Category Archives: memories

Paalam

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Paalam
Paalam
Paalam
Paalam
Sa ating nakaraan
(Paalam) Sa mga pinagsisihan
(Paalam) Sa aking nadarama
(Paalam) Kaya ko na ng wala ka
Sa naging pagmamahalan
(Paalam) Sa mga pangakong naiwanan
(Paalam) Wala na ‘kong pagsisisihan
At sa wakas ay kakalimutan
At kahit ‘di nagpaalam
‘Di bale na kung nasaktan
Ika’y naging sapat
Kahit tinapon ang lahat
Paalam

I regretted nothing. I’ve flipped everything over in my head and I would still have done the same, whatever the situation would have been. I’ve given whatever I could and I would have done the same thing again. Maybe with a little more restraint and loved myself more?

But there are things that are out of my hands, curve balls to topple me down. That’s what happened.

I pray for all the strength I would need to face this coming year. I don’t think I can take any more pain.

REFLECTIONS OF A FORMER SMALL BUSINESS OWNER

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I tried selling on Carousell yesterday and received some inquiries today (“Last price na po ba?”). While I don’t blame buyers for asking that (it is well within their right as customers), I can’t help but feel sorry for some small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who deal with similar customers who ask for discounts that cut to the bone. And they’re not even ordering/buying in bulk.

You see, we SMEs deal with high operating expenditures (opex), taxes, and damaged goods regularly. We carry those on our books without the benefit of economies of scale. At the same time, we try to price our products and services reasonably so we can retain customers while paying salaries/opex and struggle to keep afloat.

Yes, we give discounts if it is within our means but please don’t ask unreasonable rates that they cut so deep. If you do, that means you don’t want our business.

That said, I rarely ask for deep discounts because I know how SMEs bleed, especially with the kind of business environment that we have = red tape in getting business permits, crazy tax system, and high tax rates. Really unfriendly.

Selling on Carousell triggered this within me.

You see, I was thinking of going back to selling online now that LBC Express will be launching a service that would help SMEs with their logistics. (I had drinks with their key people last week so that’s how I know). I won’t preempt them but it was something that made me think whether I can go back  to it again.

In the early 2000, we used to sell items on eBay even before they thought of putting up an Ebay Philippines branch. There was no online selling platform yet at that time and Sulit.ph was just starting out. We used eBay US and had to go through the hoops of being an early adopter/user. Had to open several bank accounts due to the unfriendliness of the payment system available then (Xoom.com, Western Union, etc.) because Paypal was hard to use at that time because we needed a US bank account. I was able to set up our Paypal when the company started accepting EON by Union Bank–the first pure online/branchless banking entity (I had to give props to them on this one). Another problem with the old system before is that some of our customers do not have credit cards since we have buyers coming from Eastern Europe or Latin America or somewhere in Southeast Asia. I had to physically cut my lunch breaks to physically queue in these banks/remittance centers to get payments and go to the Post Office to ship the items.

And oh dear, the fees! The fees really do bite! We had to price them in or else we won’t have any profit at all. Ebay selling fees, listing fees, Paypal fees, etc. But those make our products expensive, on top of the expensive shipping fees.

And don’t get me started on logistics. It was (and still is) a huge headache.

Our customers complained that our local Express Mail System (EMS) is freaking expensive but that’s the only system available to us that time (tracking numbers) that ensure that our items really do arrive. Otherwise we were blind and we don’t have any assurance that our customers are not really duping us, claiming that the items did not arrive so we had to refund so the negative feedback wouldn’t gnaw out our feet. When I became a public finance reporter, I had to ask Customs/Philpost why is that our postal service is so expensive compared to Japan and the US (we bought stuff from Japan/China and their shipping costs with tracking numbers are half of ours). No one could give me a clear answer.

It was simply exhausting to the point that doing eBay was no longer an option when they changed their feedback system and increased their cuts from profits. Then there’s the logistics headache.

Then we opened our brick-and-mortar business within the fringes of the Maginhawa food hub. Half of our business was comprised of walk-in customers and being in a busy center is good. But that comes with the predatory rent rates as well so we were priced out of the area. The opex couldn’t be justified anymore.

