Restless in Kuching

Barely 12 days before the end of the SEAPA journalism fellowship, the sun rising and setting below Kuching, I've been wrestling with my demons as I tried to befriend words to tell the story. What words? What stories?
In Kuala Lumpur, words escaped me as I grappled with the memories of strange sounds and strange phrases, rolling Masjid Jamek at the tip of my tongue as I inserted ringgits and pulled out cards at the Putra train station, only to lose the phrase just a few steps away, my mind playing tricks on me, rendering me helpless, powerless.
But in Kuching, a benign feeling stayed with me since the day I arrived on a cab driven by a Chinese Malaysian driver. As if there was a benign spirit blowing a warm wind to my face. The city had a charming and welcoming air.
I walked over the whole stretch of its cobbled waterfront to watch the river cruises in the distance or gawk at the white men who looked like the white rajahs of old. I liked to listen to Rudyard Kipling's accent spoken on the streets.
How could I write a story as complicated as Malaysia? How could I put this strange country on the palm of my hand?
The cab driver who brought me from the airport was a Chinese guy who scarcely spoke English but even his presence was rather comforting to a stranger like me. He took me straight to the acacia-shaded yard of the Anglican St. Thomas Guesthouse, a very cozy wooden building over a hundred years old, its floors made of ancient wood.
Elsie, the woman who showed me to my room was a Bidayuh who told me that the guesthouse where I was staying used to be a dormitory in 1950s and the 1960s for girls studying at the Anglican school nearby!
Built by Anglican missionaries in 1848, the whole place did not have the spookiness of Kuala Lumpor's Selesa Hotel where I stayed a few days before I arrived in Kuching. A half-opened door just across my room revealed the outlines of a Dutch woman agitatedly talking on her phone. On the dark, ancient stairs as I rushed out to go, were a couple of cheerful Black Americans to stay the night at the inn.
Kuching simply felt homey and warm. Here, you can walk the sidewalks and feel you've been living here all your life. Even the streets had no sharp bends! They flowed out so smoothly, as if those who built the roads really knew the balance of the yin and yang. Most of the shops that I've seen so far have Chinese characters. Lots of Chinese live in Kuching.
Just a walking distance from the Anglican Church, just across a Chinese temple, is the Medan Pelita building (which looks like a mall), which also houses a seven-eleven and an internet cafe!
The Anglican St. Thomas Inn sat close to everything in downtown Kuching. Room at the guesthouse was only 18 ringgits a day, a lot cheaper than the 80 ringgits I paid the YMCA hostel and that spooky Selesa in KL!
Elsie would have given me quite a big room fit for the whole family (with three beds) and a huge bathroom for only 30 ringgits but I declined because I'm just a very simple person with simple needs.
Besides, I was already missing my Sean and Karl and did not want to heighten the emptiness.

Lost in Kuala Lumpur

I've been going round and round the labyrinthine concrete maze of Kuala Lumpur the past week and could not get a flight to Kuching, not because Air Asia or Malaysia Airlines have stopped plying the route but because I could not get any confirmation from the sources that I'm going to interview in Sarawak. So, everyday, I ride the Putra train, which is Mujtaba's favorite means of transport here, and the KTM commuter train or the KL monorail train express (which is Allen's if he's not taking a cab) everyday to explore the intestine of the city.
But today, May 22, the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) in Bangkok has just booked me a flight to the Cat City (Kuching) and I'll be forced to leave my spooky hotel room in Selesa Inn along Jalan Tun AbdulRahman to fly on an Air Asia 9:30 a.m. flight to Kuching on Thursday.
I'll be alone, so, I'm a bit jittery. What am I going to do if people who speak a strange language will start swarming me again (as what happened at the KL international airport) upon my arrival in Kuching? Luckily, however, I'm beginning to have some idea what I should do. I merely have to keep this in mind in order not to get lost. Besides, I have also discovered a very useful guide how to get to the Anglican St. Thomas Guesthouse, which Professor Wong Meng Chuo of the New Era College in Kajang has recommended to me as one of the best and cheapest place to stay when you're in Kuching and you don't have that much money to spend.

The Lures of Travel

I can only reach as far as my mind can go.

Wanderlust

Is this not enough to arouse your wonderlust? But this , for its sheer beauty, could easily make me cry. There are things I couldn't let go, things that I carry with me whereever I go.

A Pause for Press Freedom

This blog celebrates the state of press freedom in this country and pauses to consider the kind of readers that we are fighting for.

