A Rose Upon a Hard Rock

Her name is a vernacular derivative of the word rose. Rosing was beautiful, all right, and her life was not lacking in thorns. But the woman was a fighter long before women of her generation knew how to fight.

Our common knowledge about her starts only from around circa WWII. It’s as if her story came to be told from this time onward. She lost her only brother during that world war, and fiercely protected her mother and young daughter from the abuses of the Japanese imperial forces that had occupied the Philippines at that time. They would hide in caves in the mountainous regions of northern Philippines whenever the Japanese would conduct carpet bombing over the areas. On quieter days, she would haul an entire carabao that had lost its way, bring the animal to her family’s hiding place, butcher it, cut it up, and sun dry the meat for hungrier days to add to the staple root crops that she dug on mountainsides.

Much to her mother’s alarm, she would leave their “home” – wherever they would be holing up for the moment – and buy a pineapple or two, slice up the fruits and sell them at retail to other families in hiding. These business ventures would have her walking around. Stubborn and fearless that she was, she would refuse to curtsy and bow to the Japanese soldiers at military sentries, a mandated gesture known as “kumbawa,” another local etymological derivative of the Japanese custom of greeting called konbanwa. This predictably earned the ire of the incomprehensible soldiers who were widely known for their irrational bursts of anger.

Still, she fought back in her own little way and stood her ground. She knew too well that under the Japanese rule, the performance of the bow was a sign of complete subservience to the colonizers and total recognition of their ownership of the Philippines. Her charm must have eventually captivated the soldiers. It was said that missing or skipping this perfunctory bow would cost someone his head by the ever-polished bayonet.

In the swinging 1950s, when the Philippines was enjoying a post-Liberation business boom, she hauled her mother and daughter to the capital city of Manila and single-handedly opened what would be the biggest fruit distributorship outlet in one of the major public markets in the city. Her incomes grew exponentially as she fearlessly augmented her products to include black market American brand cigarettes. In a time when the police was considered an indubitable force to reckon with, she defied all threats that sprang from her not willing to be a victim of police extortion.

With her mother gone and her daughter married in the 1980s, she decided to retire from the harried life of tending to business everyday. She was getting old. Her strength and energy became directly proportional to what was left of her waning business.

She bought herself a small piece of land in the far outskirts of the city where the sharp-edged cogon grass was taller than humans. She saw what remained of her future in a place that was not even fit for humans. During the following months, she single-handedly hewed the tall grass till only the moist reddish earth was visible. Every morning, she walked around on the hillsides, lugging two large empty bags, and proceeded to pick up huge stones. In no time at all, she was able to fill up her small patch of land with a landfill of those stones. A small nipa hut soon stood on the land. Several fruit trees and flowering bushes started to grow, too. The nipa hut would later turn into a small concrete structure that she called her spanking new home.

There she would spend the last years of her life, fighting the chill from the nearby mountains, fighting the greedy government agencies that saw the potential of the erstwhile uninhabitable lands on the hills, and fighting the thought that, in the end, she is really left all by her lonesome. Her daughter’s father was in a faraway city, with his real family.

She simply played the cards that were dealt her – and played them marvelously.

Till her last dying breath, she fought back. All within a span of thirty minutes, she died twice before the third and fatal cardiac arrest, brain dead on the second. On the evening of June 3, she passed away at 93 – still a rose upon a hard rock.

Drowsy

At last, policy makers are awakened into the reality that currently bites the Philippines. Economic planners are trimming growth targets. It isn’t these targets, however, that ordinary Filipinos find mind-boggling. The planners and policy movers have always had a penchant for making targets anyway, elevating the effort to the level of a sport. It looks, though, that they had been making plans either in slumber or in a half-awakened state. Being in climate-controlled luxury cars and excellently airconditioned homes and offices can, indeed, induce a narcotic, numbing, and trance-like effect.

The ordinary Pinoy finds sick humor in television ads and cinema ads where the president of his country is seen smiling from ear to ear (to match a professionally done make-up and expertly coiffed crowning glory that projects a beaming leader) in cross-fade frames along with animated graphs and statistical figures that visualize a smiling, swimming, and swooning economic upturn (constant and consistent) in the past few months. Along with these images are a series of shots of government institutions that have supposedly been furiously addressing, albeit just recently, the country’s economic blight.