Fast-forward, e-commerce is booming like crazy here (but we’re still lagging compared to our neighbors in ASEAN) and SMEs have all sorts of options now, from friendlier payment systems to increased online selling platforms. Websites now are easier to make too (WordPress has become friendlier to SMEs, with all sorts of widgets available).

I remember I had to deal with a cheap domain and hosting provider then but in return i got crap security so in the end I got hacked. I abandoned all ye hope for an online store at that time. Plus I had to deal with Joomla, and that one is such a pain to use since I am no computer genius. It’s not easy setting up a shopping cart and linking my Paypal account there. I had sleepless nights trying to do it by myself.

I tried Multiply (remember that one?), the blog-social-media-cum-online selling platform of the 2000s. I ordered my Lomography stuff from a girl on Multiply and a handbag from a fashionista that only lasted me three months. I tried selling on Multiply too but it had limited reach and couldn’t make money out of it since our customers are mostly international. Multiply was ahead of its time but they couldn’t figure out how to best monetize what they had. They were like the Friendster = good concept, but slow in figuring out how to make money out of something that good.

Anyway, back to being an SME. I remember somebody telling me that SMEs in the Philippines normally have a 3-year lifespan. Well, on our third year, we went bust. So much has changed, like rent rates have gotten crazier and the proprietor’s interest has waned. Keeping afloat in this environment is a struggle. You don’t have a 9-6 day. You can’t just walk away from your shop and have a two-week Christmas vacation because that is the busiest season for SMEs. Then SSS, Pag-Ibig, Philhealth…

Then you had to deal with an employee who destroys you or steals from you. And robbers taking our cellphones and other stuff. Then BIR suddenly orders a change in receipts…so we had to order PHP 3,000 worth of new receipts and ditch the old ones. Money down the drain. Then QC government came out with an order that all brick-and-mortar stores should have CCTVs installed for security or else they would not be able tos secure business permits. How come it is the SMEs who bear the burden of maintaining peace, order and security? Isn’t that what our taxes supposed to do for us? What if we couldn’t afford a PHP 6,000 CCTV system?

It was all too much to take.

So please, if you deal with SMEs, especially those who make their own products to sell, be considerate. You can ask for discounts if you order in bulk (so that way we can offset given the small economies of scale that we can have in wholesale). But not retail. Please be kind. Especially to farmers and wet market vendors. They make so little.

Remember, SMEs provide 99% of the employment in this country.

FENTANYL GOT THE WRONG PERSON

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Among the artists who have recently departed this dimension, it’s Dolores O’Riordon who has affected me the most. I’m not ashamed to confess that her death personally affected me since I wasn’t able to see them live in 1996 (I was a poor college freshman) and 2012 (I just gave birth to twins) here in Manila. On the day she died, I played non-stop Cranberries songs, whatever I could find on Youtube. Then in my car, I continued my mourning as I played their songs in my Sony Walkman on a loop on my way to a coverage.

Cranberries was part of my high school life. Dolores and Alanis Morisette  were the female artists who had influenced me as a vocalist at that time.

The first time I heard “Zombie” back in 1994, I couldn’t shake it out of my head. I waited for it to be played on air so I could tape record it (yes, yes, the old-school recording to make the soundtrack of my life; it was an art form, mind you). Then I played it on my sister’s Walkman while in a van on the way to Manila from Los Banos with my classmates. We were competing in a science fair to showcase our study-sorta-thesis then. So the entire duration of that science fair, I was listening to Cranberries, Guns n Roses (Spaghetti Incident), Mr. Big (Bump Ahead [I fell in love with “Promise Her the Moon“]), Collective Soul (“Shine”), and a couple of locals like Color It Red, Rivermaya, and E-heads. Guys were borrowing the Walkman and my tapes to beat the boredom while we tended to our booths. (Girls had a different playlist back then, I was the odd one).

I followed Cranberries. I borrowed tapes or swapped with classmates. In my senior year, some guys and I formed an amateur band and we played Cranberries. Twenty-plus years on, a classmate told me that whenever she hears Cranberries, she remembers me. That’s how closely tied I was to the band.

