Magsaysay Awards

Kris-Crossing Mindanao : Laureates

Antonio Montalvan II
Inquirer News Service

DAW Tee Tee Luce was a housewife in Burma when she provided abandoned street children in her native Rangoon not just with a roof but most importantly, with a home and the heart of a mother. Distressed by the growing incidence of crime, Daw spent a year studying the roots and breeding grounds of Burma's deserted children. In 1928, the Children's Aid and Protection Society she had established (with the help of spirited citizens) had put up the Home for Waifs and Strays. The "Home" lives to this day in Burma, also providing formal and physical education, as well as skills training in useful crafts.

In 1959, Daw was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, as an outstanding humanitarian with a great compassion for the downcast of society.

Pedro Tamesis Orata, a Filipino, is the father of the barrio high school movement for the rural youth of the Philippines. Born in Pangasinan in 1899, Orata earned his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1927. In 1934, he was a professor in his alma mater, where he experimented on establishing a community school for a Native American reservation in South Dakota. That set forth his compelling personal philosophy about education as a universal birthright. In 1941, he returned to the Philippines, only to end up in a Japanese concentration camp.

After the Liberation in 1945, Orata returned to his native Urdaneta where he began pursuing his vision of barrio high schools, a rather unthinkable venture at that time as high school education was available then only in the provincial capital towns of the country. But in no time, Orata had 15 barrio schools. When he was 65 years old, barrio high schools could be found in 43 provinces and six cities. The citation in his 1971 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service singled out Orata's insistence that rural youth equally deserved to be given the opportunities available to those that are open to their urban counterparts.

Orata's vision provided the impetus to the development of an educated Filipino citizenry, even as it gave millions of Filipinos in rural areas hope of a brighter future.

Enshrined in the Constitution of Pakistan was a principle assuring citizens of equality and equal protection before the law. But changes in the political landscape "weakened" that principle such that the assault, rape and murder of Pakistani women (who, most often, have no effective recourse to justice) became commonplace. Pakistani woman-lawyer Asma Jahangir changed all that. Jahangir was only 18 years old when her father was arrested by Pakistan's martial law government. Upon finishing her law studies at the age of 28, she organized a law firm that catered mostly to women-clients who found her as their only hope under the most vexing circumstances. As her clientele grew, Jahangir broadened her role in reforming her country's society, but not without paying a severe price for it. In 1984, the military dictatorship of Zia-ul Haq imprisoned her for sedition. Meanwhile, her law firm continued its defense of women by pleading forcefully against laws that discriminated against women. Her free legal aid center published reader-friendly pamphlets and had a team of paralegal assistants that educated women on their legal rights. Her valiant efforts paid off with important victories in the Pakistani Supreme Court. Today, her struggle-for the repeal of unjust laws legitimized by theocracy and lawlessness-continues. In electing Asma Jahangir to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the foundation recognized her struggle for religious tolerance in her country, and with it her fight for equal treatment and protection of Pakistani women before the law.

We are in the annual season of what is considered Asia's Nobel Prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Awards. This Wednesday, Aug. 31-following tradition-the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (RMAF) will honor six outstanding Asians from India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Laos, Korea and Thailand, two of them women, with the 2005 Ramon Magsaysay Award for their accomplishments in the fields of emergent leadership, community leadership, public service, government service, journalism, literature and creative communication arts.

Last week, the RMAF concluded its nationwide essay writing contest for high school and college students. In the board of judges for the contests' Mindanao eliminations were two of Mindanao's writers and poet laureates-Christine Godinez Ortega and Anthony Tan. I had the privilege to be in their company for that occasion.

Reading through the entries of the contest only heightened my realization that today what we have is a crisis of heroes. The RMAF deserves credit for initiating this contest, which puts primacy on the values of heroism, selflessness, social compassion and community service for our impressionable young people in high school and college to imbibe. I see this as a hopeful contribution to the task of nation-building.

But we are not only in a crisis of heroes today. We also are in a crisis of saints. What we have are many saints, in fact, of the self-proclaimed variety. Enough of all the finger-pointing! Obviously, in our hierarchy of values, truth enjoys the lowest premium. Too often, we forget that when we point a finger to blame somebody, three other fingers are pointed right at us. Self-righteousness has become a comfort zone, and it is a dangerous attitude.

Few people deserve and will ever deserve to be in the roster of the Magsaysay Award laureates. I think of the day when we no longer need the Ramon Magsaysay Awards, when selflessness and charity reign supreme in the hearts of men and women.

Ancient Crimes

Looking Back : Crime and punishment in Spanish times

Ambeth Ocampo aocampo@ateneo.edu
Inquirer News Service

WHEN people ask me difficult questions I cannot answer offhand, I remind them that I am not Ernie Baron who has built a reputation as a "walking Encyclopedia," whatever that means. At the very least, Baron is humble enough not to claim omniscience like God -- unlike some academics I know who are just waiting to be struck down by lightning one day. Filipinos are easily impressed by memory and mistake having a great deal of disjointed facts lying around in the head ready for use at any given time for knowledge.

Because of my failure to answer questions as well as the fact that I still have a head full of black hair, make people doubt the things I say or write. My memory is good for useless things like Jose Rizal's waistline, the length of Andres Bonifacio's bolo or Apolinario Mabini's favorite dance steps. It is not deep enough for something like a diachronic analysis of the effect of the Philippine economy on the political situation from 1565-1965. Neither do I have a knack for dates and names, thus I have over the years developed research skills.

Students do not need to waste their time on memory work. The more important skill they should learn is to know where to find the answers to nagging questions in a library or the Internet. In my area of specialization, I have spent hours reading bibliographies and finding guides in a vain attempt to get a view of the landscape. So far, I have only seen a faint outline and not the entire horizon. Bibliographies may not be the best things to bring on a beach vacation, but in my own bizarre way I find these fascinating.

