Woe, oh woe
Living in the Philippines is like living the plot of a magical realist novel. So many things are so unreal in their realness — you wonder how such things happen and continue to be, yet you feel their effects, their impact on your life and how you view it.
Conflicts abound and erupt on such a large scale and with such unstinting frequency, and so many lives are damaged or lost, but life still, somehow, goes on. The abnormal, the irregular is what makes up normal and regular. The way of life here has the texture of the lives of circus performers and tightrope walkers.
Since I came back I’ve been more than a little paranoid. I realize that I became quite soft living in Hong Kong. My guard is still a little down, and as I try to bring it back up, my paranoia level is has reached unprecedented levels.
Last week after visiting Ka Bel in the Heart Center, Kim and I got on a jeep along East Avenue. We were heading towards Kamuning. I felt cheerful and optimistic after leaving Ka Bel (because he was also cheerful and optimistic despite the immense frustration of being cooped up in a hospital with CIDG agents 24-7), and I had already begun thinking of all the things I’d do and write to help push for his release.
The jeepney stopped a little before EDSA near GMA-7. In front of us, a middle-aged woman was using her mobile phone, pushing the little buttons, unmindful of everything and everyone else.
Suddenly, a man right outside, on the street, stuck his hand through the window grill and snatched the mobile phone from the woman’s hand quick as lightning. He then sped away, and my husband afterward said that there was a wicked, gleeful bounce in the way the man ran off.
All of us passengers were dumbstruck. I had that sensation of wading through deep water with only my head above the water’s surface. It was only a heart beat’s worth of silence, but it felt like hours before anyone reacted.
The woman screamed and started spouting curses. Then she crumpled and buried her face in her hands, weakened.
The jeepney driver just shook his head and maybe he wastrying to be consoling when he said "Madalas talaga mangyari yan dito. Maraming snatcher at magnanakaw…"
Was is it his opinion that everyone should just accept the fact that snatchers and thieves walk around taking things from people?
I felt like throwing up.
————
Just now Congress approved the 2007 budget for the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC) and the National Housing and Mortgage Guarantee agency. No one in the Minority stood against it. Am depressed like hell. Ka Bel would have interpellated the committee and argued against the allocations and how they will be disbursed. The situation of urban housing and planning in this country is such a mess, and homelessness is a most serious problem. Government agencies in the country do nothing more than coordinate with private contractors and land developers to build houses for those who can afford them –which is definitely not most Filipinos.
I live in a squatters’ area. Most of my friends don’t believe this, but I do. The environment is so squalid, and the atmosphere so chaotic. It’s a bona fide urban poor community, and the deterioration of the houses and the people themselves can be seen and felt on a daily basis.
Why do we live there?
Well, the community wasn’t like that 10, 15 years ago. I grew up in that neighborhood, in Zamora St. in Pandacan, and it was a good and happy environment for kids. There were trees and a big, wide yard where children played patintero, piko, tumbang preso and Chinese garter.
Then, well, as most things in Philippine society, things started to go bad.
Almost all of our original neighbors moved away, my own parents left and moved to Cavite, and the house fell to neglect and disrepair.
My parents rented the house (or what passed for rent - P1,500 for three rooms and a bathroom), but four years ago I moved back in.
Now I live in a rickety house which I can’t get fixed because the local government of Manila has targetted the area for demolitions. I do so want to have the house fixed (the roof, most particularly; and the foundation), but then it doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. The houses of my neighbors (beginning with the house 10 meters from ours) look stranger and dingier everyday as poverty and hopelessness tighten their grip on the occupants.
—–
This morning at 8 am I woke up to the insistent ringing of my mobile phone: it was my bestfriend from college Elias, and he was singing happy birthday.
I laughed, said thanks and said ‘my birthday’s tomorrow.’
"Yeah, I know," he goes; ‘But I wanted to be the first to greet you happy birthday!"
———–
Attended the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan’s (BAYAN) tribute to IFI Maximo Obispo Alberto Ramento. It was a beautiful, heartfelt and rousing tribute. Bishop Ramento’s legacy will live on, and the lessons of his life will continue to inspire countless progressive church people, religious, professionals, youth and students in their 
efforts to serve the interest of the basic masses of workers and peasants.
When Bayan’s Rita Baua asked the audience to stand up and applaud the memory of Bishop Ramento, everyone clapped until their palms began to hurt, and it felt and sounded like people would’ve wanted to continue clapping long after the one minute was up.
We clapped for Bishop Ramento, his life and his sacrifice; and we also clapped in tribute to the lives of those who fell before him, felled by bullets of killers sent by a killer government.
Tomorrow, there will be funeral march-protest towards Mendiola. The poor and exploited, the sectors whom Bishop Ramento served with every ounce of his energy will take to the streets to denounce this killer government and its attempts to further insult and demean the progressive mass movement and human rights activists by saying that the bishop was merely a victim of a common crime.
We’ve lost yet another good man, another faithful servant of the poor and an enemy of those whose greed for power and wealth have rendered them inhuman and inhumane.Be that as it may, this killer government and its supporters will never succeed killing the spirit that moved Bishop Ramento to overcome all limitations, ignore threats to his own life, and give his everything to the cause of the poor and working people. There will be hundreds more who will continue what Bishop Ramento begun, who will live as he lived, and who will believe in the kind of society, country he wanted to be born out of the chaos, poverty, and hopelessness of the current set-up.
