seedsforthought

[seedsforthought]

Mum whispers next to me

Spending the dust-ridden nights

between blue silk padding.

On the wall are pictures -

Books since childhood poke through…

For seven years stuffed and stacked to

awake the obsessive-compulsive, double-quilted panda That maintains good posture!

But

Come let me spend my solo nights in peaceful slumber west of the Sea.

 A cot of dried lavender hay, pillow springs, patches of quilting, straight blankets

 stuffed in white cloth

 floats on the musty branches of a golden tree.

Rest, on cavernous boughs

under a canopy of stars,

  hearing  the flute sing

a chorus that wraps the ears in awe.

[seedsforthought]

Opening credit sequence to a film adaptation of the short story Wanderlust by Fausto Dugenio.

Dugenio's narrative centres on an unnamed explorer. Gripped with an obsessive desire to see the world, he left his parents' home decades ago, and has since lived a semi-nomadic existence, living off the kindness of strangers. He is perfectly content, until he meets a simple girl in a hut on a hill over a field of cogon grass and temperate trees.

They talk. Tales of his adventures awe the girl (whom he suspects to be an engkantada/faerie/elf/nature spirit), and she soon falls in love. Their conversations remind the man of his parents back home.

After a few days, the man is left to decide whether to take her along with him, to find his family again, or to marry her and settle down at last.  The call of the wilderness feels far too great to resist, as does their mutual romance.  

Nature scenes play out as the music (Olafur Arnalds’ This Place is a Shelter) hints at feelings of nostalgia, mystery, love, as well as the passing of time. It gradually picks up tempo - opening up the possibility of lands still unexplored – and slows down again, in a somewhat sobering appeal for the man to return home.

[seedsforthought]

A splash of white purity, aged to perfection

Mang Erning works at a junk shop in Payatas – a former alcoholic who once vowed never  to drink again, he now uses any extra liquor  from the bottles he recycles strictly to wash his hands

[seedsforthought]

The

musty

dawn

creaks, bumps

childhood

is

impossible

spartan

bodies

of

dust

[seedsforthought]

11.3 Pocket Enlightenment

April 3 (Tuesday)

PUBLISH group Final Video shoot…did about a dozen last minute interviews with comm students and Sir Doy! about online social networking and changes in media content through the years                        

As the cliché goes, nothing beats great teamwork - especially on a tight deadline.  Finishing in time to upload the video to our PUBLISH website* would have been impossible without sharing the workload   (and the adrenaline rush): Angelica did the shooting, I worked on the script and narrations while Gelo edited.

PS - Communication students do great on ambush interviews, and sir Doy does even better ;)

*shameless plug here: http://mediawatchmag.wordpress.com/

[seedsforthought]

11.2 Pocket Enlightenment

April 2 (Monday)

HISTCIV Final Oral Exam (by group); one of us came just in time…

When under pressure, it’s entirely possible for three people to squeeze in a comprehensive discussion on the three eons of human existence/evolution - from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic -   in five minutes or less.

And it’s best not to argue with your friends while you’re at it. No, basket-weaving came alongside the agricultural revolution, not before.

[seedsforthought]

11.1 Pocket Enlightenment

April 1 (Sunday) – Last day of field work; Payatas  

Gave PBC a set of old books  - and Mang Erning, the usual groceries...Met a group of Baptist missionaries from Australia…  Met Abraham, a young Pinoy expat  who thinks I’m half my real age (I’m older than I look)… Toured around the dumpsite one last time …  Played games with the kids at PBC

sitting among the urban poor in my occasional trips to the real world, I try to mask my Lasallian heritage, for the moment they find out, the mood shifts in an instant, and they feel suddenly beneath me in some metaphysical hierarchy of human worth.  They take me for a brat, the elite, the foreigner in his own land. Which is probably true.

I owe my awakening to the kids of Payatas. It was with them, walking amid the waste and the refuse (both toxic and human) for a research assignment that it hit me.  Those granted the most essential parts to play in society – from farmers to maids to teachers to security guards to the scavengers who clean up after us –are also its least paid and most destitute, without whose daily toil in the worst of conditions, everything falls apart. Destitute, because they are unseen.  Unseen, because we insist on looking the other way.

Because in our eyes, they are somehow less than human. This is how we see them.

The poor are thieves beyond all hope, beyond our ability to help, beyond our responsibility. The poor are lazy and unwilling to work, so much so that they deserve their poverty – which means a man deserves to starve. A child must sell off his kidneys for 200 pesos to pay for his sister’s school books. His mother ought to work as a prostitute. And they all deserve to be left desperate enough to feast on the fast food remains of our Chicken Joy lunches fresh from the dumps, pagpag style, for dinner the next day.  Because in the natural order of things, there are winners and losers, and all pretend to be happy with the way things are.

There is not enough space here to spell out the litany of reasons why poverty is too systemic, too unjust, too deeply ingrained in a culture that excludes the poor to be dismissed as no more than a personal moral flaw on the part of the poor, because they just “don’t try hard enough”.

On the contrary, it is we who have not tried, at all, to see things from their eyes. Have we been so blind?

Still I remain convinced that it is up to us to clear our blind spots,  to reawaken a world that has long since ceased to care and  has long forgotten its noblesse oblige to the unseen.

[seedsforthought]

10.7 Side by Side

Isang karatula… isang kariton

Litrato ng pulitiko, ngiting kay-lawak … plastic, pinangbalot sa basura, ginawang unan para sa isang ulong puno ng kuto't galis

Makulay na tarpaulin... sa ilalim, batang nakahiga, hubad, tulog - patay?