Even professional Filipiniana librarians smile when I tell them how much I have enjoyed browsing through the basic references on the Spanish period: Wenceslao Emilio Retana's handsome three-volume "Aparato bibliografico de la historia general de Filipinas" (Barcelona, 1906), Trinidad H, Pardo de Tavera's "Biblioteca Filipina" (Washington, 1903) and last but not least Jose Toribio Medina's "Imprenta de Manila desde sus origenes hasta 1810" (Santiago de Chile 1896). These bibliographies not only describe the books physically (size and number of pages, place of publication, etc.), they also contain abstracts of the contents as well as opinions on their reliability or usefulness. In the case of Pardo de Tavera, he even steps beyond the academic politesse and lambasts a certain author he did not like both professionally and personally.

Aside from the bibliographies above, another of my eccentric pastimes is going over the two-volume index to the 55-volume "Philippine Islands" as compiled by "Blair and Robertson." The entries on "Crime and Criminals" cover a page and a half and the classification alone is worth a doctoral dissertation, because the notion of crime alone says so much about a specific society in a given time. Society defines crime and sets the mode of punishment. If you want a different angle to study Philippine society and history, crime and punishment are the way to go.

There are separate entries for crimes committed by Filipinos, Spaniards and Chinese. Specific crimes are then listed: bodily violence (assault and battery), torture, stabbing, poisoning, murder (assassination, homicide, infanticide and parricide). All these cover a third of a page, while another third is concerned with dishonesty: gambling is quite sizeable and one shouldn't be surprised to find the historical roots of jueteng here. There are entries on bribery, smuggling, usury, forgery, counterfeiting, swindling, embezzlement, robbery and highway robbery. All these still plague us today although on a different scale and form.

Crimes of impurity share the same number of entries as crimes against religion. Then as now, they had adultery, incest, improper relations (concubinage and licentiousness), rape, bigamy, polygamy. Sodomy was lumped with "sin against nature" or homosexuality. The crimes against religion, like blasphemy, simony and teaching of erroneous doctrines, may still be with us today, but in our pluralistic society we don't notice them as much as they did in the Spanish Philippines.

There were other crimes: debt, false witness, treason, conspiracy, arson, perjury, abduction, libel and even obscure crimes among natives like tale-bearing and breaking the silence taboo.

Going through all these will provide enough material for creative writers searching for material to use in novels and short stories.

Significantly, if you turn to the entries on "Penalties" for the above crimes, you will find about seven pages enumerating: arrest and imprisonment (slavery, and being sentenced to galleys), confiscation, exile and banishment, fines, loss of office, disqualification from municipal elections, etc. There is a lot of corporal punishment: mutilation, lashes (flogging, scourging, whipping, etc.), bastinado, suspension by the arms, cutting of hair, short rations of water, being cast into the sea, pounding rice. Then there was capital punishment through burning, decapitation, drowning, flaying, garrote, hanging, shooting, stabbing, etc. Ecclesiastical punishments are also listed: excommunication, censure and interdict, public penance, silence and seclusion, etc.

Crime and punishment is a way to study Philippine society but basic material lies largely unused in Blair and Robertson.

Luzon Provinces

Sense and Sensibility : Beyond Manila

Bambi Harper
Inquirer News Service

BEYOND THE Batangas cove were Lobo and Galban, where great traces of mines well known in other times remained but now bore little fruit. It was an area rich in cotton, palms and rice. The king had a cordage factory there that made black hemp processed in Cabite for the rigging of the galleons. Under this jurisdiction fell Calilaya or Tayabas, extending to the Bondo Peninsula up to Mauban.

Beyond Batangas was the province of Camarines where the towns of Bondo, Passacao, Ibalon and Bula were found and where the galleon Encarnacion returning from Mexico was wrecked in 1649. There was a port and a shipyard in Sosocon or Bagatao where the big galleons were made. Albay even then was a big cove outside the channel with a tall volcanic mountain. Coming from Mexico, Mayon Volcano was visible to ships from afar because of the flames and smoke that it usually exhaled.

Along the range were springs of hot water and one that whatever fell inside -- be it a piece of wood, a bone or a leaf -- was converted to stone. Gov. Francisco Tello was gifted with a crab that had turned to stone. Caceres was founded by Gov. Francisco de Sande, the second governor of the Philippines. The Bishop had his cathedral and See in what was known as Nueva Caceres. Beside it was Naga, whose coast gave shelter to the galleons and it was there that the San Diego anchored in 1650 coming from port.

After Caceres came the province of Camarines up to Paracale, where the natives mined for gold and other metals and a fine stone called iman, famous in antiquity as mentioned by Ptolemy. It was a big province and enjoyed beautiful plains, with forests and palms that yielded large amounts of oil for the royal factories in Cabite.

The capital of the province of Cagayan was the city of Nueva Segovia founded by Gov. Gonzalo Ronquillo, where the bishop had his seat and cathedral. It was situated on the banks of the great river of Cagayan, which was born in the mountains of Santor in la Pampanga and crossed nearly the whole province. The Spaniards called it Tajo, after the river in Spain.

Along the banks of the river was a Spanish infantry presidio constructed of cal y canto (lime and stone) in some parts and wood and gabion in others with four divisions of cavalry. ("Soil erosion is an ever present problem and gabions have proved to be a lasting solution around the world. The earliest known use of gabion-type structures was for bank protection along the Nile River during the era of the Pharaoh. In the subsequent 7,000 years since its initial use by the Egyptians, the gabion system has evolved from baskets of woven reeds to engineered containers manufactured from wire mesh. The lasting appeal of gabions lies in their inherent flexibility. Gabion structures yield to earth movement but maintain full efficiency and remain structurally sound.") Cagayan was the frontier of the Irayas, rebel inhabitants of the area who lived in the skirts of the tall sierras.

