as in, before the serious onset of senior moments… and because my geek son out in holland offers me the space on a cyberplate kumbaga, salamat, joel … and so that people will stop asking why i’m not blogging yet … and because saturn has just moved into my sunsign virgo so it’s the perfect time for new beginnings (whatever your zodiac sign, actually)… here i go bato bato sa langit …
Serendipity was originally published in Daughters True, St. Scho’s centennial offering, which won the National Book Award 2007.
I was five when I entered St. Scho and sixteen when I left for U.P. Diliman. After twelve years of convent schooling and nuns hovering, it was great to be free at last! After all this was in the mid-sixties, when the youth (in America and Europe and colonies like ours) were questioning social convent(ion)s and testing limits, and the U.P. campus was an exciting place to be, inside the classroom, down in the basement cafeteria, out on the steps, and over at the parking lot.
But looking back on high school now, forty years later, I see that the sixties spirit was in St. Scho, too, sneaking past the Benedictine sisters at odd moments and rousing us to moments of mischief that we remember with glee. Like decorating the ladies’ room ceiling with wads of toilet paper (each wad had to be just wet enough and thrown upwards with a certain force and flick of wrist—a creative skill!). And playing pranks on each other behind closed doors – while we changed from gym suits to uniforms after P.E. a kamison might start flying around the room, and the owner would chase it to shrieks and cheers that one day got so loud it brought the nuns running. Another time some of us got caught drinking smuggled Coke, again while dressing behind closed doors, and our PE teacher got so mad she lost it, so to speak, and the nuns had to step in. When we were seniors, despite rules that bangs should not touch the eyebrows and hemlines should touch the floor when kneeling, some bangs got longer and longer, and some skirts shorter and shorter. Until one day someone’s bangs got snipped away and another’s hemline was ripped down, and finally we got the message.
Fortunately or not, such episodes were few and far-between. Mostly we were resigned to our fate, no escape from books and exams, not if we wanted to keep up, and keep moving on to the next level.
***
What I didn’t know then that I know now is how significant a time high school was pala in terms of starting me off as a writer. I didn’t think then that I could really write – I could never come up with a decent plot for a short story, and my best efforts at poetry were pathetic, without rhythm or rhyme. But our class teacher in fourth year, Sister Mary Sylvester Marpa, who was also the high school principal, assigned me the task of writing high school news for the college paper, and there was no saying no, so I learned how to write news; then I tried my hand at a gossip column, and that was fun, and a big hit with the girls. Still, I didn’t take up english or literature or journalism in U.P. I took up psychology instead, thinking I could get into counselling, or go on to medicine and become a psychiatrist. But as it turned out, by the time I was 30 I was writing feature articles and a TV review column for a weekly magazine; by 40 I was also writing for television, stage, documentary video and film; by 50, I was writing political commentary and had published two history books on EDSA – a chronology in English and a critical essay in Filipino.
Sister Sylvester was right, I could write. But I suppose that first I needed those psych courses to give me a scientific handle on things. Also I needed to be exposed to the culture of U.P. which turned me on naturally to the nationalist cause. Next I married a musician who travelled a lot, and it was while I was bringing up our babies and watching too much TV that I finally started writing critiques of local television and showbiz culture for a weekly magazine. As it happened, this led to all kinds of writing gigs, many of them cause-oriented, that took me deep into national concerns (the deplorable state of the environment, the failure of development programs, widespread poverty, the oppression of women, the foreign debt, the diaspora…) and St. Scho receded from my consciousness, a past life that seemed barely relevant in the real world.
Or so I thought. In the late ‘80s I was doing research for a docu script (“Kiss Maria Clara Goodbye”) for the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women when I stumbled on the definitive historical essay on the high status of Filipino women in pre-colonial times. It was written by the national chairperson (1986 – 2004) of the activist women’s alliance GABRIELA, who was also a St. Scho nun, no other than Sister Mary John Mananzan, now Mother Prioress, who taught us religion and history in the sixties.
I was impressed no end by the scholarly work and thrilled by her passionate advocacy of women’s rights. It was like a jolt of electricity reconnecting me to my St. Scho roots and affirming my politics, telling me in no uncertain terms that the nuns, too, had evolved, and that we were moved by the same feminist nationalist cause.
I have since kept track of Mother Mary John through the world wide web, every time exulting in St. Scho’s commitment to academic excellence and social responsibility, and celebrating every inch won in the struggle for social, economic and political salvation in ‘a land where injustice and oppression abide.’
It’s great to be a Scholastican in these interesting times.
Angela Stuart-Santiago
High School Class ’66
April 2006
Opinion Today May 18, 2002
This is to comment on the CODE-NGO / PEACe bonds issue and Today’s bad news (May 7 issue, frontpage) that the “good fortune” of CODE-NGO is “alsopossible for other NGOs.”
The “good fortune” of CODE-NGO is as much about the Camacho connection and the Arroyo government’s debtor mentality (so what else is new) as it is about CODE-NGO and whether it deserves to call itself an NGO in the light of its strikingly profitable relationship with government.
