I am an Igorot

Gone were the days when Igorots[1] were unjustly  looked down and wrongly perceived as filthy barbaric savages with tails like that of monkeys. The discriminatory perception of Igorots before even resulted to an attitude of disclaiming any relation or affiliation to the Igorot people. Today, much have changed as Igorots find their niche all over the social, political and economic spectrum and the awareness of the mainstream population have been considerably enlightened.

Still, a lot of people in the Philippines have little knowledge about the Igorots or where they come from, their culture and traditions. One of the usual questions when Filipinos meet other people, aside from asking their names, is “taga-saan probinsiya ka?” (which province do you come from?) When I respond with, “Mountain Province”, I get a lot of perplexed facial reactions that can only mean they do not know where the hell that place is; and when I say, “Sagada”, I get a lot of “ahhhs” and “ohhhs” for those who have been to Sagada or who have heard about it and have it on their list of places to visit. Still, a lot of Filipinos do not also know where Sagada is. But if one mentions Baguio, people respond with so much familiarity. This may be attributed to the fact that it has always been a famous destination since the American colonization, and has been so popularly promoted especially when it was referred to as the “Summer Capital” of the Philippines. The familiarity of almost all Filipinos with Baguio City inclined me to just respond with “Baguio City” when people asked me where I come from. Not only that I am legitimately a resident of Baguio City, but more because I wanted to avoid the exasperation of having to deal with people who did not know their geography.

But as I went into the advocacy of indigenous peoples’ rights, I told myself that if I, an Igorot,  was not an instrument in raising the awareness of people about my place and my culture, then who do I expect to do it for me? How would the non-Igorots know about the Igorot people if I did not tell them about it? Since then, every time I get the question, “taga saan ka?”, I always responded with “Sagada, Mt. Province” and sometimes, I would add, “the Cordilleras”. I did not mind if I had to answer more questions of the curious few or the inquisitive bunch or explain that this place is located north of the Philippines to which I get another question – “malapit sa Baguio?” and I would always say, it is six hours away by public bus from Baguio, 4-5 hours if by private car. And guess what? It always does not stop there. The next question would always be, “ahh, so ilocana[2] ka?” (Oh so you are an Ilocana?) To which I would always respond – “No, I am not an Ilocana but I know how to speak the Ilocano[3] language. I am an Igorot.”

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[1] The word Igorot, according to the late William Henry Scott, comes from the Spanish words “y” (from the/dwellers of the) “golote” (mountains).

[2] Feminine term for people from the Ilocos Region, North Western part of the Philippines.

[3] Ilocano is the lingua franca in the northern Philippines.

Jaded!

Pen doodles
   Eyes pall
      shoulders slouch

grabbed from google

               room blurs......

(Manja, Sept. 18, 2013)

MRT Fare Hike: Use this to solve problems

One early morning while preparing for an appointment in Makati, I was arguing with myself whether to take the bus or the Manila Rail Transit (MRT). I was trying to decide which is the type of transport that will provide better convenience and comfort, if at all these two words can be used when referring to transportation in Metro Manila. I was coming from Quezon City and the traffic along EDSA in the morning is just unimaginable. There are air-conditioned buses which is a relief considering the Manila heat. But these buses, aside from being stuck in heavy traffic, stop at every corner loading and unloading passengers, and it takes between 1 hour to 2 hours to get to Makati from Quezon City – a distance that on a traffic-free hour can be traversed in 20 minutes. These buses would often overload, taking in passengers even if the bus is full, and making extra passengers balance themselves and hang on to rails or hooks while standing along the aisle. Taking the MRT is much worse. While it takes the MRT probably 30-40 minutes from its first station at SM North to Ayala station in Makati, the difficulty that one has to go through to get into the MRT and the situation the one has to bear while inside the MRT, is implausible. Taking the MRT is like joining thousands of ant colonies elbowing each other for space, squeezing themselves to fit into small spaces, and smelling each other’s arm pits while the train goes chug chug chug to the next station. But with the recent issue on MRT fare hike, I decided to take the MRT to see if there is basis for the increase.