The farthest north of all the capes was the one called Engaño, a landscape tormented by the north winds. It was open and treacherous because of its great currents. It was here that the galleon S. Luis was wrecked in 1646, after failing to round the cape and take shelter in a port where two years earlier she had taken refuge upon returning from Mexico. In 1639, two galleons were anchored in this cape when a furious northern wind rose and in a few hours tore them both to pieces.

The province of Cagayan ended in Cape Boxeador where the province of Ilocos began. The whole province was fertile but unprotected from the tormenting northern winds. The forests yielded wax, red wood called Brasil in Europe, ebony and other much esteemed lumber. Her savannas were full of deer that were hunted for their pelts, which were brought to Japan and other parts. There were plenty of gold and carnelians, polished and carved with much care. These were not local but had been brought in olden days from India in exchange for gold.

Ilocos was considered the richest area and most populated outside Manila. It was founded in 1574 by Gov. Guido de Lavezares, who named it Villa Fernandina in honor of Philip II's son.

In 1623, a contingent went up the mountains to pacify the Igorots, and it took them seven days or three leagues a day to climb to the top. Along the way, they passed many forests of walnuts and wild nutmegs and later forests of pines. Finally they reached the top of the ridge where the Igorot tribes had their principal settlement because of the rich mines of gold that they traded with the Ilocanos and Pangasinanes in exchange for supplies, food, clothes and other necessities. Besides gold, the province produced much rice and cotton from which thick blankets were woven that they called "de Ilocos" and used as sails for the galleons and uniforms for servants as well other curious textiles of many colors.

The next province was Pangasinan, which had much the same products. In the coast of this province was the port of Bolinao and Playa Honda, famous in Spain because of the victory of the Spanish armada against the Dutch.

Then came Pampanga with very fertile soil and abundant rice due to the many streams that bathed it. It supplied timber for the shipyards of Cabite, which was very convenient for the Spaniards since its mountains were within the bay near the port and without risk from enemies or typhoons.

(Data from P. Francisco Colin, "Labor Evangelico," 1660 annotated by Fr. P. Pastells, 1904)

Memories

Pinoy Kasi : Memory and truth

Michael L. Tan
Inquirer News Service

THEY seem to belong to a very distant past, these aerial photographs of Manila flattened after the American bombings in February 1945.

Until you see photographs of people moving around the smoldering ruins. There's a nun carrying a child, making her way across the rubble. There's an emaciated child clinging to her ration box. There are medics pushing a "kariton" [wooden pushcart] with a patient inside. There are the thousands of people fleeing across the Pasig River on a makeshift bridge.

I'm describing photographs from the Remedios Jubilee Mission Exhibition, which was launched in February this year to mark the 60th anniversary of what older Filipinos call Liberation, when American troops returned to the Philippines. The photo exhibit is on loan this week to the University of the Philippines (UP) campus in Diliman, Quezon City, shown at the main library's basement, part of History Week celebrations. The UP exhibit is all too short, considering Friday the 19th is a holiday, but I think the photographs will go back to the Remedios church in Malate district, where I hope the exhibit will continue and more people can drop in.

Pearl of the Orient

The photographs show how costly the Liberation was. Consider the death toll of 100,000 during the World War II battle for Manila -- that's greater than the total number of civilians who died in Hiroshima where the Americans dropped their atomic bomb. Historians estimate that for every six Filipinos killed by the Japanese, there were four killed by American Liberation bombs and bullets.

Manila, the Pearl of the Orient and one of the most beautiful cities in Asia before the war, never quite recovered. Sixty years after the end of the war, Manila remains one of the most squalid cities in the world. It was almost as if the war snuffed out our collective will to create, to live.

Last week, I got a phone call from Carlos Conde, who was doing an article on the end of World War II for the International Herald Tribune. He asked why -- compared with our neighbors -- we seem to be so much more forgiving of the Japanese. He had visited Mapaniqui, a small village in Pampanga province, where several women were raped during the war. Yet that village now sends out its residents to work in Japan, including granddaughters of the raped women who now work as entertainers.

My explanation here is that as a nation, we have not worked hard enough at memory-keeping. Our textbooks mention, only in very general terms, the atrocities we suffered during successive colonial occupations, with the Japanese Occupation receiving the least attention.

Carlos had another interesting angle, which he wrote up in an incisive piece in the International Herald Tribune last Saturday: perhaps, we forget World War II because we are so beholden to Japan, because of its "aid" and, ironically, because it is the market for our women.

Not only have we lost our memories, we've also allowed myths and lies to take over. When Japan early this year cut down its quota for Filipina entertainers from 80,000 annually to 8,000, we saw full-page ads vehemently protesting the move. Today, the government's pre-departure orientation seminars for the women emphasize they are not "japayuki" but Overseas Filipina Entertainers (OFEs), while their recruiters coach them on what to answer Japanese immigration officials. (Sample: Do you sit with your customers? No. What do you do between your performances? I wait in the dressing room.)

We are told to be grateful for the Japanese aid that poured in after the war -- to build hospitals and highways -- without realizing these were loans, many of which mainly benefited the likes of Marcos and other politicians. No wonder we agreed to the Japanese putting up a memorial to their kamikaze pilots in World War II.

One of Mapaniqui's grandmothers told Carlos: "You can't eat the past." Indeed we can't. But even beggars need some pride.

Reconnecting

Last week, clinical psychologist Dr. Maria Lourdes Carandang spoke at the University of the Philippines on "Truth-telling and National Healing," drawing parallels between the recovery process for individual victims of trauma and a battered nation.

Dr. Carandang worries that lying may have become a way of life in the country, and this may have happened because we have become so fearful of the truth. Our fears heighten because of the current controversies, where truth-telling is parodied through political circuses. I worry about people who are genuinely concerned, but who have grown weary, and wary. We see people disengaging. Some cop out, refusing to read the newspapers or listen to the news. Others take more drastic steps, making that final decision to join the diaspora because they fear they can no longer raise their children morally in this country.