My Audubon Goose

But maybe, I'm an Audubon goose, afterall.
In the last six years, I've been flailing my wings so hard, bloodying my breasts against the bars of my cage. I've been penned up at the season of migration and painfully and in a state of extreme panic, I feel the footfalls of time passing me by. And I'm dying, no doubt about that.
Yet, somehow, in some quirk of fortune, the cage suddenly opens!
I feel the strong impulse to run, to get out, to fly.
Never mind if I had to leave behind my fledglings in the nest. Never mind if I've been deprived of my pinion feathers for so long, I may no longer know how to fly. Never mind if I'm going to start my journey on foot--because I could not probably afford to miss my appointment for the long journey south.

The Migratory vs the Maternal

Somewhere in his book Songlines, Bruce Chatwin writes :

"In The Descent of Man Darwin notes that in certain birds, the migratory impulse is stronger than the maternal. A mother will abandon her fledglings in the nest rather than miss her appointment for the long journey south."

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"Darwin quotes the example of Audubon's goose, which, deprived of its pinion feathers, started out to walk the journey on foot. He then goes on to describe the sufferings of a bird, penned up at the season of its migration, which would flail its wings and bloody its breast against the bars of its cage."

But I am not an audubun goose and although I left Karl and Sean in Butuan, the contemplation of this trip is already tearing me apart. Maybe, I am more of a mother than a traveler.

The First Salvo of the Diaspora

It's that line snaking up Bangoy street's Mintrade Building---there's something evil about that line!

On the second week of April, the line at the National Statistics Office serbilis center in Bangoy corner Monteverde streets reached Uyanguren street, three blocks away. I arrived at the scene at 8:30 in the morning aboard a jeepney from Matina and fell in line in between a 23-year-old new graduate from Notre Dame of Kidapawan applying for a job as factory worker in Taiwan and a 37-year-old short, plump and domineering woman applying for a domestic job in Lebanon. We were there to get our birth certificates authenticated by the NSO on the third floor of Mintrade, the first step one has to make before getting one's passport. I took a passport for the first time for this journalism fellowship.
The woman at my back was full of praises about her Lebanon would-be employer. "No cellphone, no Church, no letter, no radio, no communication with family nor with other workers" she said was the standing policy in that country. "And do you know where to go in times of trouble?" I asked. "Of course, the company gave us cellphone numbers and contact numbers of government offices in Malita. "How about the location of the Philippine Embassy in Lebanon, did you look it up?" She stared at me as if I came from another planet and insisted that her employers were really good to take her in. She was forced to wean her one and a half year old child because of this trip. She had five children. Her sari-sari store in Malita was not earning that much and her husband was not earning at all. On the major newspapers that day were headlines about the Arroyo government pushing for Charter change.
The girl from Kidapawan had quite a different story. She never thought of going abroad until her sister from Taiwan insisted to take her there. Her sister has been working there in the last five years. Her income was quite good. It helped her pay off all her debts which was the reason she was forced to leave the country and worked in Taiwan in the first place. The girl from Kidapawan had to be on board the plane to Taipei in May. She loved going to the farm in Kidapawan. She went to the farm even before she took the van to Davao to get her authenticated birth certificate from the NSO serbilis center for her to take advantage of the one-stop-passport processing scheduled in her city the following weekend. She was fair. She had the eyes and features of a Chinese mestiza. She graduated from an accounting course although she kept postponing taking the CPA Board Exams. She worked instead as a sales clerk or a cashier at a certain warehouse in Kidapawan. Most of her neighbors are already going out of the country, leaving behind small children in their wake. Most of her neighbors work as domestic helpers abroad. Her mother and father were having a hard time sending her siblings to school. She still had four other siblings she had to help out. The woman bound for Lebanon said she had to borrow money---from the usurer, perhaps---to pay for the expenses of her trip.
The line going up to the third floor of Mintrade building was long and full of stories. It was here that Filipinos wanting to get out of the country started their first steps to a strange country.
We waited for the line to move, staring at a gray poodle on the dirty floor of a Chinese store advertising hot coffee or tea. A man carrying huge bundles of merchandise and sometimes, pushing a cart full of cartoon boxes would bump on us from behind and the line would bend or break to give way and then reconnect again as soon as the intruder was gone.
The girl talked about never having to fall in line before. Back in college, her mother did all the queueing for her when she had to take the exams. But she was taking a different step this time, the first steps to the diaspora.