MRT Commuters at North Station

I took the MRT from its first station at North EDSA. The queues spilled over to EDSA and it was moving at a snail’s pace up to the third floor. The escalators were not working. The elevator has a very long queue. The station was teeming with thousands of morning travellers. The MRT, which comes at intervals of 20-30 minutes, gets filled up so fast and it leaves the first station jam-packed with passengers. Despite this, it stops at every station to take in more passengers until it is almost bursting with people inside. At every station, thousands of passengers await their opportunity to squeeze into full trains. Most of the time, they have to wait for the next one in the hope that it is less full. But the next train is the same as the previous one and so is the train after that. Passengers have no choice but to force themselves into trains so they can get to their destination. Never mind that they have to cling on to nothing to keep their balance, or smell other people’s armpits and feel other people’s butts behind or in front them, as long as they don't run in late to their works or classes, or appointments.

The MRT fare hike should address this basic problem and provide more convenience and comfort to the riding public. Even if the fare is increased, if the riding public had to go through the same hell like experiences everyday, then the MRT management is not delivering well on its mandate. How can MRT possibly address this everyday dilemma? Certainly, the MRT can devise means like:

1.              But more trains to cater to the growing number of the riding public. This will justify the fare hike.

2.              Use 2-story trains to accommodate more people.  One might argue that the present infrastructure of the MRT line cannot accommodate a 2-story train. However, if we can lose 10 Billion pesos in pork barrel scam, certainly the government has enough money to fix the structure so that 2-story trains can be accommodated.

3.              Each train should have limited stops so that not every train will stop at every station. This will lessen passengers on each train.

The MRT is raking in millions of pesos everyday. It has no excuse to implement practical solutions to address issues especially the decongestion of the trains and provision of better convenience to the riding public.

Farewell, Artus....

 

The revolution has lost a petal

But more will bloom in your stead.

You are now one with our ancestors,

United with our skies

Joined with the moon, the sun, the stars.

Will you continue to stand

On the looming mountains?

Be in every first light of dawn

And in every dancing cloud?

 

Adieu my brother, my comrade,

You are now the fire that forever burns

And now forever roam our lands

Forever, your spirit, we shall seek

In every prayer we make.

Manja, Sri Lanka, 06/03/2013

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I cannot forget the unkempt hair as if he never owned a comb. Nor will I forget his famous beard, which he used to make funny faces that made us laugh. I clearly remember how he said “orgashem” instead of “agashem”. I still can recall his old black coat, which I think was the only one he owned.

I still hear his songs of love and revolution - in the streets, on the stage, between boring educational discussions or around a warm bonfire on cold winter nights. My memory is so vivid of his graceful theatrical leaps as he tried, hope not in vain, to teach us the basics of acting and dancing and music. As skilled as he was in his guitar, on the drums and the gongs, who would forget how deft he was with the nose flute?

I can never forget one time, while he was busy making some propaganda paintings with those big angry and scary faces of the President, I asked him to make one that is beautiful to see. Using pointillism, he made me a bookmark - of my face and of a gun, and emblazoned with ‘rosas ng digma’ (rose of the revolution).

He was always a patient man, a kind man.  I never heard him raise his voice at anyone. His patience helped turn stubborn, cynical and mischievous girls like me into instruments of freedom, justice and peace.

When we met in the midst of the lush Cordillera forests in a not so distant past, I wouldn’t know it would be the last. Although when he made that decision to offer his life to the peoples’ struggle, I knew that every rare meeting could be the last. And rare it was, as rare as when the moon was blue. But as the “The Little Prince” would teach us, you will forever be in one of those bright stars shining and watching over us, always. ##

Dawn of War

It flies, a solitary black crow
Above the debris of damaged homes
Abandoned in fear and dread
Beyond the parched and barren lands
Fields untended and forsaken.



The echoes of children at play,
Of flopping cows on roads and farms
Of women preparing an evening meal,
Dogs and chickens, cats and bats,
Are now but figments of the past.

For now it is a land of death
That wails and weeps of lives unsaved
Parched from the the stream of blood that flowed
Mute to the cries and welts of battle
Numb to the scorching summer heat.

Oh yes it weeps but still it glides
As it aims at the distant single tree
To rest its wings and heal its heart
To gain its strength to guard the land
Until that seeds of freedom sprout.