Dr. Carandang says there's still hope if people can just get together and do what they can around truth-telling; in effect, she's prescribing group therapy, getting people to reconnect and reminding us of what the anthropologist Margaret Mead once said: "Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have."

Memory's light

Memory-keeping and truth-telling about World War II means going beyond the facile "good guys" (Americans) and "bad guys" (Japanese) formulation of Hollywood. We all grew up hearing of MacArthur's triumphant landing at Leyte in fulfillment of his promise, "I shall return." We know little about how that return involved the destruction of Manila, or how Filipino guerrillas held the fort through the war; and how many of those war veterans died and are dying without any benefits from Mother America.

We have to recognize, too, how the Japanese suffered because of their leaders' imperial adventures. We need to look, too, at how their right-wing politicians are trying to suppress the past, revising textbooks to downplay descriptions of the Imperial Army's atrocities. Their conservatives recognize the power of memories.

Memory-keeping isn't just remembering the painful aspects of the past. During the symposium at UP, Dr. Elena R. Mirano also talked about how we forget particular moments in history where we dared to stand up. She recounted the debates around the US bases treaty. We were fearful then, that if we voted not to renew the bases, the country would die. But we dared to say "Enough. No more bases." And more than a decade later, we see we've survived. The decision on the bases was a defining moment in our long recovery process, but memories of that historic decision have faded as well.

Closing the UP symposium in behalf of the dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Prof. Joy Barrios quoted from Emilio Jacinto: "Ang ningning ay maraya. Ating hanapin ang liwanag..."

"Ningning" is the artificial glow, the dangerous glitter and glamour of myths and lies. Emilio Jacinto says all that is illusory, that what we need to search for is "liwanag," light. A wise advice, indeed, as we embark on memory-keeping and truth-telling.

Ailing Earth

The environment in our hands

Inquirer News Service

THERE is growing concern over the stability of the existing political leadership in the Philippines. However, we must also keep in mind that there are other concerns that affect Filipinos and the rest of mankind as seriously, or even more.

The effects of Earth's ailing environment may not be immediately noticeable, but they are certainly spreading like a plague that may soon prove to be too lethal.

The little things that people, Filipinos included, take for granted, such as smoking and throwing wrappers, cans and bottles wherever they feel like doing them, have created a major national and global problem that is not just gradually killing our environment but is also threatening the very people tasked to be the stewards of this planet.

I think it is important for Filipinos to be aware of our surroundings and how to protect our environment. In order for us to live with clean air around us, and with fresh water and fertile land to fill our hunger and thirst, we each have to do our part. Have your cars tuned up regularly. Penalize smoke-belching buses and other public utility vehicles. Segregate and dispose of trash properly. Reuse and recycle plastic and glass containers. Doing these simple things will make a positive and huge contribution in our quest to ease the long-standing problem of pollution.

By uniting and cooperating, we do not just help ourselves; we also help everyone around us. No matter what race, color or nationality we have, this is still one planet on which we live. We have no one else to turn to if we must save the one planet we have been blessed with. And there is no one else to blame if we just passively stand around and wait for Earth's demise.

MIGUEL R. ROCHA (via e-mai)

They Laugh At Us

Sense and Sensibility : The laughingstock of Asia

Bambi Harper
Inquirer News Service

REMEMBER how we liked to point out that we're the only Catholic country in Asia and how millions of us showed up for Pope John Paul II's visit? Come to think of it, I even remember seeing Ernie Maceda being one of the first to receive communion during the Pope's visit. I think he was on the dais with all the other VIPs. We take pride in the fact that our churches are filled to the brim on Sundays, First Fridays and other holidays of obligation, compared to the near empty churches of Europe. We love to begin our seminars and conventions and workshops with invocations, together with the National Anthem no less.

That being the case and given that we revel in the image of this God-fearing people who support orphanages and feeding programs and all sorts of projects for street children, haven't you wondered why the gap between the haves and the have-nots has evolved into a humongous chasm these past three decades? How come some people have a dozen cars on their driveways (not to mention owning submarines and yachts) so that these look like used-car lots, while there are entire communities living under the South Superhighway? Or that we have one of the highest poverty indexes in the world (nearly half the population subsists on less than $2 a day)? It wasn't always like that, so what happened and when did we begin to lose our bearings?

GQ Magazine in its August issue has an article, "Pleasure, at Any Price" that discusses the sex trade in Luzon (and elsewhere, true) but the near-nude colored photos are of Filipinas. The trade is illegal here, unlike in South and Central America where perhaps the former Spanish colonies are less hypocritical. According to the article by Sean Flynn, the bars are everywhere in our cities with signs that say, "Thank you. Cum again," (wink ... wink) and there are girls in every one of them waiting. You can buy a girl for a couple of drinks, a different one every night and even every hour -- there are so many of them.

One of the reasons the politicians wanted the American bases out (before the Pinatubo volcano blew its top and settled the matter effectively) was the prostitution it allegedly fostered. If you think the trade has stopped, you've got another think coming. Along Fields Avenue in Angeles City, there's Club Fantastic, Camelot and Stinger and a host of others. On the sidewalks vendors sell shirts that proclaim: "I f--k on the first date." In a bar called G-Spot Lounge, there's a girl gyrating onstage in a bikini. Her birth certificate states that she's 19 but actually she's only 13. Most of the girls onstage, serving the drinks, fraternizing with the customers, are all underage (if you start at 12 or 13, you're old in five years' time and the only place for you is some roadside establishment outside the provinces of Bulacan or Tarlac). The girls are paid P120 to wear bikinis from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m., dance for half an hour and work the room until their turn to dance. If she leaves with a customer, she makes $9.

Yes, it is economics and, yes, according to religious mores and feminist theory, this is wrong and sinful and oppressive, but then what are the options? And who's providing them? In high-end clubs in Manila, according to Flynn, a girl works nine hours, entertains five or six men and earns $30. I don't know if that's net or whether you still have to give your pimp or the "mama san" a cut.