Orange Days

My days have turned orange since Sean and Karl left for Butuan. Orange is the color of the sun just before the sky gets dark. When orange dominates ones life, it becomes impossible to get any work done.
So, I begin spending hours contemplating the taste of coffee. I begin to think about the smell of smoke, hoping they could awaken me from this lethargy but they dissipate into the air even before they could fulfill a promise of warmth and satisfaction.
The computer monitor goes blank. My wallet is empty. There is a nagging fear that hovers over my eyelids as I sleep. My orange days are fast turning into sepia. Soon, I will leave the place and there will be nothing left here but shadows.

Reading “Not Home but Here”

NOT HOME BUT HERE
Editor : Luisa Igloria

Skimming through the titles on bookstore shelves, oftentimes give me the feeling of reading a newspaper: You just flip open the pages half-heartedly, over and over, to stop at some item that momentarily grabs your interest, and then, setting it aside for something else.
But this particularly hot morning of a Thursday inside Davao’s Gmall’s National Bookstore, something caught my eye.
It was this orange-covered book, “Not Home But Here,” a collection of writings from the Filipino Diaspora, edited by Fil-Am writer Luisa Igloria.
Let me describe how I found it. It was in the Filipiniana section, switched in between Eric Gamalinda’s Empire of Memory and Carlos Cortes’ Lassitude. I was walking aimlessly in between the bookstore aisle, still smarting with shock at having been frisked by the guard as I entered the mall, trying to understand the meaning of such experience, when something about the cover made me grab the slim volume from the shelf.
Ignoring the sharp look of the security guard, I posed briefly just to look at the cover art by Brenda Fajardo, and opened right into the page where Luisa Igloria wrote about the poet Reetika Vazirani whose poem “It’s Me, I’m Not Home,” inspired the book title.
I discovered in an instant that I could not just put that book down.
Vazirani, as Igloria puts it, was often described as “the writer to have lived in more places than the number of years she had lived on earth because of her obsessive theme about the trauma of living between worlds.”
Her poem, “It’s Me, I’m Not Home,” describes a persona reflecting on the disembodied nature of her own voice that sounds both here and not here at the same time, as it comes out of the answering machine.
The same disembodied feeling reflects the experience of Filipinos in diaspora.
I turned over the book--so slim, it covered only 143-pages--yet, it resonates with something deep inside. I skimmed swiftly over the blurbs and flipped open its Table of Contents page, where names like Nick Carbo, Eileen Tabios, Bino Realuyo, Loreta Medina and eleven others met my hungry eyes.
Now, I began to wonder how is it then, for someone who is desperately stuck here at home and had no intention of leaving, to identify closely with the writings from the diaspora?
Is the disembodied nature of the writers voices---diaspora conjures images of the scattering of seeds, of spores, the detachment from the original body, as Igloria pointed out---echoes the same disembodied voices of those who are left behind?
I thumbed through the pages and savored the beginning of Nick Carbo’s essay “Un Beau Livre,” feeling transported for a while to the seaside village of Mojacar in Andalusia, Spain, where Carbo spent his residency in Fundacion Valparaiso while reflecting on his experiences in the brown diaspora.
For some moments, I was with him as he walked out into the terraced garden to stand in the shade of a thousand-year-old olive tree, “to listen to the ancient secrets, whispered there by the wind.”
The tree was already there when Magellan sailed off for Moluccas only to end up in the group of islands he later called the Philippines.
After a while, I was tempted to pause to listen to the sounds around me.
All I hear were the rustles of paper inside the bookstore as other browsers scanned the pages of other books on the shelves, above the din of air conditioning and the muffled sounds of traffic outside.
Hundreds of years after Ruy Lopez de Villalobos had sailed around Mindanao, the cogon grasses and later, the acacias had given way to the mall and the bookstore, where I stood.
Yet, how likely it still is, that someone—a woman with child, perhaps—must have stood in this aisle to choose between buying this book or buying six kilos of rice? I thought as I come across Loreta Medina’s “Choosing the Sun: Notes from a Journal,” at the part where she was leisurely strolling the beach of Dhaka, finding hardly a Bangladeshi woman strolling there like her.
For, poverty at home represents the other face of the diaspora. In her essay, “What My Lola Taught Me,” Leny Mendoza-Strobel wrote how the notion of a hybrid, fluid identity, that Pico Iyer eloquently wrote about in “The Global Soul,” has little to do with the Filipino Diaspora.
Even as Iyer spoke of the global phenomenon where people live in various parts of the world without feeling of rootedness in a particular place, Mendoza-Strobel showed how the journeys of the Filipino overseas contract workers, mail-order brides could never fit into that category, driven as they are by ‘involuntary displacement.’
Thus, guiltily I devoured the rest of the essays, moving on to Bino Realuyo’s “Life at McDonalds (Life is not English),” on to Merlinda Bobis’ “Border Lover,” on to Eileen Tabios’ “Toasting Poetry as a Way of Life in the Diaspora,” and so forth.
The writing from the diaspora allows me to get a glimpse at the other side of my experience, to connect with that disembodied part of myself I almost wasn’t aware of until now.
It reminds me of a cousin who had left our remote little village to migrate to Switzerland, marrying a Swiss, and straddling all the barriers of race, class, sex and culture just to send money to her family.
Of how schools and universities sprout all over the place teeming with nurses and graduates that will soon fuel the diaspora. How the old colonizers are still very much around, changing the rules of the game.
After reading the book, I was still left with questions. What and where is home in the diaspora? Is the imagined homeland exists only in the mind?
I craned my neck to listen. I had this uneasy feeling that like Nick Carbo, I had to dig up more than 400 years of the country’s colonial past for answers.