To the ordinary Pinoy, this is not only sickening; it makes his heart sink. But because Filipinos are wont to just laugh off their problems (probably, out of an attitude of being resigned to the fact that is, in turn, an after-effect of centuries-long subservience to colonial rule), the sickening images are merely taken as sick humor. Those images and statistics are lost on the ordinary Filipino because from the time he opens his eyes in the morning till the minute he rests his weary body at night, he knows a different set of facts.

He only knows lower-digit numbers in his economic realities, not ones that can be exponentially configured into statistics. Being destitute, he does not know that far.

Long before the price of rice went up, the ever-dependable instant noodles have also become staple food for poor Filipinos. A pack of instant noodles comes at about 5 pesos. A poor family of five people will have roughly about four packs a day. The taxicab driver will have to ask his passengers for a few extra bucks additional to the metered fare because it has become impossible for him to recoup his gasoline expenses. To the passenger, this means the equivalent of 30 to 40 pesos to show his generosity. Many primary and high school students, in both the countryside and urban poor areas, are forced to quit school because their families can hardly come up with financial requirements needed to sustain schooling. The school I.D. and other seemingly necessary requirements will come up to around 200 pesos more for low-income families.

While the country’s economic planners speak in terms of inflation, export, import, Dubai crude oil prices, and strong peso, the ordinary Pinoy can only utter the price of rice, price of canned sardines, price of instant noodles, cost of public jeepney fare, additional financial requirements in public schools that are supposed to give free education, and the ridiculously escalating price of gas partly due to an imposed 12% expanded value-added tax over and above the ridiculously escalating cost of foreign oil.

It would do a world of good if all Filipinos call a spade a spade. But I am not sure which is more expedient for the sake of having a unified country: for the poor to understand economic terminology or for the ones in power and authority to have their ear to the ground.

Would You Go To The Other Side Of The World For Healthcare?

Traveling for healthcare, also known as the phenomenon of medical tourism, is a fairly recent thing. Well, at least, the tag is rather new. Citizens from developed countries now opt to travel abroad to avail of healthcare services or medical treatments. In the process of availing healthcare in a foreign land, the patient takes the opportunity for rest, recreation, and leisure. The medical patient thus becomes a medical tourist.

Medical tourism is for either a leisure tourist who happens to want or need a medical check-up or a medical tourist with a hospital or clinic as destination and wants sightseeing and shopping on the side. The medical tourist has set aside his health and leisure dollar or euro, but he is not relatively rich. He is someone who is likely not insured in his First World country, or someone who cannot afford private healthcare in the US because the medical treatment he needs is not covered by his insurance.

The primary concern of a medical tourist is the medical treatment or the health and wellness concern he needs to address at the soonest possible time. He chooses to travel halfway around the globe to an exotic Asian destination for warmer climate and a different atmosphere, plus of course the cheaper cost of medical treatment and healthcare outside his country. Most likely, he has also heard of the first-rate service, professionalism, and value-added personal concern of Asian health workers who are known around the world as excellent doctors, nurses, physical therapists, caregivers, etc.

The medical tourist will need a little downtime during post-treatment convalescence, and thus avail of activities that are restive, relaxed, and pleasurable. While in this strange land for a few days, he is curious to know and experience first-hand the culture and history, sights and sounds of this place that he has known only through Internet websites.

His budget primarily and largely goes to the medical treatment he came over for (operation cost, doctors’ fees, hospital room, etc). The extra money he has will be spent on getting to know the places nearby in the remaining days left on his visa. He may also splurge most of his remaining money on a farther destination such as the famed beaches in the Orient that he has aspired to see, since these are touted to be a paradise in the Internet websites. He will most definitely sample the food of this strange exotic land.