It hasn't quite squared in my mind how we can justifiably state our Catholicism with a straight face and yet achieve the No. 2 (or is it No. 1?) position on the list of most corrupt countries. Or the fact that there are over 200,000 street children in Metro Manila alone. Yet the government does little to curb a runaway population growth, frightened of a Church backlash in the next election. We may have anywhere between 500,000 and 800,000 prostitutes, and certainly we aren't the only Third World country in the world with that problem. Of course in those countries, the churches aren't crawling with the faithful going to Mass and communion daily.

But that isn't the only reason we should put on sackcloths and ashes. This past week, CNN ran a short exposé on children below the age of 10 sharing jails with hardened criminals who beat them up if they refuse to have sex with them. There are, in case you missed the documentary, 20,000 of these children, one of them as young as 5 years old. This is not the first time any of us has heard of it; one wonders what social welfare secretaries have to add that would be any different from Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez's pathetic whimpering about resenting being asked the question of what government was doing about it. (Remember the 70 congressmen who went abroad for conferences or whatever recently with a per diem of $300 a day?) On the other hand, what could Gonzalez say in defense? The government has a lot of priorities "daw" [so they say] and no money. (No, I won't remind you of those 70 morons again who don't appear embarrassed about the horrors poverty has bred here.) But I will mention that despite the wave of development sweeping our neighbors, we remain extremely poor, mismanaged and still predominantly agrarian when we were second only to Japan in the 1960s, so why shouldn't we be laughingstock of Asia?

So before getting on your high horse the next time someone makes a disparaging remark about the country, ask yourself how true it is and what the government is doing about it.

Peter's Gone

What We've Lost
Peter Jennings used his power to make sure we learned about international news that mattered

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY

By Jonathan Alter

Newsweek

I didn't know Peter Jennings well and I'm not the best person to assess his many fine qualities as a person. But I do know what American journalism has lost with his death on Sunday--its most prominent and influential advocate of international reporting. People in television news who want to honor him should do so by resolving to include more foreign reporting in their broadcasts, even if it means lower ratings.

That's what Jennings did. I last spoke to him about six months ago, before he was diagnosed with lung cancer. I asked him how long it would take "World News Tonight" to move into first place now that Tom Brokaw was stepping down as anchor of "NBC Nightly News." It was a social occasion and Jennings was typically blunt. "We'll never catch them," he said. Jennings explained that he had lost his lead during the 1994 O.J. Simpson case, when he refused to air nearly as many O.J. stories as the competition. He still went lighter on tabloid stories and heavier on foreign news, he said, and thus would never be number one again.

I'm not sure Jennings was right. The reasons for TV news ratings are complicated and if Brokaw successor Brian Williams hadn't sprinted out of the gate so smoothly, Jennings might have passed him. But beneath the ratings talk was a justifiable pride in how he had chosen to use his fame over the years. At the expense of ratings, he insisted that his broadcast live up to its name as "World News Tonight." The challenge on a 22-minute broadcast is story choice. Every day, Jennings chose to cover a foreign news story or two that he knew would be an invitation to change the channel.

It's easy for TV news to cover the big, breaking foreign story or the juicy terrorism angle. What's much harder is finding a way to convey important but visually uninteresting stories from around the world. Jennings spent two decades in the anchor chair committed to doing so. If Pakistan, say, had an election, viewers were much more likely to learn about it on ABC News than anywhere else. As we know post 9/11, events like a Pakistani election are more consequential and relevant to our own lives than we used to think. The really scary thing is that even after 9/11, most TV news has moved away from complex foreign stories and back toward the latest entertaining distraction or news you can use.

The reason, of course, is money. If you want to get ahead as a news producer, you better give the audience what it wants, not what it needs. I don't mean to overstate the case here. Jennings was a highly competitive guy who wanted to win in the ratings and he gave his audience plenty of cotton candy. His "Person of the Week" feature accelerated the trend toward personalizing every news story. But he still did something rare and principled: Because ABC couldn't fire him without losing ratings, management had to give him a wide berth. He used that power to achieve something significant, year after year.

The rap on Peter Jennings was that he took himself too seriously. I'm glad he did, because that meant that he took us seriously, too, and our need to know about things that are distant and complicated but a lot more important than most of what passes for news.

Values

A democracy without values is totalitarianism in disguise

Inquirer News Service

THESE days, our civil authorities and lawmakers are peddling the idea that a change in our system of government will solve our political and economic crises. They are like witch doctors prescribing quack medicine for a serious ailment. One system of government can be as good as another. The good of the people and the development of society are advanced when civil authorities and citizens alike lead upright lives and uphold the right values.

This is what the "Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church" says: "An authentic democracy is not merely the result of a formal observation of a set of rules but is the fruit of a convinced acceptance of the values that inspire democratic procedures: the dignity of every human person, the respect of human rights, commitment to the common good as the purpose and guiding criterion for political life. If there is no consensus on these values, the deepest meaning of democracy is lost and its stability is compromised (No. 407)."

A value that will help us achieve the common good—though it is very difficult to obtain and to live by in our present society—is the truth.

We too easily compromise the truth. The late Pope John Paul II wrote, "It must be observed that if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political action, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism. ('Centessimus Annus,' 46)." So until we all love the truth and live according to the truth, we will always remain slaves and victims of those who manipulate the truth.

What I think we all need is a change of mind and heart. A change in the system of government will not solve anything if we don't change ourselves.

—FR. CECILIO L. MAGSINO, chaplain, Southridge School, Alabang, Muntinlupa City, via–email

Docs Leaving

At Large : No more doctors?

Rina Jimenez-David
Inquirer News Service

A SURGEON connected with a teaching hospital has a story to tell to illustrate not just why more and more doctors are emigrating to developed countries, chucking their medical degrees and re-enrolling for nursing courses, but also why enrollment in medical schools has slipped drastically in recent years.