Daan-daang libong pisong pantalastas… bente-singko sentimong panlimos

Serbisyong Totoo… sigaw ng masa

[seedsforthought]

10.6 Side by Side

 Behind hanging rosaries and sticks of incense, a golden Buddha sits, laughing, with a potbelly of epic proportions propped on mounds of gold coins. Beside him, enthroned in regal robes and a golden crown on his curly head, is a mannequin of the child Jesus, complete with gold sceptre.   

 An obese, money-obsessed statue of the man who denounced worldly excess and desire in pursuit of Nirvana … next to the son of God ‘born in a manger’,  ostensibly the essence of poverty and humility whose Kingdom is not of this world, usurped by a Sto. Nino.

Both make a complete farce of themselves on a Chinese-Filipino Altar in Binondo, the epitome of religious syncretism and all-too-human hypocrisy. Both stare in apathy at passers-by, indifferent to either beggar or merchant, slave or free, faithful or bullshitter (make no distinction). Here they sit and will sit forever, moulded by the blind faithful glaringly opposed to the basic precepts of the figures and faiths they stand for.  

[seedsforthought]

[seedsforthought]

10.5 Side by Side

Two walls side by side

Solid concrete - soggy cardboard

Bright paint – bad plywood

Window panes – galvanised iron

Iron locks – wooden planks

Above, a subdivision in disordered rows – below, a slum in organised chaos

Locked in, Locked out

Blind, Reality

Two walls

[seedsforthought]

10.4 Side by Side

An anti-globalisation protest slogan head-to-head with the golden arches of  Western hegemony - and obesity. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151022479160514&set=a.10151022446240514.774843.661110513&type=3&theater

[seedsforthought]

10.3 Side by Side

Two grown men,

Two rides,

Two bikes, 

One black, one blinding hot pink

With shirts to match.

[seedsforthought]

10.2 Side By Side

Taft.

A crowded side walk by an even busier street.  

A woman, a woman.

Old age, sweet youth,

Tattered rags, designer silks,

A plastic cup, an iPad,

A kariton, a Longchamps purse. 

A woman, a woman.

[seedsforthought]

10.1 Side by side

A Lady and her Kitten

A city sidewalk on an intersection, traffic-jammed. From beyond the shadows of a shop door left ajar, a kitten (spotted, grimy, skeletal) hops out and climbs nimbly onto the bent back of an elderly lady selling wreathes of sampaguita on the pavement.  

[seedsforthought]

9.7 Balita Ngayon

Friends resume Trips to Payatas

Research partners CJ Chanco and Gelo Bonifacio returned to Payatas  on Sunday, after skipping their regular research trips the week before.

They spoke with bottle recyclers, children and their families, as well as  representatives of grassroots people's organisations (POs) who'd gathered in the area for a monthly meeting.

The trip was their second to the last for their paper. 

[seedsforthought]

9.6 Balita Ngayon

Aunt, nephew debate over Facebook, mining

An aunt and her nephew engaged in a mini-debate over an online news article he recommended on his Facebook timeline.

The bulatlat.com article* covered the ethical, political,  and environmental issues surrounding mining in the Philippines and the 1995 mining act in particular. 

Countering Teddy Baguilat's statements  in the article assuming the existence of a united  anti-mining resistance nationwide, the aunt wrote, ""There are also some communities that welcome RESPONSIBLE mining activities in their area because they are desperate for development. And these IPs themselves are the ones who ask for unusable hectares of ancestral domain to be developed (emphasis original)"

While conceding that the Mining Act is indeed flawed, she pointed rather to its failure to control small scale miners, whom she called irresponsible. "They are the ones that pillage protected areas and abandon mines/mining communities after the "rape". These irresponsible ones -- some 300,000 of them -- are the ones that give the legit mining industry a bad reputation. So you can imagine, 300,000 vs. 31 legit and RESPONSIBLE mining companies.", 

She went on to defend the stringent licensing requirements already imposed on extractive industries as a reason to cut the mining companies some slack. She emphasized the importance of responsibility,, which has to do with both big industry and "common man". ""Teddy (Baguilat) should not generalize the issue", she concluded. 

 The nephew replied, "True, small-scale operations go hand in hand with environmental damage, poor working conditions, illegal permits, even child labour.

But these people are as much victims as the Earth they pillage. Made up of the rural poor – former farmers and their families rendered landless by ‘development projects’ or changes in climate that have radically reduced harvests – they face few other alternatives than to eke out a living mining for coal, iron ore, gold and other precious metals. They work in open pit mines, makeshift camps, or in hastily built tunnels under imminent threat of collapse. Many of them are children.", Still, large scale mining companies ultimately wreak much more damage ecologically through their sheer scale of production - measured in terms of mountains despoiled, beaches dredged, carbon emitted, ecosystems trashed, and tonnes of toxic waste released into the environment (and neighbouring communities) a year… far more than what a few rural peasants with pick-axes could possibly do. Regardless of their claims of environmental sustainability these companies must maintain (even accelerate) these environmentally unsustainable practices just to keep up with growing demand from consumers like us. We are using up the planet’s resources at a rate unprecedented in history."

The debate revolved around politics and economics, reaching as far as the question of climate change.

Both parties eventually resolved the matter with a consensus over the merits of sashimi, thanks to a shared love of Japanese food.

*http://bulatlat.com/main/2012/03/09/%E2%80%98philippine-mining-act-cannot-be-saved-by-an-executive-order%E2%80%99-%E2%80%93-environmentalists/