Category Archives: current events

THE FIGHT OF THE UNDERDOG

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I remember my journo cousin asking me why Pacquiao is very popular here in the Philippines and why is he revered as a national hero (Interview became an article for a US publication).


Clash of the Titans: Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao finally fight Photo: GETTY IMAGES

I told her that Manny is the epitome of rags-to-riches story that all Filipinos can relate to and aspire for. He literally fought his way out of hunger and rose up the economic and power ladder with sheer determination without having to earn a college degree. His English is stilted at best but he manages to grant interviews even in monosyllables.

Pacquiao embodies every Filipino’s hopes and dreams. He represents the downtrodden–the underdog that overcame the odds. He is a reminder that good things happen to the poor and the oppressed. To maids being maltreated by their Saudi employers; to the seafarers away at sea for 9 months; to the caregivers receiving pittance of a salary washing bedridden old people; and to boys hitching their carabaos to carts in the ricefield at dawn before walking to school on empty stomachs.

Manny is not only fighting for himself but for a whole country that looks up to him for inspiration, for citizens that seek reasons why we should be proud to be Filipinos when it seems like there’s nothing for us back home except corruption and poverty. And that is a very heavy burden to bear.

No, Westerners cannot understand. Rich people cannot understand.

So, go Manny! May God be with you always.

TRAGEDY STRIKES BEFORE THE YEAR ENDS

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Photo from InterAksyon.com by Brandy Roa Solayao

As of today, the last day of 2014, rescuers and retrieval personnel of the Catbalogan City government are still searching for the missing victims of the landslide in Burak, Brgy. Mercedes, Catbalaogan, Samar. Fifteen people are reported dead, three of whom were small children–the youngest was 3 years old. It has been raining non-stop for two days as Typhoon ‘Seniang’ swept from Northeast Mindanao to Eastern Visayas. The typhoon dumped huge amounts of rainfall, causing massive flooding in its wake. Misamis Oriental has declared a state of calamity. In Leyte near the town of Carigara, a bridge gave way to the rushing river that has overflowed, cutting off several towns from Tacloban City.

In short, I am not in a celebratory mood.

The kids and I had been here in Catbalogan since December 23 to celebrate the holidays. So far none of our plans pushed through due to bad weather. To make matters worse, my kids and I were down with a nasty bug, triggering really bad asthma attacks. Trips to the beach and other jaunts would have to wait until our next visit.

This year has been tumultuous for me personally, bringing me highs and really deep lows. I changed jobs but before that, I succumbed to the burnout that has affected many of my colleagues in the online news business. One such colleague-friend left her editing post almost at the same time as I did. She told me the high stress level she had been enduring for the past three years has induced neurological ailments in her. “It’s not worth it in the end,” she told me, “at the expense of my health.” She quit her online news job and now she’s a correspondent for an overseas publication and she says she still has her internal targets but she’s doing her job in her own pace.

I can say the same thing for me. I do my job at my own pace and I choose the coverage I have to go to, depending on what my priorities for the month are. I set my internal targets and I am now developing my own system since I am working alone.

Do I miss the fast-paced newsroom/news cycle? So far not yet. Do I miss reporting things that matter? Sometimes but when I see my colleagues rushing past me due to hectic deadlines, I am thankful that I don’t have to deal with that anymore. Although my news cycle is slower, I have different demands and different challenges that I have to deal with. One of them is to be verrrrrry ahead of everyone else. That’s really tough but somehow manageable.

Still winging it, being a working mom. This year we sent the twins to school so at least somehow their boredom at home lessened a little bit. Sometimes I marvel at how quick their minds work. They’re an active lot.

Thankful for the opportunities and experiences learned this past year. Here’s to 2015!