One of his interns, said the surgeon, approached him one day and asked: "Is there any specialty that won't require me to stay up late and where I can still earn lots of money?" Taken aback, the older doctor counseled the young man: "It still isn't too late. You can still shift and choose another profession, if that's your attitude towards Medicine."

"The values of young people today have changed," the doctor sighed. Indeed, where before medical freshmen would confess unabashedly that they were going through the rigors of medical school to "serve" humanity or "heal" people, today the primary motive has boiled down to making pots of money, or at the very least to recover their and their families' investment in their medical education.

And with other trades and callings offering high salaries without need of investing more than a decade of hard work in basic training and specialization, it's no wonder fewer and fewer students today are choosing to go into medicine. In a paper written last year on "The Philippine Phenomenon of Nursing Medics," Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan and his co-authors noted with alarm a "decrease in the number of examinees of the National Medical Admission Test by 24 percent from 2002 to 2003." The decrease in first-year medical school enrollment ranges from 18 percent in some schools to as high as 74 percent. "Three medical schools have already closed down. Two private medical schools located in the rural areas are contemplating on closing down due to severely low enrollment of less than 20 this school year," Tan et al. add.

* * *

FRONT-PAGE reports yesterday saying that the Department of Health has finally expressed alarm at the situation need to be taken in the context of the overall deterioration of the country's "health human resources."

Indeed, the situation is alarming, what with latest statistics showing that some 6,000 doctors are currently enrolled in nursing classes, with a nursing job in the United States, Canada or Europe as their goal. And with no prospect of replenishing the country's supply of doctors, what with the erosion in medical enrollment, it may not be too farfetched to anticipate the day when we would no longer have any doctors here. Health Secretary Francisco Duque is right when he says that the situation is "extremely threatening to the health care system."

The problem seems even more desperate when we consider how the exodus of doctors for abroad or to nursing has been paired with a similar exodus of nurses and other health care personnel.

"While the Philippines traditionally produces a surplus of nurses for export since the 1960s," notes Tan, "the large exodus of nurses in the last four years has been unparalleled in nurse migration history."

Nurses who are leaving are not being replaced. Tan says just as disturbing as the accelerated departure of nurses is the "deteriorating quality of nursing education." Though the number of nursing schools in the country has increased tremendously, this increase in the "supply" of nursing graduates has not translated into an equal increase in the "supply" of qualified nurses.

In the 1970s and 1980s, says Tan, the proportion of nursing graduates passing the board exams ranged from 80-90 percent. Since 2001, though, the proportion of passers has hovered around 44-48 percent. While some 50,000 Filipino nurses are estimated to have left the country in the last four years, the number of new licensed nurses in the same period has reached only 20,000.

* * *

ANECDOTES and testimony bear out the disturbing statistics.

So desperate are medical schools for enrollees, perhaps to make full use of their expensive facilities and equipment, that they are offering scholarships to nursing graduates. Even then, the would-be nurses are turning down the offers, preferring the more lucrative offers from abroad.

Doctors and medical administrators talk of how difficult it has been to hire new personnel, with some provincial hospitals forced to close down due to their failure to hire new doctors or nurses. "I even find it difficult to hire new nursing aides!" says Dr. Cecile Llave, director of the University of the Philippines' Cancer Institute.

Tan et al. have several suggestions for addressing the situation. One is the forging of bilateral agreements with the governments of "receiving" countries or with foreign medical institutions that would compensate the Philippine government or medical institution with funds to be used for medical and nursing scholarships for destitute students.

Another is a National Health Service Act that would require compulsory medical service from graduates of state-funded medical institutions. "A compulsory, instead of voluntary service, is called for since the situation now is more critical and entirely of a different nature from the past decades of health professional migration," notes Tan.

* * *

"ONCE on This Island," the noted musical with a "fabulous" cast that received rave notices in its earlier staging, returns to the stage starting tonight until Aug. 14 at the RCBC Theater in Makati City.

The good news is that while the same cast, composed of stage veterans as well as newcomers who're proving to be the discoveries of the moment, will be performing, improvements in staging and direction have been made for an even better viewing experience. Direction is by Bart Guingona.

Those interested should text Hendri at 09178155794 for more information and reservations.

6,000 doctors studying to be nurses; DoH alarmed (Aug. 4, 2005)

Shoes and Brews

Youngblood : Marikina shoes, Batangas brews

Rene B. Borromeo
Inquirer News Service

ONE day, I found myself explaining to my girlfriend the functional necessity of foreign debt and government red tape and corruption. I decided to talk about such stuff to avoid answering a question put up by her parents: Would I accept some old shoes to add to my collection consisting of one pair of rubber sneakers for casual wear and a pair of Doc Martens bought from the "ukay-ukay" [rummage sale of foreign-made used clothes] for formal occasions? She had explained that they were wondering what I was wearing to my meetings with government officials and representatives of international institutions.

Being happy with two pairs of shoes was a nugget of wisdom I got from my father. He used to tell me that I needed only two pairs for as long as I took good care of them and kept them clean. I, of course, followed the first part of his advice and promptly forgot the second (parents can only do so much for the education of their children). Wearing shoes was already a great paradigm shift for me, and keeping them clean needed another lifetime of childhood conditioning.

I used to prefer sandals over shoes. Sandals were more comfortable to wear during marches to denounce almost everybody and everything. Quite often, the targets of such protests were the World Bank and the government, whose representatives I have been meeting lately, prompting my girlfriend's parents to offer me those old shoes. That offer prompted me to start my lecture on foreign debt and government red tape and corruption.

Without foreign debts, I told her, the road going to the Marikina River Banks, where we once drank beer with our friends, would not be there. Likewise, we would not have a port in Batangas where we had boarded a boat to Mindoro to meet her beloved Mangyans.

She agreed, but quickly pointed out that I used to argue that foreign debts were the cause of our nation's woes. And they came with a lot of political cost, she added, sounding like I used to.