What’s in a name? In this case, plenty. Historically and ideologically, “non-governmental” in NGO means precisely that: not governmental, or distinct / different from government, and, even, critical of government (from Macapagal to Arroyo) for economic policies and development programs that over the decades have not brought the promised prosperity but instead have wrought widespread and worsening poverty along with environmental decay.
NGOs did not just crop up with the Aquino administration, as many columnists and the new breed of NGOs such as CODE-NGO seem to think. NGOs have been around since the martial law period when they were known as cause-oriented groups. Their leaders and members were mostly activists and oppositionists who, rather than collaborate with the dictator, went underground, but not to jointhe armed revolution and die for Joma Sison, rather, to do grassroots work, stepping in to deliver basic services where government was absent or to compensate for failed development programs, and help ease rising poverty in the countryside.
Unlike social workers of the fifties and sixties who were into dole-outs (that is, the immediate if short-term relief of food, water, clothing, and health needs of poor communities), cause-oriented groups of the seventies (who were either hippies or activists in the sixties) were into long-term goals – they did not want just to dole out fish, as a Chinese sage advised, they wanted to teach people how to fish – and they were guided by ecological principles, in step with the global movement for environmental protection.
Also, Filipino NGOs tried to get to the root of the problem of poverty. How can a country so rich in natural resources fail to feed, shelter, and nurture its people? Research by thinktanks revealed that the rising poverty (20 million “poorest of the poor” then, 40 million now) was / is the consequence of years, decades, of rampant logging and dynamite fishing, mining and quarrying – among other destructive commercial operations sanctioned by the government for the benefit of the local elite and multinational corporations – that continue to destroy our archipelago’s ecological systems and deprive increasing millions of kaingin farmers and fisherfolk and indigenous tribes of vital resources and life-support systems.
Do-gooders indeed, NGOs started out spending their own money (and later the money of like-minded donor friends and foundations) for the cause of the poor. Without thought of personal monetary gain, NGOs shelled out for consciousness-raising workshops, community organizing, networking, and livelihood projects meant to empower people in communities to become the stewards of their own environment and the engines of their own development. The peaceful revolution of 1986 which saw the ouster of the martial law government was a combined effort of these activists in “rainbow coalition” with leftists and Coryistas. At least this is what I gathered from the sidelines in1984 to 2001, as editor of the journals and papers of the late environmentalist and original NGO volunteer Maximo “Junie” Kalaw on NGOs and the movement for sustainable development.
With the ousting of the dictator in 1986 and the rise of environmental criteria in the public realm, NGOs multiplied even more rapidly, as did NGO funding from many international aid groups eager to help the fledgling Aquino administration. Unfortunately, much of the money came with strings attached. Too soon Kalaw was saying no to millions of dollars in U.S. aid. and being accused of blocking development.
The particular aid package had two components: $20 million for NGO environmental projects, and $75 million for government to create a National Resource Management Program that would more efficiently open up the forestry sector to more foreign investors. For Kalaw, going along with the two-handed scheme would have meant that Haribon Foundation (the first and largest environmental NGO) and Green-Forum Philippines (the largest umbrella organization of NGOs in the eighties), both of which he led, not only would be condoning government’s unsustainable development strategies; worse, it would mean changing identity from a purely non-government to a government organization (GO) or, at best, NGO ng GO, or NGONGO, how freaky.
The same conflicted situation obtains in the case of CODE-NGO’s Peace bonds. Certainly it was a remarkably creative capitalist coup, the way Marissa Camacho et al, using their connections, managed to exploit the government treasury and the banking system to make more than a billion pesos out of thin air for poverty alleviation. But there is nothing heroic or evolutionary about it because it changes nothing in the long-term. Bottom line is, it is just another two-handed scheme of the rich – helping the poor and, at the same time, shafting them by helping get government even more deeply into debt that eventually the poor will be made to pay. Fact is, the rich in this country, including the church, have long been mired in (as Kalaw put it) “the internal contradiction of donating to the poor with one hand and contributing to their poverty with the other.”
But had the intrepid Camacho spared government and fixed her sights instead on the ruling class (her own class) for funding – had she worked on the richest of the rich families, the oligarchy that pushes government around and controls the country’s resources – now THAT would have been really radical. And had she managed to convincethem, NGO-style (like, you know, consciousness-raising), that there is simply no two ways about it: one way or another, it’s time to share the wealth, if not by paying higher wages and investing in the domestic economy, at the very least by coughing up substantial sums to NGOs for poverty alleviation (also known as damage control), now THAT would have been awesome and she would deserve canonization – Santa Marissa, patron saint of NGO volunteers, heroine of the poor, mabuhay ka!
Unfortunately it’s not going to happen. Not while the civil society movement is disparaged and dismissed as “uncivil” and/or “evil” by Erap forces. And surely not until the NGOs that lead the civil society movement get their act together and get back not only on the non-government but on the non-profit non-elitist track.
