It seems like there’s no end

Posted on 15/08/2021 by admin

Delta is just getting started. Then here comes Lambda, which researchers say is more worrisome as this seems to be more resistant to existing vaccines right now. The DOH today announced that it’s finally here and the fact that the UP-Philippine Genome Center’s tests are late, that variant could be anywhere now attacking everyone. Even Israel, the most vaccinated country in the world, has acknowledged that their preferred vaccines, BioNT/Pfizer could not hold up against Delta so now they’re having people vaccinated with boosters. How can we even face off Delta and Lambda with Sinovac when most of us only had that choice? Then people are not even rallying, crying foul over the PHP 67bn “lost” by DOH. Most of the vaccines that we have here are donated; we could still not account for the loans that were supposed to buy vaccines.

Everything is so messed up right now.

Last year, I was exaggerating to friends and co-workers that I will only be able to go back to our office in Singapore in 2023. It seems like it’s coming true. I don’t see any ending to this yet.

My kids, meanwhile, are so bored out of their skulls and I can’t blame them for trying out new stunts. The books I ordered from Big Bad Wolf are still stuck at Customs, while the Nancy Drew book I just bought from Carousell would still have to be shipped.

So here’s my daughter, Twin I, sleeping a la Harry Potter in that “secret reading room” (a big closet that seems to have no real purpose). Just because.

I’m suffering from abdominal cramps and body aches because of my period but I had to get out of the house because we ran out of vegetables. I was half-afraid that I wouldn’t be allowed to go inside UP to buy from the vegetable stall inside the campus. Good thing I was wrong. Being able to get inside the campus and being around trees felt good.

Then I went to buy tea for me and the girls near Bahay ng Alumni, as a treat for being able to go out after 10 days.

And since I was already up and about, I took the opportunity to have my car washed after weeks, if not months, of letting it get dirty because it was raining non-stop.

If the lockdown is lifted by the time I am on leave from work, then I need to attend to the under chassis again and have it checked (just for safety, 16-year-old cars have a looooootttt of wear-and-tear issues). Then have its aircon cleaned. Gee, it sounds exactly like what I did last year when I went on leave, the same month.

Elections

I would also have to reactivate my voter’s ID with the Commission on Elections (Comelec) during my leave because I have skipped several elections as I was working on election days. I probably got delisted.

But this is one election where every single vote would count so I would exert extra effort. Gotta vote out Duterte and his minions.

Speaking of elections, I was invited by the chair of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) to join them at their headquarters on election week. Well, she volunteered me to join them (LOL!). That’s why I have to move my voting precinct from my hometown to QC so it would be feasible for me. PPCRV and the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) have worked with Comelec in the past as the citizen’s arm–as watchdogs–every elections. However, the two of them have become toothless last elections because–I don’t know… They get drowned out by the DDS on social media. I don’t know what happened there–no protests or batting of eyelash when the 7-hour glitch happened that allowed the nincompoop senators to enter the magic 12 and none from the opposition got a place.

Anyway, I had always volunteered for the PPCRV ever since I was legally allowed to vote. I remember then that it was PPCRV-Namfrel, but then somewhere along the way the two groups had a falling out.

Anyway, it was just PPCRV that was left working with the Catholic Church. Why was I working with the Catholic Church? Well our house is literally spitting distance from our parish. It was convenient. On election day, I would be assigned to one remote precinct to oversee the literal counting of votes because I had a car and I can drive. I had with me a physical spreadsheet to record the votes and sent the numbers via text messages (analog phones, yes) to the command center, usually at the parish office next to our house and that’s where my mom was stationed. She usually also volunteered for PPCRV (both of us were given PPCRV shirts to wear on election day so that Comelec officials would allow us to witness vote counting). These are then recorded in the lone computer at the center and then the data are sent to the national command center in Metro Manila. If I remember it right, they had at one time stationed themselves at La Salle Greenhills. Yes, this was pre-automation, when every ballot box could physically be stolen. In rural areas, there were many instances of politicians’ private armies stealing the ballot boxes or ambushing the vehicles that were carrying the ballot boxes to the Comelec center of a province.

I wasn’t able to volunteer during the 2016 presidential elections because I was already working for my current company, which doesn’t care for our national elections, so it was supposed to be business as usual for me. Ditto during the 2019 elections, plus I couldn’t leave J stranded at home so that is that.

Now let’s see how next year’s elections would be. Myla told me I would be stationed at the national HQ because she needs journalists there. Or so her pitch to me was that. I can’t remember now what she said.

Come to think of it, I had always volunteered for so many causes that I don’t remember how I am able to accomplish other things. I’m all over the place.

