Munting Binhi

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/

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.

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.

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

 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.