponent quickly spewed, "Touch move!"

MUSIC AND LEARNING, TOGETHER

(Written for Nicole Dalton of CLSU)

       Music is the language of the soul. It can run thoroughly deep within the fibers of our consciousness. The melody it produces, whatever rendering appeals us the most, influences even the barest and tiniest molecule of our personality in many ways we can imagine. And that practically includes connections with our cognitive development being human, all capable of integrated learning that signifies developments in the different genres of life.

      Music speaks using the words our heart equally speaks. The lyrics in its poetic or chaotic presentation symbolize human struggle to its ever dangerous form. The lines telling us each and every understanding of how our own world goes spinning round to the daily grind of our humanity. How many times we laughed, celebrated, floated in the air, got excited or saddened, cried and angered while reflecting a song, listening not only to its outer guise but to the secondary message imbedded within? I, myself, couldn’t count it. It was surely more ways than one.
 
      Theoretically, claimants say that the influence of music begins even before we were born. A child inside the confines of the mother’s womb consequently hears and reacts to the music she hears and eventually develops connection to the outside world all preparing her of the life he will have a few months down the line. Her brain, reacting unconsciously to the sound, develops faster. This particular phenomenon was popularly called, “The Mozart Effect”, named after the great composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who in his genius of the melodious sound composed many of history’s most celebrated musical classics of all time. By the way, Mozart purportedly composed the Twinkle, twinkle little star song when he was just four years old.

      Schools do not exempt us to musical influences. How we, during the early education, learned the alphabets, the numbers and even the common vegetables we eat through one of the many songs being taught to us by our parents and teachers. I can still remember clearly the singing of the rhymes made into songs to the delight of my relatives when I was just a little child. How they say, “Bravo!” whenever I play as the darling of the crowd with the latest completed nursery rhyme performed in front of them is still a nostalgic memory for me.

      Growing up, music becomes a part of ourselves. From the playlist we build inside our Ipods to the song list downloaded into our mobile phones, we make it just like an extension of our own personality that adds color to our lives. Not once we tuned in to our ever dependable FM transistors, from the analog radio to the digital feature of our phones, just to find ourselves tapping our fingers over the table or stomping our foot on the floor to the latest music being played all the while writing our thesis and finishing our term papers.

    All this musical connections are like an upbeat dance stepping on and off to the beats of the drum, the toots of the trumpet, the strums of the guitar, and the chromatic of the piano in a grandiose musical orchestra. The freedom of expression from the message conveyed is like a mirror reflecting the reality of my own. The melody that makes me fly into the skies of my imagination brings a soothing rest to my sometimes tired soul. The beat that makes me move with razor-like precision and pinpoint accuracy to the ever challenging days but can also makes me chill and feel relaxed during times of refreshing. The letters of the lyrics falling exactly into every crevice of my heart telling me that I am human. And into my humanity I sing. I sing into a composition, a perfect musical composition, I created out of my very own life.

Yolanda can never put the Filipinos down for good

November 2013

       Days before the horrendous landfall, typhoon Haiyan, locally named Yolanda, was slowly gathering strength in the Pacific ocean. Like many others before, it had been duly assessed and visually identified via satellite by meteorological agencies across the globe. But one notable thing that was constantly mentioned whenever its name was coming up was that of its size: It was enormously colossal -considered to be one of the largest typhoons in recorded history to ever hit land. Worse, news arrived that it was heading straight into the heart of central Philippines.

    

      We, Filipinos, are generally used with typhoons. With no less than 20 cyclones coming and going each year, we learned to acknowledge each occurrence as a natural atmospheric event that wickedly takes a few lives and leaves the country a day or two after beating with typical storm effects -visuals of uprooted trees, tattered roofs, fallen electrical posts and floods. Despite that, our spirits were never down. Our people stood up, licked the wounds, brushed aside the pain and moved on -heads maybe bruised and bloody but still, like Invictus, it is unbowed. 

   

       Everything changed in the morning, November 8. As communication lines to and fro Leyte and Samar islands consequently snapped out, we never anticipated something so catastrophic that would eventually change the lives of the victims and the people of the Philippines as a whole. Some recorded clips from major broadcast channels were able to be transmitted showing us the initial common effects of the coming storm: strong winds and heavy rains.


       Even a correspondent from a news organization was seen reporting in the streets amidst the torrential downpour only to surrender against the blows of both water and wind thereby deciding to abandon his potential exclusive footage. Roughly half an hour later, the same reporter was again delivering another report from inside a building's second floor but with camera focusing to his exact previous location in the street of Tacloban City which was by then a good six feet under the water.
    
       That, perhaps, was the last actual video of typhoon Haiyan entering the eastern seaboard. Nobody may have thought that it was just the beginning as the succeeding episodes were never recorded. Only those who survived the cataclysmic event two days later were able to tell the horrifying tale. And it was until television reports brought our eyes to the tragedy we never imagined to be even possible to a country already habituated with typhoons that we finally understood what had happened entirely. 
    First seen was the actual devastation to properties. Houses were demolished, practically smashed into unimaginable bits and pieces. Vehicles were either turned upside down, whacked or stacked with each other. Debris from all over were scattered, shambled from coast to coast. Trees were uprooted and thrown meters away. But the most agonising sights were human bodies torn and dead strayed in sporadic locations lying along the roads, under or on top of rubbles. Who would not feel the pain of a mother seeing his son dead beside her wrecked home? Or of a man finding his wife and daughters already cold and stiff near where their removed shanty was just standing a day before. A good number of corpse were still lying everywhere. Many are still missing. These aren't numbered around ten or twenty or thirty -not even in hundreds... but of thousands. Later reports projected that casualties could even reach 10,000. It was like a purging scene in the days of Niro or the holocaust by the Nazis only that it was nature who was administering the toll and water is its medium. All these on top of all the other catastrophes the Philippines absorbed within the last 50 days: From the war in the Southernmost part of the country to the killer earthquake in Bohol and the other devastating typhoon which hit Central Luzon only last month.
    

       We can only wonder now how all these will end, or realize how severe it really is when everything is fully accounted for. How will the Philippines recover from such an annihilation? We still may not know yet. For now, what we can do is to lend a hand with each other coupled with prayers and faith to our God. This could be the biggest ever typhoon to challenge the people of our country but it is not the end. No Yolanda can keep the Filipino spirit down forever in oblivion. Like a marathon runner who stumbled and fell, we will rise up anew reaching the outstretched hand of our fellow Filipinos, to continue the race and cross the finish line of the future. We may be bruised and bloody, yes, but we will stand up and face the dawning of a new day.