Family Album (excerpt of a life)

(My life as Germelina Lacorte is still a work-in-progress. This is an excerpt.)

THIS IS a snapshot of our house, before the old porch was torn down. It was probably taken in the 1980s, in one of the hottest, driest summers of the El Nino, so, all you see here is the stark wooden structure standing against the bleak dried up landscape of B’la, one of those little known villages in the surrounding towns of Mt. Apo.
All the leaves of the trees are gone. Even the bermuda grass in the front yard had browned and wilted.
Ma must have taken this with the Kodak 110 Instamatic camera that Eve was prodding her to buy at that time. A camera is supposed to capture beauty. Here, it captured the color of dust (gray and hazy) and the dried up stems of the gumamelas (brown). Even before time has turned them into sepia. Ma had tucked it for years among her files of old letters.
If we had known, then, that Ma was taking this picture, we would have stopped her at that time. Imagine, the house taken in the midst of a drought! Without even a single leaf to hide the truth. It was unthinkable. We barely reached our teens then. The truth, for us, was just too ugly to bear : a blurry image of a wooden house tilting in the uneven landscape. It was a one-bedroom house, perched high up on wooden pillars, with a porch and staircase facing east, and turns inward to a very small living room that leads to an even smaller dining room and a much smaller dirty kitchen and a bangkera to the south. The porch windows—which had long rectangular boxes holding potted plants—had wooden grills of geometric designs.
The living room—had a couple of wooden jalousie windows facing east---opens to the small bedroom to the west, where we used to peer out at the setting sun with fear in our hearts. Small kerosene lamps light our nights. We slept on wooden lauaan floor and wake up to the harsh sun, dappling the floor near the porch with geometric shapes, and the living room and the bangkera, with stripes.
The dining room opens to a pantawan facing west, where a huge rotting wooden table stood nearby a rickety wooden ladder that led to our muddy backyard. On top of this rickety structure, precariously stood a huge water tank, where once upon a time, a cat had drowned. I used to be afraid that this water tank might fall and spill its contents down the termite-ridden ladder, in a deluge. Nothing of the sort happened and yet, the fear and apprehension I used to suffer in the good old days in that house, stayed with me until now...

Make Tea Not War

At four o'clock in the afternoon, you can hear a pin drops at davaotoday.com. It's the time of the day when you're supposed to get out of the huge dormitory building to follow the scent of sugar and bananas deep fried in oil wafting down the streets and finally come upon the mysterious place where noisy children gather.
But it's about the beginning of summer--the time when schools close to give time for leaves to sprout---and the maruya makers are gone, trying to find someplace else where to cast their mysteries.
Now, as I contemplate the absence of that sweet aroma that had become part of my day, I become aware of the light coming from the window to the right. The sky beyond the roofs of houses, I can see from here, is gray and white. There's the ceaseless buzzing of the electric fan on the wall to my right, and the rustles of papers on the bulletin board on the wall opposite me.
"Make Tea Not War," says a huge poster on the wall, showing a man wearing a white teacup for a hat. He is tight-lipped and he wears a hard look all over his face. He is wearing black and his right forefinger is about to pull the trigger of the gun he perpetually holds. The iron gate on the groundfloor squeaks. The total absence of human voices allows me to hear voices inside.