When I read that the Cranberries was reuniting, I thought to myself I will finally have the chance to see them live. But it was never meant to be.

I was sad when Chris Cornell died. When Dolores passed, I was heartbroken.

Goodnight.

ODE TO THE OLD BEACH HOUSE

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Old Beach House location, UP Diliman

If there is one fond memory I have of my graduate student days in UP Diliman (yupielbi girl forever here), it’s this: eating outside the small canteen called Beach House adjacent to the UP Diliman Main Library. Brought my classmate (whose undergraduate school was Letran, hence, her ignorance of the place) here to eat after our Anthropology class (something that I regretted taking because it was just an utter waste of time). Two barbeque sticks, veggies, rice and soup for less than PHP 200. After that I usually went to the library to do my thesis (when I finally buckled down to work on it after leaving it to stew underneath my aspirations to become the best business reporter my newspaper had–but failed on that front, i guess). Or sometimes pretended to do my thesis. I have slept with my head on the table among the musty copies of theses that I painfully had to read. Then I would go out here again at the Beach House, by that time it would have already been closed for the day, to sit and ponder my future.

I haven’t been to this spot for a long time. Probably time to visit.

Wala Nang Tao Sa Sta Filomena

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I had been singing this haunting song to my twins when I put them to sleep since the day I brought them home from the hospital until tonight. Yeah, I know it’s not a good lullaby but it’s the only song I could think of that I couldn’t sing without my entire being shredded into little pieces and stuffed into each note that comes out of my vocal chords.

I got to know this song through Patatag‘s Nagbabagang Lupa album, which my parents brought home one day. It was rare that my parents could buy tapes then because money was really tight so it was a novelty for us to have a tape of any musical genre at home. That tape was played to death on our lone radio/cassette player that sat on top of our mala-cabinet black and white TV.

I think my youngest sister and I had our first heartbreak with that album. I remember that same sister crying after hearing “Tano” because “kawawa naman sya.” I was six years old and my sister was five. The country was about to see its first mass uprising to get rid of a dictator. The housewife of a murdered senator was about to run for president.

Fast-forward, my parents again brought home another tape but this time it was by Joey Ayala, his first album. I discovered he was the composer of the song that has haunted my sleep for so long.

I saved bits of my small weekly allowance to buy his succeeding albums. I was in grade school that time. Later on I fell in love with “Walang Hanggang Paalam.” (That’s for another future blog entry.)

Anyway, the Patatag’s rendition was the one that got stuck in my head for 30 years. It was painful and at the same time beautiful. Joey Ayala’s song was so visual and yet deep. It was a song told from the point of view of a bird, seeing the desolation caused by war. A village caught in the middle of gunfire.

Well at least that was my interpretation when I was in high school and college. I have yet to Google its real meaning or the circumstances surrounding that song.

Years later, I had a gig writing for a series of 2-minute spots about child soldiers for RMN. Dong Abay was one of the musicians working on the series. We spent an afternoon or two figuring out how to incorporate the revised lyrics of “Pen pen de sarapen” with granadas and armalites and my script into 2-minute spots (In the end we used one of his original songs for some of the spots instead).

I was too shy to chat with him about Patatag then. I was also probably starstruck (hey, he was one-half of Yano of my highschool and college years!) and all I managed was “Yeah, I’ll email you my script.”

A decade later, I got to work with AR Sabangan when we were doing investigative stories for InterAksyon. I learned that she was part of the Nagbabagang Lupa album and she was the one who recruited Dong Abay and Grace Nono to join Patatag. Parang, whoa, my youth revisited (sorry, AR, alam mo namang malaki tanda mo sa kin hehehe).

One hazy night (well, hazy because my head was already cloudy with all the stuff we had been doing for our investigative gig), we were able to go down the Patatag memory lane, allowing me to ask her about some of the lyrics of the songs that played on a loop in my head for 30 years.

And I told her that Wala Nang Tao sa Sta Filomena is one of my favorites and their rendition is the one I could never forget.

I hope this song will be remembered by my kids as something that their mother had sung to them while they slept. A song that would remind them that all is not well in other parts of this country. I just hope when they grow up, there won’t be any Sta Filomenas anymore.

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.