On the Road to Boston, Davao Oriental

That day, we took the road that diverged from the highway in Trento, Agusan del Sur, cutting through huge swathe of plantation area that would later give way to the long stretch of land where nothing much seemed to be happening after the trail of the typhoon. The road brought us by midday to a torn bridge that connected the land of Agusan to Surigao del Sur.  I was alarmed to discover that the British-Indian (or was it Indian-British?) humanitarian aid worker knew the area better than I did; she said she spent her Christmas there, she flew in after the devastation of Pablo, which hit us on December 4, 2012; I felt awkward and embarrassed when I realized she had been elected as our guide for this trip. No one knew the area better than she did and she had several local contacts. So, I pretended there was nothing unusual or extraordinary about that as I sat next to a British communications officer, spending her last weeks in the Philippines before flying back to London to wait for her reassignment to South Africa. Who are these people, I asked myself. Wasn’t it a bit insulting for a journalist—who grew up in Mindanao all her life—only to be guided by a foreigner from the other side of the world in her own territory? I was thinking then, this might be a new kind of conquest, something that is designed to make you feel totally emasculated, helpless in your own land? She was a sweet, handsome woman, bubbly with a lot of sense of humor.  I was reading Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure” at this time, its paperback copy, I secretly sneaked into one of my backpack pockets, but I refrained from asking her about the place where Hardy used to live and the places he wrote about; most people in my circle thought Thomas Hardy was the author of The Hardy Boys, but I realized I did not want to spoil my T.H. pleasure with what I might discover.

The Boatman

The TawaTawa in Camouflage

Just trying to detoxify

The absence of stories is failure of the mind

That shot is totally useless, throw it away, Ja said as soon as he saw this. But it's yellow and it's made of wood, I replied, you know how I love wood, and the way that it bears the marks of the elements, see those dents on the edges? See its uneven surface, the marks of time showing despite the yellow paint? The marks of the sea and wind, how can I just throw it away?
But there's no story there. What exactly are you trying to say? Ja asked.
No story! I exclaimed. Canary yellow against the blue, no story? Who painted it, no story? How long has it been standing there, no story? Who are the boatmen? What kind of people are they? No story? Isn't the absence of stories a failure of perception? Isn't it even a failure of the imagination?

I miss my reading time today

Photographing photojournalists

Lake Lanao. Mick and Toto. Panglantaw Mindanao Mobile Multimedia Newsroom. June 2014.  

Shining Moment

Loving the Shadows

Since I am still chasing an impossible deadline, just let me post this first to mark this time of my life, hoping that I can retrieve it later, and then, I can remember what I have gone through, and finally, I can write and talk about it with you, and that would be a chance for both of us to laugh again and be free.

Sunrise at Nova Tierra

Morning starts with Ja telling me if you really want to be a photographer you have to get up and watch what the sun’s first rays are doing to the mosque, get up, what are you doing there, lying down, you, spoiled lazy brat, just a few seconds and this moment is gone; I said, what do you mean, just a few seconds, are you sure you're talking to me? I live here for a long time, don't you realize? I have taken millions of pictures of that mosque and they all look the same,  I’m tired, I’m still sleepy, I have memory loss, and I still have to finish my dream to retrieve my memory, otherwise, I’ll feel lost and tired the whole day. As soon as I said this, I get up anyway to take a picture of the Al-Ziddiq Mosque.

Photographs are like Babies...

It’s a long wait for justice for this elderly claimant in Davao City who was forced to sit down as the long queue for claims processing seemed not to be moving. GERMELINA LACORTE Read on

Glimpse of Lake Lanao

After I chased Pam to the third or was it the fourth or the fifth (?) floor of the unfinished building, where, as soon as she saw me,  she glared at me saying, what are you doing here--you and your fear of heights? Go down, go down, just leave me alone, I can easily get this thing done. I said it's not about my fear of heights that is the problem here, finish what you're doing as fast as you can and let's get out of here, ASAP! All the while I saw the man or whoever it was at the construction site looking at us, with loathing, looked Pam up and down with such a look of contempt, why does he look angry, full of hate, am I just imagining things? I smiled my best smile to the man, hoping to break the ice, hoping his hatred will somehow thaw, but sometimes my charm just wouldn't work and this was just one of those times.

To the Man at the Marco

Back in October 2013, after I dismissed the class at a university at 9 pm, I crossed the street to cover a late night presscon in a hotel. On the third (or was it the fourth?) floor, we were all awaiting, ambush style, for the main source to appear  when I looked up at a man looking down upon us from his hotel room window.  This was my thoughts to the man:  Whoever you are, I want your life. If it’s not for sale, just give it to me for free and I’ll make you happy, do you think I talk like a whore? Come on down here, where Mick and I am squatting, looking up from among these cameras and TV crews, all waiting in ambush to interview the mayor; Mick, contemplating of a probable life in Jakarta, while I am thinking of buying a camera, how can I buy one, I need one very badly, what are you thinking standing there, opening your door like that? Are you looking down upon us, wondering, what are those cameras, those tripods doing down there, swarming like bees, what are they, TV crews, reporters? Those people with notebooks, pens, recorders, readied; why are they squatting like that? How about the others, how long have they been standing there, waiting? What’s up? Who are those people inside the function room, where their eyes seemed to be fixed upon, who are they really, these people? So many of them, waiting, when it’s almost 11 pm, only hour before midnight, what are these people waiting? Aren’t they going to get some sleep?