Stories

Sometimes, I can almost say, I work for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Stories like this appear on its pages once in a while to tell the world where I've been spending my weekends. I've been issued the correspondent's ID and an ATM card where I draw out my pay every 15th of the month although fear hovers over my existence most of the time. The fear has something to do with the next pay. And the next stories. I'm scared of the days when I might stop writing these kind of stories and my by-line won't appear on the pages anymore and I'm lost in some remote, unchartered territories of my mind, unable to find my way home.
Those days have finally come. I don't know what to say.

On the Graveyard Shift

It's one o'clock in the morning.
Inside downtown Davao's Clickerz' internet cafe, a strong lemony scent wafts through the air. A lanky guy wipes a rag next to this computer as somebody raises the volume of a curious music playing from an invisible soundbox. The beat is playful and a bit too loud.
A group of dark-clad youngsters smelling of beer are crowding the counter. They are a noisy lot. Their stance and their presence is threatening. They keep passing by my computer, casting hostile glances at my direction. Some of them are standing right behind my back, as if asking me to leave. I can feel them reading what I'm writing here.
It's one fifteen now. I keep resisting the urge to go home in the comfort of bed. I feel so lost it looks like I could no longer find my way home. I'm stuck here in this place crawling with drug addicts, rugby boys and young people losing their way to the crazy whims of the world.
The Roman Catholic Church has a name for it. Purgatory. Urrrgggh. Even their music is boisterously loud. Their lyrics do not make any sense to me. All I hear is a repetitive chugchugging of drums. I'm shaking. The air conditioning is so cold. These people around me never seem to get tired. The bluish lights near the entrance makes me think it's five o'clock in the morning but it's still two o'clock yet. Five more long hours to go before daylight and the streets of Davao become habitable again.
Maybe, I'll have to go to the sea.

The Spy in my Pillow

I can feel a pair of eyes snooping in my room as I was writing this. I saw the dark shape of a head, sticking through the door I was facing as I typed on the keyboard. Several seconds later, the same head materialized through the window to my left, as if its owner wanted to find out what was happening to me, what I was writing here and why. I can feel the piercing pair of eyes as if it were a thermometer, trying to gauge how hot or how cold my room was. Or, more likely it was a barometer trying to tell whether a storm was coming. Was it my temperature he was trying to measure? Was it my storm he was bracing against?

Who was this snooper? Why won’t he come up to me and face things squarely?
I was seeing him only through the peripheral vision of my eyes. But the way he tilted his head to avoid the light and the way the light caught the pair of spectacles he was wearing, the way it sculpted his forehead and his face as he tried to read my face-all were too familiar. I turned around to meet his gaze-perhaps, to ask what was he doing peeping in my room like that, making me feel I was kind of a lunatic---but just as swiftly, he was gone.
Instead, I found myself in my room looking out to another grilled set of windows in our living room, which in turn was also looking out to the busy highway outside.
The blue curtain in my window was tucked away sideways to the left to accommodate the view--but looking out from here, all I saw were the holes of the granite fence walls showing glimpses of jeepneys scrambling along the McArthur highway.
Over an hour ago, the rain was pouring in a tumult down the house. The noise was almost unbearable when the waters slammed down the galvanized iron roofing above our heads. I had stood by that window, watching the last pair of kaimito and coconut trees, swaying across the street littered with small stores and brightly-painted commercial buildings. A kind of a thin, grayish haze seemed to hover over our part of Matina highway. This part of the highway closely approached the intersection just a few houses away, where one curve of the road leads to the SM city mall in Ecoland while another one straight ahead leads to NCCC mall and further down to the old downtown street of Claveria.
The haze and the gray skies were giving me a stifled, oppressed feeling. I blurted this out loud and someone had disagreed. He straightened the pair of spectacles he was wearing, peered at me very closely and said it was the date. February hung ominously over our house, he said, because the day when I was most susceptible to extreme mood swings was getting near. He was talking to me. He said I was sick. He had his own way of seeing things.
Hearing him, I felt sick and tired. The familiar suffocating feeling swept over me.
Then, suddenly, the rain had stopped. He had rushed outside to do his work in some café while I sat here in my room, before the heavenly white screen of my computer monitor. It was the only space in my entire universe where I can be free.
Now, the light in the sky was back. I looked up to see a gleam of white light to the West. I still had an hour before dark and it felt like eternity. I began typing away.