I could not remember any imperialist maneuvers in any of the meetings I had attended recently. But I did recall that the World Bank insisted that those who had to be resettled in Marikina be paid their due, and that the Japan Bank for International Cooperation insisted that 90 percent of families to be resettled in Batangas be assured of employment. That's my job, I told her.

I used to demand the same things in the streets, shouting and frothing in the mouth, but the power was there all along. Now I get to do my advocacy in an air-conditioned room that serves free snacks. And advocacy is seldom needed: Philippine laws require that its people and the environment be taken care of. I almost kicked my own butt for knowing all this just recently, after nearly getting skin cancer from all the sun I got marching in the streets.

Then my girlfriend shifted her attention to government officials. She thought it queer when I told her government officials, like other people, are basically good. We just hate them because they are victims of bureaucracy -- and unfortunately we cannot do without it. I cannot wait for the know-it-alls, who keep on blabbering that things should be this way and that, to get into power and start institutionalizing processes to deliver their vision, only to find themselves suddenly wallowing in the same mess. Our government is far from a Utopia (if there ever existed one) but it has a process of cleansing itself.

But surely corruption is intrinsically evil, my girlfriend protested.

In reply, I told her that some of our country's best and brightest are in the government service and they are getting paid less than their counterparts in the private sector, in some kind of economic redistribution.

She told me she was beginning to believe that I was taking opium-the one that Karl Marx had warned about-or that I was taking too much caffeine from all those Batangas brews.

I pointed out to her that she must have noted undertones of sarcasm in the words I said. After all, I was once the king of cynicism (which is probably genetic) and maybe I was just trying to convince myself about what I said. Nonetheless, I have long been cured of the Superman syndrome. I cannot save the world. I am here primarily to exist. I just take small pinches of the human abstractions of justice, freedom and the brotherhood of men whenever I can.

My girlfriend and I are struggling to maintain a long-distance relationship. She sends me notices about job openings in the metropolis. And she's helping me save for a new pair of shoes.

Rene B. Borromeo, 29, is a project manager in an environmental management consulting firm based in Los Baños, Laguna.

David's Column

At Large : Breast is still best

Rina Jimenez-David
Inquirer News Service

THE PHOTO of the President with a toddler in her arms, surrounded by other toddlers, their parents, health officials and legislators was a photo-op at its heartwarming best.

Cynics may sneer that this was but the latest in Malacañang's public relations drive, to paint a warmer, touchy-feely portrait of Ms Arroyo in sharp contrast to her often dour, businesslike demeanor. Still, I must give it to her that she offered her person, always a guarantee of front-page news especially now that she's fighting for her political life, to the noble cause of breastfeeding, the occasion being the launching of August as National Breastfeeding Month.

Breastfeeding is one of those causes that everybody assumes everybody else supports. Who, after all, would be against it? Don't the ads for infant formula even air a caveat at the end that "breastfeeding is best for baby until two years"? And yet, in the Philippines, despite the progress the government made in the 1980s and early 1990s in promoting breastfeeding, support for breastfeeding has steadily declined.

Both WHO and Unicef recommend that a mother exclusively breastfeed her child for at least six months for "optimal infant growth, development and health." In 1998, the average duration of exclusive breastfeeding in the Philippines was only 1.4 months (not even the full duration of the legal maternity leave). But by 2003, even this short duration was cut to 24 days -- less than a month!

Not only are fewer Filipino mothers choosing to breastfeed, those who do are breastfeeding for shorter periods.

* * *

WE must read these dismaying statistics against the background of the even more dismaying state of the health of Filipino children below 5.

An estimated 16,000 child deaths per year can be traced to formula-feeding, WHO says. Overall, 12 percent of Filipino infants below one year are considered underweight, with the percentage rising to 32 percent among those who survive their first year. None of these babies would have died, or started off their life handicapped by malnutrition, if only their mothers had been breastfeeding them. Breast milk, after all, is considered the "perfect food," safe, clean and imbued with protective antibodies and perfectly balanced nutrients that not even all the advanced lab work of infant formula manufacturers can improve on or even equal.

Swayed by TV ads that show children nourished on artificial formula and "follow-through" brands marching in child-size togas or showing off their giftedness? Just remember that long-term studies show conclusively that breastfed babies grow up to be, on average, more intelligent, more verbal, more emotionally secure and healthier overall than those fed on powdered milk. In fact, breastfed children are three to five IQ points smarter than those fed on formula. And since breastfeeding promotes bonding between mother and child, breastfed children also score better on the EQ scale.

* * *

IF the government would only resume its promotion programs for breastfeeding, the country even stands to meet its overall economic and development goals. Families would save P500 million on funeral expenses, for instance, while P1 billion could be saved from lost wages due to caring for sick infants. Families with sickly infants spend about P100 million in out-of-pocket expenditure for health care and basic drugs, and P50 million for hospitalization. The government itself spends P230 million on expenditures for subsidized hospitalization. In addition, Filipino families spend a total of P43 billion to buy infant formula, or an average of P4,000 a month per family.

Sen. Pia Cayetano, who has taken breastfeeding as one of the many health causes she champions as chair of the Senate committee on health, and whose office provided most of these statistics, says there's not even a need to enact a new law or measure to ensure that every Filipino baby enjoys the clear benefits of breastfeeding.

"Executive Order 51 (The Milk Code) and Republic Act 7600 (Rooming-in Act) pretty much contain all the provisions we need," she points out. The problem is that these "model laws" are barely enforced, with standards and monitoring allowed to steadily slip. Milk company representatives, it's been reported, are even now allowed to distribute "samples" of infant formula to mothers about to leave for home with their babies, even in government hospitals.

* * *

OF course, no amount of laws, and no amount of policing or enforcing them, could force mothers to breastfeed if they've somehow put it in their minds that bottle-feeding is the way to go.

There are many reasons propounded for this strange and unhealthy preference, one of which is the successful marketing image created that bottle-feeding with infant formula is "modern" and "scientific" while breastfeeding is "old-fashioned" and "unsanitary."