Losing my yellow coin purse

Losing my yellow coin purse is really very difficult because it brings back the devastating feeling of all my previous losses: those bagful of clothes long, long ago, I left in a hotel after I heard the devastating news about you; or that stupid brown wallet I lost inside the busy Marawi public market in June while taking shots with Mick and our Maranao friends; or how it felt to lose my beloved eyeglasses one Tuesday in April while shuttling from a magazine office to a TV network and finally, to a big newspaper compound at the heart of Jakarta. Or, how it was to leave the newly-found Rachel Cusk's book on a seat of a jeepney. They were not really worth millions, especially my yellow coin purse, which only had six one peso and two 25-centavo coins in it; but there’s something about losing that makes you feel empty and dry. There’s something about the absence of the thing you lost that makes you look around to notice the color you once took for granted but now makes you think of the missing object with ache. Now I look at them and take notice: the yellow tupperware glass standing tall amid all the clutter on my table, the yellow container thrown in a grass-covered lot next to our house, the yellow cover of Ken Auletta’s book “Googled,” my yellow underwear. I remember the day that Ja left and we ran out of cooking oil. Is that the way relationships are measured? Through the sheer number of yellow cooking oil containers bought from a convenience store, used up and emptied? [This post has nothing to do with Pnoy's yellow, which I vehemently detest!]

A Harried Visit to My Mother's Garden

I’m still in the midst of a very difficult assignment but I can’t help posting this here. It’s always gratifying to find out it was not my eye that was at fault, afterall; nor was it my poor overworked point-and-shoot. Something else is the reason why I can't take the kind of shots I wanted to take for a long, long while.

Watching Dewitt Jones

Who won't fall in love with Dewitt Jones?

Birthday Wishes

I never used to celebrate birthdays—but increasingly, these years, I get a certain wish, a strong, quiet but maddening desire, to be with myself on this day; to do nothing, to spend time with myself (of course, with dear ones); but primarily, to see the beloved hermit in the form of an Old Man with the Lamp on this very day, very far away from society. But normally, this wish doesn’t usually happen to me. In 2007, I remember spending this day right in a newsroom in Cebu, trying out a copy-editing job with friends and strangers who never had an inkling it was my birthday. I read a lone greeting from a friend (it was from Ca) in Davao when I sneaked peek on my FB—or was it my email? They never knew I was in Cebu, spending the graveyard hours copy-editing. In 2008, I was inside a dorm in Quezon city’s barangay Loyola Heights, battling with thick theoretical readings for our Media Ethics class at the Asian Center for Journalism (ACFJ) at the Ateneo the following day. I was already very drowsy because it was already deep in the night so I told Prateesh, my pretty Nepali roommate, I can’t take it anymore, I got to sleep and leave my readings in the morning; but Prateehba was so insistent that I should not sleep. “No, no!" she said. "Do your readings now. You won’t be able to wake up in the morning.”  “I can wake up,” I said, confidently. “My body has an inner clock that’s working perfectly.” Prateesh insisted that I should not sleep so, I read a few more pages for a while and only went as far as Herbert Marshall Mc Luhan and never got to John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, which was my report the following day (how I figured out John Rawls’ theory of justice the following day without reading him is another story) but on this night of my birthday, I simply could not take all those readings anymore, I was already very drowsy as I declared to Prateesh, “I’m not going to brush my teeth tonight because it’s my birthday.” I can still see the shock and amusement on her face. She laughed so hard that she totally gave up making me read the rest of our readings. It was Bryant who discovered the following day it was really my birthday (I think I had forgotten it) and he rushed to join us with the Indonesian gang for some simple fun at the mall.  The following years, my wish to be alone on my birthday remains a wish that has never been completely fulfilled and satisfied; and this year, this month, I’m afraid I’m going to spend my day exploring a Unesco mountain.  I only wish I get to see the hermit.  It will make up for everything.   

View from the Seventh Floor

Just a Glimpse of Iligan

We climbed up the top floor of the other building (what do you expect if you're with an excited bunch of photojournalists?) Pam, whose friend showed us the way, was always willing to climb anything; she's the type who won't think twice of climbing the highest tree in a jungle just to get the vantage point of a photograph, any photograph; as she did when she climbed the unfinished building inside the MSU campus to take a perspective shot of Lake Lanao. Here, we took what Ja and Sean would refer to as the sniper's view of the Iligan City Hall; even as I was trying to suppress my inherent fear of heights as we inched closer and closer to the edge.

Anatomy of Pablo

I was trying to organize my files when I came upon the photographs I've taken in one of the series of stories I covered in the aftermath of the typhoon Pablo. The photographs showed me something that I did not see at the time I was covering the stories. Years after the killer typhoon that ravaged Mindanao towards the tail-end of 2012, I feel the need to look back and bravely take account of what I did and what I failed to do in those stories.