It’s the 14th of August

Posted on 14/08/2021 by admin

And we have 14,000 new infections today. Very apt.

To make myself feel better, I tried again the oven and grill feature of my new stove top. Less oily food for us today.

I received some packs of Quorn products from its parent company as part of their relaunch in the Philippines. So for today I baked the vegetarian nuggets while i cooked tamagoyaki on top of the oven.

After this I removed the pan and replaced it with a wire mesh to grill okra.

I haven’t tried grilling steaks on this gas griller and I don’t want to ruin a perfectly seasoned steak. Not yet anyway. But I tried grilling burgers on it last week.

It has been quite a while since my meals have become irregular. Too much work. But it was last week when I realized that I had consistently been eating less in terms of serving and frequency. Only twice a day. I tried fasting yesterday with only milk as my source of nutrition (breakfast). By 4 pm I gave up. I couldn’t go without food. I needed to eat, especially after writing a 1,500-word article.

So if I should attempt again to fast, I should do it on a weekend and not when I am pressured to write epics. 🤦🏻‍♀️

I am distracting myself with cooking because right now I want to kill the DOH secretary. I don’t want to be stressed today with news about him and the COA report. And the mass resignation of healthcare workers.

Meanwhile, the lockdown may be extended given the steady rise in the number of new cases and hospitals operating at maximum capacity. A lot of people are going hungry again. I am in touch with one of the community pantry organizers here and they are now distributing food packs to jeep and tricycle drivers. I’ll see if I can give them a hand during my work leave.

We’re so f*cked

Posted on 13/08/2021 by admin

This lockdown will never end and this Delta variant is just getting started. I’m scared for my children as no vaccine has been allowed for those aged 18 and below. Even if I’m already fully vaccinated, I can still carry the virus back home when I’m buying supplies outside. I haven’t gone out since Thursday last week or 8 days. My freezer is holding up so I really don’t have to buy meat but I have gone low on vegetables. I have to brave it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Dept of Health Secretary Duque is going straight to hell. He has to answer a lot of questions…missing funds, unpaid hazard pay and allowances to healthcare workers, missing PhilHealth money…He is Satan’s little worker. He’s going straight to hell.

According to Commission on Audit (COA), DOH spent PHP 700,000 (USD 13,868) for four laptops. I wonder what kind of rocket DOH was launching to require them to buy a laptop costing PHP 175,000 (USD 3,467) each.

When I was still reporting on national issues, I used COA reports during my slow news days to investigate how each line agency or Congress is spending its budget. I once wrote about congressmen spending most of their pork barrel on waiting sheds and basketball courts that do not exist. When I was doing the investigative reports on the Napoles pork barrel scam, I used COA reports to follow the money and I haunted the Securities and Exchange Commission to get the General Information Statements of the NGOs that were supposedly the recipients of the pork barrel funds.

PhilHealth not paying hospitals is already crippling the country’s healthcare system. A lot of hospitals are going belly-up and many more will become crippled and may have to close down if this goes on. I wrote a long-form article last year regarding this. As some of my sources said, private hospitals outside Metro Manila have bigger exposure to Philhealth compared to those in Metro Manila as the percentage of privately insured patients and out-of-pocket payers is higher in the country’s capital compared to the provinces. This is dangerous since there is a dearth of public and private hospitals in the provinces and if you have a raging pandemic, it’s like you have already doomed the population that lives outside Imperial Manila.

I was supposed to write something related to this for a local news outfit but the lockdowns and my lack of free time for other things outside my day job have hampered me from doing this. This kind of reportage requires old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism—it involves poring over voluminous public records and documents that could only be provided by sources. Clandestine meetings with sources. Working as an independent journalist on output-basis arrangement with a news agency is not feasible unless the journalist is under a grant. Investigative stories should be done by news outfits that can dedicate a team for this, which we did before. It’s expensive and a lot of work. The news desk will also be understaffed because it will lose people who can write and edit daily spot stories because these people will have to dedicate their waking hours to the project.

So I can’t blame newspapers, TV networks, and online news outfits for not being able to build and retain a special team to tackle stuff like this. They are caught up with the day-to-day production of news stories as they fight for eyeballs and ad revenues. And this country is not like Singapore where nothing happens–where trivial things get front page treatment. Our news cycle is faster than other markets–about two weeks max–because this country is just too fucked up, too many things happening. I remember going through and reporting on a civil war, major earthquake, and earth’s strongest typhoon on record, all of which happened in just three months.

So it is up to the special dedicated investigative journalists to put these corruption stories to the spotlight.

All The President’s Men and Spotlight will not happen if not for them.