At the Marco Polo

As usual, I arrived late for the Wednesday Club 888 press conference. I thought there was nobody inside the little bar just beside the hotel's concierge counter, when I saw the empty chairs near the glass door.
But when I entered, everybody was there. I saw Q and Joel Esco and the rest of the group gathered around the bar, sipping lukewarm coffee from their cups while Awi and the others were crowding around a man in pink in the next table, ambush interviewing.
I was in no mood to join them because I just had a row with Karl, who lost his ID when we were supposed to go to the bank to open his savings account this morning. I stormed out of the house in Matina and boarded a jeepney, feeling ill-used and exploited despite my having screamed so loud, I must have awakened the neighbors.
Even as I took my seat very near the presscon's speakers, my anger at Karl's sloppiness had not left me. Probably it had borne a hole in my stomach. Waves of nausea and exasperation swept over me. I've been reminding him about his ID since the other day but it was only when we were about to go that he finally decided to look for it.
"I don't need an ID," he was saying earlier with that sheepish grin all over his face, the same grin used by his Dad, when he was trying to tell the children, "Don't mind Mama, because we know better. She's just plain neurotic, paranoid, etc.. ."
I was angry. I still am. He needed an ID to go to that bank and he had been postponing going there since eternity. Urgghh, children. As if it was for our own sake that we are doing things for them. I've been feeling sooooo bad in being treated this way. I'm a disgruntled ONE. I feel like I could start a WAR!

The Woman in White

I don't know how to go about my story. Angst, according to Nico, would lead to pangs or hunger. I got to write as fast as I can to earn my bread but I can't because I think, I don't have to eat that much to stay alive. Besides, I need to blog.
Today is the last day of the ASEAN Tourism Forum and all the guests are doing the last minute shopping before their flight tomorrow. There's going to be dinner hosted by some city or town somewhere. I don't think I can go there. I don't need to go.
All I care is to be here, inside the press center, sitting before a keyboard and a computer. Somebody left a cup of coffee and a pile of saucers near this desktop I am using. Except for one or two computers, the press center is full. I don't understand my notes. The woman to my right is talking to her companion from Manila. A while ago, I've been laughing at something that Jessica Zafra has written on her blog and this woman asked me if I had done my stories for the day.
Maybe, she was making an accounting, I thought. I heard she was from DOT or something. I told her I have done wwwooooolll my stories already. I was about to tell her, I've done so many stories for ATF, some came out of the Inquirer business features, some did not come out at all. As long as I can blog here all I can, I really couldn't care less whether they come out or not.
She opened her computer and I can tell that she's under some very visible throes how to go about her story. She typed on her keyboard, "media release," all caps. Thirty minutes passed and she was still staring at the white monitor. I don't know what she found there. It must be quite interesting. She's wearing a white blouse and a pair of black pants. Then, her companion pulled a chair and sat beside her and she said, "She's with Inquirer." Her companion smiled. "From Manila?" I said, no. "Provincial," the woman said. I wanted to strangle her.

Bargaining with the FireDog

It’s getting late in the year and I haven’t exactly known the FireDog yet. But I can smell hunger stalking in the halls as I sit lusting in the corner after the things that the FireDog can bring, if I manage to strike a successful bargain.
I promise the firedog the most memorable year in terms of pictures if he brings in one of those four to eight megapixel Canon Powershot digital cameras, with 7x optical zoom Canon was selling with a free powershot radio and USB card reader last Christmas season as a holiday treat to unsuspecting customers. Or, I can settle with any of Sony’s Cybershot line with 32 MB internal memory and the Carl Zeiss Vario Tessar lens, as long as these are brought to my doorstep for free before the end of the month.
Or, even that V530 Kodak Easy Share digital camera, now advertised as an amazingly stylish camera, in a very hot deal ad on the Philippine Daily Inquirer, will do for a moment. That V530 is now selling at P20,995; free with 128 MB Kodak SD card and a camera case. It’s a five megapixel digital camera, sleek and stunning in red, grey and black colors, powered by the exclusive Kodak color Science chip. I wonder if this camera is really as good as it looks but it is equipped with Schneider-Krueznach V-Variogin lens, with 3x optical and 4 x digital zoom and an MPEG 4 video that capture high quality, true-to-life colors, so that ad says!
Now that the reign of the firedog begins, I promise to deliver my part if the firedog fulfills his part of the bargain. I’d take pictures of Davao at six o’clock in the morning, standing at that portion of Magallanes street, just a little behind the SP building where the gables of the Royal Mandaya hotel jut out of the old shabby rows of buildings along Bolton street.
I’ll disembark from a jeepney passing by the Bankerohan bridge and take a shot of Davao river, framed by shanties that populate the riverbanks. Or, hang around Bankerohan public market shortly before dusk to take pictures of crowds crawling over the open ukay ukay stalls like ants, under the backdrop of the setting sun.
Walk along Matina’s McArthur highway to buy pan de sal early in the morning, to frame the peak of Mt. Apo blanketed by clouds, with the concrete overpass hanging over the road by the Matina public market.
I promise to be as truthful as I could get, whatever truthfulness means. I’ll take a walk along the seedy aisles and alleys in the city to capture a glimpse of life that other people deem ugly. I’d choose the often forgotten and taken for granted street alleys as mementos to the future. I’ll start with that alley in between the Grand Menseng Hotel and the carinderias lining down Magallanes street that hide the Community Hospital at the back. This alley leads to the bank of the Davao River where people take the boat ride across to the SIR village of Matina. Another small pathway running parallel to the river, branch from this alley going to the emergency room of the Community Hospital, where patients’ relatives keep vigil late at night. This alley stinks of dried urine, where foul-mouthed teenagers ply at night, something that could not be captured by camera. But the sights of barbecue stalls and street food and the transaction going on near the riverbank surely will give future anthropologists something to think about.
I promise to take them all to treasure--but only if the firedog gives me one hell of a chance of owning one of those cameras, instead of just leaving me here drooling over the pages.