Several key factors have brought about the phenomenon of medical tourism. There are aging populations in Japan, US, and Europe. Healthcare is expensive in developed countries, such as those in North America and Europe. Patients have experienced a long waiting period in the national health system of some western European countries. Private and social benefit schemes are getting expensive, forcing patients to look for an alternative. At times, the individual ends up paying for his own healthcare. Often, some surgeries are not covered by insurance and will, therefore, be out-of-pocket expenses.

Outsourcing of healthcare becomes an attractive alternative because Third World prices are more affordable. The technology and quality gap between First World and Third World has been eradicated. Developing countries now boast of improved medical technology, as well as competitive healthcare prices. The Internet has compressed the world, offering a wide array of comprehensive information. International travel is easy and affordable. Add to all these is the prospect of fun and relaxation in a new land.

Categorized as an export product, medical tourism is basically marketed to people in the First World countries who are not insured or people who cannot afford private healthcare in the US. The phenomenon of medical tourism is said to now be a US$40 billion global industry and is projected to grow to US$188 billion by 2013.

Medical Tourism

Medical Tourism in the Philippines

Medical Tourism in India

Payatas: The Poetry of Poverty

An eyesore to those who are used to seeing asphalted roads, at least, the terrain here is of the mushy, squishy type. A crust of a curious kind that covers the unseen ground is made from layers of refuse at different stages of decomposition. All sorts of organic stuff fill the ground, from the raw to the maggoted to the egested. As to the garbage that doesn’t decompose, the place is also a grand showcase of an amazing array of synthetic items, from the ubiquitous plastic bags to polystyrene in many shapes and sizes.

The biodegradable trash emits the distinctive stench of death and dying. The non-biodegradable expels the frightening smell of kill. Plastic that has been left out in the open, under the elements, lets off a putrid sulfuric stench that comes with smoke. Some say that the killer methane must be coming from the chemical reaction between biodegradable and non-biodegradable, mixed with H20 from the rains and the CO2 that comes from somewhere. My little knowledge from high school chemistry cannot comprehend all that.

Human beings scale this place and spend hours on this mountain in the only livelihood they know how to eke out – picking trash that can be sold. Armed with long and thin metal rods that are bent on one end to make a hook, hands quickly search the area, hook items that are mostly plastic, and throw them into used rice sacks slung on emaciated backs. Like a metronome, rods held by grimy hands pierce into the refuse, expertly search and hook, and deftly shoot into the sack the coveted discards. A graphic oxymoron. Whole families can be seen plying this trade.

At the foot of this garbage mountain is a thriving colony of illegal settlers, known more colloquially as squatters. These people who have not known the more pleasant side of life, are buried under ignorance, social degradation, economic desperation, senseless infighting due to gross crab mentality, and vice. An entire family’s meal budget for the whole day may be thrown away on betting for the much publicized and legalized lotto. There is a not so half-hearted joke that poor Filipinos used to run to church to pray for hope and solution to their never-ending economic woes, but now run to the lotto betting stations for brighter hope.








Drugs proliferate the place in such ridiculous ease that one can turn on a corner, hand a ten-peso bill to one of the many people packed on every possible square foot space, and openly receive a packet of weed or a smaller sachet of what is locally known as ‘shabu.’ This drug of choice is synthetic amphetamine, regarded as poor man’s cocaine and even lower in cost than crack. It slowly fries the brain to a crisp. Peddlers are users. Users are couriers. And the whole shebang is of people drugged enough to forget that they haven’t eaten for at least two days.

On July 10, 2000, the mountain of garbage caved in on the slum colony below, killing hundreds of people and rendering some more hundreds of families homeless. That is, if makeshift contraptions made out of derelict wood, rusty galvanized iron sheet pieces, and cartons of milk assembled to stand up can be called shanties.

Days of heavy rains during one of the fiercest typhoons that ravaged the Philippines loosened the mountain of rubbish. Three days after the crash of the dumpsite, rescue teams were still pulling bloated decomposing bodies out of the heaps of garbage. Society’s debris buried under plain debris, seen over CNN.

The place has remained ugly. It is a picture postcard of squalor and pain. It is so ugly that it starts to look pretty on pictures that accompany some NGO’s country report.