On covering dead children

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“Being calmly rational about dead children feels like a very particular form of madness. Whatever else journalistic objectivity is, it surely cannot be the elimination of human emotion. If we don’t recognise that, we are not describing the full picture.” How can journalists be objective when writing about dead children? by Giles Fraser (The Guardian)

Palestinians gather around the body of 40-day-old baby Kerem Ebu Zeyid, who died after Israeli attacks in Gaza on 29 July. Photograph: Belal Khaled/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

That’s why I can’t cover war. Or famine. It’s gut-wrenching trying to be objective when kids are involved. Going to Yolanda-hit areas already shattered me. I am a very passionate and emotional person pa naman. Kaya it’s better for me to be a heartless business reporter. (hehe)

No, really. I can’t cover these topics because it destroys me. People like me are oftentimes taken over by emotions. The reason why I lasted as a business reporter is because it is one of the coldest subject a non-initiated journalist can think of covering. The reason I cannot cover war, disasters, famine, and depressing things like that is because I hate them. I hate covering things I abhor because I cannot distance myself from the reasons that why these stuff happen. I will always take sides and it will reflect through my writing. I cannot possibly write about dead children without any emotion lest I be accused of being a sappy unprofessional journalist.

Some people thrive in reporting horrors like that and I do salute people who do because without them, who would deliver to us the news from the ground?

But then, I will be the last person raising my hand for the assignment. Not because I am afraid of the uncomfortable circumstances but because it will rip my heart and head apart.

Which reminds me, I haven’t been debriefed from my Yolanda coverage.

My childhood and the dying sakada child

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I was reading my old blogs and deleting spam comments when I encountered two comments that prompted me to resurrect this blog today.

The entry was about Joel Abong, the symbol of poverty in the Philippines, the poster child of the sufferings of the sakadas in the 1980s. He haunted my childhood, changing me forever and ever. (No, he’s not the reason why I am fat today. Let’s just say I’m scarred forever because there will always be a part of me that would hanker for a meaningful job, instead of getting rich and have a happy ignorant life.)

One of the comments in my old blog directed me to Kim Komenich‘s page devoted to his coverage of the Philippines during the tumultuous Marcos regime leading to Cory Aquino’s ascent to presidency.

Photo by Kim Komenich/San Francisco Examiner) Young tuberculosis/malnutrition victim Joel Abong is among the hardest-hit of the children at The Corazon Locsin Montelibano Memorial Hospital in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental. The hospital is home to a clinic where about a dozen kids are being treated for third degree malnutrition as a result of lack of food due to sugar layoffs. Joel’s father, a fisherman, cannot make enough money to feed Joel and his six siblings. It is doubtful whether Joel, photographed on May, 4, 1985, will recover. (revolutionrevisited.com/remember)

I remember Joel Abong as a sakada child whose emaciated body was plastered all over the newspaper’s front page (and for the life of me I cannot remember what newspaper was that because I’m not sure if it was right before or after EDSA I). Now I don’t know if my parents mistook him for a sakada child, the newspapers mistook him for a sakada child or, as one of the commenters in my old blog claimed, his parents were paid by the photojournalist to pass him off as a sakada child.

Little did I know that this child — skin and bones and all — would haunt me for eternity.

My mother always showed me the newspaper clipping of Joel Abong whenever i threw tantrums and didn’t want to eat. I was really a picky eater then. She often reminded me that I was fortunate that I had something to fill me up whereas this child did not. (Don’t get me started–my parents didn’t care about the psychological repercussions of my harsh education as long as I grew up to be a compassionate and mulat na Filipino).

Because of that, I could not forget that image and his name.

His memory was again resurrected in my head when I watched Maalaala Mo Kaya four years ago featuring a sakada family. Two of the letter sender’s siblings died of hunger and neglect, because of their parents’ ignorance and because their situation was further aggravated by their father’s abusive nature and irresponsibility. I cried towards the end of the episode and I couldn’t pinpoint the exact reason why… Maybe because the drunkard, abusive father asked for forgiveness from his son whom he banished more than 15 years ago or because of the plight of the letter sender’s family.

When MKK showed the ashen corpse of the letter sender’s youngest sibling, the image of Joel Abong suddenly flashed through my mind. No, they didn’t look alike but their lasting impression on me was the same: it was that of horror.

At the back of my mind I know people like them die everyday and stark realities like these every now and then get shown on TV. I’m angry that a child could die like. What makes me more frustrated was that I don’t know if my being a journalist is making any dent to their situation. I don’t know if I am making a difference. Our housekeeper that time asked me (she was watching MKK with me that time when we were having dinner) if it’s true that such things happen. Yes, I replied. It happens everyday. And I don’t know if I am doing anything about it.