Notes from the Year of the WoodCock

Was it a good year? Was it a bad year?
I don’t know. But throughout the year of the Wood Cock, things had a way of turning up.
The year started the morning I was dancing frantically in my room with no lights on. It ended with my blog at some downtown internet café towards the midnight that signaled the start of another year.

I WAS DANCING in my room at the start of the year (that was) while outside, Dad sat at the corner near the door, sketching a brigantine. The boys--Sean and Karl--were staying mostly in the kitchen, eating biscuits and watching Nickolodeon on cable TV, which was eventually cut off later in the year for our failure to pay the subscription fee.
I was dancing not because I was happy and excited but because I was afraid. I was wondering what the Year of the Cock would bring (to my boys) and dancing had a way of chasing away the bad spirits, keeping my heart open and my mind alert. I’ve been hearing things about the Cock even before that. “Isang kahig, isang tuka,” somebody warned. “One eats from whatever she can get from scratch,” went my very poor translation.
But how this creature, the Cock loved to crow and how cocky it can get, how flamboyant and how whimsical---and also how lucky! The Cock had a knack of finding anything wherever it scratched.
Indeed, it was the year I scratched everywhere like crazy. In the nearby city of Tagum, I documented a mining conference where the Mansakas, Mandaya and Dibabawun tribes were angry at what’s happening to their lands and because they can’t understand the paradoxical things the government was telling them about mining. Months later, I documented again the making of the “Tagum Indigenous Peoples’ Declaration on IP Education,” where I watched a Dibabawun balyan (a tribal priest) doing the ritual dance under the mango tree. Midway through his dance, the balyan stopped because the “abian” (spirit) was complaining about the altar. The balyan was using a four-legged wooden table somebody dragged from the workshop hall instead of the traditional “tambara” (altar). For atonement, the abian required the balyan to come back on the full moon, on the 16th day the following month to do another ritual dance.

ALL THOSE scratching yielded gems. Things that I loved simply turned up in the most unlikely places to cheer me up when I was about to lose hope. Bruce Chatwin’s “Songlines” selling at P35 at the NCCC Bookshop when my spirits were down. Or the Winter1993 issue of “The Paris Review” featuring Wang Meng’s fiction, “The Stubborn Porridge,” and Joanna Scott’s “You Must Relax!” and many others I never expected to find.
My dear friend Ava Vivian’s story on the Free Press, I chanced upon to read one afternoon when I entered the City Library while waiting for the rain to stop. Or, the email I got from Janis, the author of the Waray poetry whose lines had always made me cry, now telling me she had survived a year working for the Department of Labor and Employment!
Or Keith texting me from out of nowhere because he was going with us on our trip to Mamasapano, Maguindanao at the height of the rido conflict there when some other colleague had tried to scare me off from riding the helicopter.
Or, when I was running out of everything to give to the house help, Inquirer texted me to pick up an unexpected check for a story I wrote the previous year that the editors had picked up as the newspaper’s Best Feature for the month.
But most of all, the allure of working in our paperless news magazine www.davaotoday.com which never ceased to make me feel both magically invisible and visible, at the same time.