Last Christmas when Junie phoned for an astrological reading of his year to come, I warned him that he was likely to get sick again if he didn’t take a long break asap from what otherwise promised to be a year full of stress, the kind that cancer feeds on. He said hindi puwede, he had commitments that could not be put off, work that he could not delegate, but yes, he would take care, he would try not to take on too much at a time, he would ask for help, he would relax and meditate a lot.
The last time I saw him was two months later, towards the end of February, when he was home for a couple of days on his way to, or was it on his way back from, Japan for a conference. He dropped off a 5-page resume of his environmental advocacy work, 1971-2000, for editing. He looked great, walking tall as always, a little grayer in the hair, a little more lined in the face, a little slimmer in the waist, but still sexy, and still obsessed with sustainable development. For a change, he asked me at once how much I wanted for the job. For a change, before I had seen how much work it would need, I said I would do it for nothing.
In June I heard the bad news via email from Patty A; she had seen him in London, the cancer had recurred. “He sounded fine, still full of dreams. He is trying to put things in order, wants to merge PIAF and the Maximo Kalaw Foundation, get an active working board to run it. But he looked very weak and had lost a lot of weight. He’s been to Madrid for treatment in an alternative clinic, now he’s back in New York after recovering some strength from the treatment. He will see how his health fares before making any decisions on chemotherapy. Hopefully he is recovering. I shall let him know you asked.”
In July Junie phoned from New York, asking me to look at a draft manuscript that he would send by email, and would a month be time enough for editing? When he called again the next day, I said it would make a nice slim volume to go with his first book Exploring Soul & Society, but I would need the help of Jorge Arago (with whom I edited the first one) and Junie exclaimed, naku, kung si Jorge it might take a year! Why, I had to ask, how much time are the doctors giving you? A year to a year and a half at most. And at least? Six months or so. Aray. A lot of pain? Yes. Aray. In a month then, I promised.
Junie was not a writer, but he was a thinker and a seeker who kept up with the latest in spiritual and political discourse. Not only did he have his own ideas about how to effectively and appropriately address the critical problems of our times, particularly the problem of extricating the great majority of humans from poverty, he had first-hand experience of and insights on the obstacles in the way of change. He had much to say, and over the years he had learned to write, high-brow activist stuff, visions of an alternative wholistic future, written in the developmental jargon of the UN, for the powers-that-be who could / would lead the world to sustainable new highs.
Junie had been hoping to make it to Johannesburg, South Africa on September 2002 for the UN Summit for Sustainable Development. In the manuscript titled Making Sustainability Work / Ten Years after the Rio Earth Summit – A Personal Assessment, he goes over the ground covered since Rio ’92, tracking the initiatives of governments and business groups as well as NGOs and people’s organizations over the last decade, distilling lessons learned that will help us in the struggle ahead for a sustainable future as one human family and one earth community. Writing it he prepared for Johannesburg – he meant to be there, if not in body then in word and in spirit. Immortal Junie.
*
On the most fundamental level, as I see it, sustainable development depends on how any one person fulfills the critical obligations that spell the difference between a life lived according to the new paradigm I’ve tried to flesh out in this slim volume and a life lived, wittingly or unwittingly, in opposition to it.
*
Whether as producer or consumer, as one who contributes to the build-up or clean-up of waste, or in the choice of lifestyle that goes with one’s personality, income, and ambitions, one cannot avoid micro interior “summits” and the meaningful participation in it of the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the individual and governance by the soul.
*
I have often reflected on how to be in the postmodern world with integrity, responsibility, and accountability. As I wrote in the introduction to my book Exploring Soul and Society (1997), I have used a framework for wholeness called Kabuoan – a framework that affirms for Filipinos their multi-level identity, a coherent ecology of values, and a transformative process of change in the inner and outer dimensions of personal and social life.
*
Soul-work has acquired a certain currency or vogue. It is a sign of the growing reaction to crass materialism and consumption, what now is called “Affluenza,” a product of our market-oriented and -driven development activities and our search for meaning in our lives, communities, and species.
*
All of the cosmological and spiritual systems that I have come across taught their truth in a system of interrelated parts and different levels of wholeness – as above, so below – so that it was unthinkable to imagine a sustainable global system without sustainable local and national sub-systems.
*
Sustainable development requires the nurturing of relationships though they be located in diametrically opposed perspectives, or across the great divide that we are prone to see between such as private and public, ecology and economy, people and nature, autonomy and codependency. It requires the preservation of sacred relationship values as material and form evolve. It is concerned with practical concerns, such as how to keep community values as we move from small village dwellings to condominiums in mega-cities.
*
Change begins with the Self. It seems to me that there is not much else over which we exercise near-total control apart from our own selves, which thus suggests the proper locus for authentic change.
*
I felt that to be without duplicity in the way I think, feel, and act must needs be the essence of the integrity of my being if I were to continue to have the freedom to move on to the truth of the next moment in my life’s journey. I found such a state to be essential in doing advocacy work, for it enables one to say what one feels without fear or without being beholden to anyone except to the truth.