We, the burgis crowd, are lucky we don’t know the realities of what this woman lives with everyday. We only get to do stories about them. We only get to read them. Like poverty pornography in print.

–

I remember my friend of so many years became so disillusioned with multilateral/bilateral projects/grants/loans after being part of one of those “aid” projects in the country. Part of her job was going around the country, to the most depressed places you could think of, and see the areas that needed “development”, to put it simply.

She met a family from a province down south who cut and gathered firewood for a living. All of the children had to work alongside their parents day in and day out so that they could earn a maximum of P250 a day. Collectively. for a day’s work each of them only earned P50.

In contrast, her bosses — the project consultants — were earning at least P350,000 a month. She complained that some of them weren’t even reporting to the office and weren’t doing any work at all since most of the “work” just piled up on other people. As if these consultants were just milking the project of those much-needed dollars that should be going to these impoverished families. She knew they weren’t doing anything much to help solve the poverty problem and all of what they were producing were papers, recommendations — those sort of stuff that wouldn’t really put food in those wood gatherer’s stomachs.

She asked whether there were any sense at all in these projects. She asked me, why can’t these multilateral or bilateral agencies just use the P350,000 paid to each of those “consultants” to help the wood gatherers and their kind instead?

She was so distraught and disillusioned. She resigned from her high-paying job (at that time) and wandered around for a while until she found herself again.

I couldn’t blame her. I would be questioning my raison d’ etre if I were put in her shoes.

Was my father right all along? The debate still continues if these loans do really help the poor.

—

And now back to the sakadas, I wonder about the sugar workers of the azucareras in the south. I wonder what happened to Joel Abong, his family. I wonder about the farmers who continue to suffer, with climate change, with the failure of WTO agreements and the so-called safety nets that economists promised two decades ago.

I wonder about where I will be going.

 

 

 

 

OBAMA IN MANILA

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Next week will be hectic with US President Barack Obama visiting Manila. Top concern for me are the traffic and tight security–the bane of my life as a harried reporter.

As for the expected outcomes of his visit, as far as I know, it would be mostly about geopolitics and economy would not be as important as the former. I was invited for a teleconference by the US Chamber of Commerce but due to logistical reasons, I wasn’t able to participate. Supposedly, the main topics of discussion are the themes for Obama’s visit to Asia, which are:

  • swift conclusion of a high-standard Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement;
  • implementation of KORU;
  • and bilateral trade and economic relations.

Now, I wonder where I will be deployed…

King Abdul Halim Mu’adzam Shah, second left, addresses President Barack Obama at a state dinner on Sunday. Photograph: Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images

He is now in Malaysia, to strengthen the geopolitical clout of the Americans on that side of the world.

Barack Obama visits Malaysia with economy and security on agenda – The GuardianOpening the first visit to Malaysia by a US president in nearly half a century, Barack Obama looked ahead Saturday to economic and security talks with the prime minister, Najib Razak, who leads a south-east Asian nation with an important role in Obama’s efforts to forge deeper ties with the region.

Stepping on to a red carpet at the Royal Malaysian Air Base, Obama was whisked by limousine to Kuala Lumpur’s Parliament Square, where a 21-gun salute rang out as Malaysia’s king and prime minister greeted Obama under muggy skies and a yellow awning. A military band played the US and Malaysian national anthems twice and Obama inspected an elaborate honour guard in crisp green and white before the arrival ceremony came to a close.

Read the rest of the article here.

THE TRUTH HURTS

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Sabi nga ng isa sa mga sources namin sa pork barrel scam na ito, we will never see another plunder case of this magnitude go on trial if a big fish wont be convicted. Napoles is not the big fish. Just one conviction is all we need. Three convictions would be so sweet. If no one is convicted, tatamarin na ang mga tao. There would be no more whistleblowers, no more Benhurs et al going on record. Nothing. Because those who would be willing to sacrifice their lives (or their way of living and their families) will see that it will be pointless.