On the first month of the year when I was reeling from friends’ betrayal, I unconsciously opened the old copy of “The Complete Handbook of Astrology,” left lying in my elder son’s room. On the left bottom of the page was a pen and ink drawing in sepia of a girl fainting and being helped by the dwarves. I read, Cancer Affinities, and discovered the archetypal Cancerian: Snow White, the innocent whose trust was betrayed but who found comfort and shelter in the bosom of her tiny family. I have never been a “Snow White,” I hated all the things she represented but the day that I discovered this “archetypal Cancerian” was the day I beamed with gratitude to those bosom friends in my life.

It was also a year of outrage and endless running away. Realizing that the battle I’ve been fighting in the kitchen (or the home, as a whole) was something that I could not win, I decided to run away from home. I took refuge in my sister’s house in Butuan and began thinking of endless possibilities. Loving the taste of freedom and the unbearable lightness of being freed from all weight of responsibilities, I kept dreaming of flight. But in the end I went back home to the kids, quietly cursing myself for having the mentality of a slave.

But things, indeed, had a way of turning up! On the day when we finally launched the maiden issue of Davao’s newest online magazine www.davaotoday.com, I went home to hear the heartwarming news of Karl winning the editorial cartooning contest in the Davao city division elementary school press conference. Towards the end of the year, he would win in the region. But he’s still a boy. He hardly cleaned his room last year. He got me worrying 90 per cent of the time for always coming home late and staying too long in those internet cafes, playing games of Ragnarok, or whatever online game it was that caught his fancy. He found numerous exasperating ways to circumvent the rules we set at home. On the day that he won the division press conference, his campus paper adviser scolded him for coming to school late. On the day that he won the region, the only sign pen that he brought to the contest would not write. So, you see!

BUT STILL, the year ended with a happy note. Like magic.

Fodders for the New Year

FODDERS. I went around Davao city before the Christmas holidays and had real trouble finding an SM city mall second floor bookshop because it has been replaced by another shop selling Christmas gift wrappers, gifts and souvenir items.
Talking to the guy of another bookshop at the ground floor, I learned that the owner of the bookshop was lending out the space of the upstairs bookshop to a friend for the holidays. The books will finally be back some time in February. It’s a long wait for my book-starved soul but anyway the one running the ground floor was pouring into their rummage bins a horde of dusty, crumbling paperbacks put on sale at P10 a piece. There, I found a sturdy paperback edition of Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing," a crumbly copy of Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar," Philip Roth's hilarious parody of former US President Richard Nixon’s stance on abortion "Our Gang," and other paperbacks by Jack Kerouac, and by the author of "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," Ken Kesey. Forgive me for sounding so pathetic but my state of penury is now reaching 'poetic' proportions. The garbage bin is my last chance of nourishing my soul. It is perhaps, my last chance of getting an education!
Thanx to UP Prof. Butch Dalisay for his column too is a rare, delightful holiday treat. Hope he doesn't mind that I post here a part of his Philippine Star PENMAN column to brighten the prospects of another year. HAPPY NEW YEAR!


A treasure trove
PENMAN
By Butch Dalisay
The Philippine STAR 12/26/2005

”Speaking of books, let me share my joy in discovering – or make that rediscovering – the treasure trove of used and remaindered books on the fourth floor of National Book Store in Cubao. (I believe they have the same setup at NBS Quezon Avenue.) I found myself with a free hour on my hands a couple of weeks ago and remembered Clinton Palanca mentioning to me once that he went up to that floor for his fix of French books. I don’t read French, but any bookstore that has a corner for such rare treats must have something more, and I gave up my usual foray into the seafood section of Farmers Market for a stroll though the NBS shelves. What a cornucopia it turned out to be – shelf upon shelf and row upon row of books in glorious disarray; there was some effort to put all the books, say, about the vacation-spots of England in one corner, and all the computer books in another, but ultimately a grand disorder prevailed, refreshing and compelling in its challenge for you to explore the place for its hidden prizes. I’d stopped buying books for some years, having hopelessly fallen behind in my reading of what I already had, and I’d forgotten what a pleasure it was to brush the deckled edges of carefully bound books or to savor the prose of an unremarked genius. In the end, I came away with a fine balance between interests old and new: the hardbound and well-illustrated In Search of Shakespeare by Michael Wood (P500), and a thick paperback I just couldn’t resist, Infinite Loop (How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane) by Michael S. Malone (P360). There went my budget for crab and shrimp, but I’m not complaining.