How to be brave

Posted on 12/08/2021 by admin

I’ve talked to two HR managers today–two cousins of mine who works and worked in global companies–for career advice.

It has been weighing on my mind for months and months. Both of them gave me some kind of solution to my predicament, but each gave me a different approach. So I’ll sleep on it and if I still feel the same tomorrow, then I roll into action.

But right now I’m starting to get a bit… apprehensive. What if there’s really no room for me to maneuver? What if the solution is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire?

How to be brave?

I’ve taken so many risks in my life and I’ve been strong because I have no other choice because I’m a single parent. But I don’t know if I am brave or just foolish.

Lord, just catch me when I fall.

Most powerful song

Posted on 11/08/2021 by admin

This one song had a profound effect on me, especially the lines:

“Years go by, will I still be waiting for somebody else to understand?
Years go by, if I’m stripped of my beauty and the orange clouds raining in my head
Years go by, will I choke on my tears ’til, finally there is nothing left
One more casualty, you know we’re too easy, easy, easy“

Because of this song, I promised myself I will not waste away my years and end up at 65 years old, asking myself where has my life gone? It was 2016. I told the the father of my kids about me filing an annulment case. Because of these most powerful lines:

…I said sometimes I hear my voice
I hear my voice, I hear my voice, and it’s been here
Silent all these years. I’ve been here silent all these years
Silent all these, silent all these years

After I got off that horrible situation, I thought I found “somebody else to understand” me. Nope. This need for some kind of understanding was exploited. And landed me in a situation where “I choked on my tears ’til finally there is nothing left.”

I’m still trying to recover. I’m still trying to find my voice because staying silent through the years, when I gave more energy than I received, is like being disembowelled. I died but I kept on living.

Tori Amos, you do not have any idea how much your song changed me.

The political economy of media

Posted on 10/08/2021 by admin

When I was still teaching in UP, I always introduce my students to the concept of political economy of media in real world settings. Not the kind that you read in textbooks or essays of academics. I tell them how the day-to-day decisions in the newsroom are affected by this. It’s about what story gets killed because the newspaper/TV network’s sacred cows would be offended. Or a real estate company would threaten the advertising department with an ad pullout if the article written by a supposedly independent-minded journalist is slanted differently. You have your ideals as a reporter and an editor but then the powers that be have a different view. As my ex-boss said before, it’s an everyday battle. You keep pushing the envelope; testing how far your sense of justice and fairness can get you.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer was the first newspaper I wrote for. I had been writing for them when I was still in college, which spilled over to my first few months as a fresh grad research assistant. It was born when the country was about to mount an uprising against dictator Ferdinand Marcos. It was founded by Eugenia “Eggie” Apostol, who led Mr and Ms, an innocent-looking magazine that contained anti-dictatorship articles, subversive stories that people like my parents were consuming like mad during the time all media outfits not under Marcos’ thumb are shut down (we had mountains of those magazines at the back of our house, together with Malaya).

It was a newspaper that defied the government when it was wrong. It fought for what was right. It was THE newspaper after Manila Times never recovered its footing after Chino Roces got imprisoned by Marcos and had to sell his newspaper. After some years, Eggie Apostol stepped down and Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc took the reins. She was an equally tough lady who faced a threat of closure by Joseph Estrada when his own presidency was threatened after scandal after scandal was uncovered (which led to another revolt against a sitting president). Manila Times under Lisa Gokongwei did not survive the economic pressures from Estrada after my friend wrote that famous “unwitting ninong” article about the insider trading involving BW Resources and the president. Gokongwei had to sell the Times to an Estrada crony.

Inquirer was the first newspaper that stumbled upon one of the biggest corruption stories of the decade, if not decades, which started with a simple kidnapping case filed with the National Bureau of Investigation around 2012-2013. (I also picked up this “pork barrel” scandal and was part of the investigative team for my own news organization that focused on this and our stories competed and complemented the stories produced by the Inquirer). That newspaper was instrumental for sending three senators ALMOST to prison (the courts have overturned whatever progress we had, after Duterte came into power because crooks gotta band together).

Now I feel that the Inquirer is already a puppet newspaper. It has folded under the pressure from some bit players in that pork barrel scam. The pressure though may not just be coming from one Melo del Prado but from some more sinister quarters of Duterte’s world. I don’t know; it normally wouldn’t succumb to such small fry. But then Duterte has already crippled the owners, the Prietos, when he came into power and there was a point that Ramon Ang, the president and CEO of San Miguel Corp, was about to take over the newspaper because financially they couldn’t cope anymore.

And here is Prof. La Vina’s take on the whole thing:

Stories from the sidelines

A journalist has a life other than news