Three months out of a year, every year, I live in this place on a self-funded and singular mission to do whatever I can to upgrade the literacy level of out-of-school youth who are drug dependents. Because the drug trade along the dark dingy alleys peak from 10 in the evening to 2 in the morning, I schedule my classes during those hours and call it the Midnight School. We hold it under a mango tree on the yard of a kind old lady that keeps me there, with the dim sputtering light from the lone incandescent bulb of the tiny house spilling out to provide us some form of illumination. It looks poetic to survey a sea of heads huddled over seatwork exercises.

When the police frisk these youth during the months that we don’t have school, the law enforcers find drug packets and fan knives inside pockets. During those three months, however, police are surprised to find little pocket dictionaries, ballpens, and crumpled folded makeshift notebooks instead.

I always look forward to those three months, every year.

Hope in the Midst of Squalor

Payatas Garbage Dump Collapse

After the Crash

Life On A Banana Leaf

One in three Filipinos are now living in poverty despite the purported modest economic gains in recent years.

The number of Filipinos living on just one dollar a day rose from 23.8 million in 2003 to 27.6 million in 2006, according to a survey released by the country's economic planners.

Oil prices have been rising (22 percent over the last three years). So have the cost of transport and basic food items. Wages have barely moved in the past few years. Inflation has been rising steadily (5.4 percent in February, the highest since October 2006).

Poor personal income in the face of soaring cost of living equals a desperate country.

"Let's move to Australia," my husband says, lost in thought.

I shoot back nonchalantly, "The opportunity for this country to go up is available only when it's down."

"You're philosophizing Reuters. You wax everything poetic," he retorts teasingly with a silly grin.

"At least my life does not revolve around pairs of Nikes," I snap back only half-jokingly.

He grabbed to hug me, as if to say I win the argument hands down.

Yes, I am hopeful for this country. It's the only one I have. I had made a definitive choice a long time ago to not be part of the statistics of diaspora. I probably think this way because I happen to be in a childless double-income family. The thoughts might not be the same with those coming from families of large broods and a myriad of needs.

But making dreams in a place like this can only be put on hold. I pinch myself each time I say that things will be okay in this desperate land. In the meantime, we merely dream of moving out of our city-center dwelling and set up residence in the suburbs where we can have a garden (planted on land, and not in pots), keep a dog and cat (that can procreate their respective lines till they can), and inhale unadulterated air (as well as exhale unadulterated carbon dioxide). We can also almost see our little adopted Aeta boy from Pinatubo with a mop of hair in very tight curls.

The Fable of Foibles (The Fallibility of Knowledge)

While global economic experts debate on such real considerations as Gross National Income (GNI) Per Capita, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP$), Actual Final Consumption Expenditure (AFCE), etc., the typical Filipino rural child does not even think if the water he drinks from the communal shallow tube well is safe, whether his parents will allow him to still attend classes this coming planting season when his manual help in the farm is absolutely needed, or if he can still manage to walk the muddy roads to school at daybreak because a mudslide is surely to occur again this year. It may not even cross his mind that he is very rarely able to drink milk because his father would rather pump up the gamecock with multivitamins.

Knowledge is lost on those who are truly informed.

A little knowledge, indeed, is a dangerous thing.

Children of the Country(side)

I met them in the provinces when I went to teach their teachers. Lives of seeming insignificance. It looked like they have already found their place under the sun - and that place is hopelessly right where they are. It makes one wonder whether insignificance will NOT beget insignificance.

Unlocking Potential

A child that is raised well by his village will someday raise well his own. Such is the organic nature of culture.

One only needs to intervene to facilitate this process. One only needs to unlock the potential.

Children in rural schools are far from centers of dynamic cultural exchange. But to let them remain marginalized is a way to retard the culture of a country.

Heroes Necessitate the Opposite

There are 12,000 Wanted Persons in the Philippines today. These are the top crop among the fiercest criminals in the country.

Everyday, the courts hand 500 warrants of arrest for law enforcers to serve.

They say the Philippines badly needs heroes. But it is the existence of these templates of ideals that produce failures.

Goodness shouldn't be put on a pedestal. It should be the norm.

The day that the hero doesn't need to exist anymore is the day the criminal won't either.