(Manja, Mar. 31, 2013, Sri Lanka)

What’s on the Road Ahead[1]

(By Wilson Cadiogan)[2]

T

 hree months ago the decision was simple – well, not so simple. Starting a new life in Australia as a lowly paid factory worker with a family of five to depend on that pay, and after only 48 hours in the country was not necessarily an act of desperation. I could easily have opted for unemployment benefits, considerably higher than the factory job paid, while looking for something more appropriate to my training and experience. But I did not want to lose a moment to find out, in order to find myself in a relation to the land of OZ, whether Australia was the proud and clever country that its politicians say it is.

        

The factory, the heart and soul of the industrial religion, was my second choice as a first step in the journey ahead. I wanted a job with the garbage collection department – an almost impossible aim, being new and non-union and from the wrong part of the globe. It would have been perfect to discover the biggest former penal colony in the world through its backside.

         My decision was a conscious act of commitment to a new way of life. I am a migrant, an Oriental from a non-English-speaking background. The young fair woman at the Commonwealth Employment Office asked me if I could speak English. I said yes. She looked at my job qualifications as we talked. She was a nice person. But slowly I began to understand from her other ‘employment officer’ person, that by some weird logic of the system my extensive university studies and teaching experience were nothing, nothing more than figments of my imagination. Why? Simple, because they were obtained from a non-English-speaking background and therefore non-existent, or at most, inferior.

         She apologized. Equal employment opportunity is government policy and there is no racial discrimination in Australia. “But what can I do? That is the rule. By the way, there is a factory demand for a general hand at Kirrawee, if you are interested”. We stared at each other for a moment. We both laughed. She arranged an interview for me with the factory. I got the job on the spot.

         A master’s degree in philosophy, ten years teaching in the academy, and being 46 years old, are not exactly the right training for a factory peon. The first month was hell. But I soon became intimate with every fibre in my body and sharpened my knowledge of human anatomy. Nightly, I could name the several hundred muscles and bones in my body by the same number of aches and pains. By the second month I was fully enjoying the job.

         The factory building was a formless and ugly prefabricated structure, like all the plants sprouting like pimples around Sydney. Inside was dusty, noisy and unhealthy: freezing in winter and boiling hot in summer. The name of the game was profit, fuelled by cheap migrant labour. The company produced speakers for stereos and public sound systems.

         In two months I was a good factory hand. I could assemble the components with my eyes closed, spray paind the wooden castings, pack them into cardboard boxes and load them onto big trucks while humming ‘Waltzing Matild’ and not miss a beat.

         It was by the end of the third month that I paid more attention to what I was handling. As I worked on the assembly line I noticed disturbing signs of the state of the Australian dream. The woofers and tweeters were made in Taiwan, the amplifiers made in Hongkong, the screws and drivers made in the People’s Republic of China, and the big plant machines bore instructions in Nippongo. Only the wood and the labour were Australian. It dawned slowly on my unbelieving mind that the ‘clever’ country was a myth. Australia was going down the Argentinian road, a fetcher of water and a hewer of wood for the industrialised nations of Asia. The signs are there in that factory.

         It was Friday. It was payday, always my favourite day these last three months. I drew my pay. I walked leisurely from the factory through the main street of Kirrawee, part the ugly factories, the shops pregnant with goods, the banks and their sharp-eyed moneylenders, the bottle shop doing its usual Friday double time, the silent apartment houses, the concrete steps down to the railway station. It then occurred to me that this was the last time I would walk this familiar road. I had made up my mind that moment that there was nothing more to learn in the factory.

         The station. The train arrives. The hard seat. The train moves. I continue to ponder over my three months spent in the factory earning my daily bread and a beginning that they were also spent looking forward to its end and the start of something new. Now jobless, I grew uneasy that I have done nothing to make the new life more real. Only my walking out of the factory had reality. I felt cheated and betrayed. Three months lead to the myth and a seat on this train. Were it possible for me to fix this train on its tracks, to extend its present rails to eternity, to defy space and gravity, I would have done so. I would then stay rooted on my hard seat, close my eyes, drain my strength and passion, my mind empty as my idiotic grin, and I would stay there, timeless and unnumbered, unregistered and unknown, bothering no one and no one to bother me, travelling forever and ever between my past and my future.

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[1] Patti Miller (ed), Writing Your Life: A Journey of Discovery (1994), Allen & Unwin Pty. Ltd. Australia, pp. 120-124.

[2] Editor’s Note: Wilson C. wrote the following piece about his first job in Australia after he arrived here from the Philippines with his wife and three children. He writes with his characteristic sharp observation and skeptical, wry voice.