Another, I believe, is the eroticism attached to women's breasts, with modern society viewing them as primarily serving a sexual function rather than a nourishing one. Recently, I guested on a radio talk show on NU 107 (a rock station, which earned me instant "cool" points with my children) together with Daphne Osena Paez. In the course of the interview, Daphne mentioned that she had breastfed her and husband TV reporter Patrick Paez's daughter, which of course got us started off on the benefits of breastfeeding. One caller wanted to know if it was true that "breastfeeding makes your nipples darker." We said that we knew of no studies proving or disproving this, though I had to ask why this should matter. "Who would see your nipples, after all, except your partner and baby?"

When we begin to value pert breasts and girlish nipples over our children's health, then I guess we're really in trouble.

Bonding

Youngblood : Father and son

Volts Castillo
Inquirer News Service

I SNEAKED out of my class recently to have a bite at Ma Mon Luk Restaurant. I had been hankering for some of their noodles and "siopao" dumpling, so I thought it would be a good idea to visit their old joint on Quezon Avenue in Quezon City.

I left school at exactly 11 a.m. and got there 15 minutes later. I proceeded to order my usual fare: beef "mami" noodles and special siopao. Then two things happened. First, I began to eat. Then I was overcome by a wave of sadness. It was dumb, really, because I stopped eating and lost my appetite halfway through peeling their famous siopao. But then I had suddenly remembered my father.

There are people who peel their siopao, and there are people who don't. Papa used to do this for himself and for me when I was still a little kid.

"Papa, bakit mo binabalatan 'yung siopao?" [Why do you peel the siopao?] I would ask.

And he would answer, "Kasi, anak, marumi 'yung balat." [Because, son, the peel's dirty.]

It's one of those little conversations that cement the bond between a father and his son -- short, funny and unimportant. But when you lose your parent at a relatively young age, it's those cute Q&A's you remember most of all. Never the big stuff, the big fights, or your futile, teenage rebellion. Your mind (or my mind at least) harks back to the simple times when you were 12 and your parent was 38 and you had a lot of questions about the world.

Something as mundane as peeling a siopao shouldn't be a cause for unleashing a tidal wave of emotions. If you think about it, people shouldn't even be peeling it at all, because it's as clean as the bread and meat inside, and the fact that you're eating in a place like that…well, if you eat in a place like that and expect five-star hotel quality and cleanliness, then you're in the wrong place and you ought to leave immediately.

But a father doesn't take chances with what he feeds his son. So he starts removing the tough, outer layer of the bun to expose the softer, sweeter inner bread layer. He does this for two reasons: one, the outer layer could be dirty; and two, he doesn't want his young son to break one of his cute little milk teeth on the bun. He doesn't realize that it doesn't matter to his son if it's dirty or clean; he'll eat the food because his father does. To the child, they are just a couple guys eating siopao. He doesn't realize that he's imprinting the memory of his father peeling his siopao and that he's having fun.

In my own experience, it was just my dad and me, eating in this smelly joint. Hey, after this he's going to buy me a pair of shoes.

All relationships between father and son, regardless of race or ethnicity, have some sort of conflict roiling underneath. The father may resent the son from time to time, and vice-versa. I don't know any underlying anthropological/behavioral theory to explain this, but I've seen it everywhere: on TV, in other families I know, even in the books I read and the movies I watch. It's real.

Papa and I had exactly the same relationship as those father-son characters you see on TV: good today, bad tomorrow. The reasons that trigger the changes are endless, but most times it's got something to do with me being lazy, or hooking up with the wrong type of girl, or doing poorly in school.

You might say, "Dude, that's perfectly natural. All dads are like that."

I agree. We're not different from the rest of the world, after all.

But in times like these -- with me hitting 29 in a couple of months, married for some months, confused as to whether I'm supposed to stay or quit government service and resume the law studies I've postponed on for so long -- I miss my father's strength and his strong will. People can only kid themselves for so long about their own maturity and wisdom, but in the end, they will always ask themselves, "What would my father do?" No matter how old you are, sooner or later, you'll come running back to your dear, old dad to seek advice, whether you have a turbulent relationship or not.

Those whose fathers are still alive know and appreciate this. Those whose fathers are no longer of this world are left with just memories and dreams. No matter how stupid you think your father is, my friend, he always knows more about life and how to live than you. That's an indisputable fact.

In the Chinese restaurant, I stopped eating and just started staring into the distance because I suddenly realized that I was now without a father, and had no one to turn to "when bad things start happening." Like Marcel Proust and his madeleine-eating episode that triggered his multi-volume work, I have written several thousand words on this subject before, but it was only lately that I realized how many things Papa taught me without him actually giving me a set of directions to follow. I suddenly remembered all the things I do on autopilot, all the problems I've solved thoughtfully or thoughtlessly by copying Papa's no-nonsense habit (use your brain, not your mouth, and don't whine, just do it, silently, wordlessly, because people don't care how you solve it, they want to know when you've solved it). Like peeling siopao in one, swift, stripping action. It's there, it's automatic, and it's a habit I picked up from my old man.

You can say: "Hey, you always have friends and your mom to ask for help or advice."

But seriously, how many men whom you know "open up" (I hate those two words) to their friends when they're down? I am an old-school guy, and I think men shouldn't be opening up to anything, and those that do so are weak. As men, it's simply not our lot in life to ask for advice from anyone else other than our fathers. You're the man, everything in your family depends on your wisdom. If you go around "opening up" to your friends, hoping to win sympathy and help, then you might as well put on a dress and swish around the room for us because you're a bit soft.

Let me close this rambling article by saying that you should be thankful if your parents are still alive. There is no shame in running back to your father for help. As they used to say, you're the fruit of his loins, so how can he not help you?

A for those among us who no longer have the benefit of feeling the paternal touch, all we have left are shadows and dust.

Volts Castillo, 29, works with the Social Security System.