A Boy Named Christopher

Christopher B. Bajala, then an 8-year old Grade 1 student of Manoot Elementary School in Occidental Mindoro had mild cerebral palsy. He showed difficulty with his fine motor tasks such as holding the pencil and using scissors, maintaining his balance, and even walking. He also had difficulty in his gross motor skills such as catching the ball and carrying his school bag. He had an obvious speech impairment and could not utter words. Occasionally, he drooled.

In June 2005, Brain Gym therapy was administered on the child by a special children educator, with the help of the boy's class adviser and school principal.

By September of that year, Christopher was found to be able to write his name and utter two syllables. He would pass by the principal’s office during breaks and greet the principal and teachers. During lunch breaks, he would join other students in reading books as part of the school’s Child-to-Child Program.

On February 2006, Christopher was observed to have improved his penmanship, and write and read words by syllables. He was also able to perform basic mathematical operations and solve simple math problems. He was very active in all his class activities.

The boy's principal and class adviser have been painstakingly tutoring the child, Christopher’s post-test results were 79 in Math, 77 in English, and 78 in Science. He was able to pass Grades 1 and 2. He entered Grade 3 in school year 2007-2008.

(excerpt from a short conversation with Christopher in May 2007)

Interviewer: Christopher, ilang taon ka na?

Christopher: Eyt.

Interviewer: Eight. Itong darating na pasukan, anong grade ka na?

Christopher: Tri.

Interviewer: Grade three ka na pala. Nabasa ko, ang talino mo pala. Natuto ka ng magbasa. Tapos pumasa ka ng grade one. Ang tataas pa ng grades mo. Galing! Anong favorite mo, Science o Math o English?

Christopher: Inglis.

Interviewer: Aba English! Anong naalala mo sa English?

Christopher: Ay lab may skul.

Interviewer: I Love My School. Bakit gusto mo yun?

Christopher: Kasi tungkol sa kalinisan ng skul.

Interviewer: Diyan sa matataas mong grades, sinong tumulong sa iyo?

Christopher: Nanay ko.

Interviewer: Sino pa?

Christopher: Kapatid ko.

Interviewer: Nahirapan ka pa ba magsalita? Patingin nga ng dila.

Christopher: Maiksi. Beeh! (laughs)

Interviewer: Anong maiksi, ang haba-haba eh! (laughs) Kumain ka na ba?

Christopher: Hindi pa nga.

Interviewer: Anong gusto mong mangyari paglaki mo?

Christopher: Maging matalino. Makatapos ng pag-aaral.

Interviewer: Tapos anong pangarap mong maging paglaki mo? Anong trabaho ang gusto mo?

Christopher: Sa bukid.

Interviewer: Gusto mo din magsaka. Anong ginagawa mo pag wala ka sa school?

Christopher: Nagtitinda ng gulay.

Interviewer: Binibili mo yung gulay tapos tinitinda mo?

Christopher: Tanim namin.

Interviewer: Anong gulay?

Christopher: Patola.

Interviewer: Saan ka nagtitinda?

Christopher: Doon sa kanto. Naglalakad.

Interviewer: Magkano ba ang tinda mo?

Christopher: Payb pesos.

Interviewer: Sige nga, kunwari meron akong 50 pesos tapos bumili ako ng isang patola, magkano ang sukli ko?

(quickly proceeds to count by 5s)

Christopher: Porty payb!

Interviewer: E, bumili ako ng sampung patola, magkano na ang sukli ko?

(Proceeds to count by 5s again)

Christopher: Wala na!

After the short lighthearted conversation where he also told stories about his friends and thanked his principal “Sir Bobby” for helping him, Christopher proceeded to show off for more attention and wrote his name on the ground using a long twig from the talisay tree. The huge letters were written neatly on the loose soil. Each letter, he read aloud. Christopher may not seem to be completely normal but his mental faculties are sharp. He has grown to be a typical precocious little boy.

He noticed that the afternoon was getting late. He said goodbye apologetically and started his long walk home. Gone was the little helpless boy who could hardly walk and did not talk barely two years ago.

Christopher is a child who has been raised by his village, and raised well.